The Endgame In Job
Some thirty-five years ago, Reb Zalman wrote an article called “The Endgame in Job,” in which he gives a brilliant analysis of The Book of Job.
Karl Jung, in his book, Answer to Job, says that Job’s suffering was necessary and he explains why. According to Jung, at some point in ancient times, YHVH, as the godhead, was not as useful and relevant as before. The Book of Job stirs up a question in us that Jung wanted to address: “Was there some reason, some utility in Job’s experience and suffering?” Jung’s answer: “Yes. Humanity needed to be promoted in the hierarchy of the godhead. God became incarnate in man.” Jung would have answered Job that Job’s relationship with YHVH in the story helped make the incarnation happen.
Reb Zalman’s article provides a different, Jewish perspective on this book. Just as YHVH is eternal, so does the The Book of Job stand the test of time as part of tanach / Jewish scriptures. Please read Reb Zalman’s wonderful article and feel free to share any thoughts in the comment section at the end. Gabbai Seth Fishman (BLOG Editor)
THE END-GAME IN JOB
(Winnipeg 1972)
Table of Contents:
Introduction
The Prologue
The Experiment and its Implication for God
Job’s Punishment for Silence
History and Authorship
Significance of Names in the Book
Prologue/Epilogue
The Outcome: Man is the Winner
Myth and Theology
Mystic/Exoteric
Job, the Mystic’s End-Game
Behemoth/Leviathan
Catharsis of the Book of Job
The Messianic Era
“The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away.” (Job, 1:21)
“Dust thou art and into dust thou shall return.” (Genesis, 3:19)
“Wherefore I abhor my words and repent, seeing I am dust and ashes.” (Job, 42:6)
The book of Job is fascinating and it has inspired many writers who have employed its themes in their works. Nonetheless, the book has aspects that are somewhat puzzling.
The prologue begins with descriptions of the blissful life of Job and his children. It mentions his meticulous behavior, and his generosity in sacrificing for the possible excesses of his children. The first line hints at a kind of humanism contained in the book: “There was a man in the land of Utz; Job was his name.” With this opening, the focus is placed on Job. For the moment, God and the angels are in the background.
Job might well have lived his perfect life until the end of his days had it not been for what follows: The scene shifts to heaven. The angels are checking in and giving their reports, then leaving God’s presence in most officious manner. An angel hangs around and banters with God and that one is the Satan.
Satan seems almost God’s “best friend”; like dog and Master, they find comfort in one another’s presence. With bantering tone, God asks Satan to tell where he has been. Satan, echoing this same tone through a kind of colloquial language replies that he’s been, “up and around.” God reveals His pride in having a servant like Job and then leads with a seeming gambit: “Hast thou considered My servant Job; there is none like him in Earth; a whole-hearted and upright man, one that feareth God and shunneth evil,” as if to say, “I must really be someone special because I have so great a servant as Job!”
Satan, as God’s best friend, playing the court fool, now replies with a counter gambit: “Doth Job fear God for nought,” as if to say, “So what, that he seems faithful! He’s got plenty of reasons for seeming so.” Satan thereby casts a doubt on Job’s sincerity. So we are now faced by the enigma of a gambling God, and of Satan, the only significant counterpart to God. We see man, the crown of all creation, reduced to a pawn.
The Experiment and its Implication for God
Satan has introduced a double-think problem and God now must find a resolution. (For God to “double think” and then catch Himself is God doubting. The word “doubt” originally meant being of two minds.)
God’s doubt regarding Job has greater implication. It puts at question the true motivational force for others of God’s actions, for the act of creation itself. Are they connected to God’s doubt?
A doubt of God’s becomes our doubt about God too, introduced through the situation. It plays out as follows: Needing to confirm His own existence, God has created a world so He can have a cosmological argument. He has created language and revealed truths so He can have an ontological argument regarding His own existence.
So having taken pride in Job, having anchored His own value on Job’s obedience and rectitude, God must now give Job up so he can be tested. Thus begins the experiment, which, on the surface, seems an honest one. Satan’s hypothesis is that Job’s behavior is occasioned by Job’s dependence on God, and God’s hypothesis is that Job’s behavior is autonomous, based on a self-contained moral rectitude. The independent variable is Job’s good fortune. According to God, changes to the independent variable will not impact Job’s rectitude. That rectitude, says God, stems from Job’s own autonomous, self-chosen sense of Justice.
The interesting point is that whether or not Job is really autonomous makes no difference with respect to where God will come out in the end. There is no satisfactory solution in this bet between God and Satan, this experiment they’ve devised. If Satan’s hypothesis is correct that Job’s behavior is occasioned by his dependence on God, God has lost, Satan has been proven right. For, in this case, Job was simply scared that God would no longer permit Job to depend on God for his life and sustenance. However, if God’s hypothesis is correct that Job is acting out of his own moral rectitude, then that rectitude had to stem from Job’s own autonomous, self-chosen sense of Justice and not from God. For how could Job simultaneously act out of his heteronymous relationship with God when Job acts autonomously? And when Job acts autonomously, how could it be of God’s influence?
Satan stands to win and to win a lot. If Job blasphemes, Satan benefits because of the tradition that holds that Satan as the blaspheming anti-God. As a blasphemer, Job has moved into Satan’s camp. If Job rebels because his extrinsic reasons for dealing with God have been removed, Satan becomes vindicated because it proves that everyone has extrinsic reasons for dealing with God as Job does. Satan simply resists being dominated; shouldn’t we all? And if Satan is simply the court fool, then Satan gains the benefit of diverting the King from greater, more destructive games. So in this case too, he comes out ahead.
The Midrashim / interpretations about Job can be used provide some background and perspective on his character. One Midrash claims that Job suffers as punishment for his silence at Moses’ trial. According to this story, when Moses was a baby being raised by Pharoah’s daughter Bathya, he removed a doting Pharoah’s crown as the king leaned over the baby’s bed. This upset Pharoah, who then placed baby Moses on trial. Pharoah called for his counselors, Jethro, Balaam and Job, to advise him. Jethro defended the child, Balaam was the accuser, and Job was silent. It was for this silence, goes the midrash, that Job was later punished.
When I think of punishment for silence, I think of a story told by Elie Wiesel. Wiesel goes back to his home in Sziget because he feels he must see a certain man to confront him. This man had been a silent bystander when Jews were loaded into vans to be carted off to concentration camps. Thomas Merton has said that every bystander who witnesses an evil act and is silent can be seen as guilty, can be judged by his inability to act.
Although the Talmud expresses the opinion that Moses wrote the book, the consensus seems to be that it was fiction, that no real person existed by that name, and that it was to serve as a great parable for the instruction of the faithful. “Job never was and never existed but is only a typical figure to teach men the virtue of resignation.” (Baba Bathra 15A). Maimonides likewise held that Job was a parable meant to exhibit the use of mankind in regard to Providence. It is puzzling and curious that the author of Job would have permitted God to be so drawn into an arrangement in which God cannot possibly be the winner. Perhaps this is why the book of Job is exempted from the Talmud’s predisposition to take all scriptural events at their face value. Attempts to establish the historicity of the book are difficult. Determining who the author of this book was, the one who would have permitted God to be put in this no-win situation is also difficult. We find a mention of Job in Ezekiel 14:20 which points to an ancient tradition of a righteous man with the name of Job. But it’s possible that the book was written much later, using Job’s reputation as a righteous person for his own purpose in this book.
The Midrash that states that Job was punished for his silence supports the view that the story is not historical. Yet at the same time, if one considers Job truly innocent as God suggests, the view that the punishment was for his silence vitiates a real meaning from the book. Perhaps that sort of bystander is both guilty and innocent in not acting. This may be what the Rabbis wished to emphasize. Be that as it may, even a guilty Job is innocent as the pawn in the game between God and Satan.
Another argument against this being historical: The story is too pat in the way in which names and numbers are offered. Seven sons, three daughters, seven thousand sheep, three thousand camels, five hundred head of cattle, five hundred asses: The numbers seem to be made up. At the end of the book, when Job’s belongings get restored, while his possessions are doubled, the number of his children subtly remains the same as before. (“For us, no child lost can be replaced,” says theologian Peake in the Soncino edition’s commentary.) The threes, the sevens, the mythic numbers appear as one would expect. In the search for symbolism, special numbers have special significance. Often their significance is not verbal but existential. Three and seven are such numbers.
Significance of Names in the Book
If we take the book to be a fiction, then we must look at the names which point to roles. Job’s name, an uncommon one, and the names of the comforters all have significance in this story:
Job: “Iyov” in Hebrew – is related to the word “Ayvah,” (emnity) or “oyev“(enemy). The grammatical form of the reflexive, intensive and repetitive pi’el verb form portrays him as a self-hater, a masochist. The author wants us to sense this in his name.
Utz: The place where Job came from – “Utz“- could for all intents and purposes have been called the land of good advice, a place where one always looks for an angle, a world that is fully pragmatic.
Eliphaz the Teymanite: The name of one of the comforters, Eliphaz renders into “my God is like gold.” He is a Teymanite, a word with the root of “yemin” / right, i.e., the one who rights [a wrong]. According to this name, God is always right, golden, and man is always less than that. His theology is basically a whitewash of God.
Bildad the Shuhite: His friend Bildad the Shuhite means a loveless person who down-levels, bows down, talks a lot and digs ditches. This places Bildad among the dour obsequious defenders of the faith.
Zophar the Naamatite: His name means one who seems haloed – with a straw halo, i.e. there is some beauty about him, na’amati. Another meaning for Zophar is “shrieking pipe.”
So we can see in Job’s first three friends, three alter-ego’s: To the right, one who gilds God; to the left, the obsequious, unloving, submitter to God; and in the middle, a person capable of Dionysian hallowing and shrieking.
Elyahu: Whence the fourth one suddenly appears we do not know. His name is again a giveaway – Elijah, Eliyahu, and other variants all mean God, YHVH. Perhaps the rest of the dialogues in which God is reported to speak, are just a continuation of Elyahu the son of Berakhel, meaning the God-blesser. Perhaps that too is one of Job’s alter ego’s, the divine spark originating within him.
Job’s daughters and sons: His daughters’ names (cf, Job 42:14), say something loud and clear. The three daughters are named Yemima, Qetziah and Karen-haphuch. Yemima stands for dove, or daily. Qetziah means cassia, a plant or spice. Karen-haphuch means arching eyebrows.
That the daughters would be named and the sons not, is rather interesting. A Freudian might say this indicates the Electra relationship in operation; a Jungian, that Job comes through with a new peace made with anima, and therefore symbolizes his daughters as projected anima beings.
Names are of importance in the characterization of the roles.
The book has a prologue and an epilogue which are essential to the plot. Modern authors have sometimes removed them, (see, e.g., Goethe’s Faust and McLeash’s “J.B.“). This puts the emphasis onto Job and his comforters rather than Job and God. They may have felt that the prologue and epilogue gave too much away of the nature of the drama. Or perhaps they wanted to leave a sense of bewilderment with the audience. The speeches and the actions of the central part of the book are of course the main reason for its having been written. However, if the prologue and epilogue are removed, the book has an entirely different character. So felt the book’s author.
When the book ends, we are left with a feeling that a transaction between God and Job is not quite completed. However, it is interesting to note that Satan no longer figures in the epilogue. We might have been shown how God gloats over Satan and then collects his bet. But Satan is no longer important here, because God, having been overwhelmed by human suffering and having been involved in Job’s pain, can no longer treat him as a mere pawn. In fact, God has now entered into the game and has left his erstwhile partner, Satan, out of it, having taken man as his partner. For all the insistence of God that it is through His power that He is God, we still suspect that He is somewhat tamed by the humanizing and humanitarian aspects of suffering. Man turns out to not quite be a laboratory rat or a pawn in God’s game. How so? Because man can relate in an I-Thou relationship, man can address Him, man can insist that God make his accusation known; in short, man will not take anything less than a covenantal position vis-à-vis God. That God should deign to do so, might remain a puzzle to us. Perhaps we have an insight about why God is motivated to enter into a covenantal relationship with us; perhaps we, instead of God, can solve this puzzle.
The Outcome: Man is the Winner
From the prologue and the entire book, it would seem that justice is nothing but a human category. Perhaps this is really so. Perhaps all of the burden of the narrative books of the Bible, is that God is tamed by man: “Will not the judge of all the earth do justly?” (Gen. 18:25). Of course one might argue that Job’s restoration is, in the end, a characteristic of God’s justice. But one might also say that it is the justice that comes about through man’s demand of God. This is the really curious thing.
It would seem that the transcendent aspect of God cannot be asked to act in justice without man’s partnership. At the same time the immanent aspect of God, the aspect that produces in man a sense of equity and a striving for justice, needs to be seen as God inherent in man. In cosmic terms and in Kabbalistic terms one could then say that it is God immanent who is trying to teach God transcendent justice. How very paradoxical.
And, not only is transcendent justice the product of divine immanence in man, but so is the need for salvation. Here again we find a very curious reversal. In the story, God transcendent strives with God immanent, (i.e. Job’s rectitude), to bring Job to despair in the face of divine power. Salvation becomes the surrender in this despair to God’s Will: “No man can see me and live” (Ex. 33:20); “Whosoever loses his life regains it” (Christian).
Job finally surrenders when he sees that, “I am but dust and ashes” ( Job 42:6). Yet in all this surrender lies the etiology of God’s justice. “What does the Lord thy God require of thee, but to deal justly, love mercy and walk humbly -inconspicuously, with God.”(Micah 6:8) Paradoxically, man cannot make a covenant with God unless he surrenders, unconditionally. Out of this surrender comes the establishment of the game rules that are to be the terms of the human-divine covenant.
Job has seen something. In the end he has been granted a theophany to end all theophanies. While couched in terms of being overwhelmed in power by power, the full nature of the theophany is not given to verbal statement. Perhaps man has been privileged to have a glimpse of the divine loneliness. God is condemned to solitary confinement for eternity. In the absence of another god with whom He can interact, play with and strive against, God needs Satan. Satan is not the best playmate for God, however. Satan is not vulnerable, nor is God really vulnerable to Satan.
Vulnerability comes with man, with man’s despair and eventual acceptance of his vulnerability vis-à-vis God. It is this vulnerability which becomes engaging for God and encourages God to respond by becoming vulnerable to man. So God begins to depend on man. Perhaps this dependence is already implied in God’s willingness to enter into a gamble with Satan. Without a faithful servant, God seemingly lacks the quality of perfection. Job, recognizing that he is nothing but dust and ashes, is willing to be a toy in God’s hands. His ontological impotence renders him so. In the face of divine transcendence, man must make the leap of faith against all evidence. Perhaps man hopes that “underneath are the everlasting arms.” (Dt. 33:27)
But as Job is about to leap, all guarantees get called off. The teleological suspension of the ethical is not only a problem for Abraham in his binding of Isaac; it is a prerequisite for Job’s reconciliation with God. Russell, in his “Nightmares of Eminent Persons,” has a nightmare for the existentialist which is a fear not to exist. In the end, the existentialist is willing to suffer as long as he can exist because existence is more important. Similarly, in the case of Job, God immanent suffers in man in order to give existence to counterplay vis-à-vis the transcendent because the transcendent to Job is more important.
If Job would, in the end, only be concerned about himself, he would not have been restored to his former fullness. It is only after Job has interceded for his friends, has accepted the consequences of keeping his covenant with his Comforter intact, and has pleaded for them before God, that his own restoration to his former state is made possible.
God seeks not only one man, but a community of men with whom He can interact. Neither Satan nor God are the winners; man is the winner. The human contribution to the cosmic process has been to initiate other games with God than the power game. Thus God is forced to become vulnerable and to negotiate covenantal terms.
Job belongs to the wisdom books of the Bible. They differ from the prophetic in that they place themselves beyond the “ought.” They are the esoteric books of the Bible. Exoteric books like Deuteronomy place the moral law on the same level as natural law and make natural law dependent on the moral law, as in the passage: “if you will hearken to the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, then I will give you rain in its due season.” (Dt. 11:14) The wisdom books claim that natural law is on the surface independent from moral law, as in passages that the righteous die just like the wicked, and that man and beast share the same fate (cf Hosea 4:3).
While the prophetic books are the books of God immanent, the wisdom books speak about God transcendent. With God transcendent, no sermon, no morality, is of any effect. Myth is the only vehicle for the esoteric wisdom books. Contrary to the opinions of many Bible scholars who maintain that the Bible demythologizes, wisdom literature exposits the myth. Ultimately no sermon can do what a story can.
A problem with myths is that some of them die. They must be reinforced by mythic life.
While myth is the only vehicle for the esoteric wisdom books, at the same time, the wisdom books spell the death knell to myth because all revelation, in a sense, becomes a post mortem. Once the wisdom book’s “pathology report” is in, i.e. once it has been analyzed, life for the myth isn’t possible. For example, Kazantzakis has pointed out that by the time Homer had written up all the myths, they were no longer alive in the people of Greece.
It is only people who live in ab initio ecstasy who can still live with myth. Those who have caught on, those who understand what the Dionysian myth is all about, live in the rarified air of Apollonian stability. Apollonian stability makes for theology. Theology provides tradition with a didactic outline. Then tradition can go on and transmit the value games.
Without theology, however, the myth cannot be understood. With theology alone, it cannot be lived. The game is so rigged that in order to play it, one has to forget that it is a game. When I no longer live the story I can tell it.
My theologization of the myth has put value into the story. It has become not only my story, but a cosmic story, and once I know this to be so, once I suspect that God is not an-Other to me, but that in truth He is my I AM, I have short-circuited the game.
Only by re-engagement into the story, by committing myself anew to it as if I did not see through it, by making the story again my story, by having amnesia after the theophany and relegating the theophany back to the unconscious, can I continue to play my part in the play with full involvement as if it were my true existential position. This, “as if,” is the crux.
The mystic has great difficulty forgetting that the words “As if” precede whatever else follows. It is perhaps for this reason that exoteric colleagues of the mystic are so suspicious of him. Having opted for only one level of reality, having forgotten that “As if” precedes whatever else follows, the exoteric mind pushes that level of reality very hard. All the problems and solutions of life have to be on that level. That makes for drama. The mystic, on the other hand, is the one who, for all his good acting, can never forget that it is only an act, a pretense. The exoteric person sees in the act all actuality. The exoteric mind must fight the paradoxical.
On one level of reality (exoteric), everything has to be coherent. In contrast, in myth there is no need to make things coherent on a single level. Therefore, as long as there is multi-level coherence, paradoxes can be maintained on a particular level. They only become integrated when raised up to much higher niveau / levels.
Myth is the mystic’s way to stall the exoteric from calling the thought-police. Alan Watts, in his Beyond Theology, has demonstrated that even the most serious games of religion are nothing but games. The mystic can bear this knowledge; the exoteric mind cannot. Once the play is given away, the exoteric opts out. His problem is not that, henceforth, he will have transcended all games he might have been playing in his mind; it is that he has just invented a few new ones which he takes to be something he identifies as actuality. If the exoteric were to continue, and the mystic in turn continued to expose the masks of God that the exoteric projects one by one, the exoteric would soon turn to despair.
This is not a problem for the mystic (esoteric). In fact, it is precisely what the mystic hopes to have, because the mystic would want to have the exoteric embrace his own mysticism, to embrace the knowledge that this is just an “As if,” which the exoteric cannot do as long as he has an optimistic view about reality being one-level.
The book of Job is the mystic’s end-game. Job himself, from the beginning to the end, remains a pawn. The theophany he has does not cause him to laugh. Otherwise Job may have remained a beggar, echoing in his mendicancy, the mendicancy of God. But in the end, he is restored to his former position, which is to say, the game is set up anew.
That Job lives happily ever after and dies old and sated with days, having doubled his possessions and regained his children, having named them nice names, and generally being a well-respected Job, bespeak, on the one hand the futility of the esoteric. A restored Job is a vindication of the exoteric bourgeoisie. For example, we are not told that Job continues to live with the insights he might have received from this experience. He might just have become the founder of a stoic religious movement.
But on the other hand, we do find the author of the book winking at us as the curtain falls, and some of us will wink back at him and say “good show.” Others may be beset with anxiety as to their own future, having identified throughout the story with Job; they will be glad it is all over and that everything has been restored to its order.
Those of us who identified with the comforters were put to shame. The comforters receive feeble applause.
Neither does God get a great ovation, or Job.
If anyone receives the applause, it is the playwright.
And where is Satan all the time? Perhaps he is the playwright, or perhaps the audience.
And what was it that Job was shown? Behemoth and Leviathan:
“Behold Behomoth which I made with thee. He eateth grass as an ox. Lo now, his strength is in his loins and his force in the stays of his body. Surely the mountains bring him forth food, and all the beasts of the field play there. He lieth under the Lotus trees and the covered of the reed and fins. The Lotus trees cover him with their shadow, the willows of the brook compass him about…[40:25]. Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord? Canst thou put a ring in his nose and bore his jaw through with a hook?…Lay thy hand upon him [40:32]… Think upon the battle. Thou wilt do so no more[40:41-2]. None is so fierce that dare stir him up. Who then is able to stand before Me?”
Having seen the Leviathan, having God’s report of him and of Behemoth, Job is now silent and capitulates.
These images troubled the Rabbis of the Talmud a great deal. In the Midrash Rabbah,Shemini, Chapter 13, it is stated that Behemoth and Leviathan are contestants in the tournament which will take place in the righteous life to come. Behemoth pierces Leviathan with his horns and rips him apart; Leviathan slaughters Behemoth with his fins.
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, in his Liqutey Torah, discusses this along the following lines: There are two kinds of saints. The one who serves God in an exoteric and manifest manner, he is the Behemoth. The other one plays his counter-game in the deep, and is the esoteric saint. He is rarely seen on the surface, and yet he stirs up the deep. He is the one with whom God truly plays and sports, as in the verse “Leviathan hast thou created to sport with him.” [Ps. 104] It is as if God can rule and be praised by Behemoth who serves like an ox who bears his yoke, but the true sporting and blissful ecstasy is what he does with Leviathan, who represents the saint who has no direction, no landmark except his inner compass.
The drama of world’s consciousness is contained in these two kinds of saints. In the book of Job, the final identification is not made. Nor does Reb Shneur Zalman dare to make it. Namely, that it is Satan who is Leviathan.
Captain Ahab loses his life when he makes this identification, but he does it without a sense of humor. Overwhelmed by the cosmic spectacle, Job surrenders and says he is nothing but dust and ashes. He realizes that he had been tossed into the arena between the manifest Saint – the Behemoth – and the esoteric Saint, the Leviathan. In addition, he had tried to emulate Behemoth. But there is no victor when the show is given away. In the final act Behemoth and Leviathan kill each other – or perhaps they embrace. Either way, the curtain falls.
If there is any catharsis of the Aristotelian sense brought about by this drama, it differs from the catharsis of the Greek tragedies. In those plays, the catharsis is usually achieved by pointing out to the audience that through their identification with the characters, they found that they had far fewer troubles than the gods or the Titans. In effect the catharsis is another way of saying: “so you think you have troubles? Just look at the troubles the gods have.”
While very close, the catharsis of Job is different. It points out that existence ceases when strife ceases; that existence is created by tension, by fascination. Look and admire and try to touch and see what will happen to you. It is as if Job finally gives his consent to the cosmic game, realizing that the cessation of the game would mean the cessation of all being. If the game calls for a sucker, what can one who is but dust and ashes do?
In the end, striving for justification by the standards of Behemoth is just as futile as striving for justification by the standards of Leviathan. Behemoth’s standards are ethics, justice and equity, while Leviathan’s are esthetic – play, game ecstasy, pain.
If Behemoth wins, the world need not continue, it cannot continue. The element of suspense is taken from it. The equation is established. Good begets good, evil begets evil, everything is manifest, clear and above ground. Once this equation is proven there is no need for continued existence. Balance has given way to stagnation. The rest of it could simply be worked out as a corollary of the given.
If, on the other hand, Leviathan wins, all meaning and all sense disappear. Camus and Sartre, in all their recognition that the world belongs to Leviathan, are not happy with it.
If there is no cosmic Behemoth with his pattern and his equity, then the “outsider” must take on the function of Behemoth. This is precisely what Job does.
If, on the other hand, morality and order win, life is boring.
As the child’s prayer puts it: “Dear Lord, make all bad people good and all good people interesting.” The problem with all Messianic Millenia is that they sound so boring. And this is why Jewish legend has it that the light of the Messianic era will be found in the righteous partaking of the Leviathan and Behemoth.
But then again, perhaps the Messianic era is already here. Perhaps the problems we experience are the indigestion from a piece of Leviathan or Behemoth that we have ingested. That little bit of Leviathan and Behemoth turned us on, and we are now in the middle of the journey. A journey that began with the Alpha point at the time of the ingestion, and will end at the Omega point when we wake up and say: “History, wow! What a good show!”