Job Marched the Four Directions Knocking for God's Door

The cry came out of the ash heap like a man asking for directions. "If only I knew where to find Him," Job said, scraping his sores with a shard of broken pottery, "I would go to His abode." He did not mean it as a prayer. He meant it as a route. Somewhere in the round world there had to be a door, a threshold, a fixed place where the Holy One kept His house, and Job intended to stand on the step and knock until someone answered for what had been done to him.

He read the word and heard an address

It was the word for abode that started him walking. R. Abba bar Kahana turned it over in the study hall and found the same root buried in the book of Ezra, where the returning exiles set the new altar firmly upon its base. A base. A foundation. A platform with a floor you could stand on. So when Job said he longed to reach the Holy One's abode, he was not reaching for a feeling. He was reaching for a building.

"If He keeps a temple above," Job reasoned, "I will climb to His abode. And if He keeps a temple below, I will go down to His abode." Up or down, he would go. He only needed the coordinates.

East, and the door was not there

He went east first, toward the place the sun comes up, and he searched the horizon the way a creditor searches a debtor's street. Nothing. "I go forward," he said, "and He is not there." He turned and went backward, west, into the country of the setting sun, and he peered at every ridge and shadow. "I go back, and I cannot perceive Him." He swung left to the south and groped along the bright edge of the world. He swung right to the north and felt for any wall in the dark. Four directions. A door in none of them.

The compass had run out. The man had marched the whole rim of creation, knocking, and every quarter had answered with the same silence. He stood in the middle of everything with his hand still raised to knock, and there was nothing left to knock on.

The friends closed in like a tidy court

His three companions had been watching the search, and the spectacle of it offended them. A grown man tramping the four winds to serve a summons on the Almighty. "How long will you go on hunting Him with words?" they said. "Have we not told you over and over that you cannot march out and meet Him and argue your case to His face? You cannot even speak roughly to Michael. Could you stand before the chief of the angels and talk to him the way you are talking now? Then how much less the God who made Michael."

It was a clean argument. It shut every door Job had been pounding on and called the shutting wisdom. Know your station. Lower your eyes. Stop asking where He lives, because the question itself is insolence. Job listened to the neat little syllogism and refused to put down his shard.

The presence stood in the west the whole time

Then R. Yochanan leaned in over the verses and caught what Job in his agony had missed. The man's own words had betrayed a seam. East, Job had said, "He is not there." A flat absence. But west, Job had said only, "I cannot perceive Him." Not gone. Unseen. The wording had changed under his feet, and the change was a clue. When Job faced east the door was truly empty. When Job faced west the Shekhinah was standing in front of him.

The Divine Presence had been in the west the entire time. Job had walked straight up to it and stared through it. Grief had fogged the glass. He had reached for the clouds the way a drowning man kisses the spray, frantic arms closing on vapor, certain he was grasping nothing, while the thing he wanted stood close enough to touch and let him pass his hands through it unknowing. Thick clouds veil Him, the saying went, so that He does not see. Job had it backwards. The clouds were over Job's own eyes.

He could not find the house, but he knew he was seen

And here is the strange thing the search did not break. Job never located the abode, never found the floor or the step or the door, and still he would not let go of one fact. "He knows the road I am on," Job said. "When He has tested me, I will come out the far side like gold from the fire." He could not see God. He was dead certain God could see him. The whole geography had failed, every direction had come up empty, and out of the emptiness Job pulled the one thing that held. He was being watched. The agony was a furnace and not a forgetting. The fire was an assay, and gold does not fear the assayer's flame.

His friends had a God too high to be questioned and too far to be reached, parked behind clouds that kept Him from seeing the world. Job had a God he could not find in any quarter of the sky and who never once stopped watching him scrape his sores in the ash. The friends bowed to the safe distance and called it reverence. Job kept his face raised to the west, to the presence he could not perceive, and kept on arguing toward the place where the gold comes out.