I am slowly reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s magisterial The Lord of the Rings to my son at bedtime, and a few nights ago we reached a passage that made me pause.
Frodo the hobbit has just discovered that the Shire, his beautiful green and sleepy homeland, is not what he thought it was. Terrifying and mysterious riders on black horses are hunting him on the very roads he walked as a child, leaving him not only shaken but disoriented.
He meets a friendly elf named Gildor, and pours out his shock:
“’I knew that danger lay ahead, of course; but I did not expect to meet it in our own Shire. Can’t a hobbit walk from the Water to the River in peace?’
‘But it is not your own Shire,’ said Gildor. ‘Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.’
‘I know, and yet it has always seemed so safe and familiar. What can I do now?’”
Strange as it might seem, these paragraphs reminded me of a very different character in a very different book: Job, the most tragic figure in the Bible.
Scripture introduces Job as blameless and upright, a man who feared God and turned away from evil, the greatest man of the East. He had seven sons, three daughters, thousands of head of livestock and a household of servants. He was so careful about sin that whenever his grown children held a feast, he offered sacrifices on their behalf in case they had cursed God privately in their hearts.
Then, in a matter of days, he loses everything.
Raiders carry off his oxen and donkeys and put his farmhands to the sword. Fire falls from the sky and consumes his sheep. Another band seizes his camels and kills the men guarding them. While he is still absorbing the news, a final messenger arrives to tell him that a great wind collapsed the house where his ten children were eating together, and that all of them are dead. Job is then struck with boils from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, and we find him sitting in ashes, scraping his own skin with a piece of broken pottery.
Three friends come to comfort him. They sit with him on the ground for seven days without saying a word, and then they begin to argue that suffering on this scale can only mean hidden sin. Job refuses to confess to crimes he never committed, and every reader instinctively takes his side. He is right. He did not steal, he did not oppress anyone, and he did not chase after other gods.
So what exactly did Job do wrong? What did this good man do to deserve his terrible fate?
Jewish tradition has never accepted the premise that Job was flawless. Maimonides makes a sharp observation about the language the book uses. Scripture calls Job upright, honest, God-fearing and morally clean. It never once calls him wise. “He was neither intelligent, nor wise, nor clever, for if he had been wise, he would not have had any doubt about the cause of his suffering.” (Guide for the Perplexed 3:22)
Job himself tells us what his religious life looked like. In his long defense he swears that he never turned away a poor man who came to his door, never let a stranger sleep in the street, never withheld a widow’s request or ate his bread alone while an orphan went hungry, never rejoiced when his enemy was ruined, and never looked at a woman who was not his wife. He kept his word in business. He treated his servants as human beings. He prayed. By every measure we use to judge a religious man, Job was a success.
The French Jewish thinker Abraham Livni argues that Job’s failure had nothing to do with his character and everything to do with his vision. Job was a good man with a small faith, wrapped up entirely in his own soul and his own household, while the world around him was coming apart.
“His faith had rendered him deaf to the great calls of the hour. He had organized his routine little religious life and was preoccupied with his personal salvation. The pressing problems of the future of civilization and his responsibility in the emergence of new times had completely escaped him.”
Isaiah captured the very same criticism in one of the most shocking verses in the entire Bible: “Who is blind, but My servant? Or deaf, as My messenger that I sent? Who is blind as he that is perfect, and blind as the Lord’s servant?” (Isaiah 42:19). The blind man in this verse is not a pagan or a sinner. He is God’s servant. He is the one Scripture calls perfect, the man who has kept every commandment and for that very reason never thinks to ask what he is missing.
This is Job’s failure, and why his book ends the way it does. God speaks out of the whirlwind, yet Job never confesses to a single sin. What he says instead is this: “I had heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You” (Job 42:5). Hearing is secondhand. It is the faith you receive from someone else, accurate and true and entirely borrowed. Seeing is recognizing God at work in front of you, in your own lifetime, and recognizing the unique moment in which you are living.
Tolkien’s Frodo suffers from the same blindness as Job. He is decent, loyal and brave, everything a hobbit was raised to be. Yet like Job, he is blind to the unique moment in which he is living, unaware of the unique demands that God is placing on him and his generation. He cannot grasp that the Shire of his childhood is gone.
Which brings me to my own people, the Jews of America.
For nearly two thousand years, we Jews clung to our tradition. Against all odds, we survived a long and often brutal exile, outlasting our tormentors. We studied the Bible in Babylon and Spain, built great communities in Poland and Morocco, raised families under hostile kings, buried martyrs, and prayed three times a day facing a Jerusalem few of us ever expected to see. At the end of every Passover seder and every Yom Kippur we cried out, “Next year in Jerusalem,” knowing full well that next year would look exactly like this year. It was heroic, and it was all that God could expect from us during the era of exile.
That era is over. The exiles have been returning home to Israel for three generations. Millions of Jews now live in our ancient homeland. The Hebrew language is reborn and spoken on the streets of Jerusalem. Our prayers have been answered.
Yet the largest Jewish community outside of Israel goes on living as though the gates to the Holy Land were still locked. I am describing my own friends, colleagues and family, and they are not wicked, God forbid. American Orthodox Jews keep kosher. They keep Shabbat. They study the Bible seriously and give to Israel with a generosity no Jewish community in history could match.
What they do not hear is God’s call that the exile has ended and the redemption has begun. Like Job, they have organized a careful religious life around their own homes and their own souls, while the greatest event in Jewish history in two thousand years unfolds across the ocean in a country they happily visit but refuse to make their home.
This is the tragedy I address in my new book, Countdown: American Jews and God’s Plan for Redemption. I wrote it for American Jews, and I wrote it for everyone who reads the prophets and wants to understand what God is doing in our generation. The ingathering of Israel is not an internal Jewish matter. It is the event on which the future of every nation depends. The nations of the world will not be redeemed until Israel is redeemed, and Israel will not be redeemed until her own children open their eyes and learn to see.
Ultimately, Job did learn to see. The tragedy is that he only learned it after his children were buried and his body was covered in sores, when there was nothing left to lose and nothing left to protect. That is the hard way, but it is not the only way.
American Jews still have time to see what God is doing. Job only saw after his children were dead and his life was destroyed. American Jews can see now, before anything is taken from them. God is calling, and the door is still open.
There is no sin here to confess and no wickedness to repent of. There is only a nation of righteous people who have not yet opened their eyes. God has gathered His children from the four corners of the earth and is calling for the rest. All they have to do is see.
