Letters Volume II

 

 

It (Answer to Job) is a book that moved me deeply.

I find it the most beautiful and profound of your books, whereby I mean to say that it is actually not a ‘book’ any more.

In a certain sense, it is an argument with God, an entreaty similar to Abraham’s when he remonstrated with God because of the fall of Sodom.

It is, for me personally, an entreaty against a god who let six million people be slaughtered, for Job is precisely Israel.

I don’t mean that in the ‘narrow’ sense; I know full well that we are only the paradigm for all of mankind, in whose name you speak, protest and comfort. And exactly the deliberate one-sidedness, yes, the frequent incorrectness of what you say, is for me an inner proof of the necessity and righteousness of your attack – which actually is no attack at all, as I well know. Erich Neumann, Letters Vol. II, Page 243.