Answering Answer to Job Again

Answering Answer to Job Again

In 2011 I wrote a repudiation of C. G. Jung's Answer to Job, arguing that its psychoanalysis of the divine character rested on a flattened reading of Psalm 89, on ignorance of rabbinic and kabbalistic sources, and — following Richard Noll [1] — on a submerged Aryan-Christ agenda that Victor White and Martin Buber each sensed from different directions. Three developments now require the file to be reopened: Sanford Drob's demonstration that the symbolic vocabulary of the late Jung is more Kabbalistic than Gnostic; the 2019 publication of Erich Neumann's The Roots of Jewish Consciousness, written in Tel Aviv between 1934 and 1945 and withheld for eighty years; and Elliot Wolfson's account of primal suffering within the divine, which stands far closer to Jung than I previously allowed. This revision retains the ethical verdict of 2011 while substantially revising its grounds. I argue that the governing question is not Jung's — whether Job changes God — but Scholem's: whether the fissure lies in the substance of divinity or only in its life and action. I propose that neither formulation is adequate, that the encounter itself constitutes an interval whose direction is normative rather than merely descriptive, and I locate that interval in the clinical encounter.