Job by Joseph Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thaumaturgy: A Philosophy of Blessings and Curses

For those who do not live solely in a scientific universe of mechanical rationality, the world is enchanted. It is filled with forces which have personality and therefore might be appealed to for deliverance or assistance. In the monotheistic religions, such forces are natural but may be suspended or re-directed by God. The result is a miracle - either a blessing or a curse which has a supernatural cause - as of course in the biblical story of Job.

But miracles are problematic for the religions which recognise them: If God is omnipotent and therefore can relieve suffering or manage the world to be benign, why does he not do so as a matter of course? Further, if God is omniscient and knows what his creatures need from him without their asking, why does he require fervent, even obsessive, prayers from their before acting on their behalf? Finally, if God is immutable, that is unaffected by all the forces over which he has control, how is it that human prayer has any effect on him at all? These are the issues which run through Roth’s Job.

In Roth’s Job, Mendel and Deborah Singer live in an obscure Jewish shtetl in the far west of the Russian Empire. Mendel does not believe in miracles: “His upright mind was directed toward the simple earthly things and tolerated no miracle within range of his eyes.” He prays because that is what is due to God, and he accepts his fate. He wants nothing; he asks for nothing: “he was nothing more than one praying, the words went through him on the way to heaven, a hollow vessel he was, a funnel.”

Deborah on the other hand does believe in miracles, but as a Jewish woman it is not her job to pray to God; instead she prays for the help of her dead relatives - for smuggling her conscripted son out of the country and bringing her handicapped son into health, among other things. Her objective is to change the way things are, favorable or not: “To pray for the older sons, she again made pilgrimages to the cemetery. This time she prayed for an illness for Jonas and Shemariah, as she had once begged for Menuchim’s health.”

This is a family, therefore, with an essential division in religious outlook when it comes to divine assistance - and an equally divergent attitude toward religion itself. Mendel’s resignation is accompanied by guilt. His misfortune, he believes, must be the result of a spiritual error or inadequacy or his part: “he thought incessantly: Where is the sin? Where is the sin?” Scrupulosity, no matter how spiritualised, is clearly not the same thing as trust in the divine. Mendel neither trusts God, nor is he willing to stand up to a God he believes is wrong as did his biblical counterpart - at least until what is really important to him is taken away.

His wife has no such spiritual qualms. If life is difficult or the world threatens, these are merely temporary events. Her first instinct is to blame Mendel for his inaction. But ultimately Deborah’s confidence is not shaken by setbacks. After all “Perhaps blessings need a longer time for their fulfillment than curses.” She simply attends the graves of the ancestors more frequently. Mendel quotes scripture to her, but she won’t be bullied. She responds coldly, “Mendel! You always know the wrong sentences by heart. Many thousands of sentences were written, but you remember all the superfluous ones!”

The spousal differences also show up in their perceptions of the world at large. Mendel, given the status and vulnerability of Jews in the countryside, is fearful to the point of paranoia: “Alien to them was the earth on which they stood, hostile the forest, which stared back at them, spiteful the yapping of the dogs, whose mistrustful ears they had awakened...” Deborah, however, engages with the local peasants, even to the extent of negotiating a free ride to the county town. She obviously knows the same facts as her husband about the dangers of drunken locals, Russian soldiers, and periodic pogroms, but exerts her will for her family regardless.

The lives of Mendel and Deborah are subsequently filled with the usual mix of happiness and tragedy with which most of humanity is familiar. Some events are so testing that they lead to apostasy and the abandonment of the idea of divine benignity itself. What remains with them throughout their lives, however, is not trust in divine good will but ritual, ceremonial routine, tradition in clothing and relationships. These are the things which sustain them until coincidence, fortune - or who knows, God - decides to favour them with the unexpected. What matters ultimately is neither faith nor hope in the divine, nor the exertion of human effort, but the support provided by a sort of familiar set of actions until,... well until the world looks better, or one is no longer around to notice the state it’s in at all.

This is the miracle of ritual. As Adam Levin puts it in his novel, The Instructions, "..it is good to do justice because God will kill you and your family whether you do justice or not." Ethics is a routine which helps us to live and die better.

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