The Coens have raised the bar with A Serious Man, a sledgehammer allegory delivered in a blizzard of wordplay and imagery so subtle I still don't know what hit me. Nevertheless, I feel reasonably comfortable that, in a big way, the film is an assault upon its intended audience.

As a cine-masochist, I am plum delighted.

A survey of the criticism on imdb suggests three main readings.

1. Political--ASM is a biting take on the foibles of a Hebraic tradition that has become hollow—equated textually to the erosion of the American Dream.
2. Postmodern--The movie is a loving send-up of the same tradition. A moral fable, wherein the existential conundrum is absolved through the proper apprehension of Love and its purported source, Hashem. A fancy turn on the axiomatic 'God is Love', built upon a Kafkaesque reading of the Book of Job.
3. Magical--A parabolic parable upon the nature of uncertainty.

A Serious Man is all of these, I reckon, and more. At once an apparently impossible riddle or Gordian Knot, an emo one-liner and a sort of magic trick, complete with a dazzling punch provided by the use of in situ music by Jefferson Airplane. So to start us off, we have three solid interps, which taken together ought to provide enough fodder for a good variety of critique and analysis well into the future.

But I deduce another and much tougher meaning. A Serious Man is a message, loud and clear and in no uncertain terms: there is a God and he is fucking pissed-off. See, folks have pretty much given up on him, Hashem, God, though some don't know it or won't admit it. The Coens take serious lengths to establish Hashem's unique problems, going so far as to a hint of his ultimate identity.