Sermon for Yom Kippur morning 5782
September 16, 2021
Here we are at the last of my four High Holiday sermons on the four chapters of the Book of Jonah. Jonah Chapter 3, which we focused on last night, was when Jonah ventured off to Nineveh (like he was originally supposed to do before he ran off to sea in chapter 1 and before he was swallowed by a big fish in Chapter 2.)
But in chapter 3, he does what God tells him to do, albeit still less than enthusiastically. He wanders through only a part of the city of Nineveh and utters just five Hebrew words to its inhabitants.
ע֚וֹד אַרְבָּעִ֣ים י֔וֹם וְנִֽינְוֵ֖ה נֶהְפָּֽכֶת׃
(Od arba’im yom ve-Nineveh nehpahkhet)
Meaning ---
“Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overturned”
But that’s enough to do the trick and all is well by the end of chapter 3.
You’d think Jonah would be happy about having made such a positive impact on so many people.
But no – Jonah is annoyed.
Back in Chapter 1, when Jonah ran away from his assigned prophetic role, it was never explicitly explained why he was doing so. It’s only now in Chapter 4 that he finds his words to express what’s really ticking him off:
As we read in Jonah 4: 2-3:
וַיִּתְפַּלֵּל אֶל ה’ וַיֹּאמַר, אָנָּה ה’ הֲלוֹא-זֶה דְבָרִי עַד-הֱיוֹתִי עַל-אַדְמָתִי--עַל-כֵּן קִדַּמְתִּי, לִבְרֹחַ תַּרְשִׁישָׁה: כִּי יָדַעְתִּי, כִּי אַתָּה אֵל-חַנּוּן וְרַחוּם, אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב-חֶסֶד, וְנִחָם עַל-הָרָעָה.
He prayed to the Eternal, and said: Please, Adonai, was not this my word when I was still in my own land? That is why I fled to Tarshish; for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, and abounding in kindness, and repenting of evil.
וְעַתָּה ה’, קַח-נָא אֶת-נַפְשִׁי מִמֶּנִּי: כִּי טוֹב מוֹתִי, מֵחַיָּי.
Therefore now, Adonai, please take my life take, I beseech Thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.'
I would worry about such a person. If we didn’t think he was somewhat suicidal in chapter 1 when he told the sailors to pitch him overboard, it would certainly seem that way now. This is a man in existential distress.
In our own lives, occasionally we find ourselves, God forbid, dealing with people who are thinking about suicide. I have personally known a couple of friends who suffered from depression and committed suicide: my friend Ken in Philadelphia in 1999 and my friend Michelle in Montreal in 2000. Zichronam livrachah/ May their memories be for a blessing.
Depression is a horrible disease, but help is available. If you or anyone you know ever have suicidal thoughts, God forbid, please call the the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline toll-free number, 1-800-273-TALK(8255). Calling that number would connect the caller to a certified crisis center near where the call is placed.[1]
In any event, none of the commentaries I’ve read about the Book of Jonah focus in that direction. They apparently interpret Jonah’s exclamations as just melodramatic , exaggerated language. Rather then seeing Jonah as potentially suicidal they see him as simply angry and annoyed with God.
But why the anger and annoyance?
Some would say, Jonah was just motivated by ego. If he preaches that Nineveh will be destroyed, and then it doesn’t get destroyed, then he’ll get the reputation of being an incompetent prophet.
But prophecy – at least in the sense that Judaism understands the term – is not about predicting the unalterable future. Rather, it’s about shedding a light on the ills of society to encourage it to reform itself. It’s not about what “will” happen but rather about what “could” happen if we don’t change our ways.
As we learned in chapter 3 – there is more than one way in which a city can be nehpahkhet (“overturned”).
But the main philosophical issue played out in chapter 4 of the Book of Jonah is that God’s justice is tempered by God’s compassion – implicitly teaching us that our own sense of justice should be tempered by compassion. Jonah is the kind of “by the book” stickler who wants everyone to play by the rules and to suffer the consequences if they don’t.
Jonah wonders where is the justice in the world if evildoers don’t get the punishment due them?
But we know better than Jonah --- This world needs both justice and mercy – both din and rachamim. That’s our Jewish understanding of the way of the world. We are all less than perfect. And God, as it were, does not expect us to be perfect. Rather, what we can and ought to be doing is trying to be the best versions of ourselves, to the best that we can. And that very much includes being forgiving of others.
In Jonah chapter 4, God, as it were “throws shade” at Jonah.
First, in the literal sense, God provides Jonah with a “kikayon” – which is a large, shade producing plant. Jonah is most pleased with this. But soon thereafter God sends a worm to attack the plant and cause it to wither. This prompts Jonah once again to complain that he “would rather die than live.”
But God has the last word --- throwing shade of a different kind -- the kind of “shade” defined by www.urbandictionary.com as “acting in casual or disrespectful manner towards someone.”[2]
How does God “throw shade” at Jonah in that urbandictionary slang sense?
Well, listen to God’s last words to Jonah – the last words of the book, to which Jonah has no response, no answer, no teshuvah:
“You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight. And should not I care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many beasts as well”[3]
Our Temple member David Siegler wrote about this passage in our Temple bulletin a few years ago. He writes of Jonah:
“Jonah is the archetypal slacker, self-involved and self-pitying, who just never gets it that it’s not all about him.[…]
“Jonah is just clueless that God has saved the lives of over a hundred thousand people; all he can think of is that he missed the Packers-Vikings game on TV.”
And David Siegler paraphrases God’s final words to Jonah this way:
“You know what? There’s a whole bunch of cattle there too, and right now, they mean a whole lot more to me than you and your insufferable attitude, and don’t even get me started with where I think you stack up against the Ninevan cockroaches!”
As David Siegler’s essay broadly hints to us, there’s plenty of humor in the Book of Jonah.
But all this all this talk of prophecy, and the imagery of Jonah in chapter 4 sitting forlornly in his sukkah east of the City of Nineveh, boiling in the hot sun and the sultry wind, had me thinking about climate change.
Many prophets of our own time are right now trying to get us to change our ways both at the grassroots level and at the governmental level to save humanity from this worsening scourge. Wildfires, floods, droughts --- the signs grow more ominous each year.
We have to have hope. But we also have to have a sense of urgency. Both at the grassroots level and at the governmental level.
Unlike Jonah, I’m sure that those sounding the alarms on climate change would be happy if a great teshuvah movement of environmental action staves off the worst forecasts --- so that the worst forecasts prove to be as wrong as Jonah’s forecast of Nineveh’s destruction.
And yet, I didn’t tell you this part – and the author of the Book of Jonah doesn’t tell us this part either. But the fact is that that great city of Nineveh was in fact destroyed by the Medean Empire in 612 BCE, about a century after the events described in the Book of Jonah, though prior to the writing of the Book of Jonah.[4]
This was hinted at in Jonah 3:3 where it says that Nineveh “haytah ir gedolah leylohim” – “Nineveh WAS [past tense] a great city to God.”
All of this reminds us that teshuvah is an ongoing task. It’s not a one-shot deal. We may overturn a terrible verdict. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we won’t possibly have new challenges in the future.
Sometimes we can get frustrated with it all, like Jonah.
Jonah, who didn’t know how to take yes for an answer.
Jonah, who couldn’t accept that he had a beneficial role to play in the lives of others – and that he had succeeded in bringing about needed change.
And sometimes, in the face of the enormity of the tasks before us, we get frustrated. We lose sight of the beneficial role we play in the lives of others and in the healing of the world.
Today is Yom Kippur our communal Day of Atonement. Though Yom Kippur comes once a year, teshuvah is a year long process. Indeed, a lifelong process. There will be new challenges in the future even after we muddle through the current ones.
But we are not in it alone – and that is indeed a blessing.
***************
We have spent a lot of time this High Holiday season thinking about the Book of Jonah. We finally get to hear it – in bilingual stereo! – this afternoon when Linda Eason and Kathy Levine come up to the bima as our Ba’alot Maftir for the Yom Kippur afternoon service. I hope you’ll all be able to join us for that at 3:30 p.m. today.
In the meantime, I hope all who are fasting are having a tzom kal (an “easy fast”), and that this day brings all of us chatimah tovah (a “good sealing”) in the Book of Life, at this start of shanah tovah umetukah (a “good and sweet [new] year”).
© Rabbi David Steinberg (September 2021/ Tishri 5782)
[1] Within the next few months a new simpler phone number “988” will become available for this national hotline. See: https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/988-fact-sheet.pdf
[2] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Shade
[3] Jonah 4: 10-11
[4] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Nineveh_(612_BCE)
