A recording of this sermon being delivered can be viewed here beginning around 1:41. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ti_9x8SIZuQ
Before I settled here in California, I made my home in New England well known for its breath-taking shoreline and fishing industry. I still follow the local news there and my eyes caught on one particular story from this past summer. Maybe you saw it, too? It was the story of a Cape Cod lobsterman who while diving to retrieve his lobster got swallowed by a whale. Yes – it really happened! While the humpback whale was feeding, the lobsterman seemingly got sucked in by accident. Once the whale realized there was an unwanted dinner in its mouth, it promptly spit the man back out. He was slightly injured, some ligaments were torn, but ultimately, he was okay. The local papers, of course, dubbed him a modern-day Jonah.
A man swallowed by a whale? A modern-day Jonah? To this rabbi, it felt like a sign that I needed to return to this beloved Yom Kippur tale.
The Book of Jonah has long been associated with this holiday and tonight, I would like to dive into why. Our Jonah is not a lobsterman, but a Hebrew prophet and the setting is not New England, but starts off as the ancient land of Israel in the 8th century BCE. We almost always associate Jonah with his time inside that big fish (a whale isn’t the correct translation by the way, but it seems more plausible than a fish, especially given recent news), but there’s much more to Jonah’s story that deserves our attention, especially as we reflect on our own lives this Yom Kippur. The Book of Jonah consists of four short, but powerful chapters and each, I believe, carries its own relevance for us here, now in the year 5782.
Chapter 1 - When God comes knocking
Sometimes opportunity knocks. Sometimes, we grab it, but sometimes we run. In the case of Jonah, son of Amitai, that knocking was God. God tells Jonah that he has a purpose in life. Oh, that we all knew our purpose in life so clearly! Jonah’s purpose was to go to the place known as Nineveh, today in modern day Iraq, then the capital of the growing Assyrian empire and there, proclaim the city’s destruction due to their overwhelming sins.
God says Kum, get up! Go! And Jonah went… except in entirely the opposite direction towards Tarshish, most likely in modern day Spain, essentially the end of the earth, the furthest he could go. God knocked and Jonah ran.
Why did he run? Maybe he was afraid of being ridiculed – a man yelling Repent in the streets doesn’t always invite good will. Maybe he had no desire to travel into the very heart of enemy territory. Maybe he doesn’t want to remind a people whom he presumably fears, perhaps hates to change their ways to receive a second chance. So many maybes. We all have so many maybes, so many reasons not to lean into what the moment may be asking of us. Sometimes we don’t even consciously know why we run; we just do. Maybe we’re afraid we won’t live up to our potential so it’s easier to just not try.
When God urges Jonah to use his voice to make the world a better place, he runs from that moral responsibility. As we read his tale, we must confront our own tendencies to do the same.
Maybe Jonah had been watching the world for years and now wondered what one redeemed city’s little drop of goodness would be in a world full of sinners? Sometimes, I wonder, too what impact any of my actions will really have on the world around me. Will my words from the bima actually land and make any impact, will my showing up at that protest have any effect on local or national policy, will my little bin of recyclables make any difference in the sea of trash being created every single day? Maybe Jonah was simply cynical about humanity. Maybe sometimes so are we.
Jonah flees to a boat and then in the middle of a storm kicked up by a divinely inspired wind, hides in its depths. He lets himself fall asleep in order to shut out the world. And sometimes, we sleep through life, too, don’t we, hoping like our reluctant prophet that the storms will simply subside and go away.
The captain seeks Jonah at the bottom of the boat and cries out, Mah lecha nirdam? How can you be sleeping? Despite our desire to fast-forward this moment and sleep through our discomfort, the captain is shouting in our ears as well. How can we be sleeping through everything happening around us? The pandemic. Fires like we have never seen before, a climate clearly out of control. Antisemitism and crimes of hate all around. Reproductive rights stripped from us, our bodies no longer our own. Using the same language as God, the captain screams: Kum, get up!
Rambam taught that the shofar is meant to waken us. We’re meant to hear in its calls these words: “Awake you sleepers from your sleep. Arouse you slumberers from your slumber and ponder your life… Return to God.” The captain is right. How can we be sleeping?
By now, his shipmates have ascertained Jonah is the reason the seas are raging. When accused, he doesn’t deny it. They ask what can be done. He offers himself up, telling them to throw him overboard. We could potentially read heroism and selflessness in his act, but I see instead utter passivity, the opposite of heroism. He’s simply given up. There were other choices that could have been made in that moment. He could have told them to bring him back to port so he could resume his mission. They even try that themselves by rowing in the direction of shore, but it's Jonah's mindset that is driving the storm and the storm won't cease.
So, with no other choice, he is heaved overboard and his shipmates immediately repent for their grievous act. The storm stops; they are forgiven.
Chapter 2 - What happens when we get stuck
Jonah sinks until a big fish, readied by God, miraculously swallows him. He is now alone. At the bottom of the sea, Jonah weeps. After the eighteen months we’ve had, I feel Jonah in this moment. As I thought about what I needed to say tonight, what you needed to hear, I half-jokingly considered instead of a sermon, we simply follow Jonah’s lead and just all weep. God, I think, would understand.
Our reluctant prophet who ran thought all he wanted was to be alone and escape God’s voice. He had retreated by himself to the depths of the ship and shut out the world. And now, in the belly of the beast, he really is alone. Here, he finally understands how lonely he is and pleads for connection, pleads to return to purpose, pleads to feel God in his life again.
This chapter of Jonah’s life is filled with prayer. The words Jonah utters are the words of his heart. He cries out, “The waters closed in over me, the deep engulfed me. Weeds twined around my head. I sank... Yet You brought my life up from the pit.” “In my trouble I called out to the [You] and [You] answered me.”
This day, the holiest of nights, we are meant to be at our most vulnerable. We aren’t eating or drinking. We’re traditionally wearing our own burial clothes, all in white in kittels and tallitot. This is the day of our judgment; we act as if this is the day of our death. Jonah, in the depths, surely must have felt that the day of judgment was upon him as well.
Prayer is essentially about understanding who we are in the cosmos. Plans get waylaid. Life gets turned upside down. A diagnosis. A divorce. A death. A misunderstanding that spirals. A truth that unsettles. An accident that changes everything. Life is not always easy; in fact, sometimes it is downright hard. We worry if we can live up to this moment, to our potential. But if we can humble ourselves to purpose, if we can make out our significance amidst this chaos, if we can believe in our own power to make an impact, that’s true tefillah, that’s prayer.
Once we return to the truth that that we are precious and can create change, that’s when the big fish spits us back out onto dry land.
Chapter 3 - Transformation is Possible
Acting with purpose, Jonah makes his way to Ninevah. Why do we read this story on Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment? Not because of that big fish or even all that prayer, but primarily for this moment right here. We read the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur because in this story, repentance, teshuvah works!
When he arrives in Ninevah, Jonah shares God’s message with its people in just five words: Od arba’im yom v’Ninevah n’pachet - Forty days more and Ninevah will be overthrown. The people hear Jonah’s prophecy and for once, actually listen and begin to repent. They transform. And even God changes. Deeply moved by the Ninevites’ open-hearted teshuvah, God revokes the decree. In a mere ten verses, chapter 3 teaches us that transformation is possible. We deserve and receive second chances. Chapter 3 gives humanity hope.
If the book ended here, all would be well. Our prophet would have learned his lesson to lean into purpose and follow through. We would have borne witness to a repentant people, inspiring us as well. But the book does not end here.
Chapter 4, our final chapter - There is still a lesson to be learned
We don’t always learn life’s lessons even when confronted with them head-on. Jonah once again isolates himself, heading to a hilltop to watch the city burn. Except it doesn’t – for the people have repented. They’ve changed; they will live.
What does Jonah, the one who helped them do all that change, think?
The text reads: “But to Jonah this [God relenting] seemed very wrong, and [Jonah] became angry. Heprayed to the Eternal, ‘Isn’t this what I said, [God], when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment. Now, [God], take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.’”
Jonah’s mission, his purpose was to convince people to change yet he seems to be the only one in our entire story who is incapable of change. When one should be celebrating that the gates are always open for teshuvah, Jonah is a grump in the corner unable to muster even a bit of compassion. Maybe he changed in that big fish, but clearly that change was temporary. Once back on land, he forgot his brokenness and returned to his cynical ways. We are so good at forgetting.
Now, he fears looking like the fool, the false prophet. For what will people think? Jonah seems more worried about his ego than the lives of the real, breathing, saved Ninevites. God reminds Jonah that all are God’s children, all deserving love and forgiveness. As the prophet Isaiah shares in God’s words, “Blessed be Egypt, my people; Assyria, the work of our hands; and Israel, my inheritance.” We’re all God’s, and God does not wish punishment on any of us. God wants us to turn from sin to righteous action in the world.
But Jonah doesn’t understand. He believes those people are not his problem. His narrow, insular view on life is what led him to that boat to Tarshish and it’s what led him to his lonely hilltop now. When we only care about ourselves, about the people who look like us or think like us or pray like us, the world turns into a very scary and lonely place. And we have to ask – who are our Ninevites today?
Jonah accuses God of what… being too compassionate? Too kind? Too forgiving? So, God accuses Jonah right back, haheiteiv charav lach – is it good for you to be angry?
The Book of Jonah overflows with deep soul questions. First: How can you be sleeping? And now: Is it good for you to be angry? … Well, is it?
There’s a lot out there to be angry about for sure. And anger, if channeled, can transform into righteous, righteous action. However, we have too much anger within us when we find ourselves fuming over someone else’s teshuvah and transformation. We have too much anger within us when we are mad at someone else’s joy. As if there is a finite amount of transformation in the world. As if there is too much joy.
Jonah longs for the God of the Sodom and Gemorrah days. He wants shock and awe. He wants justice for sinners. From his spot up on high, Jonah craves a God of judgment. Tonight, we crave a God of forgiveness because we are on the other side, aren’t we? We pray for a God of compassion because we know that all of us make mistakes and none of us are perfect.
When we choose to hang on to our anger and our resentment, our need for judgment, our sense of superiority, we, too, will end up like Jonah, alone and isolated. Is that really the life we want to lead? Grumbling against kindness? Scoffing at teshuvah from the hill we want to die on?
Maybe the real problem is not the sinners at all. No, it’s with Jonah, our supposed hero – and we are Jonah, too. Though he preaches change, it turns out he doesn’t really believe in change at all. He chafes at the repentance and redemption of the Ninevites. I imagine he would think the same of any of us. One strike and you’re out. Humanity then as a whole, according to Jonah, must be out.
God tries to teach Jonah by making the lesson about himself. God causes a plant to grow quickly over him providing much needed shade and comfort – and Jonah is happy. But then just as quickly, God causes a worm to eat the plant to destruction and Jonah is left blistering in the sun – and Jonah mourns. God uses this as a lesson to teach Jonah that if he can mourn the plant, why wouldn’t he mourn people if they perished? Why wouldn’t he assume that God would do the same?
Someone once taught me in rabbinical school that each of us have only one sermon within us. We just say it in thousands of different ways. Well, if that’s true, then it all comes down to this for me: I believe in humanity. I believe in us. And I believe in our capacity to transform and change.
Someone also taught me that we often give the sermons we most need to hear ourselves. Sometimes, on the most difficult of days, the days I am disappointed in humanity, days like when SB8 went into effect in Texas two weeks ago or every day our ICUs unnecessarily hit record highs with the eligible yet unvaccinated… I find I am Jonah on the hilltop, so very angry, feeling way too close to giving up, judging from afar, watching and expecting that at any moment the world will burn.
But the hilltop is not where I am meant to be, no, and neither are you. In those moments, we need to move ourselves off the mountain as quickly as possible and get back with people and believe in them again. We need to surround ourselves with real-life versions of Chapter 3 with all its staggering teshuvah.
I could tell you any number of transformative tales, but the best story for you comes from you. I want you to use this moment to think of a story of change in your life, a time when you grew or when someone in your life astounded you with their turning. A moment when humanity shined.
We all have at least one story of hope within us and God-willing, many, many more.... So think of that story now… Do you have it?... And when you have it, hold that story close, hang onto it for that story just might be what you need when you need to move off your mountain.
As the Book of Jonah comes to an end, God has one more question. Ninevah with all its people, children, and animals… should I not care? And that’s how the text ends. With God’s question. With Jonah’s stunned silence. It’s left unclear if Jonah ever gets the message… But we can. We know the answer to God’s question. Yes, God should care and so should we.
Jonah ben Amitai translates as Jonah, child of truth. In four short, powerful chapters, Jonah searches for truth about humanity. In Chapter 1, he gets distracted and derailed and don’t we all? In Chapter 2, he gets taken to the depths and we’ve been there, too. Maybe we are there now. In Chapter 3, his life and how he lives it creates change; he makes an impact. And so do we. But in Chapter 4, he reverts, he questions his purpose, and he worries about all the wrong things, even choosing judgment and anger over compassion and kindness.
Jonah is deeply flawed, and he repeatedly needs to be re-taught life’s important lessons, and we do, too. That’s why Yom Kippur comes around every single year and the Book of Jonah, too, to remind us not to give up on humanity, to believe in us again even on the most difficult of days.
Even though Jonah doubts humanity, God never does. We have purpose, each our own. We may not be prophets, but we have powerful voices of moral conscience, capable of creating magnificent change. How can you be sleeping echoes in our ears. Writer, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote, “Whenever you wake up, that is your morning.” God is knocking, the world is calling, the shofar is blasting: Kum, get up! “There is work to be done. There are tarnished things that need to shine again. There are broken things that need to be made whole again.” Whenever we wake up can be now. God, may we be brave enough to answer your call, to wake ourselves up, and to make this our morning.
G’mar chatimah tovah.
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