“Call me Jonah.”
Later today, we will hear his Book. By then we’ll have been fasting a long time. Some will be spiritually attune, but others will be foggy, not in the best state to think hard and feel deeply about this unusual prophet. And so I bring him before you now, at this central point of Yom Kippur. I bring him before you on this awesome day as a figure who offers lessons for us and our time — not through direct teaching or exemplary conduct, but through what he experiences.
This past summer on a drive to and from Montana, John and I listened to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. You may have heard its opening line echoing, “Call me Ishmael,” when I began with “Call me Jonah.” There are important intersections between the two works, as well as with the book of Job. Moby Dick is a very much a tragedy, but it’s also influenced by our Tanach. When Captain Arab pursues his quest for revenge against the White Whale, the first mate Starbuck, a Quaker, accuses him of blasphemy and impiety for placing himself and this quest above God and all creation.
Jonah too is an impious blasphemer, although when asked to identify himself by the mariners with whom he has shipped out to Tarshish, he replies: “I am a Hebrew. I fear the Lord, the God of Heaven, who made both the sea and the dry land.” But his behavior shows him recklessly resistant to God’s role as sustainer of life and the ground of morality.
Melville gives us some sense of how Ahab became what he is — how the loss of his leg, coupled with years away from wife and child, have hardened his heart and skewed his moral sense. But we have no idea how Jonah became himself, whether or not he is the same Jonah son of Amittai who was active during the reign of Jeroboam. It’s clear that his flight from God’s command issues from something deep within him that no biographical or historical factors can explain.
And fly he does when Adonai’s word comes to him: “Arise and go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before Me.” Jonah strives to flee mi-lifnai Ha-shem: away from the presence of the Lord. This unusual phrase (rather than the more usual mi-penei) is repeated twice to underscore the magnitude of Jonah’s audacity, and perhaps to make us wonder how God will respond.
The divine response is fast and furious. According to the Midrash, the great storm that arises targets this specific ship on an otherwise calm sea. Initially Jonah is willing to imperil his shipmates; but when the casting of lots makes clear his responsibility for the danger they are in, he goes to the opposite extreme and is too ready to sacrifice himself. By responding to the storm in this way — rather than praying, as the pagan sailors do — he persists in stubborn opposition to the divine will.
Again Adonai arranges things so that Jonah’s escape is blocked. Rather than die, the prophet winds up in the belly of a great fish, where his distress finally impels him to pray. The concluding line of his prayer is yishuatah la-Adonai: “Deliverance is God’s” —whereupon the fish spews him out onto dry land. This represents a new beginning for Jonah, one in which he obeys the divine instruction to go to Ninevah and convey Adonai’s message. And yet, Jonah’s stony silence here suggests internal opposition. He has been subdued but not necessarily persuaded.
Throughout the four short chapters of his book, Jonah is a man of few words. His resistance to articulating his feelings pressures the sailors and God to speak more than their share, most of which Jonah ignores. In contrast, the people of Ninevah, and then their king, grab hold of Jonah’s curt message and respond to its implied instruction to repent. They put on sackcloth and ashes, and along with their animals, fast from food and water. They turn back from the injustice that had been habitual with them, and call out to God in prayer. The king expresses a humble hope that the city’s total destruction can be averted. And indeed, after observing their actions, God turns back from the justified punishment that had been announced to Jonah, and that Jonah had announced to the great city.
If the Book of Jonah ended here, we would have a classic morality tale in which Jonah, the Ninevites, and God emerge as positive figures, who learn and change. However, the story instead takes a sharp turn. We begin the most original, disturbing, and ultimately illuminating section of the book.
With Nineveh having done tshuvah and been forgiven, Jonah would have been free to pursue his own purposes — to declare victory, express satisfaction, and go home. But instead he digs further into his rebellion against God and God’s ways. In contrast to Moses — who sought to know those ways and draw closer to the divine presence, and for whom God’s compassion is the basis of hope — Jonah finds this cardinal divine quality to be a source of despair.
If Shadenfreude is taking delight in someone else’s misfortune, then Jonah exemplifies its transposed variant: Freuden-schade, feeling sorrow at the success of others. (And which of us have not felt both emotions?) Brain-scanning studies show that schadenfreude correlates with envy. And so, it seems to me, must its counterpart. Rigid and absolutist as Jonah is, he envies the Ninevites their emotional and spiritual flexibility — their capacity to understand what they have to do, and courage to do it.
The Ninevite king is a great leader, who notices and enhances his people’s understanding. Like the sea captain and unlike Jonah, he displays religious humility and love of life. He sees that mortification of the flesh is not sufficient, but must be completed by prayer and right action. As a result, rather than the “measure for measure” of God’s strict justice responding to the Ninevites’ past sins, their tshuvah is balanced by divine compassion. By using the same word — ha-ra-ah — for both the sins and the anticipated divine punishment, the text makes it clear that such punishment is at best a “necessary evil.”
It is this that Jonah cannot understand or accept. The very divine attributes — sh’losh esray midot — that are invoked throughout the Yamim Noraim — these attributes drive Jonah crazy. The “great evil” — raah g’dolah — that had been corrected by the Ninevites and put aside by God, that evil, is, in effect, embraced by Jonah, filling him with anger and despair. His willingness to die for his principles steels his heart and nurtures his rebellion. Psychologically, he is motivated by the death wish that assails him whenever the course of his life reaches a blind ally, and so he implores God to take his life. God replies with a rhetorical question: “Are you that deeply angry?” In effect, the God who has been generous with the sailors and the Ninevites, refuses to comply with Jonah’s request for death.
Left to stew in his own juice, Jonah camps out east of the city. He hopes to see the Ninevites backslide so that God will be compelled to destroy them after all, thus proving him right. There he builds a succah as temporary shelter, much as we will soon do. God adds a kikayon plant, thus offering reassurance and also more shade — but no sooner does Jonah take comfort in this divine overture than the plant is snatched away. Again he longs to die, and again God presses him with a rhetorical question: “Are you so deeply angry about the plant?” Jonah confirms: “yes, so deeply that I want to die.” He has reached the end of the line, with no place to go physically, emotionally or spiritually.
At this extreme point, at the nadir of his life, Jonah receives a revelation. His book, like Job’s, articulates rebellion and protest. God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind in majestic fashion. Although God’s address to Jonah is much smaller in scale, it too issues from the fullness of creation, explaining that Adonai has regard for Ninveh ha-ir ha-g’dolah, whose population density and repentance have rendered it a great city. Moreover, beyond forgiving the mature repentant Ninevites, Adonai brings out of the shadows the children and animals, who were involved in the atonement process and would have been destroyed in the city’s overthrow. God’s final rhetorical question to Jonah ends the Book: “Should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than twelve myriad persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well.”
The last two words are the book’s clincher: ooh v’haymah rabbah: “and many beasts” — especially the final word, rabbah. Before Jonah and us, God unfurls the plenitude of creation and, by implication, the sacred vitality of life itself. Jonah’s mute response indicates that he has no answer to the argument implicit in God’s final rhetorical question.
Does God’s pedagogy with Jonah work? From the biblical text alone, we simply don’t know. It may have ended his rebellion — or not. God has the last word.
Yalkut Shimoni substitutes a moving midrashic conclusion to the narrative: “At that moment, Jonah fell upon his face and said, ‘Conduct your world according to the Attribute of Mercy; as it is written ‘To Adonai our God are mercy and forgiveness.’” This alternative conclusion resembles Job’s response to God: “Therefore I recant and relent, being but dust and ashes.”
And yet, does it really seem likely that Jonah would turn about so quickly and decisively? I myself am inclined to give up on Jonah, and you may well feel the same way. We give up on him much as he gave up on Nineveh — pinpointing negative traits and then casting them aside so that we can feel superior. In contrast, God’s patience is not exhausted. First, instead of lecturing to Jonah, Adonai creates an object lesson with the plant and the worm. And then, as an ultimate act of mercy, instead of waiting to see how Jonah takes the final teaching about children and animals, God, as it were, pulls the curtain. The book of Jonah is more concerned with our answer to God’s question than Jonah’s.
Thus far, I’ve alluded to many traditional interpretations of the book of Jonah. But the Midrash of our lives has special capacity to generate spiritual sparks when rubbed against biblical stories. Let me offer eight teachings for our time that have arisen within me through studying and thinking about this book. As I present them in serial order, without much elaboration, I hope that each of you will feel a resonant connection to at least one — and then hold onto it, so that it echoes through the remainder of Yom Kippur and into the year ahead.
1.) It is better to face a difficult situation directly than trying to evade it. Real responsibilities cannot be easily ignored or escaped. Passive aggressive behavior is at its core aggressive — filled with anger, cruel and dangerous. It will eventually bite the hand that feeds it. Not expressing feelings directly to others, or figuring them out for oneself, creates great pressure.
2.) Jonah’s words and actions give us permission to doubt. We don’t fully understand the process of tshuvah, even if we value and engage in it. Jonah, in effect, voices our doubts about self-transformation just as Yom Kippur is drawing to a close. Almost all of us have some of Jonah within ourselves.
3.) Doubt is one thing, and depression is another. Letting depression take you down to the depths can be a choice, though it often is not. It takes moral courage to affirm life, more for some people than others. Reaching out can help a great deal. Jonah’s loneliness — which comes from his flight from God and human beings— takes him down, down, down.
4.) But for most people, in most situations, there is no depth of despair from which we cannot arise and return. Life often gives us second chances to do better. In chapter 3, Jonah gets another chance to accept his prophetic role. In order to actualize such chances, we need to take risks and stretch ourselves.
5.) It is dangerous to take oneself too seriously and identify too zealously with a particular role. For then, if problems arise in performing that role, your life loses purpose and meaning. Jonah lost a major sense of himself as a God-fearing person by fleeing, and even more when God pardoned Nineveh. But nothing we do or don’t do, take on or believe encompasses all of us.
6.) We need to defend not only our own personal and national interests but also larger values. God’s great statement at the end rejects narrow parochialism. Jonah’s divides his world into two camps: us and them, the good guys and the bad, Israel and everybody else. The lesson of human universalism needs to be constantly reiterated and relearned.
7.) It is easy for human beings to tire of life’s endless round of less-than-perfect, compromised existence — easy to run out of words, patience, and pity for the Ninevahs and Jonahs of this world. It’s tempting to long for a clean, decisive starting-over. This kind of apocalyptic, absolutist thinking goes against Judaism’s imperative to “choose life.” This is a lesson that God learned during the flood, and we need to keep relearning.
And finally, (8.) We are reminded by God’s closing speech of the value and power of children. Those who do not know their right hand from their left depend on competent adults to lead the way, making sacrifices and hard choices.
Now, let me draw this drash to a close. The Epilogue to Moby Dick opens with a famous line from the Book of Job — “I alone am escaped to tell you” — which is repeated by the messengers come to announce Job’s losses. In the end, God vindicates Job’s resistant, questioning stance; and Job in turn accepts his own creatureliness in relation to God’s awesome creation.
In Melville’s book, it is Ishmael who alone has escaped to tell the story of Ahab and the White Whale. He is no great hero — he doesn’t really get involved in the epic battle that results in everyone else’s death. But his narrative displays compassion for the Pequod’s wide spectrum of humanity and for all living creatures. Ishmael enlarges his understanding and sympathy, and lives to tell an enduring story.
Jonah is even less a hero than Ishmael, though he finally fulfills the job for which he’s been drafted. Like Job, he resists and criticizes God. It’s hard for him to grow, but he finally enables others to grow and do the right thing. He is God’s prophet, but he’s also Everyman. We can identify with him and learn through him.
The poet Zelda brings Jonah into a beautiful poem entitled “The Light is My Joy.” Let me offer its final stanza as a concluding blessing. I will repeat the poem’s title line at end as a nechemtah.
Jonah the prophet, whose path to God
was filled with flights through raging waters,
will ask mercy for you
and for me
and for all who are drowning.
For the light is my joy. Ki ha-or sha-a-shoo-ai. For the light is my joy
G’mar chatimah tovah!