The Book of Job is a useful vehicle for exploring ways to find justice in human suffering, Einstein Forum Director Susan Neiman said in her lecture "Job, God and the Problem of Evil," held in Filene Auditorium on Tuesday.
"We're moved by this Book because we take the text at face value because something about it rings true," Neiman said. "Here's a good man who suffers the most horrible of catastrophes for no reason at all, and though he tries to bear them with humility and fortitude, he breaks down in a rage we share."
The Book of Job is an Old Testament text that follows the sufferings of the righteous Job, whose pain and anguish encourages readers to question the justice of a world in which bad things happen to good people, Neiman said.
"The experience of inexplicable suffering forces us to ask whether our lives have meaning or whether human existence may be deeply incomprehensible," Neiman said.
Although Neiman is a philosopher and not a religious scholar, she said she still finds the Book of Job pertinent to her work at the Einstein Forum, an organization centered in Germany that provides research opportunities and inter-academia collaborations.
"The problem of evil is a central point where philosophy begins and threatens to stop," she said. "If the task of philosophy is to show how the world is or could be made rational, it must address the problem of evil."
People who read the Book of Job in the 21st century approach the text differently than people have throughout history, according to Neiman.
"Job has preoccupied people for centuries, but what interests us about Job is not what's interested them," she said.
The injustice shown in the Book of Job which modern readers will find "undeniable" was not beyond doubt for readers in previous centuries since they often sought reasons to justify Job's punishment, Neiman said.
"Some medieval Christian interpretations did this in the most straightforward of ways," she said. "They simply censored those pieces of the text in which Job expresses rage," she said.
Without Job's protest against injustice, he is portrayed as a perfectly pious man who is finally rewarded at the end of the book as scenario that is the epitome of justice, according to Neiman.
While any misfortune was deemed divine punishment for wrongdoing in the medieval era, Job's situation is interpreted differently in today's age, especially now that the Book of Job is uncensored, Neiman said. Modern readers often do not believe that the world is just, according to Neiman
"I think this is a good thing," she said. "It allows us to have sympathy for innocent suffering."
Throughout her lecture, Neiman said that modern readers tend to react to Job with enthusiasm.
"It's a text that in our century, at least moves everyone immediately in a way like nothing else does," Neiman said.
The basic desire for justice in the world reflects traditional parenting methods, she said. Parents create a connection between good actions and good rewards, or bad actions and undesirable consequences, according to Neiman.
