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Indeed, the Book of Job could not have been written if the Jewish God were like Odin, Thor, Apollo, Zeus, or even Athena. The God wouldn’t have been so mysterious, powerful, wise, moral, terrifying, disturbing, and yet somehow edifying too. The Book of Job was possible because of God’s awesome might, His presumed goodness, His apparent nihilistic streak, and His mysterious ways.(In some ways, it might be read as a story of the ‘prodigal god’. Just as the Prodigal Son was tired of the strictures of home and ventured off to find freedom but then returned all the wiser and genuinely appreciative of the value of home, maybe God needed a vacation from the burden of His perfectness and pull some devilish trick on mankind: revert to being like one of those terrifying nihilistic pagan gods, the source from which Jewish religion was built. There’s something terrifying about the Book of Job because the nature of God’s violence is different from their counterparts in earlier stories. Sure, one could argue that God went too far with the flood, but people had become nasty and loutish. Sure, God may have been overly harsh on Sodom and Gomorrah, but the fruitkins had gotten so out-of-control that they were even trying to make angels ‘squeal like a pig’. Sure, God commanded the Israelites to commit all sorts of horrors upon the pagan populations of Canaan, but like General Sherman said, "War is hell." As Rocky Balbao said, "ya gotta do what ya gotta do." Such is the nature of war. In contrast, the violence in the Book of Job seems utterly arbitrary and meaningless. Job was a devout man, and a better man could hardly be found anywhere. So, God should have loved and cherished him, but God bashed him real good, in some ways even worse than what Jesus got in THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST and Tuco in THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY aka THE PASSION OF TUCO. In previous acts of violence, God was often angry but also morally righteous. He was punishing mankind for its wickedness. But in the Book of Job, God is almost nihilistic like the pagan gods. Because there’s no element of moral justification in what God does to Job, it’s almost like He’s having fun like a big lazy cat with a terrified mouse. When God smote the fruitkins of Sodom and Gomorrah, He acted out of moral outrage because the homos were mooning Him. He was like a judge sentencing a criminal to death or a general dropping bombs on an enemy city. There was an element of moral or strategic necessity. God was doing His job as the executor of moral righteousness. But in the Book of Job, it’s as if He’s taken a vacation from His duties as the morally righteous God. As if He’s got nothing better to do, He decides to torment a good man, rather like a child tearing apart the wings of a butterfly or dragonfly just for the hell of it. So, it’s this vacation-from-duty element of the Book of Job that makes it like a ‘prodigal god’ story. And yet, just as the Prodigal Son had to be prodigal in order to gain a deeper meaning and return to the bosom of home, it’s as if God had to be ‘prodigal’ to gain deeper insights into Himself and also to allow humanity to gain deeper insight into Him. After all, God does come around to being the good God and He redresses the ‘wrongs’ by making Job’s life bountiful and filled with happiness again. In some ways, one could argue that the Book of Job presents God at His worst and most terrifying, and yet, as the characters say in THE WILD BUNCH, "I wouldn’t have it any other way." In some ways, the Book of Job is the linchpin of the Old Testament. The Old Testament without it would be like BLONDE ON BLONDE without "Visions of Johanna". Without it, we’d like the old lady in Wendy’s commercials demanding "where’s the beef?" There is a duality at the heart of the Book of Job that is, at once, primitive and high-concept. On one level, there’s the sense of a reversion to pagan amorality, but on another level there’s a sense of philosophical-ism beyond anything that had preceded it. Through most of the Bible, God is presented as a moral figure, which makes Him different from most amoral/nihilistic pagan gods but also somewhat limited in philosophical dimensions. After all, morality is about powerful sense of right and wrong felt in the heart & guts and buttressed by the power of laws & customs. In contrast, philosophy, which found its full flowering among the Ancient Greeks, seeks truths, meanings, and implications beyond the moral strictures and cultural prejudices of any given society. Philosophy questions the validity of what one feels is right and the veracity of the received truisms of a culture. Philosophy is more about ethics than morality, and it also probes into areas that go far beyond ethics, especially as there was no clear division among science, math, spirituality, and philosophy in the Ancient World. In one sense, God’s deed in the Book of Job seems arbitrary and thoughtless, not unlike the actions of so many pagan gods who liked to bash things for the hell of it in KING KONG VS GODZILLA fashion. And yet, in another way, God’s decision is rather like a high-concept philosophical experiment to probe into and ferret out the meaning of man’s relation to God. God watches Job rather coldly, rather like how a scientist might observe a dog or cat being subjected to agonizing experiments. [To a dog or cat subjected to such torment, it can only seem harrowing and terrifying. To them, it wouldn’t be any different from being tortured by a psychotic sadist, drunken Mexican, or vicious Korean. But veterinary researchers have done terrible things to dogs and cats in labs so as to learn a great deal so that methods could be developed to cure and treat millions of dogs and cats all over the world. In that sense, one could say the dogs and cats that were subjected to horrible experiments didn’t suffer-and-die-in-vain. Of course, the tragedy is they have no way of knowing, but it’s a fact that a scientist who uses horrible methods isn’t the same as a sadist who use similar methods. The scientist is trying to learn something and apply the truth for the higher good of future dogs and cats, whereas the sadist merely takes delight in the suffering of animals.] So, is God of the Book of Job like a pagan-bully god who enjoys the wanton freedom of doing as he pleases for-the-hell-of-it or is He like a cosmic philosopher carrying out an experiment to understand something deeper about the soul of man and thus His own soul as well since God is after all the product of man’s imagination? But then, if God is all-perfect and all-knowing, He wouldn’t have had to do Job what He did in order to learn something since He knows everything already. Then, one can argue that God carried out the experiment not for Himself but for humanity since only through the example of Job’s story could man gain a philosophical — rather than just a moral or spiritual — understanding of God. The Book of Job threatens the moral order of the Old Testament with a vision of God that is pagan-like, amoral, and arbitrary but ultimately comes around to a vision of God who, even when seeming most purposeless and pointless, has a deeper intention and design. It’s true enough that some of the greatest and most essential lessons of humanity have been learned through the worst kinds of tragedies, and in the 20th century, the Holocaust has added a profound new chapter to the Jewish experience. Though all Jews wish it had never have happened, they also know that something crucial would be missing in Jewish history and consciousness without it. Jews would like the Holocaust not to have happened but want to possess the value of the Holocaust. The tragedy is one cannot have one without the other. Same goes for World War II. We all wish it had never have taken place, and yet, it has become such an essential narrative of the 20th century — and even all of history — from which so many lessons and insights have been derived that we cannot conceive of our understanding of humanity and history without it. We want the valuable lesson without the horror, but some lessons are only availed through the horror, and in some ways, there is a necessity of horror since humans, by nature, are so apt to forget and fall into childish decadence or dissipation when times are good. Consider how so Americans thought they learned an eternal lesson when 9/11, but it wasn’t long before they became vapid and stupid again, not least because politicians exploited the tragedy to wage Wars for Israel. We don’t want to meet with tragedies, but we also know that there’s something essential about us that can only be attained through tragedies. It’s like what Theodore Roosevelt said of his feelings in relation to his departed wife: "only when you have been in the deepest valley can you know how magnificent it is to reach the highest mountain", a sentiment Nixon identified with in Oliver Stone’s film. In that sense, Book of Job is like a Necessary Horror, and perhaps, there’s something in us that craves to be reminded in such horrific manner, and that is partly the great appeal of horror movies, especially in a world where too many people have it so good, i.e. though a lot of people seem drawn to horror for cheap thrills, they could also be subconsciously craving for God and a powerful re-connection with reality via catharsis. It’s like the guy in THE DEVIL[story by M. Night Shyamalan] and Richard Gere’s character in MOTHMAN PROPHECIES regain their bearings only through the trial of horror. Without the Book of Job, the philosophical dimensions of the Old Testament might be reduced by a quarter or even half, and in some ways, one could argue it is the essence of the Rabbinical tradition as well the inspiration, even if subconscious, of what some might argue as the greatest works of modern fiction: THE TRIAL and THE CASTLE by Kafka. In no other story is God both so near and so distant. More than in any other Biblical story, we are brought into the something like the ‘mind’ of God as He tells Job of the vastness of His being and knowledge that man cannot even hope to fathom, let alone understand. God lets us in but keeps us out. It’s like effect with the camera where the lens zoom in while the camera pulls back. We are left with the question for the answer, but it is a special kind of question that keeps multiplying into more questions. In some ways, the character of Job seems to be the opposite of the arrogant fools who built the Tower of Babel that dared to reach and challenge the Heavens. Job dutifully kept his head close to the ground in dutiful obedience to God, but then, maybe the perfection of humility itself is a kind of pride and arrogance since, especially following the Original Sin and the Fall of Man, no man is supposed to be perfect. So, It’s damned if you do, damned if you do in a way. After the Fall, man is cursed for his imperfection but also for his near-perfection. But then, white folks should be familiar with this conundrum since no matter what they do to redeem themselves, Jews-as-the-god-race will always find some new ways to demean and denounce them. It’s like the guy in WHEN A MAN WHO LOVES A WOMAN with Alan Garcia and Meg Ryan. Like Job, he was so-very-good. Ever so understanding, supportive, and caring as a husband to his troubled wife, but then... that was his sin! He, as a stoic pillar of strrength, was so good and supportive that his wife came to rely on him than to stand on her own two feet. It was written by Al Franken the hideous Jew, and I guess he enjoyed playing god to his own private goy-as-Job. This is why we wanna smack Jews upside their heads. It’s like Cass the Ass Sunstein seeing us as guinea pigs to experiment on. Steven Pinker may be a bit more thoughtful and fair-minded but ultimately isn’t all that different. Anyway, because there’s no absolute certainty of meaning in the Old Testament — not least because of the Book of Job — , reading it is sort of like gambling in a casino, and maybe this is why so many Jews are crazy about gambling, especially running it, which gives them the power of god-of-money over us. Maybe if Jews die, they go to some casino in the sky where they can play the slots, roulette, or cards forever with the angels or something. Anyway, given the seemingly endless popularity of the Bible, maybe its appeal has something to do with release of body chemicals related to highs one gets from gambling. Gambling is addictive because there’s always the hope and chance of winning and winning again, and it seems that, more than any other book, there’s something about the Bible that makes its readers feel they’re playing for the jackpot of truth and meaning every time they read it. When people in churches yell "Hallelujah", you’d almost think they hit the jackpot at Caesar’s Palace.) The Book of Job raises the issue as to the apparent injustices of the world done to good people in a world in which God promised His blessings on those most loyal to Him. As Job was an obedient, devout, and humble man, it raises crucial questions about the way of God. After all, didn’t God say He would bless those who would honor Him? So, why was Job whupped so bad? God’s answer that isn’t really an answer is, at once, one of the most profound in history/spirituality and one of the biggest con-jobs one can imagine. It’s where truth and trickery have become interchangeable. (In one respect, the Book of Job addresses the ‘dark matter’ of Jewish cosmology. It’s like Albert Einstein couldn’t make his calculations work in relation to certain things about the cosmos and therefore proposed the notion of ‘dark energy’ to make his theory stick. Similarly, the Jewish theory of God, as powerful as it was, led to unsolvable problems in their experience of reality. This was less problematic among pagans since pagan gods weren’t all-powerful, all-good, and all-perfect. So, if things went wrong, pagans could live with it and say ‘shit happens’. Also, as pagans believed in multiple gods, the bad stuff could be done by nasty goods and good things could be done by good gods. And since some gods favored your people and other gods favored other peoples, you won some and lost some. Also, as pagan gods didn’t control everything, not everything that happened needed to be attributed to the gods. They could simply be the work of man. But Jews said there is one God, and He is the only God, and He is totally good, and His hand is behind everything; and if Jews keep up their end of the Covenant, God will use His power to protect Jews, favor Jews, and bless Jews. So, everything that happens in the world came to be associated with God and His power. Oftentimes, the theory of God seemed to be right. The wicked often did end up badly. The decadent fell by the wayside. When Jews lost their way, they became weak and feeble. When they were virtuous and sober, they would grow in strength. But there were areas that made little sense. Why did so many good people end up badly? Why did some terrible people gain great power and wealth? Why were they and their descendants favored by fortune when they were against God or not even of the Jewish faith and blood? And if God was indeed so powerful, why didn’t He stop wicked pagans from attacking and bashing Jews, indeed even when Jews were virtuous before the Lord? A more troubling interpretation was that if indeed God is all-powerful and behind everything, then even the horrific violence visited upon Jews by pagan peoples or natural disasters must be the work of God. If everything happens because God wills it, then even the worst things are the doings of God. But if God is so all-perfect, all-good, and all-powerful, why did He create such a world where so many seems crazy and arbitrary? The Jewish theory of God didn’t work in practice as promised in the Bible, so Jews needed a ‘dark energy’ side-theory to explain the way of the world at odds with God’s promise, and the Book of Job is, in some ways, that side-theory. In actual truth, when powerful pagans attacked Jews, Jews lost because they were weaker and there was no God to protect them. But such realization would have undermined the entire edifice of God. So, the Book of Job plays a neat Judo or Jew-do trick that makes believe that God sent the very forces that wrought havoc on Job and his family. Jews didn’t want to believe that there’s no God or that God couldn’t protect them from hostile peoples. So, why not have God as the sender of the hostile parties that attacked Job? That way, Jews could sustain the theory that their God is indeed the all-powerful agent behind everything. But while solving one problem, it created another one. While faith in God’s all-pervasive power was sustained, it also meant that God uses His power in ways that can be devastating to Jews, even a very good one like Job. But then why? And this is the unanswerable answerable in the Book of Job. Prior to the Book of Job, there was the hand of God to make the world, the eyes of God to see the world, the heart of God of love the world, the mouth of God to teach the world, and the fist of God to punish the world. With the Book of Job, there’s something like the mind of God, and the effect of our entry in it is like David Bowman’s funneling through the mystery of the extraterrestrials in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. It is beyond the infinite but ludicrous too.) It’s God unveiling a bit of His infinite wisdom and concealing His innate contradiction... and maybe corruption as well. If indeed the logic of power is that power corrupts and that absolute power corrupts absolutely, then couldn’t one say that God is the most corrupt Being in the universe? In a way, God fulfills His Covenant since He blesses Job and restores the good life to him and provides him with a new family that he loves just as dearly as the earlier one, and yet, it’s also a terrible violation of the Covenant since God did horrible things to a good man. (To be sure, one could argue Job is especially or doubly blessed because of his horrible ordeal. If the bad stuff hadn’t happened to him, he would have only known his first wife and family. He would have lived and died as an content man but with only one view of reality. But because of what befell him and God’s eventual restoration of his fortunes, he has both the tragic memory of his earlier life with his first family as well as the joys found in the new one. After all, when he’s settled in with his second wife and family, aren’t they as valuable to him as the first wife and family had been? Would it have been better if the bad stuff never happened to him? In one sense, yes, because he dearly loved his first wife & family and will mourn their loss as long as he lives, but in another sense, no, because his new life with a new wife and family is no less meaningful to him. Because of the tragedy, Job is able to feel the love for two families: His earlier one as beautiful memory and the new one as living companions. The earlier one is no more but alive as memory in his heart, and there’s something precious and sacred about tragic remembrances. Nothing is sadder but nothing is as valuable as the memory of what has been lost. But there is the new family as well, one with no connection to the earlier one but as dear to Job. In a way, Job gains a valuable lesson about life by being pulled out of his comfort box. When we become accustomed to a certain situation, especially one that is accommodating and pleasing to us, we are likely to think it and only holds the meaning of life for us, and without it the meaning of our life would be lost. One might call it the idolatry of life. It’s like Oliver Barrett falls so love with Jenny in LOVE STORY that he cannot really love anyone else after she dies. He cannot move forward emotionally. Or, it’s like the character of MOTHMAN PROPHECIES whose trauma over the loss of his wife renders him incapable of starting a new emotional life. Though idolatry in the literal sense is about worship of man-made objects, we can become idolatrous with life itself. And perhaps, Job was idolatrous in this manner in believing that his life was perfect and deservingly so because he was so good in the eyes of God. But only God is perfect and permanent. Even things that seem perfect in life and love aren’t so, and one mustn’t fixate on them as the ONLY meaningful things in his/her life. In a way, the Book of Job is about soul-immigration from a fixed life to new one. Some people are so attached to their land, culture, and tradition that they cannot imagine any meaningful apart from it. They would rather die than go to another land or begin anew. Yet, others do make the journey and even though everything in their lives has been turned upside down, they discover a new life, new truths, and new meanings as valuable as the one they’d left behind or lost. It’s like in ROOTS where Kunta Kinte, for a long time, nurses his dreams of somehow returning to Africa as he cannot imagine a meaningful life without his father, mother, siblings, and tribesmen. But when he stares at his daughter born in the new land with a slave woman, he realizes he has something as valuable as all that he’d lost when he was torn away from his ancestral land. Perhaps, the Book of Job especially speaks to the nomadic nature of the Jews because they had to drop everything and begin all over again in yet new parts of the world. In doing so, they often felt as if they’d lost everything, but in finding meaning through new beginnings, they realized that the most essential thing is the power of life to begin anew again. 
This process is both ‘revolutionary’ and ‘conservative’ for it requires a whole new start but along the blueprint of timeless truths bound with God. So, in that sense, the hopeful side of the Book of Job is the lesson that we shouldn’t ‘idolatrize’ life no matter how precious it may seem to us. In the end, what really matters is the power to go on despite everything than the position of illusory permanence. In this, the Book of Job challenges the conservative side of Judaism that hopes for the utopianism of the Promised Land where Jews can be happy and safe under the eyes of God forever. It instead suggests that the real power of Jews is their ability to start over again and find as much value in the new as in what they already have. And if God giveth and taketh away, there really is no other option in the long run as nothing is permanent or fixed. It’s like many people love their dogs or cats so much that they want to be with the same dog or cat forever. But dogs and cats die before their owners do. Sad as this is, if not for the deaths, people would never get new dogs and cats that, in time, become just as valuable as the departed ones. It’s like the Akira Kurosawa film MADADAYO where the teacher almost gives up on his life because his dear cat disappears one day and fails to return. But another one arrives, and though it can’t the console the teacher over the loss of the first one, it becomes as dear and valuable in time. While it’s natural for us to cling to what/whom are dear to us, every attachment blinds us to all other possibilities. Consider how a man or woman might consider his or her spouse to be The One, indeed the ONLY person he or she was meant to be with. But under different circumstances, he or she would have fixated in the same manner on another person. Or, in settling down in one place as the one and only place, we are likely to believe that we were meant to be in that place and nowhere else. But everything that seems certain, fateful, and necessary is also accidental and random because no one decides when or where he or she is born, and there are countless forces at work in the world that rolls our lives like dice. So, even when we meet someone that seems to The One we are meant to meet and be with forever — like how Bella Swann and Edward Cullen feel about one another in TWILIGHT — , it’s really all an accident. So, if God is indeed a ‘jealous God’, He may want to shake people out of doldrums of the conceit of life’s certainties. The only certainty should be God Himself. Everything and everyone else, however dear and precious they may seem, are grains of sand and dusts in the wind that could have been scattered and arranged in infinite variety of ways.) And yet, in using Job to demonstrate His truth, one could say God was bestowing a blessing on humanity. Because without someone like Job to suffer as he did, God couldn’t have demonstrated His truth with as much drama, eloquence, depth, and mystery. (In this sense, God is like Shakespeare of the cosmos. In order for Shakespeare to express something deep and dark about mankind, he had to create characters like King Lear who suffered hell on earth. If Shakespeare didn’t want any of his characters to suffer, his plays would have been very narrow and limited. Likewise, God as a ‘tragedician’ had to create powerful scenarios of life to draw out the deepest meanings of life. People like Richard Dawkins blame the writers of the Bible of presenting a violent and spiteful God that visits all sorts of horrors upon mankind, but they should really blame nature than the authors of the Bible. It was nature that produced asteroids-hitting-earth, volcanos, diseases, earthquakes, fiery infernos, hurricanes, floods, and etc. that scared the hell out of early man. It was nature that produced all sorts of dangerous animals that attacked man, and it was nature that created the aggressive and murderous ‘human nature’ of man. What religion did was to try make sense of all that natural sense. Since the great forces of nature was dangerous and since the soul-nature of man was so dark, it was only natural that religions that sought to explain the world of nature and man were also dark and fearsome.) Also, the Book of Job is one of the greatest blessings to the Jewish people since it instilled them with the power, will, and meaning to carry on against adversities. To that extent, Job’s suffering was his greatest blessing, notwithstanding the fact that he’s most certainly a fictional figure. If not for what God did to Job, he would be either a nonexistent or forgotten figure. Whether Job really existed or not, he represents the experiences, emotions, and questions of so many Jews, and in that sense, he is like one of those ‘based on a true story’ characters. He’s a ‘composite character’ of so many trials and ordeals of the Jews. And the story is especially prophetic and timeless in relation to Jewish history in the 20th century. After all, Holocaust is up there as one of the absolute horrors in human history, and yet, in a perverse yet profound way, it has also become the greatest blessing for modern Jews for it has elevated Jews to the status of a Holy People. It’s as ‘6 million’ little Jewish Jesuses died for the sins of mankind, and we must find our salvation through our devotion to the Jews as the god-race. That Jews derived profound lessons from the Holocaust, we cannot deny. And yet, just as the Book of Job hints at the corruption — however concealed — of the Jewish God, the Holocaust cult also suggests at the profound corruption of the Jews. 

Anyway, one could still argue that there was no guarantee that Jews would necessarily grow smarter or deeper in genetic/biological dimensions just because they wondered and pondered about a profound God. If people could grow more intelligent that way, Lamarck would have been right, i.e. the attributes of straining — mental or physical — of one generation will be passed down to the next generation.

The famous Lamarckian argument is the idea that giraffes developed long necks because each generation stretched its neck out to eat the fruits on high trees. But evolutionary science says Lamarckianism is wrong. No matter how far you stretch your neck in your life, its physical attributes will not be passed down to your offsprings. No matter how many books a dumb person reads, his or her dumb kids will likely be dumb too. 
And yet, might not culture affect genes in the following sense? Once Jews devised a profound mind-puzzle that encourages, allows, and even demands much thinking, memorization, argumentation, discussion, imagination, and introspection, they were able to divide the wheat from the chaff in mental ability among their children. If Jews had no grand-deep-profound-intellectual scheme/system, they would have had little use for intellectualism, therefore, it wouldn’t have mattered if some Jew kid was smart or dumb. He would have been expected to just herd goats and swing his dong at Jewish girls. But once Jews had a mental system of deep study, thought, and discussion — that applied to the entire community as God didn’t just bless the Jewish elites but all Jewish people, even the poor — , they had a means to measure which kids were best at memorizing the sacred texts, making sense of them, forming new ideas, and proving themselves especially adept at scholarly pursuits. Since the Jewish God and religion were infinite in their dimensions, a very smart Jew could dazzle other Jews with his profound insights, and being favored for his super-intellect, he would be admired and given women to hump and have kids with. 
In a similar vein, suppose there’s a community with no use for exercise and sports. The community decides that as long as kids grow up to herd goats or till the fields, that’s all that matters. So, it doesn’t matter if a kid is particularly strong. He’s just made to do things like everyone else and isn’t favored by the community in anything, not even access to women.
But suppose the community devises a difficult set of physical challenges and has the kids compete to see who is the strongest, fastest, and toughest. Then, kids will compete extra-hard to excel in these difficult challenges, and the ones who achieve the greatest glory will be prized most, and he might be showered with lots of prizes and women to hump and have kids with. Thus, the community grows stronger since it has an systematic means by which to divide the athletic wheat from the weakling chaff. Of course, even without such means, it’s easy to tell which ones are stronger than others. But it is through such means that the community can measure who are really fast or really strong, and pick them out for special attention. 

Anyway, because the Jewish concept of God was profound, deep, elusive, and weird, it was bound to favor not only the very smart, imaginative, and verbal but also the very neurotic, which may account for the weirdness of Jewish personality that seems almost space-alien-like: Einstein, Rand, Kubrick, Kafka, Mamet, Allen, Freud, Trotsky, Charlie Kaufman, and etc.
Greek philosophy(and Greek mythology) favored the logical thinkers of facts, ideas, and emotions that could be explained with a degree of clarity. In contrast, Jewish religion and culture is a strange and contradictory blend of logic and mystery. The logical element comes from a set of premises about the nature of God and His moral nature. And yet, this logic can meander endlessly within the Godly realm that vacillates between infinite justice and infinite jest. 
With Greek thought, it’s possible to arrive at some kind of conclusion through rules of math, ethics, or facts. With Jewish thought, there can be no real conclusion since the truths, trickery, and mysteries of God are infinite. It’s about thinking through the impossible. The sort of mind that could best navigate this infinite realm tended to be sort of ‘aspergergy’, and that may explain the over-abundance of ‘spergy’ types among the Jews. Jewish religion could have, in this sense, profoundly affect Jewish biology. In the Jewish community, the ideal of mental achievement by thinking about God favored the ‘spergy’ types who became much admired and were maybe given a bunch of women to bang and have kids with. Someone like Kafka might have been happier as a religious Jew in a traditional community because, despite his natural-born neurosis, he would have had faith and solace in the mystery his mind was navigating through. (Also, a troubled person like him might have easier access to women in a society where matches were made by elders.) It’s like Job becomes depressed, but despite his agonies, he never loses his faith in God who remains his source of comfort. In contrast, Kafka was born with a mind that had been shaped and molded by thousands of Jewish history to seek the meaning of God, but he was a modern Jew in a world without God. His mind had been programmed by Jewish history/culture/genetics to create mazes in search for God but found itself without God... yet the structure of the maze remained even with the loss of what it had been designed to search and explore. Even though Kafka could consciously accept the absence of God, his mental mold still imagined a vast and profound network of power governing the mind, soul, society, and the universe. And this power felt malevolent since it could not be God who was ‘dead’ in the modern world. God was gone from the modern Jewish mind, but His shadow lurked in every corner of the world and every corner of the Jewish soul, and this filled Jews with a powerful sense of paranoia. Jews felt as if trapped in the world of Fritz Lang’s M. The ‘M’ character is, in some ways, a diabolical double of the ‘K’ character in THE TRIAL. Joseph K is an ‘innocent man’ in a world without God, yet he is still stalked and sacrificed by awesome god-like forces. ‘M’ is an ‘evil man’ but in a modern world that no longer has much use for the unscientific notion of the ‘satanic’. From a purely scientific viewpoint, one could say he’s mentally ill or sick, i.e. he too is a victim like a diseased person. And yet, despite such modern notions founded on the science of medicine, we sense a profound shadow of Evil lurking all throughout the film. Both THE TRIAL and M are modern stories with a medieval feel to them. God and Satan may be dead, but as the mental molds of humans had been formed for so long in the images of God and Satan, people feel the presence of supra-normal powers everywhere even in the absence of God and Satan.