On Yom Kippur we read the Book of Jonah, a text that is simultaneously incredibly simple and incredibly complex. Perhaps that is why Jonah and Yom Kippur fit so well together.
We know the simple story of Jonah, if from nowhere other than the Broadway hit song, ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh, but Jonah goes to Tarshish instead. He is swallowed by a big fish (not a whale) and ends up in Nineveh.
It’s a simple story that we teach our children. Simplistic Moral: Do What God Wants You To Do.
The problem with the Book of Jonah is that there is a substantial list of perplexing questions that jump out at us throughout the story:
What is the point of the gourd at the end?
Why does the book end by mentioning cattle?
Why are the most righteous people not Israelites?
Isn’t going to Tarshish going to Nineveh?
Why is the big fish masculine in one part of the story and feminine in another?
And more.
However, while the answers to these are worthy of exploring at perhaps another time, for me the most perplexing question of all is why Jonah runs in the first place. Certainly, as a prophet Jonah knows that he cannot go where God is not. Why would Jonah do what he did at all – such an utterly futile act?
The answer, I would suggest, is found in Newton’s Third Law. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. However, we need to understand what the action is and what the reaction is, and whose action and reaction these are.
The answer comes after Nineveh is saved, when Jonah vents his frustration towards God. Jonah almost shouts at God that he knew from the very beginning that God would not destroy the city. “You are a merciful and compassionate God – I knew you could not do it. All Nineveh had to do was say ‘Sorry’”.
The saving of Nineveh by God was the action. Jonah’s anger was the reaction, anger over what he perceived as the lack of justice (retribution) on God’s part. What we might see as compassion, Jonah sees as a lack of justice.
Jonah is angry with God–so angry that he does not even want to talk to God. God tells him to go to Nineveh, but because he is angry, Jonah instead goes to Tarshish. God produces the storm, and Jonah ignores the storm by sleeping in the bottom of the boat. Jonah ends up inside the fish and says nothing to God for three days. Finally, Jonah confronts God. He demands of God an accounting for God’s lack of justice.
And so we come to the reason Jonah and Yom Kippur fit so well together. We want God to show compassion toward us, for our loved ones and for our community and to forgive us for our missteps, just as God showed compassion toward Nineveh. But when it comes to those who might harm us, we become like Jonah, demanding justice, expecting God to treat them more harshly than we were treated.
Compassion for us? Justice for them?
Maybe that’s not how it works.
B’Shalom
Rabbi Stanley Halpern