Way back when I brashly sent Elie Wiesel a paper I'd written--on Job,which lent irony to a standard reply:  "not being an authority on the subject . . . "

"The subject" is Jobas a scholarly accretion rather than Job as a metaphysical inquiry (the one I had tackled), designated by the same term but nonetheless a separate endeavor.  Scholarship and inquiry may not be mutually exclusive, but it is far from obvious that they often go hand in hand and while academia's claim to aim highly at both ends (to keep the flame and stoke the fire too) goes without saying pretty much everywhere, the preservative and the innovative may be at cross-purposes.  The absolute refusal (not a whit) of such critical terms to surrender their ambiguity is made possible by the fact that metaphysics consists of place without space so that, in this case, Jobheld in suspended animation by authorities on the subject and Job still out there (to be encountered firsthand without so much as a gloss even if you were born yesterday, just by reading it) daring his accuser to show his face, present the bill of indictment so we can finally get down to it--these are altogether different subjects which share a complex, resonant text as geography so they could be places worlds apart (as if one street map worked both in Paris and Tokyo) or, giving scholarship the benefit of the doubt, they could occupy the same space and both endeavors happen in one institution or department.  The point is that the difference between these two situations would not be readily apparent.

In other words, if there were more to be seen, say, in Job,we can't be sure expertise would help, much less be prerequisite, and it might even be an inhibition.  If more had already been seen and the point were expeditious dissemination, taking it to the authorities could well be precisely the wrong approach.  And there is, in fact, a simple answer to the question of the text's inception, not original but also not fully accepted . . .  Six centuries before the common era Babylon's army flattened Jerusalem, including the temple, and took part of the population back.  Until recently no historical question was more fraught with meaning than this one--its resonance never ended.  Who "Jesus" was (what did he know and how did he show it?) came on strong as christendom's chronology played to the point of cracking, and then Auschwitz bettered (absorbed) them for pertinence.

Twentyfive centuries ago, the destruction of the temple was it for riddles and never mind the truth of it:  in the light of what Israel took to be a unique experience of the Almighty, what could this possibly mean?  As a fact to be faced, the disjunction loomed larger rather than receding with time.  And Jobis one proposed solution.  Deutero-Isaiah, the sixteen chapters in the middle of Isaiah, is the other.  By now the specialists I've [offended], I would fill convention halls and have, but the Jesus riddle is in large part solved by the insight that whoever he was he saw himself in Deutero-Isaiah.

Three riddles, then, and a set of texts to be saved from the specialists: Job, Deutero-Isaiah, the temptations in the wilderness, the (shall we say) Passion, the Grand Inquisitor chapter of The Brothers Karamazov (in the context of Ivan's turning in his ticket) and for Auschwitz the entire corpus, just now resolving itself into something like geography.  Not entirely arbitrarily, we'll include Solomon's dream and Yeats' "The Second Coming."  Specialties are careers and Auschwitz a preoccupation for Wiesel, Hilberg and the others who've done most to map the place, but the riddles are simply put and the texts manageable without special education.

I heard Wiesel speak twice in the late seventies, and both times he closed with the Hasidic story of an empty castle burning in a forest.  Whether there is an owner, Wiesel said, and why One should be away are open questions, but there is no longer any doubt that the castle is Israel.

The extent to which the texts mesh, hinge on each other is frightening, as if this were all one riddle, in three forms [reiteration in 70 CE] for particular events, and in treatments where the question[s] is made accessible but reduction of the [issues, questions, ] to those of personality.

Taking these as texts, without context or commentary, as the first few exhibits in a case presented to a nonhuman court, as it were--just the texts--we can easily shift the Passion after Auschwitz.