Paper

Natalie Brandsma
Lit 240
15-12-2009


"Zeus has led us on to know, the Helmsmen lays it down as law that we must suffer, suffer into truth."
-Aeschylus

Grief is isolating; loneliness is part of the experience of pain, of loss, for it is alone that we experienced that which we now miss. If it is a person who has died, we miss them in a way that is very unique to our experience of sharing life with them. No one else understands our relationship with that person like we do. There is no way to fully describe our pain to another person, because to understand fully, they would need to share in our experience. But we try—again and again—to share our stories, and we find that with sharing, comes a sense of shared experience. From that, we can begin to heal. We do not share our unique grief still, that will always be ours alone to bear, but with the sharing of our story comes a sense of the collective suffering of humanity. We understand grief, pain, and loss—all these are a part of the human experience. These dark feelings are most intense and most primitive. Because pain is unpleasant, we try to avoid it, to run from it; and in a quest to understand our pain, we question it. Why did this happen to me? And as some sort of deity has existed in the minds of humans since the early human experience, we question God. We try to extract some sort of meaning from our intense pain, isolation, this darkness that is grief. From our questioning, we receive no definitive answers.
So the character of Job in the Bible and Jacob in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Slave question the reason for their suffering, their sins, and God. Both ultimately find that there is no causal relationship between the sins they have committed and their suffering. Ultimately, God can provide no individual answer to either character; suffering is part of the human experience of life, and we must discover meaning that emerges from our own suffering.
Job begins as a pious man, he says, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (2.9) Job then goes on to state that which is the central message of the book in 1:21 "...the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Often quoted to provide comfort to the grieving, it is this message of acceptance that the Book of Job is known for. However, Job begins, as all who suffer begin, in denial. He stumbles forward numbly on with his life. He has not had time to process all of the tragedy that has occurred in his life, but once he does, he demonstrates a storm of emotions. His friends question him over and over again: what has he done? What sin has Job committed to deserve this punishment? Job insists that he has done nothing to deserve such misery: “O that my vexation were weighed…/For then it would be heavier than the sand of the sea” (6.2-3). Job’s reactions ring true to human nature: we believe that there must be a purpose for our suffering, and that this suffering has been decreed by divine justice.
Job’s friends implore Job to reveal and repent his wickedness; they tell him: “If you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you” (8.6). But Job has begun to question God, insisting that he has not committed a crime so great as to deserve such suffering. He complains, "See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face./ This will be my salvation, that the godless shall not come before him" (13.15-16). Job defies God and shares his anger, reflecting another stage of the grieving process.
"My spirit is broken, my days are extinct, the grave is ready for me" (17.1). Job, in the depths of his suffering, is purely human, sharing in this experience we call grief. And he has learned that sin has no causal relationship with suffering. At the end of the Book of Job, Job questions God as to the reason behind his suffering. Wisdom is to be found from a fear of the Lord (28.28). The Lord answers Jobs questions: to question leads to nowhere, for we humans cannot possibly understand the ways of the divine. And Job replies, “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. “ (42.2). God is angered at Job’s friend’s words to their friend: “my wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has” (42.7). Job remains righteous because he has discovered that there is no definitive answer to why he suffers, no reason humans can understand. In his book, The Great Code, Northrop Frye comments, “the situation cannot be contained within the framework of law and wisdom and no causal explanation is good enough” (194). We must learn to accept our suffering along with our joys, this is the lesson from the book of Job. And we must look for meaning that may emerge from our own suffering.
Early in the novel The Slave, Jacob is pious and repentant. He questions not God, but himself. What sins can he repent for? What has he done to deserve his position as a slave? But through the novel, Jacob changes with his experience. His views of the world broaden, and he grows more contemplative. With the death of his wife, Jacob changes completely; he begins to ask bigger questions, and he rejects personal responsibility for both his sufferings and those of Sarah.
Like Job, Jacob rejects the notion that he is somehow responsible for his suffering with the death of his beloved Sarah-Wanda. He begins, instead, to question God. As she is dying, he thinks of her as virtuous, “a thousand times better than any of the others. Have they been to heaven and learned what God likes? Worry and fear, the isolation in which he found himself, had made him rebellious” (239-240). Jacob questions the knowledge of his fellow men; his suffering is great, and he is coming upon some sense that the answer to his question is that there is no definitive answer. He blames himself in moments, because he fell in love with a gentile, but on some level, he believes that their love could not be a sin. “What happened was no accident. Everything was preordained…he had been driven, he knew, by powers stronger than himself” (247). Jacob begins to trust in the divine in a different way. He no longer is questioning himself and his sins, but he questions the ways of the world. He has found wisdom in his sorrow, and, “now he at least understood his religion: its essence was the relation between man and his fellows” (247).
He realizes that all of the rules are unimportant compared to a larger theme about his religion that seems to be missed by his community: love for one another. Jacob moves, with his grief, into his own space with God. Like Job, Jacob has rejected the idea that there is a causal relationship between his behavior and his suffering. When he is in the woods running for his life, engulfed in grief, Jacob demonstrates that he has gone through a major shift in thought; he draws comfort from thoughts of Sarah-Wanda rather than from his God (254). He has halted his obsession with proper behavior, and he focuses instead on the things of his heart.

Jacob comes through his suffering, and in the end, he discovers “Everything remained the same: the ancient love, the ancient love, the ancient grief” (279). Jacob has discovered wisdom from the depths of grief. He has accepted himself and, like Job, he has discovered that the nature of suffering is universal. He has done nothing directly to deserve so much pain; rather pain is part of his human experience.
Job captures the essence of the experience of suffering in the conclusion of his defensive speech (29-31). He laments, “And now my soul is poured out within me;/ days of affliction have taken hold of me,/ The night racks my bones,/ and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest” (30.16-17). Job is a miserable character, yet he attempts to cling to dignity as he separates his suffering from his identity. He feels isolated and abandoned by God and by the joy of living.
Life is a binary. Joy cannot exist without suffering; it matters not whether we are a sinner or the utmost pious. Suffering is inevitable. Yet when we are deep within the swirling darkness of suffering, we search for justification or meaning. We, like Job, question, why me?
In our dealings with each other, with our children for example, we often inflict suffering as punishment or discipline. Therefore it seems natural for humans to question God, the father figure, what was done to deserve the punishment and pain that is experienced. As humans, we think, unable to turn off this constant stream of conscious thought, we must question and agonize over our suffering. We run away from our negative emotions, we stuff them down, we try anything to avoid acceptance. Yet acceptance is what we ultimately move to, and only by moving straight through the heart of the grief we try so hard to avoid can we move beyond it.
May we find comfort in our darkest moments of suffering in the knowledge that all suffer, all will suffer. May we turn to the words of Job, of Jacob, and of the myriad other characters in literature who grieve and suffer. We are not, in fact alone, no matter how isolated we feel by our experience. And our experience exists for a reason, experience brings with it lessons and growth.
The day my father died started out as such a normal day—another day in the mountains, just him and me, together, like hundreds of previous days. We talked and laughed during the early part of our climb. Growing silent as the climb grew harder, and I suppose my dad’s stomach ace grew worse. But silence was normal. We had the ability to spend hours together in silence. Those moments, of quiet togetherness, were intimate. Our love, our friendship, was such that we did not need words or business to express it. So together, in our own thoughts we climbed. Dad really wanted to make the top that year, as we had not been able to the year before. He complained of an “annoying” stomach ache. But we dismissed his discomfort as indigestion from the Nepalese food from dinner the previous night. My dad and I both have EMT basic training—he actively used his training, I did not. But neither of us recognized the symptoms as heart trouble. I did not realize something was seriously wrong until dad wanted to turn around less than ten feet from the summit. Moments later, his hand started to tingle, and we both realized that he was having a heart attach. My dad said, “I can’t believe this. This is ridiculous.” Only moments later, he lost consciousness. I am thankful that there were other people around to help me perform CPR to talk to the rangers on the phone; we tried desperately to save my father. But he died anyway. And suddenly what had been a normal day, turned into an extraordinary story.
I do not know if I believe in God, but I question. Like Job, like Jacob, I throw my questions out, scream them in anger. Why did this happen? I search for meaning. And I have found truth in the quote: “we must suffer, suffer into truth”. There is meaning in suffering; through suffering, we learn to appreciate the mundane. We learn to embrace the gift of a “normal day”. We learn that life should not be taken for granted. And we learn to embrace and treasure our memories. I found this quote on my dad’s bathroom mirror after his death; these words describe painfully my experience and perspective. But they also draw from my grief a powerful lesson.
“Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are. Let me learn from you, love you. Bless you before you depart. Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow. Let me hold you while I may, for it may not always be so. One day I shall dig my nails into the earth, or bury my face in the pillow, or stretch myself taut, or raise my hands to the sky and want, more than all the world, your return.” -Mary Jean Iron