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Jewish Community News

Ask the Rabbi: December 2006

Job’s Misunderstood Wife

One of the contributions of Jewish feminism was to help a whole class of people, women, begin to find themselves and their lives in the texts of our people. Over the past 25 years that reclamation process has been pretty successful, rounding out Jewish life, and giving all of us, men and women, a fuller way of relating to our tradition.

For centuries the biblical character of Job has been the focus of human questions about suffering and pain. The answer the Bible provides, especially in the book of Deuteronomy, is that the good are rewarded and the wicked punished. That warning and exhortation is excellent for reminding us of the importance of making good choices and the negative consequences of not doing so; but when we are older and have seen more of the world, it does not answer our basic questions about G-d’s justice and care. We would like to believe that what goes around, comes around. But sometimes, when reality hits us like a ton of bricks, we doubt that this is really the case. Job voices the anguish of the sufferer who reviews his life and finds in it no explanation for the burden he is carrying.

But Job is not alone in his suffering, though we often imagine him that way. In the Bible, Job, though he loses his children and is abandoned by his friends, is accompanied from the beginning of his story and until its end by his wife. The midrash gives her a name, Sitidos, and I believe she has something to say to us. She speaks to us not as the patient, but as the one sitting outside the surgery waiting. She speaks to us not as the one facing the end of life, but as the one facing the abandonment that is also part of loss.

Early this summer I was fortunate enough to take a class with Dr. Rachel Adler, a professor of Modern Jewish Thought at Hebrew Union College , in which she gathered texts on Job’s wife and asked what we could learn from this difficult woman and her troubled life.

Job’s wife appears as a minor character in the Biblical text and is perhaps best known for her advice to her husband: “Curse G-d and die.” While this is usually considered evidence of her being a negative influence on her more devout husband, I believe that it is possible to read these words in several different ways. Rather than seeing Job’s wife as a temptress, who pulls Job away from his faith in G-d, we might recognize her compassion in these words. Job’s wife has seen the depths of her husband’s suffering and is ready to say, enough. Like some of us involved in the decision to discontinue medical treatment when it has become futile, perhaps she too is looking to death as a release.

Another interpretation is also possible. If you notice in the book of Job, it is after she speaks these words that Job finally responds in a long speech with the anger that has clearly been building within him. Perhaps it is up to her to say something that will give him permission to express his pain and despair. Professor Adler expressed this saying that her words” lance the boil of his anger.” Those who visit with the ill and the dying know the extent to which our words set the tone of their response. We let them know whether we want to exchange pleasantries or talk about what is really going on. We, who are closest to them, may be the ones to allow them to express their less noble and heroic feelings, the fears and resentments that exist in every heart. As caregivers we sometimes have to deal with realities which they might not choose to make visible to outsiders.

Finally there is a psychoanalytical understanding of Job’s wife. Perhaps she is saying to him, curse G-d yourself, so I can stop carrying your anger for you. Sometimes in very close relationships, one person becomes the one who expresses the feelings of the other. Perhaps even under these very trying circumstances, Job’s wife is urging him to grow and mature, to separate and assume his own identity. In many family situations, allowing each person to express their own thoughts and feelings is a move towards healing, even where a return to health is not possible.

One Jewish midrashic source tells us that Job’s wife, also identified as Dinah, the troubled daughter of Jacob, as if her suffering at the hands of Shechem and her brothers was not trial enough. Still Dinah’s end is considered blessed as we are told that after all these things she gives birth to and raises up ten children. In addition to the seven sons, replacements for the children she and Job have lost, she has three daughters with special gifts of prophecy and the ability to write psalms. One person with whom I shared this ending saw it as a metaphor for the deepened spirituality that she herself felt she developed because of her caretaking.

Jewish feminism is above all the belief that all of our stories need to be part of our heritage and that all of our experiences must be reflected in our prayers and rituals. Remembering Job’s wife is a way of including in our Jewish story also our own stories as caregivers and family members of those who are ill. In these roles we are not mere adjuncts, but actors with our own story and potential for growth. As our community ages and we more often confront illness and loss, may we chose to reflect on our caregiving experience with them and the growth in our own spirit that we may have experienced as a result.