Sermons and Divrei Torah
Jonah
by Rob McCready
(Dvar Torah - Yom Kippur 5762)
The haftarah we will be reading today is the book of Jonah. It's
a strange story, and not just because of the oversized fish and
the repentant cattle. I'm going to approach it by comparing Jonah
to three other important figures in the story: the Ninvehites,
the sailors, and us. Then, I'm going to talk about yoghurt. But
I'm getting ahead of myself.
The story opens with God tell Jonah to proclaim judgement on the
Assyrian city of Nineveh. Jonah instead tries to flee from God's
instructions by boat, but is thrown overboard in a storm and brought
back to land via fish. Once he arrives at Nineveh and announces
his prophecy, the people there immediately repent. Jonah becomes
very angry so angry he asks God to kill him - and says that
the reason he fled in the first place was that he knew this would
happen. The story ends with God pointing out that if Jonah cares
about the fate of a plant that briefly shaded him, then he should
not be angry at God for caring about the fate of 120 thousand
people.
Jonah's stubbornness in the face of God's commands places him
in stark contrast with the readily repentant sinners of Nineveh.
This constrast is often mentioned, and is typically not very favourable
to poor Jonah. But how responsible were the Ninevehites, really,
for their repentance? The people of Nineveh were not told, "repent
or you'll get to ride in a fish". They were told, "repent or be
destroyed in 40 days". We can imagine that this made the situation
pretty clear to them. The gift of urgent insight is one that takes
more away from the recipient than it bestows; it takes away options,
and it takes away doubt. Jonah's prophecy was intended to make
Nineveh's choice simple. In contrast, God appears to have enough
confidence in Jonah to let him wrestle with his frustration and
anger himself. God doesn't let Jonah get away from his task, but
he doesn't bring Jonah's continued existence into question either.
It is Jonah, in fact, who tries to revert to a simpler relationship
by repeatedly bringing his death into the picture as an option.
God doesn't go for it, however, but instead maintains the role
of patient teacher to Jonah's frustrated student. In this way
the story demonstrates that deeper and more complex relationships
with God, even those of prophets, are not expected to be perfect
relationships with God. Doubt, frustration, and even anger are
to be struggled with, but not condemned.
Now if Jonah really wanted to learn how to master frustration
and anger, he should have watched the sailors when he was on their
boat in the middle of a God-made storm. His presence on their
ship nearly kills them, and in turn they nearly kill themselves
to save his life. I'm no expert on the shipboard etiquette of
2500 years ago, but I can imagine that any passenger fleeing from
the service of his God was probably supposed to notify the crew
before boarding. But Jonah says nothing to them about his situation
until after they've already found out that he's to blame. In fact
when the storm first hits, Jonah goes below decks without saying
a word and takes a nap, leaving the sailors desperately throwing
their cargo overboard to keep everyone afloat. If we didn't already
know the story, we would expect the sailors to hardly even think
once about throwing him overboard. But we would be wrong. Despite
Jonah's disregard for their lives, the crew does everything to
avoid abandoning him. They first row for shore as hard as they
can. Midrash tells us that they then try three times to calm the
storm by lowering Jonah partway into the water, with no luck.
They finally beg God to not make them kill Jonah. Only when they
have no options left do they throw him to what they can only assume
is his certain death.
There are many explanations for why this passage exists. Some
suggest that it is intended to demonstrate that God's power has
no geographical boundaries, but this doesn't account for its complex
human drama. Others suggest that the sailors are another model
for repentance, but for this to be true we have to think that
their actions constituted a change in behaviour rather than an
expression of what they already were. Putting them on par with
the Ninvehites assumes them to be bad people simply because they
were not Jews. This would be a particularly troubling assumption
for me; some of you may have noticed that my last name is McCready,
and though I don't want to shock anybody I have to be honest with
you…McCready is not a Jewish name. Or, at least it wasn't until
earlier this month. So let's look at them not as sinners but as
good people; they infuse an extraordinary situation with their
ordinary human decency. In this way they are a counterpoint to
Nineveh; the Ninevehites, unlike Jonah, immediately followed God's
commands. The sailors, like Jonah, initially resist God's plans
but are eventually made to comply. Their reasons for doing so
are, however, very different from his. Where we considered Jonah
to be motivated by anger with God and apathy towards the lives
he was saving, the sailors are motivated by respect for the life
of a complete stranger even when they had considerable reason
to be angry. For the sailors, life is not something that others
have to deserve. For Jonah, life must not only be deserved, but
must be deserved on his terms alone. We can even read this as
the main point of God's concluding lesson to Jonah: God points
out that Jonah considered a simple plant deserving of life because
it behaved in a way that pleased him, but considered thousands
of people undeserving simply because they did not conform so immediately
to his standards.
Back at the beginning of this talk (I know it seems like a while
ago) I said that we are also part of the story. Living Judaism
is created not by the Torah alone but by the responses of Jews
to Torah in general. The story of Jonah is not just the words
on paper but includes the reactions and thoughts of the Jews that
have encountered and studied it. So how does our experience compare
to Jonah's? In his world, the inhabitants are struggling with
their actions because the consequences of those actions were so
dire: a flight from God; the destruction of a city; leaving a
man to the mercy of a storm. We, on the other hand, are usually
struggling with our action because of how incredibly trivial they
often seem. We have created for ourselves a society that not only
allows us but encourages us to be insulated from the consequences
of our actions. We have turned it into an art. This art goes by
different names at different times: advertising, economics, technology,
progress… We do not struggle so much with how to repent for our
weighty sins, but instead struggle with figuring out which of
our seemingly consequence-free actions are sinful in the first
place.
Which brings us to the yoghurt…and the environment. Because the
environment is one of the best examples of a modern dire warning
that is still clearly not dire enough. It allows us to highlight
the difference between our world and Jonah's by simply going to
the dairy section of any grocery store and looking at the yoghurt.
Yoghurt comes in two forms. There are the large yoghurt Tubs,
and the smaller yoghurt Cups. If the Tub was the only delivery
system for yoghurt, all those wishing a smaller yoghurt serving
in their lunches would have to portion them out beforehand, probably
into sturdy re-usable containers for travel. But Cups are much
more convenient and besides that come in many different flavours
with exciting ingredients like granola and fruit on the bottom.
It is the Cups that can show us how our world is not like Jonah's,
and they can do it because of what almost certainly fails to happen
when we pick one of them up for purchase. We completely fail to
be hit by a momentary vision of the thousands of tonnes of landfill
generated annually by discarded yoghurt cups. And, really, why
would we? That landfill is probably hundreds of kilometres away.
We could go our whole lives without seeing where all that garbage
we generate goes, because that's the way we want it. We definitely
won't find a picture of it on the top of a yoghurt cup. That wouldn't
sell yoghurt.
Our warm bubble of consumerism and western affluence is sustained
only by making sure that we never really know just what it is
we are doing, and I'm not just talking about the environment.
We here in the west make a lot of money by abusing inanimate land
and water but we probably make more by abusing people. Of course,
we hide their pain behind an abstraction called economics. We
tell ourselves that it's just all part of the natural order of
economies and that, somehow, that mother of 3 making pennies a
day in a sweatshop, well, that just makes sense. Things will all
work out in the end. It must just be a coincidence that while
things all work out, we're the ones raking in the cash. The first
half of our problem is waking up to the consequences of our actions.
The second half is being willing to pay the cost of changing our
behaviour. As long as we are unwilling to both acknowledge our
role in the problems we see in the world and give something up
to solve them, we might as well stop pretending that we don't
like them.
At the end of the book of Jonah God says that the people of Nineveh
did not yet know their right hand from their left, and we can
presume that by giving them the gift insight and urgency God started
the process of teaching them. We need exactly the same lesson,
but we can give it to ourselves by being a little more diligent
and a little more thoughtful in examining the consequences of
our actions.
Right now is a particularly good time to start. I don't have to
remind you of why, and I won't weigh in with my opinion for what
anyone should do other than to repeat myself: we need to be as
diligent as we can in assessing the context of our actions in
order to determine their consequences. Finding all of the necessary
information from only our highly commercialised media outlets
(CNN, MSNBC, take your pick…), well, finding the necessary context
there is about as likely as finding a picture of landfill on the
top of a yoghurt cup.
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
