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A Man Named Job/17 The first and last hour of the poem of our life are always a gift given to us
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/07/2015
In Job I am the one who sings, it is the man who exists and, if you will, it is the man himself who can seek the light that he is looking for with the help of this book - a book that is absolutely his. Because, after Job, there was nothing new said by any man about the problem of our lives.

David Maria Turoldo, Da una casa di fango – Job (From a Mud House – Job)

There once was a righteous man named Job. He had many properties, daughters and sons, he was blessed by God and men. One day a terrible calamity hit him and his family, and the man accepted his misfortune with patience: "Naked I came into the world, naked I shall leave." When they found out about his bad fate, knowing his righteousness, his friends and relatives joined him in his mourning, to comfort him and help him. But in the end it was God himself to intervene in his favour, by giving him back double what he had lost, because Job proved faithful and upright in the test.
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The primitive legend of Job was like this or something similar, known in the ancient Near East and in the land of Israel. The author of the Book of Job, however, broke away from this story. He kept the materials and used them for writing the Prologue (chapters 1-2) and the Epilogue: "And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job... And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. (...) And he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen, and 1,000 female donkeys. He had also seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first daughter Jemimah (Dove), and the name of the second Keziah (Cassia), and the name of the third Keren-happuch (Silver). And in all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job's daughters." (42,10-15)
But when the author began to compose his poem, that ancient legend became something very different. The wonderful songs of Job were born, the dialogues with his friends and maybe the words of Elihu and those of God. At the end, he found himself with a work retaining very little of the original and yet fascinating legend. Job is shown as anything but patient: he protested and shouted against God and life. Instead of being comforters, his friends became torturers and lawyers of a trivial God. And the same God - when he finally enters the scene - is a disappointment: he does not come to comfort Job or to answer his questions. That ancient legend became the container of a theological and anthropological revolution and an authentic literary masterpiece.
So when we come to the end of the book, to the Epilogue, we are amazed to read: "After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: 'My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.'" (42,7). Here God becomes the judge between Job and his "friends", in a process that Job wins but that he had never asked for nor desired (he had sued Elohim, not his friends). And so Job, first reprimanded and silenced by the Almighty God, now suddenly becomes "his servant," the only one who said "what is right". No mention of the illness of Job, his rebellion, or the bet with Satan.
Obviously we are dealing with materials from different traditions, but we should attempt an interpretation even this last time. Of course, even here we could easily solve the problem by saying that the Epilogue was added by a later, final editor, perhaps the same that added the Prologue. There are, in fact, many people who suggest this solution. But not all. Some think that it was the author of the great poem of Job who wanted to leave the materials of the ancient legend behind, like the builders of the first Christian churches who used the stones and columns, sometimes even the perimeters of the former Roman and Greek temples. And so, set inside his cathedral, the ancient author has created and left some magnificent columns and beautiful capitals to us. But these ancient materials, along with their beauty, bequeathed some architectural and stylistic constraint, too.
If you write using other stories received as a gift (and every writer does, stories and poems have always fed them: every word written is a word received first) as your point of departure, you should know that if you want that gift to bear fruit, you should also have respect for it. You cannot only use it for your own construction without obedience to the "spirit" that the story gave you engraved in the gift itself. There is also a continuous and essential exercise of truthfulness and gratuitousness to which all those are called who do not aim at profit only but to serve the daimon that's in them, and that inhabits the earth in them. All stories, even the greatest ones, are born on columns erected by others.
"And after this Job lived 140 years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, four generations. And Job died, an old man, and full of days" (42,16-17). This is the last verse of the Book of Job. All stories have a profound, almost invincible need for a happy ending. The demand for justice, the desire to see the good triumph and the humble being exalted at the end are too deeply rooted in us and in the world for us to be able to settle for dramas and stories that end with the "why" of the penultimate chapter.
But we know that the Jobs of history do not die as the patriarchs, "old and full of days". The living Jobs die too soon, sometimes they do not even become adults; their goods and children are not returned to them (because no child can be replaced by the gift of another one), their health is lost forever, their wounds are not healed, the powerful are always right, God does not answer, their misfortune not never stops, their cry does not calm down. But, more fundamentally, the children and the assets that life gives us are not there forever, good health ends sooner or later, and if we have the gift of seeing the angel of death face to face, we almost always leave this world with a "why". It may be pronounced with an "amen" and perhaps even a "thank you" which make it tame, but it does not disappear.
So as we read this Epilogue arriving as a gift of an ancient pearl to us, we should not forget the song of Job and, thanks to it, the song-cry of the many Jobs who do not know and neither would be helped by that last chapter - which brings us back into the retributive theology of the "friends" of Job. And so we do not finish the book by reading Chapter 42. We return to the prayer to the earth “O earth, cover not my blood, and let my cry find no resting place” (16,18), to Job's quarrel with God “Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven (...) that he would argue the case of a man with God, as a son of man does with his neighbour.” (16,19-21), to his desperate protests ("I cry to you for help and you do not answer me; I stand, and you only look at me.” (30,23). These are the words with which we all can and should pray with, even those of us who pray only to ask that the sky should not be empty. The Job who is the friend of men, in solidarity with all creation and with every victim, is the one who stops a step before the Epilogue. This is the path of every true human solidarity, the one that departs from misfortune and ends with disaster, and the one that is surprised, just like the misfortunate, if and when paradise arrives on earth or in heaven. Paradise is always a chapter that's donated, the one that no book can write for us, not even the great books of the Bible, because if it were already written we would not even leave the book and enter the mystery of our life, which is called life exactly because the past chapters can only be the penultimate ones.
But perhaps there is another hidden message in this Epilogue donated to us. We are not the authors of our finale. We are not the creators of the auroras and the beautiful sunsets of our lives, because if they were our creation they would not surprise us, they would not be as wonderful as the first love or the last glance of our spouse is. As in the most beautiful stories, where the real conclusion is not written and the ones that every reader has the right and duty to write (the eternal novels are those unfinished). We, too, come to the world within a horizon that welcomes us and shapes the landscape in which we're going to live. We write the poem of our life, but the prologue and the epilogue are given to us, and the masterpiece is created when we are able to inscribe our song in the oldest and largest symphony of all. We can and must write the many hours of our day, but the first and last ones are a gift given to us - and perhaps that is because they are the truest.
It was difficult to start reading Job, and now it's even harder to leave him. He wants to stay, the scenery one can contemplate from the top where he has taken us, holding hands in the journey, is so beautiful. Thank you, ancient nameless author. Thank you for your entire book. But above all thank you for Job. The commentaries of Genesis were a great adventure of the heart and the spirit. Exodus offered us the discovery of the power of the voice of YHWH on earth and that of the prophets, who are not false prophets - if they free the slaves and the poor. But Job was the most unexpected discovery, the greatest gift that I have received ever since I started writing. I want to thank those who followed me - all the way or even just for a while. There were many comments I received that joined in my own reflection, many words have become my words. You can only talk about these great texts together, by singing them in a choir.
There once was a man named Job. The God that Job sought, hoped for and loved, however, did not arrive. The innocent continue to die, children suffer, the pain of the poor is still the greatest that the earth has ever known. Job taught us that if there is a God of life then he must be the God of the not-yet. And that because of this he can come at any time, even when we least expect it, leaving us breathless. Come!
************
Our dialogue will resume on 26th July, after a break for two Sundays, necessary after crossing the 'continent of Job', thanks to director Marco Tarquinio who continues to believe in this unusual "page three" of the Sunday edition of Avvenire. (Luigino Bruni)
And thanks to Luigino Bruni, economist and writer, who continues to believe, as we do, that our hard and wonderful times can be understood, loved and saved by the deep encounter through the words he has spoken and continues to tell and tell himself and to us driven by love. (Marco Tarquinio)
 
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A Man Named Job/17 The first and last hour of the poem of our life are always a gift given to us
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 05/07/2015
In Job I am the one who sings, it is the man who exists and, if you will, it is the man himself who can seek the light that he is looking for with the help of this book - a book that is absolutely his. Because, after Job, there was nothing new said by any man about the problem of our lives.

David Maria Turoldo, Da una casa di fango – Job (From a Mud House – Job)

There once was a righteous man named Job. He had many properties, daughters and sons, he was blessed by God and men. One day a terrible calamity hit him and his family, and the man accepted his misfortune with patience: "Naked I came into the world, naked I shall leave." When they found out about his bad fate, knowing his righteousness, his friends and relatives joined him in his mourning, to comfort him and help him. But in the end it was God himself to intervene in his favour, by giving him back double what he had lost, because Job proved faithful and upright in the test.
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A Man Named Job/15 - The soul is alive as long as we seek Him who has not answered to us yet
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/06/2015
At the end of his fight that he knows to be lost from the start - how can man hope to win over God? - Job discovers an ingenuous method to persevere in his resistance: he will pretend to give in before even engaging in the battle. ... So we understand that, despite appearances, or because of them, Job continues to interrogate the sky.
(Elie Wiesel, Biblical characters through the Midrash).
When, having waited and hoped for it for a long time, the decisive encounter arrives, it usually lets us down. That imagined and hoped-for meeting was too great to be satisfied by a real encounter. We had dreamed of it and 'seen' it a thousand times in our soul. We had already pronounced the first words in our thoughts and chosen the dress for the other, glimpsed him/her, felt his/her smells and heard the sounds he/she makes.
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But there are no real words, clothes, smells, colours or sounds that would equal to those imagined and printed in our longing hearts. Even faith, all faiths feed on scraps between these dreamful meetings and the encounters that actually occur, and surprise or even disappointment, is the first experience of every authentic spiritual life, the first sign that the God were waiting for was neither an idol nor just a dream. Because if those who actually come are too similar to those we have dreamed of, it is certain that we won't be changed through that encounter. The soul is alive and does not go out as long as we keep longing for that different God who did not attend the appointment.
And so, after a wearying wait, we are about to see the appearance of the most important witness in the courtroom, the one that Job relied on relentlessly. The Book of Job is great also because it was able to hold back and keep itself and us in God's silence for thirty-seven chapters. By not entering the scene, Elohim allowed us to push our questions to the very end, and Job to finish his poem. Too many times our songs do not become God's masterpieces because God's lawyers make them come to the scene too soon. The truest presence of Elohim in the drama of Job was his absence, his most beautiful words were the ones unsaid when his friends asked him to speak and to make his powerful voice heard. A silent but real sky is more capable of saving us than a sky filled with words that are not enough human to be true.
God starts speaking from the midst of a storm but does not answer the questions of Job, he does not descend to the level we expect. Why? No theology can give an abstract answer to the most radical questions rising from the innocent who are suffering in the world. People are capable of asking more questions to God than the answers he can give us because a God who has ready and perfect answers for all our great and desperate why-s is only an ideology or, in the worst but very common case, an idol that we have built in our own image and likeness. The God of the Bible learns from our big and desperate questions and he is surprised when we put them to him for the first time. If it weren't so, creation, history, ourselves and time would all be but fiction, and we'd all be inside a TV set with God as the only, bored spectator. Only the idols do not learn anything from people, because they died without ever having been alive. The gap between our questions and the answers of God are a space for the true experience of faith, and when theologies seek to reduce or delete these differences they do nothing but alienate their man and their God from the Bible.
“Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” (38,1-7)
Elohim does not accept the dialogue between equals that Job asked of him, and he does not respond to his questions. He scolds him and reminds him of the infinite abyss separating the Creator from the creature - a gulf that Job knew, but that did not prevent him to sue God. He does not call Job by name but as 'faultfinder' and 'he who argues with God' (40,2). The Book of Job and perhaps no holy book knows a God who is able to fight on par with Job. Only an extreme type of God could stay close to the extreme humanity of Job. The God of the book, in fact, can only make Job quiet, to bring him back in the coordinates of a creature, but in doing so he also leads himself back inside the theological barriers from which Job had tried to untangle him throughout his many lines. Job had asked for a greater God than the one he had known; but, at the end of his poem, he finds the same Elohim of his youth, as if the drama of Job had not taught anything to heaven. Perhaps we could not ask any more of the book. But we can and must ask Elohim for more, we must ask him to be different from how he is presented by this great biblical book, which is perhaps the greatest of all. Along with Job, we must continue to pose questions that are bigger than the answers we get, not being content with a God who is too much like the one we knew and that theology told about to us: the one who is the creator, omnipotent, wise and wonderful. All this we had already known before we got to know Job. Now, having listened to and cried with him facing the pain of the innocent in history, the God-before-Job is not enough for us. It is not what Elohim says in itself that is disappointing (if you extrapolate it from this book we find a lot of poetry and beauty in it): it is what God says at the end of Job's cry that leaves us unsatisfied. Is it possible that only we have changed, and that Elohim has stayed the same as he was in the bet with Satan that we saw in the prologue of the book (chaps. 1-2)? But then does the innocent suffering of the world not reveal something new about the universe even to God? And if it is so, then what good is it for us to remain faithful and honest to the end in endless solitude?
Therefore we have a spiritual and ethical duty to ask for more, to continue to implore God to tell us something he has not yet said to us. Because if we do not do so, we lose contact with the poor and with the victims, with those who continue to cry out and with those who are too helpless at the spectacle of evil to be consoled by the omnipotence of God. The poor and the victims do not ever keep silent in the name of God, even when they curse against the sky. When you look at the world together with the victims, when you attend the existential, social, economic and moral suburbs of the world, the greatness and power of God seem too distant, and, above all, it does not push us to do everything possible to reduce suffering in the world with our freedom. No narration of the incredible things of the universe, no magnificent description of the terrible Behemoth ("He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together. His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron." 40,17-18), or the Leviathan ("His back is made of rows of shields, shut up closely as with a seal. One is so near to another that no air can come between them..." 41,15-16) can comfort and love those who scream as they are sinking into the sea, or those who die alone in the beds of elegant hospitals. Only the God awaited by Job could meet them and collect their screams. But that God is not to be found in the Book of Job: “Or who shut in the sea with doors when it burst out from the womb, when I made clouds its garment and thick darkness its swaddling band, and prescribed limits for it and set bars and doors, and said, ‘Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed’?” (38,8-11).
To the ear and heart of Job, sitting lonely on the dunghill, at the ford of his desperation, these words that are perfect in themselves would only have produced the same effects as the wise words of his 'friends': they only increased his loneliness and abandonment. In fact, even this God wants the conversion of Job and asks him to surrender - which he will get: "And the Lord said to Job:
‘Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.’ Then Job answered the Lord and said: ‘Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but I will proceed no further’” (40,3-5). Job, as so many innocent victims, is made quiet, he is silenced. This Elohim, the defence attorney of his own unfathomable omnipotence, is not the God that the poor and the innocent like Job seek and deserve.
The responses of this God cannot match the questions of Job. His words are not up to the moral height of the words of Job. But - and this is where the extraordinary mystery of the Bible lies - Job's words, too, are God's words, because they are embedded inside the same and only scripture. Therefore we can listen to the voice of God by making Job speak who denounces and attacks him. By defining the whole Book of Job (and other books) 'sacred', biblical tradition has created a wonderful and eternal alliance between the words of YHWH-Elohim and those of man. The word of God in the Book of Job and in all the scriptures is to be found also in the pages where Job speaks and shouts; where men speak, in their extreme, unanswered questions. We can pray to God with the words of Job without God. This mestizo God who wanted to mix his words with our own is the only one capable of speaking from the burning bushes of the earth, and still calling us from there by name.
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A Man Named Job/15 - The soul is alive as long as we seek Him who has not answered to us yet
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 21/06/2015
At the end of his fight that he knows to be lost from the start - how can man hope to win over God? - Job discovers an ingenuous method to persevere in his resistance: he will pretend to give in before even engaging in the battle. ... So we understand that, despite appearances, or because of them, Job continues to interrogate the sky.
(Elie Wiesel, Biblical characters through the Midrash).
When, having waited and hoped for it for a long time, the decisive encounter arrives, it usually lets us down. That imagined and hoped-for meeting was too great to be satisfied by a real encounter. We had dreamed of it and 'seen' it a thousand times in our soul. We had already pronounced the first words in our thoughts and chosen the dress for the other, glimpsed him/her, felt his/her smells and heard the sounds he/she makes.
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A Man Named Job/13 - Dialogue, even the most unexpected type, helps understand life and God
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 07/06/2015
Iob says that the good ones do not live and that God makes them die unjustly. Iob's friends say that the bad guys do not live and that God makes them die justly. The truth is that everyone dies.
Guido Ceronetti  Il libro di Giobbe (The Book of Job)

Job has ended his speeches. His 'friends' have humiliated and disappointed him, but they also allowed us to find more and more profound reasons for his innocence. In moments of deep discernment on the justice of our life and that of the world, dialogue is an essential tool. We may only manage to understand the deepest questions of our existence and penetrate the darkest depths of our soul in company, by performing a dialogue.
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Even when the interlocutors are not our friends, they do not understand us and hurt us, the truth about us emerges in dialogue with other humans, with God and with nature. Instances of solitude are only good when they represent a break between two dialogues. To know who we really are, to reach the furthest and truest corners of our heart above all we need to speak and to listen. In the nights of life it is better not to be well but in company than to be alone.
Job got to the end of his trial with raised head. Like a 'prince' he is waiting for God but he does not know if he will arrive, and if it will be the God of his old 'friends' or a new God. And we, unknowing just like him, share in his wait. The Bible is alive and true as long as it is capable of surprising us. If we can wonder here and now again at the sea opening in front of us while we are chased by the pharaoh's army; if we desperately witness the death of a man on the cross and then we are out of breath when we hear him, alive, pronouncing our name.
The first surprise comes at the end of the Job's words (acting as his own lawyer) is the arrival of a new character: Elihu. It is not clear if it is a character that is expected in the initial script of the play and kept intentionally hidden until this point, a spectator that suddenly bursts onto the scene, or even the theatre director who wants to make his different voice heard. What is certain is that no reader approaching this book for the first time really expects Elihu at this point. He wasn't there in the prologue, and the dramatic tension of the text prepared us to meet only one last character: Elohim. But this book is also great for its twists, the continuing leaps that force us to keep the desire for the words of Elohim alive: we all want these to be great, at least as great as those of Job.
Perhaps an early draft of the book ended with chapter 31, when Job answered all the charges of his interlocutors and silenced them. The silence of all those involved could have been the earliest conclusion of the book. Job had finished the test, and Satan had won his bet. Perhaps there was no need of Elihu, nor the words of Elohim, because - come to think of it - God has already said everything in the prologue of the book. But the great books, certainly the Bible's books, are still alive because, as it happened in ancient cities, the first temples are transformed into churches, the new houses are built using the stones of the old one, new architectural styles are born around the first buildings. The little poem of Elihu is a new square in Job's town, the most recent of the first large forums and temples, artistically less original, and too large not to disturb the harmony of the ancient landscape. A place that we have to cross anyway. Walking through it we will discover some interesting corners, and coming on top of some of its steps we will see new perspectives on the ancient and eternal beauty of this town.
“So these three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes. Then Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the family of Ram, burned with anger. He burned with anger at Job because he justified himself rather than God. He burned with anger also at Job's three friends because they had found no answer, although they had declared Job to be in the wrong.” (32,1-3).
A first interesting thing about Elihu is his name that is very similar to that of the prophet Elijah: “He is my God”. Elihu is the only character in the book with a clear Jewish connotation. Elihu also only has a genealogy: he is from the region of Buz. We know it from Genesis (22,22-24) that two grandsons of Abraham are called Us and Buz, and Us is the region of Job. There are two facts that place Elihu right next to Job and the culture of Israel. Elihu tells us that he wants to put himself on a par of Job, in a dialogue on equal terms between two earthlings: “Behold, I am toward God as you are; I too was pinched off from a piece of clay” (33,6).
The first 31 chapters of the Book of Job are very radical and extreme for any reader in any era. If we are honest, we cannot go into crisis, because this song of the innocent righteous forces us to reconsider our theologies, religions and ideologies deeply. It obliges us to put ourselves on the side of the victims and their questions that take off our mask of idolatry, watching the world from the bottom up, to question God starting from the poor and not vice versa (as is our habit deriving from the same religions). During our reading, when the questions of Job begin to hurt us, the temptation to amend it, to tone down his radical message may be born really easily so as to be more comfortable inside the story. One day, when the text was still in a permeable phase and prior to final editing, a generation of intellectuals perhaps had the courage and the audacity to meddle in that old song of a misfortunate innocent man, and inserted of a long digression in the original text (chs. 32-37) to make it less scandalous a defeat of traditional theology and less clear a victory of Job - and perhaps to improve God's discourses themselves: “Beware lest you say, ‘We have found wisdom; God may vanquish him, not a man.’” (32,13). The authors of Elihu do not accept defeat on the level of dialogic arguments: they want to attempt a last statement and show that there are other all-human reasons to disprive Job's 'blasphemy'.
Yet their result is modest. They find very few new arguments, although some of the verses here are worthy of the best pages of Job (eg. from 33,15-18; 27-29). Elihu's most original thesis - well-known in the traditional wisdom of Israel but almost completely absent in the arguments of Job's three friends - is about the salvific role of suffering that God sends to improve and convert his creatures: “Man is also rebuked with pain on his bed and with continual strife in his bones” (33,19). Here we find an idea that runs through the whole Judeo-Christian universe and is fascinating because it also contains a truth. It is a thesis, however, that poses too many problems in itself and it certainly does not work for Job.
We cannot deny that in the biblical tradition there is a theological line according to which God sends various forms of suffering to mankind for their conversion (it is enough to think of the 'plagues of Egypt'). But when a salvific reading of suffering and pain prevails in religions, there is always the temptation not to do anything to alleviate human suffering and that of the poor. They can also insinuate the idea and practice that it is good to let people in their suffering because if it was alleviated or eliminated the sufferer may lose the chance to save themselves. Job, however, is waiting for another God that is not the cause of human suffering - and we join him in this. He is looking for a face of Elohim who is a travelling companion of those who suffer, who has mercy on him and cares for him.
Suffering is part of the human condition, it is our daily bread; and if Elohim is the God of life, we can certainly also find him at the bottom of our or other people's suffering. Sometimes the night of pain allows us to see the most distant stars, and to feel that the void created by the suffering is "inhabited". The encounter with suffering can make us access the deeper dimensions of our life, when in the nudity of existence we can meet a truer "me" that has been unknown so far. At other times the pain makes people become worse, it takes the light of day away and we can no longer even see the sun at noon. Too many poor people are crushed by suffering that does not make them more human. The first chapters of Genesis tell us that the suffering of Adam was not in God's original plan and that its source is external to Elohim. The Bible knows that the gods that feed on the suffering of man are called idols.
But Elihu cannot use his argument to explain the suffering of Job. Job is righteous and innocent, he was not or is not in any condition of mortal sin from which he should exit by way of suffering. So despite having to recognize the anthropological and spiritual value that suffering can sometimes produce, no humanistic and therefore true reading of the Bible can make God the cause of the suffering of people, let alone the innocent. Which God's actions could be associated with the suffering of children, the destruction of the poor, the cry of the many Jobs in history? And if anyone were to come up with such an idea, they would be constructing inhuman religions and gods that are too small to be up to the best part of us that continues to suffer when faced with human suffering. What religious sense would a world have where the better humans have to be fighting the suffering that God would cause? None. Those who are crucified without resurrection do not save either people or God, and anyone who tries to constrict religions to Good Friday is preventing the flourishing of man and God. Solidarity and fraternity are born and reborn by our capacity to suffer for the suffering of others, our compassion for the pain of every woman and every man. It is this caring God that Job is seeking: a God who is the first to suffer from the pain of the world, the first to take action to reduce it by redeeming the poor and the victims.
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    [metadesc] => Al termine delle parole di Giobbe, non entra in scena Dio, ma arriva un nuovo personaggio: Elihu.
Cerca di convincerci che la spiegazione dei mali di Giobbe sia il ruolo salvifico della sofferenza. Ma nessuna lettura vera della Bibbia può far di Dio la causa della sofferenza degli uomini, tanto meno degli innocenti.
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    [text] => 
A Man Named Job/13 - Dialogue, even the most unexpected type, helps understand life and God
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 07/06/2015
Iob says that the good ones do not live and that God makes them die unjustly. Iob's friends say that the bad guys do not live and that God makes them die justly. The truth is that everyone dies.
Guido Ceronetti  Il libro di Giobbe (The Book of Job)

Job has ended his speeches. His 'friends' have humiliated and disappointed him, but they also allowed us to find more and more profound reasons for his innocence. In moments of deep discernment on the justice of our life and that of the world, dialogue is an essential tool. We may only manage to understand the deepest questions of our existence and penetrate the darkest depths of our soul in company, by performing a dialogue.
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A Man Named Job/11 Let's find the sky in ourselves, faithful to the truth that is in us
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 24/05/2015
Job continues to interrogate the sky. Thanks to him we know that man has been given the capability to transform divine injustice into human justice. Once upon a time, in a distant land, there was a legendary man, just and generous, that, in his loneliness and despair, found the courage to face God. And to force him to look at his Creation.

(Elie Wiesel, Biblical Characters Through the Midrash).
The history of religions and peoples is the unfolding of a real struggle between those who imprison God within ideologies and those who try to free him. The prophets belong to the category of the liberators of God who perform the essential function of criticism of all the powers in every age and overcome the invincible, tempting charm of using religions and ideologies to strengthen their dominant positions.
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Job is one of these 'prophets', who - more than anyone else - forces us to go to the heart of the mechanism of power by criticizing and attacking directly the idea of ​​God built by the ideologies of his time. Therefore he does not limit himself to the criticism of the powerful, the priests and kings, but just as and most of the great prophets of the Bible, he wants to dismantle the idea of ​​God that is artificially supported by the whole edifice of power. His stubborn request to put the ideological God of his 'friends' to process is the precondition for liberating the possibility of another God.
When Job is eclipsed or silenced in a religious community, the answers in the name of God proliferate and questions to God disappear. And when we stop posing new and difficult questions to God, we prevent him from talking to our history and to grow inside it, we harness him in abstract categories that no longer understand the words and the cries of the victims. The prophets are essential because they call people to die and rise again to free themselves from idolatry, and because they force God to die and rise again to live up to the real human.
At the end of their discourse to Job, the three friends have not achieved anything. Job is increasingly convinced of his innocence, and so more and more determined to meet God in a fair trial where he hopes to be cleared by a different God that he cannot see yet but he can hear him. The theo-ideology of his interlocutors only reinforced the conviction of his own righteousness instead of reconciling him to their reasoning about God. Those dialogues, however, have had the great merit that through them we got to know Job and his radical religious and anthropological revolution. And so, that great pain and infinite misfortune that at first seemed to us as a high hedge of suffering that covered out the horizon of man and God have also gradually opened to a boundless space beyond and to new horizons of man and God.
As a link between the first and second part of the book, at this point we find a Hymn to Wisdom, perhaps an already existing poem inserted in the book by the author to break the narrative rhythm and let us take a breath. It is an interlude that's difficult to decipher but it is full of poetry, yet another gift of this great book. “Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place for gold that they refine"; man "searches out to the farthest limit the ore in gloom and deep darkness”, he creates shafts underground and to reach precious metals that "hang in the air”. The man of technology uses his intelligence to dominate the world: “He cuts out channels in the rocks, and his eye sees every precious thing. He dams up the streams so that they do not trickle, and the thing that is hidden he brings out to light." (28, 1-11) The ambivalence of technology is pointed out to us, however. Like any man of the antiquity, the author of the book of Job is amazed and humbled by the capacity that man has developed in dominating matter, things, the world. But inside technology he also sees the hidden but real risk of abuse: “As for the earth, out of it comes bread, but underneath it is turned up as by fire. ... Man puts his hand to the flinty rock and overturns mountains by the roots.” (28;5,9). Technology has its own intrinsic law that drives man to dig ever deeper tunnels, to topple the mountains in search of precious materials, thus starving the peasants who lived on the land, yesterday and today. Therefore, if we want to understand the biblical message about the relationship between man and nature, we must read the command of 'subduing the earth' contained in Genesis (1:28) along with this hymn in the Book of Job, where the value of the spirit of technology is recognized but it is also distinguished from the spirit of wisdom: “But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding?” (28,12) Wisdom is not extracted inside mines, nor can it be bought in the market place in exchange for precious metals: “Gold and glass cannot equal it, nor can it be exchanged for jewels of fine gold. …The topaz of Ethiopia cannot equal it, nor can it be valued in pure gold.” (28,17-19).
To point out the innovative message of these words we must keep the culture of the time in mind that was all steeped in 'economic' theology. For the ancient Middle Eastern world it was certain that gold, silver, topaz and pearls did not buy wisdom; however, these were unmistakable signs of God's blessing, that same God from whom wisdom comes. And it was common to think that you will not become rich without wisdom. The spirit of the wealth and that of wisdom were considered the mirrors of one another. The fool does not become rich, and those born rich become poor if they lack wisdom. Just as the engineer and the scientist are not 'intelligent' if they lack wisdom.
This hymn, however, separates wealth (and technology) from wisdom, and in so doing it takes Job's side: in fact, he has reiterated to us that there is no relationship between wealth and justice, because there are rich and wretched among the righteous on this earth, and the same is true for the non-righteous. The gold and silver of a person does not say anything about his righteousness: Job was righteous as a rich man and continues to be so when he becomes poor and unfortunate, too. The goods pass and are changeable, justice and wisdom are forever, and so they are a much smarter investment. We could then read this interlude as a confirmation and approval of the 'theology' of Job and a critique of the economic and retributive theologies of his friends. This hymn to wisdom reminds us of the ancient and important truth that wisdom is a gift and gratuitousness: charis, not a commodity to be purchased with either gold or through soothsayers or magicians. Here, too, YHWH-Elohim is distinguished from the idols that only give their 'wisdom' to their flatterers if they pay the price in terms of sacrifice and submission. The God of the Bible is not an idol because he does not sell wisdom, but gives it freely - every retributive religion is, in essence, an idolatrous and commercial religion. Words that could have been uttered by Job, too.
But - and here it is the mystery and the interest of this chapter - the author tells us something else that complicates the discourse, and forces us to dig deeper. He tells us that wisdom is unknowable and unreachable by man: “God (only) understands the way to it, and he knows its place.” (28,23).
And here there is a definite distance created from Job. Not all of the book of Job is at level with Job. We have to select and save Job's words from the many other words of his book, including those of Elohim that soon we will also hear.
Job denies the law that connects justice to wealth, but believes that there is, there must be a logic of wisdom. The God whom he calls and waits for is not an accountant who assigns assets to men according to their merits, because that would make him a trivial god just like all the idols. But he does not accept the idea that there is no link between justice and wisdom: the righteous one is wise, even if he is poor and unfortunate. And the proof of this is the history and the life of all those for whom wisdom does not coincide with the intelligence of technology, but where there exists a relationship between righteousness and wisdom, and it is a real one. We know people who are wise and ignorant, wise and poor, wise and not very intelligent. The homo faber and the homo oeconomicus may be foolish, and often they are, too. The righteous man is not foolish, because God - if he is not an idol - must give wisdom to those who follow justice, even when its following (as in Job's case) means denying the justice of Elohim.
A false, unjust and evil person is never wise: this law is as real as that which moves the sun and other stars. An unjust man can hope for all other goods, but not in that of wisdom. Job knows this law because he sees it in the world, but mainly because he carries it inscribed in his conscience. And we also know it and recognize it outside and inside us (that's why there is hope that we can always convert, even with the last breath of life). So the mine of wisdom exists: it is inside us, and to discover it, the only thing necessary is to remain faithful to the truth that is in us. This is the main message of Job.
This hymn to wisdom then contains a half-truth. It reminds us that wisdom is a gift, but it does not tell us that we receive this gift right upon coming into the world, and it dwells in us. It is there where we can dig to reach him, and once reached we find that it is the best part of us. That's where we can meet, discover, listen to and follow wisdom. That's where we can recognize the voice of Elohim, a voice that we could not recognize if it weren't already within us, perhaps covered or wounded. If Adam was kneaded in the image of Elohim, divine wisdom is also human wisdom. The sky within us is no different from the sky above us, and the inner sky darkens, the one above us goes out or fills with idols.
The song of Job is a great hymn to the truth of the living human, which is truer than all of his nights. If God is true then man is also true, and his clear conscience is not a self-deception. If God is wisdom then man is also wisdom. If we separate these two wisdom-truths - we have done so many times, and we still do - religions become useless, humanisms are lost, and Job ends his song.
 
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A Man Named Job/11 Let's find the sky in ourselves, faithful to the truth that is in us
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 24/05/2015
Job continues to interrogate the sky. Thanks to him we know that man has been given the capability to transform divine injustice into human justice. Once upon a time, in a distant land, there was a legendary man, just and generous, that, in his loneliness and despair, found the courage to face God. And to force him to look at his Creation.

(Elie Wiesel, Biblical Characters Through the Midrash).
The history of religions and peoples is the unfolding of a real struggle between those who imprison God within ideologies and those who try to free him. The prophets belong to the category of the liberators of God who perform the essential function of criticism of all the powers in every age and overcome the invincible, tempting charm of using religions and ideologies to strengthen their dominant positions.
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A Man Named Job/9 - Through the eyes of the poor, beyond the night of man and God
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 10/05/2015
"I'm a wounded man. And I'd like to leave, pity, / And finally reach a place / Where a man who is alone / With himself will be heard. / (...) Show us a hint of justice. / What is Your law? / Dash my wretched passions / Release me from anxiety. /I am tired of my voiceless screams."
Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pity (La pietà - English translation: Diego Bastianutti)

Each generation produces its own gap between the new and difficult questions of the victims and the insufficient answers of Job's friends. Sometimes this gap becomes a loophole that we observe trying to see a broader human horizon and a higher sky. Many other times, the space of this gap is denied and cancelled, erasing the painful but fruitful questions of the poor. To hope to meet "Job and his brothers" we should simply learn to live in this inevitable vacuum, by listening quietly. There may flourish a new type of solidarity with our time and perhaps, finally, fraternity.
    [fulltext] => 
Seeing the obstinacy with which Job declares himself innocent and denies the "retributive" theology of his friends, in his second attack on Job, Eliphaz the Temanite abandons the abstract reasoning (if you suffer you must be sinful and evil), and comes to accuse him of some specific, concrete, historical serious crimes, attributing the worst deeds to him: "...you have exacted pledges of your brothers for nothing and stripped the naked of their clothing. You have given no water to the weary to drink, and you have withheld bread from the hungry. (You were like) "The man with power ... You have sent widows away empty, and the arms of the fatherless were crushed." (22, 6-9). But Eliphaz is not yet satisfied, and he accuses Job of having committed these crimes "for nothing" (22,6), for no reason, 'just because'. This gratuitousness is the opposite of the true one of Job, this is what Satan had made the object of his bet with God (“Does Job fear God for no reason?” (1,9). Reality is completely overturned: Job who is righteous “for nothing”, quite freely, is now accused of being a powerful evil capable of malice, which is an accusation worse than that of Satan - who, in fact, only challenged the gratuitousness of Job, not his righteousness.
And so, continuing his inquisition, Eliphaz comes to evoke even the perverse condition of humanity before the flood (22,14-20). Job as Lamech. Job as Cain.
Eliphaz knows that Job has ever committed these heinous crimes. We know (from the Prologue of the book) that Job was a righteous and honest man, the most righteous man on earth (“there is none like him on the earth”: (2,3). Like Noah, the saviour of mankind from the flood. Eliphaz and his other friends knew all this, too. Yet they overturn reality completely. Why?
Here we are facing a perfect description of what an ideology is. When a person, a community, an organization or a school of thought is captured by ideology (which, lest we forget, is always idolatry: they worship fetishes manufactured by their own "hands"), it means not only to deny evidence, but, almost always, to invent facts, stories and words. In the beginning, the inventor of this virtual reality is still able to distinguish what's invented from what's real; but soon comes the time when the same inventors are starting to believe in the reality they have created. The strongest point of ideology is this capacity to invent a different reality and then believe in their own inventions. This is what makes it irrefutable and invincible at the level of discourse and dialogue - Job shows it to us. Stories, heroes and victims are built artificially and one day they leave the realm of fiction and become real for those who produced them. Thus the person made ill by ideology actually lives in another world, sees other things and lives in a parallel reality. History presents a series of ideological monsters to us who end up devouring real people and almost always their own authors, too. Ideological thought is always presented as a progressive departure from the ambivalent reality of everyone's real life to enter another different, simpler one, with perfect answers to all questions.
Job, however, is the anti-ideologist, because all his efforts are directed at remaining anchored to his own truth and land, to avoid that he, too, should fall into an ideology which his friends consistently and tenaciously propose to him as a way out from the black hole that he has fallen in.
What is tremendous and wonderful in the dialogues of Job is his stubbornness in not accepting even the mercy of God that is systematically reintroduced by his friends (“If you return to the Almighty you will be built up”: 22,23), because he feels that he would not meet God, but only an ideology, an idol. Even mercy needs to have truth. He who forgives a non-existing fault or a forged crime meant to elicit a request for forgiveness in the other person is not merciful. To accept this mercy would only mean entering the same ideology of those who propose it. The offers of mercy to forgive invented sins are common and subtle forms of domination of the powerful over the poor and the victims, of which history offers us a wide, sad range. Job did not seek or want this type of mercy, and he acted also on behalf of those before and after him; he had to do so. How many poor people, how many women have had to apologize for crimes they never committed, to beg pardon for sins they have never made, to shoulder faults instead of others who had to remain covered and "innocent". Job continues to cry out for them to keep their erased memory alive and to echo their choked cries. The cries of the innocent are not to be muted by false offers of mercy: the greatest act of mercy that we are asked to perform is to let them go on screaming, waiting for someone, or God, to listen to them and receive their cries. Perhaps there is no act of non-mercy that could be worse than that of those who do not let the poor scream, convincing them of their guilt. If it is true that there is no justice without mercy, then Job tells us that mercy without justice cannot be true, either. Every gift that's manipulated becomes a poison, and it poisons relations.
Job did not want the bargain of admitting his guilt, he only wants to get his full absolution, and the condemnation of God for his unjust behaviour towards himself and towards the many innocent in the world. Therefore, chapter after chapter he continues to ask for only one thing: to be able to meet God, on a par, and get an explanation of the injustices of the earth: "Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!" (23,3).
Job - and here is the shocking greatness of this book - is looking for a face of God that is willing to admit his faults, and accept the possibility of having to lose at court against the justice of man. But can there be such a God? Is there an Elohim who is willing to accept getting into an argument with mankind, and then take the verdict of being guilty? "I would lay my case before him and fill my mouth with arguments" (23,4).
But Job cannot find the throne of God, he cannot see Elohim on this earth, nor can he surmise him arriving on the horizon: "Behold, I go forward, but he is not there, and backward, but I do not perceive him; on the left hand when he is working, I do not behold him; he turns to the right hand, but I do not see him" (23,8-9). His is a night of the perfect God. He keeps looking for him, beyond the chatter of his friends. And so his honest night prepares a dawn for man. Skies that are too bright and clear inevitably end up darkening the humble, rocky and barren lands of the poor.
And at this point there comes a twist. Job uses the same images of sin and wickedness that Eliphaz had attributed to him (bread and water denied, widows, orphans, pledges, clothes ...), but he uses these to give us an image of the victims of the crimes of the powerful that is very real and very true: “Behold, like wild donkeys in the desert the poor go out to their toil, seeking game; the wasteland yields food for their children. They gather their fodder in the field, and they glean the vineyard of the wicked man. They lie all night naked, without clothing, and have no covering in the cold. ... hungry, they carry the sheaves; among the olive rows of the wicked they make oil; they tread the winepresses, but suffer thirst" (24,5-11).
The poor work as wild donkeys: they carry sheaves of wheat on their shoulders for their masters and they themselves are starving, they press olives and grapes and they themselves are burning with thirst. The poor are forced to pawn their clothes to their creditors, and instead of getting it back for the night to cover themselves with, they are left naked in the streets (Exodus, 22,26). There are too many people who become atheists in the face of inadequate answers to their questions on injustice and evil in the world.
Eliphaz, with his theo-ideology, had invented a powerful and cruel Job who wanted to oppress the imaginary poor and commit crimes against them. Job, who is truly poor and innocent, looks at the same world of Eliphaz, but sees it differently. He places himself in solidarity with the victims, and says: “From out of the city the dying groan, and the soul of the wounded cries for help; yet God charges no one with wrong” (24,12). When we look at it from the dunghill of Job, the world cannot seem like the sight of some large, systematic and universal injustice. The poor continue to sleep at night without clothing to cover themselves, under the closed shutters of the windows of high fashion.
Job is starving to death, and right next to him his friends are philosophising about food. The temptation is becoming ever stronger to build new and increasingly sophisticated ideologies in order to silence the poor, not see them, persuade and convince them that they are only guilty and deserve their sad fate. Job continues his struggle, generation after generation. And he is eternally waiting for true answers in solidarity, not false mercy. By people, by us, and by God.
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A Man Named Job/9 - Through the eyes of the poor, beyond the night of man and God
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 10/05/2015
"I'm a wounded man. And I'd like to leave, pity, / And finally reach a place / Where a man who is alone / With himself will be heard. / (...) Show us a hint of justice. / What is Your law? / Dash my wretched passions / Release me from anxiety. /I am tired of my voiceless screams."
Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pity (La pietà - English translation: Diego Bastianutti)

Each generation produces its own gap between the new and difficult questions of the victims and the insufficient answers of Job's friends. Sometimes this gap becomes a loophole that we observe trying to see a broader human horizon and a higher sky. Many other times, the space of this gap is denied and cancelled, erasing the painful but fruitful questions of the poor. To hope to meet "Job and his brothers" we should simply learn to live in this inevitable vacuum, by listening quietly. There may flourish a new type of solidarity with our time and perhaps, finally, fraternity.
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A Man Named Job/7 - The redeemer of the poor serves both the brother and the God of the living
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 26/04/2015
“My last desire will be for you, who hold my whole life in your name: mother. I am at peace and I am innocent. Never be ashamed for the reason why I'm dying, rather, say that your child did not fear and that he died for freedom and now I forgive everyone, bye Mum, Dad, Stefano, Alberto, bye to all, everything is ready, I am at peace. Farewell Mum, Mum, Mum, Mum ...”
(Letters from the death row of the resistance fighters, Domenico, 29 years old)."
Many faiths have been reborn from the supportive context of fraternity that were able to accompany the man shouting towards a sky that appears to be blank or hostile all through his experience of the dark. But around the desperate people sitting on piles of manure in the world, the gossip and persecution of non-supportive “friends” are no less frequent. They do not see that the truth is often hidden in the silence of faith and the “fights” with God, and they want to fill the empty sky of others by their empty words. And so the lament of Job continues to resound in our lands: “How long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words?” (Job 19,2).
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Even in his second dialogue-accusation Bildad the Shuhite reaffirms his theses with increased aggressiveness, making it sound perfect like all theorems without flesh and blood. You, Job, cannot change the world's order. The righteous one lives and is rewarded, the wicked one perishes and suffers: “shall the earth be forsaken for you, or the rock be removed out of its place?” (18,4). He describes the fate of the wicked and the sinner in detail, and it coincides perfectly with the situation Job is in. With just one, albeit radical difference: Job is a righteous man.
But the great, crazy and wonderful hypothesis of Job returns with increasing power and conviction: “know then that God has put me in the wrong and closed his net about me.” (19,6). Job too, like Bildad, believes in the divine order of the world, and to escape atheism, he takes God so seriously as to debit him for the misfortune he is going through. And he shouts out for help: “Behold, I cry out, ‘Violence!’ but I am not answered; I call for help, but there is no justice.” (19,7)
"Violence" (hamas) was a scream, a scream, with a specific legal value. When a person in extreme difficulty shouted ‘Justice!’, they created an obligation of help in the other - something like the ship sending out an SOS obliging those receiving it to intervene in its help. But God remains silent even about the extreme SOS of Job, because he himself is the author of violence. God – as for Job - has heard the cry and is not doing anything. Unlike in the case of many lamentations in and outside the Bible, the God of Job is not deaf, but his enemy: “He has kindled his wrath against me and counts me as his adversary.” (19,11). To whom should he cry out then? What remains is the hope in his friends: “Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me!” (19,21). Left alone in the world, Job has prayed the earth (16,18), and now he prays friends. His prayer is fully earthen, which becomes a last appeal to the solidarity of men under a hostile, closed sky. It is a prayer that resembles the one that the condemned man addresses his captors, reminding them of their common human condition. It is the appeal to fraternity as a last resort.
Many instances of human solidarity are born and reborn from horizontal prayers, from desperate cries for help received by companions, when the sky seems closed, or when the “lawyers” of God manage to convince us that their obvious and academic answers were really the ones by Elohim. Even when it seems the only one, the cry to the other person is almost always the second one, which is launched by the poor when the first cry upwards remains unanswered. These instances of fraternity that come from knowing how to receive the screams of pain cannot be the enemy of God, even when the people involved cannot pronounce his name and do not recognize his voice. The enemy of prayer is not the other, supportive person, but the narcissism of the one who speaks only with himself, with the idols or with the goods. Even a prayer in search of a friend can be a sublime prayer and human solidarity that comes from God's silence can be more real and spiritual than prayers to the trivial god of the adulators of God and therefore the enemies of Job.
Job's cry for human compassion remains unanswered, too. Even his friends are silent. But his extreme quest for justice continues, opening up another sky for us: “Oh, that my words were now written! Oh, that they were printed in a book...” (19,23). Job's wish is that his words should be engraved “with an iron pen and lead” (19,24), into the rock so they do not die with him. He wants to leave his testament as his last message - there is an immense love for humanity in all his drama. The rock mentioned is the Bible. Here, too, we can find the mystery of the word: while Job uttered that cry – “Oh, that my words were now written!” - his words were really being written, so that we could receive them. At this point a key process throughout the book of Job is revealed to us: the friends capable of pietas to whom Job calls for solidarity are us, the readers, recipients of his song, who can receive his SOS today and respond to it. Every unheard cry that has been kept in the Bible - including the great cry of Golgotha - is addressed us. The Bible is not just a great collection of psalms, divine truths and prayers, and it is not only a story of God to men. Above of all of these, the Bible is a great story of man - to man, under an inhabited sky. The Bible is a humanism inviting us to try to respond to the women and men when the answers of YHWH are not there. All the Scripture is an SOS sent out to our humanity, a call to us to become truly human, to receive the cry for justice by the man named Job and all his brothers and sisters who continue to cry out throughout history, who have enriched his first song and are calling out for our pity. For biblical humanism God's answers are not enough, as he is often silent to make room for our responsibility. If Elohim had not been silent for most of the book, we would not have had the great questions of Job, and his cry yearning for justice would not have embraced and reached all the despair of the earth, as a means of saving it. God must know how to keep quiet if he wants responsible people who are capable of non-trivial questions.
But the Bible is not the only treasure chest guarding the last messages of the real human. Much literature has been and is still born as a testament - perhaps all great literature is born like that. Many last words and many cries towards heaven and people were written in search of brotherhood inside the stories of fratricide. Many of these words have been lost, but there are many others that we have been able to collect and cherish. The concentration camps, prisons, deaths in solitude were all piles of manure also capable of generating wonderful flowers. Thousands of poems, diaries, letters from the front, music, songs, art and even the stones have joined in and kept up the cry of the beggar Job. When a man on the death row entrusts his last message to paper so that it can reach someone, his hope is alive. So even a letter or a poem can make that last moment of hope last forever. They make hope eternal and do not let it die - death can be defeated even by our words.
At the height of these cry-prayers of Job, an unexpected and wonderful, a authentic song of hope flourishes: “For I know that my Redeemer [goel] liveth, and that He shall stand at the latter day upon the earth” (19,25). It is about a hope that comes like a rainbow while the storm is still raging. That is how real hope always comes: it is not the result of our virtue or merit, but all and only grace, charis, gift. And it always surprises us, leaving us breathless - and if it doesn't surprise us and is announced well ahead, then it is either small or vain hope.
Who is the redeemer, the goel that Job wants, yearns for and calls to from the bottom of his desperate hope? We do not know. But perhaps it is another God, a God who is more real than the one he feels to be more of an enemy. It is the hope inside the despair that resurrects faith, because it calls it to transcend itself, to become what it is not yet. And as he is hoping for goel, the redeemer of the innocent poor, he sees him already approaching on the horizon. In the dark nights of faith, of every faith, one always starts again from hope, by re-learning to hope, and re-learning it many times (the hope-gift comes shining like a rainbow, and like a rainbow it also fades).
We do not know what kind of goel Job hopes for. But we know that it is not enough for Job to be redeemed in Paradise, because he does not know it. The God of these biblical books is the God of the living, not the dead. No biblical humanism can be a authentic if it postpones the redemption of innocent victims to the eschaton, or the afterlife. The goel in whom Job is hoping must arrive and stand up on the dust of our human condition of living beings. The promised land is our land. Every promise of redemption of the victims that does not become a concrete commitment to free them here and now ends up being inhumanity and deceitful hope. Job wants to see his goel arrive in the dust of his dunghill, to see him with his own eyes: “whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold” (19,27).
The goel is not an idol if he is able to get down to the dust of the victims, if we can come across him in our street, if we can catch a glimpse of him in the men and women of our city who are able to listen to Job's cry and respond to it. Too many poor people have never seen the goel arrive to their piles of manure, and are still waiting. And Job continues to call to the earth, to people, to Elohim. For them. For us.
 
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A Man Named Job/7 - The redeemer of the poor serves both the brother and the God of the living
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 26/04/2015
“My last desire will be for you, who hold my whole life in your name: mother. I am at peace and I am innocent. Never be ashamed for the reason why I'm dying, rather, say that your child did not fear and that he died for freedom and now I forgive everyone, bye Mum, Dad, Stefano, Alberto, bye to all, everything is ready, I am at peace. Farewell Mum, Mum, Mum, Mum ...”
(Letters from the death row of the resistance fighters, Domenico, 29 years old)."
Many faiths have been reborn from the supportive context of fraternity that were able to accompany the man shouting towards a sky that appears to be blank or hostile all through his experience of the dark. But around the desperate people sitting on piles of manure in the world, the gossip and persecution of non-supportive “friends” are no less frequent. They do not see that the truth is often hidden in the silence of faith and the “fights” with God, and they want to fill the empty sky of others by their empty words. And so the lament of Job continues to resound in our lands: “How long will you torment me and break me in pieces with words?” (Job 19,2).
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A Man Named Job/5 - The false love of those who defend the Lord to praise themselves
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 12/04/2015
"Let's go from here. Let's ask for all this sickness to pass. Whom shall we ask? The vineyard that is ̀all 
a burst of new leaves, 
the acacia branch with its thorns, the ivy and the grass 
empress sisters that are 
a lying mantle and a powerful throne"
(excerpt from the poem Ai miei maestri immensi - To My Immense Masters by Mariangela Gualtieri)
There are many economists, philosophers and intellectuals who build theories to legitimize misery in the world, about which we are told that it is a result of the laziness of the poor, and may be something coded in their genes. Job and his great pleas for explanations are marginalized, they are not listened to, but ridiculed, and the one who tries to defend the truth of the poor and their reasons is surrounded by thousands of the 'friends of Job' that condemn and mock him. The false friends of Job are not extinct, and they are always with us with their ideologies, to humiliate, despise and condemn the poor.
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The third friend Zophar's accusation is clear and merciless: Job is a fake innocent, a bragger who hides his sins under a curtain of words: Then Zophar the Naamathite answered and said: “Should a multitude of words go unanswered, and a man full of talk be judged right?” (11,1-2). Job responds: “No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you. But I have understanding as well as you; I am not inferior to you.” (11,1-3). Job wants different and new answers from God, he does not need those of the wisdom consumer theologians: “What you know, I also know; I am not inferior to you. But I would speak to the Almighty” (13,2-3). He wants to hear the version of events directly from God. He does not want to hear the professional defenders, he wants to hear the voice of the accused.
To celebrate the infinite and unfathomable wisdom of God, Zophar attacks, condemns and humiliates the man, Job. Job, however, remains on the side of the earth and is totally in solidarity with humanity (with Adam, the earthen one). He does not praise God against man, he is not an adulator. However yesterday and today, there has always been a legion of the adulators of God like Zophar and Job's other friends who defend God to praise themselves, without really loving either God or men.
To defend God, these three friends offend man and deny what's evidence (they knew Job and they knew that he was righteous). Their theology is that of the cold theorems, praising God to praise itself. It is an ideology, and thus idolatry. However, every non-ideological theology is first of all humanism, it speaks well of man to God before speaking well of God to man. Divine truth, goodness and beauty cannot be defended against human truth, beauty and goodness. And he who does it denies what's human, the earth and God.
The concrete and incarnate experience of the righteous Job who is unjustly struck by misfortune is the first fact of reality from which Zophar started his argument. But, like all false prophets and false wise men, he defends God who does not need it to save himself and his own theological “truth”. The dialogues between Job and his friends are therefore a critique of the type of religion that is the enemy of man (and God), of the ideologies, philosophies and religion reduced to ethics.
Job denounces all moralists who do not look at the world from the pile of manure and become aggressive like Zophar. It is impressive, if one looks at history and the present, to see the huge group of theologians, philosophers and moralists who have used and still use (their idea of) God to build a pyramid only to able to place themselves on top, next to or even above God (as his architects and builders). Job is then the true theologian, the one who asks God to “wake up” in order to be at level with the suffering of the world.
From the meditation of these chapters in the Book of Job we find out then that the man named Job is a symbol of many things, all of them decisive. First, it reveals some essential dimensions of the mystery of truth. The victims, the poor have a privileged path to wisdom, they can access a truer truth. When you reach the extreme human condition, where all the bridges fell behind you and looking ahead you do not glimpse the promised land any more, you can search only the truth for truth - and we often find it, too, or rather, we find ourselves immersed in it. It is this truth, perhaps only this truth that allows those who 'own' it (or, better, those in whom it dwells) not to use it to their own advantage, not to consume it; like when, having discovered a rare mountain flower, instead of picking it to scent and embellish our home, we leave it in the meadow for everyone to see and enjoy. It is this gratuitousness that makes the truth, all truth, humble, chaste, pure and precious. Agape.
Job is also an excellent icon of biblical faith: a continuous and incessant demand for truth, that if it wants to be authentic, if it wants to be love it must be shouted out with Job, while sitting on the piles of manure of the world, never ceasing to feel brothers and sisters of everyone and everything.
But Job is also a paradigm of those who have received a true vocation - whether it is religious, secular or artistic. When you walk following a good voice that is calling you (from outside and from inside), there inevitably comes the stage of Job: you find yourself sitting on your and the city's garbage, and an absolute need for truth is born about your own story, about God and life, that can no longer be contented with small truths and simple answers. Having given everything, you can and must ask for everything. And with Job we understand that the answers to our questions of truth are not for ourselves, but for all, and a friendship is born with men, women and nature which is not the fruit of the virtues, but only and completely gift.
Afterall, the cosmic song of Job is really wonderful. In his condition of the poor and disinterested lover of truth, Job experiences the unity and communion with the entire creation in his own wounded flesh. He includes animals, the earth, the plants and the straw in his song; he understands them, loves them and feels one with them: “But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you.” (12,7-8) Seen from the dunghill everything becomes alive, everything speaks, everything prays. But in order to see this life and this prayer that is the deepest of the universe one needs to love the truth for itself. This is the way, the only way to get to see a cosmic brotherhood, and from the pain of the world there springs and flourishes a communion with the grass, the finch, the rock, the star, the wild ass, the old man who passes away in a hospital bed. You learn to see and contemplate the innocence and the truth of the animals and of all non-human life - only men are capable of being false, flatterers and idolaters, animals or plants are not. In the real world of Job there is a more fundamental truth of the cosmos: rocks, water, trees, roots and leaves compose a single song of the earth taking the shape of words in the bleeding but life-filled throat of Job. The fragility of the ephemeral human condition makes Job feel even more like a creature. The death of man is more desperate than that of the tree (which after being cut can still hope to start sprouting and renewing again: 14,7), it is actually the poor sister of the death of the river and the lake that dry because of the lack of water (14,11). All creation is vulnerable and ephemeral (the mountain may come down with a landslide, the rock may be eroded by water: 14,19-20); like everything, like us.
This cosmic vulnerability, however, this kind of universal pain for the unexplained suffering of animals, plants and the earth, gives Job a more solid basis for his argument with God: he becomes the real and extreme spokesman of the earth and asks God to give reason to a world he created where there is too much suffering for no reason.
We are facing an amazing reciprocity between Job and nature: the earth gives him further evidence and more strength for his trial with God, and Job gives voice to nature, demanding explanations from the Eternal Being also on behalf of the rocks, animals and trees. The demanding of justice and truth that rises every day by plants, animals and men is rather powerful if we listen to it.
The presence of Job or someone wearing his mask well in the drama of life is essential for every person, community, society or people who do not want to fall into the ideologies and then in the regimes that are always built on the basis of the type of reasoning the 'friends of Job' practiced, using high ideals and God himself to oppress the poor and justify such oppressions.
The real brothers of Job, however are those (very few) poets and artists who, because of their vocation and charisma, are not afraid to persevere in asking questions about the truth of life, without stopping in front of the almost invincible temptation to try and find consolations that are other than the consolation of truth. If we never meet Job or a poet like him in life who is in love with the naked truth (for example the poet Leopardi), we cannot get rid of the ideologies, and we get enslaved by some idol providing simple answers to our simple questions.
We are living in a deep poverty of big questions. We are quickly getting used to the dialogues of the talk shows, and so we have forgotten that we grew up by asking thousands of “why”-s from our parents, and that the way to become adults and old is if we can get back to the big 'why' of children. God will speak to us again when, with and like Job, we will know how to ask questions to him that are able to “wake him up”.
 
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A Man Named Job/5 - The false love of those who defend the Lord to praise themselves
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 12/04/2015
"Let's go from here. Let's ask for all this sickness to pass. Whom shall we ask? The vineyard that is ̀all 
a burst of new leaves, 
the acacia branch with its thorns, the ivy and the grass 
empress sisters that are 
a lying mantle and a powerful throne"
(excerpt from the poem Ai miei maestri immensi - To My Immense Masters by Mariangela Gualtieri)
There are many economists, philosophers and intellectuals who build theories to legitimize misery in the world, about which we are told that it is a result of the laziness of the poor, and may be something coded in their genes. Job and his great pleas for explanations are marginalized, they are not listened to, but ridiculed, and the one who tries to defend the truth of the poor and their reasons is surrounded by thousands of the 'friends of Job' that condemn and mock him. The false friends of Job are not extinct, and they are always with us with their ideologies, to humiliate, despise and condemn the poor.
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