Congregation Netivot Shalom

Yom Kippur, Jonah

Sep 26, 2012 / 10 Tishrei 5773

Josh Gressel

Jonah

The story of Jonah is a wonderful teaching story. I think it has a lot to say about heeding the call to change and the different kinds of change which are possible. I want to look at this story through these two lenses of quantity and quality of tshuvah: how often do we say "yes" to the call to change, and how deeply do we let ourselves be changed.

I will begin with a brief recap of the Jonah story, even though you just heard it. I worry that between the hunger and the Hebrew the plot may not have stuck in your brain.

The story is a brief four chapters long. It goes like this: God tells Jonah to go to Ninevah and warn them that he's about to overturn their city unless they mend their ways. Jonah takes off for Tarsus instead. God sends a storm to make it difficult for Jonah to escape. The sailors on board, terrified by the tossing waves, cast lots to find who's at fault. They discover it's their passenger Jonah, who has gone to sleep in the hold. He admits he's the cause, and tells them their only recourse is to throw him overboard. Reluctantly they do. The sea is calmed immediately, and Jonah goes down, down, down, where he's swallowed by a great fish.

Jonah spends three days in the belly of this great fish. He has a "let go, let God" moment, and then the fish vomits him up on the shores of Ninevah. He walks across the city's breadth for three days, preaching them to mend their ways. They do, and their fate is averted. He then goes outside the city, depressed by the ease with which they were relieved of their fate. While lying out in the sun, God causes a plant to grow over his head and provide shade. Jonah feels again the shelter of God's care and is happy. God then sends a worm to eat the plant and Jonah falls again into despair. The story ends with God saying to Jonah: "Why are you so upset about a plant and not concerned about the fate of a city of 120,000, and all their cattle?"

Now let's review the course of this story through the two lenses of quantity and quality of change. How does Jonah do initially on the measure of saying "yes" to God's call? Not so good. God tells him to go to Ninevah, which is north of Israel, near Mosul in present day Iraq. What does he do? He boards the first ship to Tarsus. Historians think Tarsus was in southern Spain, near the straights of Gibraltar. So that in those days, saying Jonah boarded a ship for Tarsus is like saying he took off for Timbuktu.

Our first question might be: What exactly was Jonah thinking? If he knows enough to hear God's call, does he really think he's going to escape his destiny by taking off in the opposite direction? Like God is going to be too tired or busy to track him down?

We might laugh at the notion, but think of all the times we avoid the call to act. How many times do we override a call for good, whether it be learning the piano, joining the Peace Corp, or volunteering at the local shelter? How often do we avoid changing things in our lives that need changing, such as diet, or exercise, or relationships? What are we thinking when we take off in the opposite direction from where we know we should be going?

I'll tell you what I think we're thinking: we're thinking that what we do or don't do really doesn't matter, that no one will notice, that avoiding our destiny at most hurts only us. We can try, as Jonah did when he went to sleep while the storm was raging all around, to just close our eyes and go to sleep to the consequences of our refusal to heed God’s call. But as this story so graphically depicts, avoiding our destiny is not a victimless crime. Other innocent people can become collateral damage when we don't do what we know we're supposed to be doing. We may think it only harms us, but according to this story, that simply is not true. Trying to shirk the responsibility of being who we're supposed to be can turn us into brittle shells, peevish, depressed, cynical, shrunken versions of who God created us to be. Our family feels it, our friends feel it, but we keep trying to ignore it, going to sleep to our true selves just like Jonah went to sleep in the hold of the ship. At a certain point, the waves of our lives become too threatening, and can no longer be ignored. Perhaps we get fired, perhaps we get threatened with divorce, perhaps we get a serious illness or depression. Something gets our attention.

One might think Jonah, who has just fessed up that he's the cause of all the disturbance, would just hop overboard. But no, he asks to be thrown overboard. The way I understand this is that sometimes we have to ask someone to force us to do what we know we need to do but can’t do on our own. This is why we hire personal trainers, or coaches, or get sponsors. There is no shame in asking someone help you to make the change you can't make alone.

Next Jonah gets swallowed by the great fish. The darkness of the belly of the great fish is not described in threatening terms. It's more like an experience of sensory deprivation. When we first commit to the change we've been avoiding, there often is an eerie sense of unreality because we have unplugged ourselves from our normal way of being in the world. This experience, while very disorienting, can also be very centering. When we let go of our attachments to who we’ve always been and how we think we need to be, of all the things that connect us to the world on the surface, what's left is God. Subtract all of the nareishkeit and we realize, as Jonah realizes in the belly of the great fish, that God is all that matters because God is all that is. Jonah has learned what he needed to learn and is released back up to the surface of life, right where his destiny originally commanded him to be.

Jonah then goes into Ninevah, preaches to the people to repent, and lo and behold, they do. I have no way of proving this, but I believe that had Jonah gone to Ninevah without the attempted detour to Tarsus, he would not have been so effective. There is a saying that where the sinner who has fallen and risen stands, the righteous cannot stand. In this process of making a mistake and righting ourselves something strengthens us and makes us more powerful. Yes we need to listen to God's call and to answer it, but our refusal and eventual return is also a part of God’s plan. Tshuvah is one of the things which is said to have existed before the creation of the world. There simply are no wrong turns.

Why is Jonah so upset that his mission is a success? That is, why is he grieving that the people of Ninevah repent and are relieved of their punishment? Here we need to move to the other measure of change: its quality. Do we make a surface, behavioral change, or do we open ourselves to transformation? Another way to conceptualize it is to think of two types of repentance on a qualitative continuum: repentance based on fear is at the lower end and repentance based on awe is at the higher end.

Repentance based on fear is the kind of behavioral change that stems from a fear of punishment. It has the advantage of being quickly effective and the disadvantage of being easily forgotten. When we’re speeding and we see a highway patrol car on the side of the road ahead of us, we immediately slow down. But usually, as soon as the patrol car is no longer in our rearview mirror, we will speed back up again. We haven’t really learned anything except to try to avoid the consequence of the law.

Repentance based on awe is the kind of change Jonah makes: the transformation which occurs when we really get that God is everywhere and everything. We would all behave very, very differently if we had this consciousness ever present in our minds.

By this thesis, Jonah is upset with the Ninevites because they haven't really learned anything. They just changed because they were afraid of the punishment. History later proves him correct, because we read in a later book of prophesy by Nahum that they have returned to their sinning and need to be destroyed.

According to Jonah, we need to internalize that the reason we shouldn't speed is not because we might get a ticket if we do, but because it endangers others as well as ourselves. The degree to which we still behave for fear of punishment is the degree to which we are like the Ninevites.

Jonah, with all of his flaws, is willing to take a leap into the unknown without knowing where he will land. He simply knows this is what is required of the situation, and while he initially struggled against it, when he lets go he lets go completely. The sailors, like the Ninevites, are those people whose sole focus is on maintaining smooth sailing -- just don't upset the rhythm of my life, don't rock my boat. They bargain with the force of change, agreeing to do just enough to avoid repercussions, but afraid to let go of the security of their ordered lives.

Now I’m going to complicate this even further, because it is only for purposes of clarity that I divvy up this story into quantity and quality and into Ninevites and Jonahs. The more complex and messy truth is that we all have both types of people inside ourselves. We all do or don't do some things out of fear and some things out of awe. We avoid some things we shouldn't and say yes to the call in other areas. Sometimes we do take the leap of faith; more often we make some middling compromise until we can figure out what to do and when to do it.

And this is the final message of the story: compassion. Jonah expects a lot from himself but there is the danger in such an attitude of losing perspective, of caring more for a plant than for people. So while we are all called to be agents of change, we are also called to be compassionate with those whose pace or path are different than ours. Without this final message we run the risk of being self righteous hypocrites.

In summary, in these four short chapters we are told we should not run from our fate because we can't, and in trying to do so we endanger others. We should be willing to take leaps of faith if that is what is required of us by the situation, and to ask for help when we can’t do it on our own. While we may spend some time in darkness, as Jonah did in the belly of the great fish, when we get to the place of complete letting go we will be released and capable of taking the next step we were originally commanded to do. And that no matter what agents of change we become, we must always remain compassionate for everyone and everything else around us. Gmar chatimah tovah.