Post by Rabbi Neil on Oct 4, 2022 14:56:01 GMT
“The word of the Eternal God came to Jonah son of Amittai [saying] “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before Me.” But Jonah ran away from the Eternal God and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Eternal God.” [Jonah 1:1-3]
Why do we read the story of Jonah on Yom Kippur? The most common reason that is given is that it is a story of atonement, that if even the wretched city of Nineveh can atone, then so can we. Atonement is always possible and God will forgive. That’s an important message for Yom Kippur. But that message connects us to the people of Nineveh, and I’m not convinced that’s the purpose of the book. If it were, much more time would be spent in Nineveh. I think we’re meant to connect with Jonah and compare ourselves to him.
Jonah is, after all, the unwitting prophet. Even though he runs from the Divine call, whoever he interacts with ends up believing in God. Near the end of chapter one, once they have thrown Jonah into the sea and the storm immediately calms, the sailors “greatly feared the Eternal God and they offered sacrifices to the Eternal God and made vows to God.” [Jonah 1:16] In chapter 3, he ducks into the city of Nineveh, not even going into the center of the city where the institutions of power were to be found, he shouts five words and despite his lack of effort, the people all believe God. [Jonah 3:4-5] Jonah is the most successful of all Biblical prophets – all the people he encounters end up believing in God.
He's the most successful prophet and yet he’s the least religiously observant person in the whole book! In chapter one, all the sailors cry out to their gods, but during that time of real devotion, Jonah instead sleeps. [Jonah 1:5] His prophecy in Nineveh is offensively short. And he gets angry when the people of Nineveh repent because he knew they would – “Isn’t this what I said, Eternal God when I was still at home?” he complains. [Jonah 4:5] He’s had to schlep all this way, hardly done anything and the people have still repented, so he complains to God that it’s essentially been a total waste of his time.
We don’t like comparing ourselves to Jonah for one simple, obvious reason – we’re not prophets. We don’t hear God speaking to us. Moreover, it’s easier to mentally associate ourselves with the people of Nineveh because they don’t hear God and because they come to recognize that they’re all sinners, which is a message that is repeatedly directed at us in our own liturgy at this time. We associate with them, the sinners in the story despite the fact that Jonah clearly errs too – he goes against the word of God, he gets unjustifiably angry, he only thinks about himself and not the people who need his help. I think we are embarrassed by the idea that God calls to us. I feel like we subconsciously hold by the maxim that “If you talk to God you are praying, but if God talks to you, seek professional help.” [The original quotation, by Thomas Szasz, is “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.” I chose not to quote it in this way.]
There is an essential difference, though, between God talking to us and God calling us. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes [Abraham Joshua Heschel, To be a Jew: What is it?, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p.11] that “Israel did not discover God. Israel was discovered by God. Judaism is God’s quest for man. The Bible is a record of God’s approach to His people. More statements are found in the Bible about God’s love for Israel than about Israel’s love for God. We have not chosen God; He has chosen us. There is no concept of a chosen God but there is the idea of a chosen people.” Heschel is very clear that a chosen people is not better than any other people, but it means that God calls to us. “Religion consists of God’s question and our answer,” writes Heschel. [Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, p.137] “The way to faith is the way of faith…. Unless God asks the question, all our inquiries are in vain.” Existence for Heschel means being called. Not called by a booming male voice in the sky… that’s not even what the book of Jonah says happens! But we are called as a people, it’s just that we don’t want to hear the call because, just like Jonah, we’re way too comfortable in our lives to want to be inconvenienced by a sacred task. “This is the decision which we have to make:” writes Heschel elsewhere, “whether our life is to be a pursuit of pleasure or an engagement for service. The world cannot remain a vacuum. Unless we make it an altar to God, it is invaded by demons. This is no time for neutrality. We Jews cannot remain aloof or indifferent. We, too, are either ministers of the sacred of slaves of evil.” [Abraham Joshua Heschel, No Time for Neutrality, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p.75] We are now richer than any of our ancestors, we live longer, travel further, have access to incomprehensible technology, which is why we wallow in generationally-earned indulgences. We have become more aware of more suffering around the world than ever before, and our response is to change our Facebook profile picture, because, like Jonah, we run from the call. It is inconvenient to our lives of luxury. Our ancestors endured the most terrible hardships, though, so aren’t we entitled to enjoy the kind of life they could only dream of? That response is essentially identical to that of Jonah – we hear the call but we’re too comfortable to want to respond positively. And, to be clear, it is not a call to an individual but to a people, the Jewish people. In the past, we responded positively “na’aseh v’nishma, we will do and we will hear” [Exodus 24:7] but now we hardly respond at all because we’re so busy atoning for our own personal sins that we haven’t even worked out how we might communally hear the divine call. Heschel writes [Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, p.78] that “most vividly the Jews feel that the world is not yet redeemed, that the present order of things is appalling. There is no anxiety in Judaism about personal salvation. What matters is universal salvation. The task is important, not who does it.” That, I feel, is an essential difficulty with the High Holy Day liturgy – we pray in the plural form but we try to repair the mistakes that we made personally. But there was much anxiety in Rabbinic literature about personal salvation. Heschel is thinking Biblically, but the Rabbis, who framed the liturgy that we pray at this time, also very strongly thought about personal salvation.
We live in between two points in universal time – revelation and redemption. In Judaism, we are always moving toward redemption. But the remarkable thing about Jewish time is that if we don’t move deliberately toward redemption, it moves further away. The temptation is always to stay where we are, like the story of Rab Zusya reading the same page of Talmud again and again that I told on Rosh Hashanah morning. If our Judaism is to mean anything, it has to motivate us to respond to the call from God to humanity that has been repeated daily ever since the Garden of Eden – “ayeka, where are you?” [Genesis 3:9] We will do and we will hear. We are a people of action, not of reflective philosophy or, at least, our philosophy has to lead to action. Jonah’s didn’t – his led him away from action. God calls to us, but not with words. Not with a voice in one person’s head but with a compelling commitment of our entire people. A covenant was made not just with those standing at Sinai but also with us. [Deuteronomy 29:13-14] We have no choice but to act – the world needs it and that’s literally what it means to be a Jew… to be called upon. The world needs our active Judaism, our transformative Judaism. It needs us to hear the call and to answer it. The Hebrew teshuvah means repentance but it also means answer. There is a call, there has always been a call, the question is how do we answer? Not answering is an answer, and it’s not a good one. We are called upon to act. We are called upon to hasten the redemption of the world even if it leads to our own personal discomfort, because that call is communal and our response must be communal.
Teshuvah is by definition predicated in the past because it’s a response to something that happened in the past. If teshuvah is fixing the problems of the past, of perhaps covering over the effects of problematic behavior of the past, then it’s not really setting a vision of the future other than “not that.” It would be like a community engaging in a strategic planning process saying, “We commit that the future will not be like the past.” That’s really not much of a plan. How are we meant to move toward redemption when we’re just rectifying the mistakes of the past without any concrete plan on how to move forward? That’s another underlying problem, I feel, with the philosophy and theology of the High Holy Days – that it seeks to repair that which was broken in the past but doesn’t set a direction for future action.
Answering the Divine call necessitates recognizing that we are being called and then forming an answer to that call. Teshuvah must be predicated both in the past and in the future. If God calls to us today, how do we answer? With new, creative rituals? With new prayers? How are those going to be expressed and used? Do we answer God’s call with a particular focus on social justice or on education and, if so, how? How do we determine communally what God’s call is to us? Is it in committee? In prayer? In dialogue? Or do the clergy just tell the community what God says and the Board creates the response?!? If our lives are to be dedicated to service, which I profoundly believe is the quintessential Jewish position on the role of human beings, then does a Temple simply provide a multiplicity of ways to serve and encourage its members to choose what is appropriate for them? Perhaps that is, indeed, the role of a community such as ours, and this year that is probably what we should be working towards.
During this High Holy Day season, we need to do more than ask questions of ourselves. We need to also train ourselves as individuals and as a community to hear the eternal question that is asked at all times of all of us. We need to not be like Jonah who ignores the call, preferring a life of comfort. We need our teshuvah to consider the future. So, this year may our teshuvah look forward as well as backward. May we hear the call and answer it appropriately. May answering that call hasten redemption for all, and let us say, Amen.
Why do we read the story of Jonah on Yom Kippur? The most common reason that is given is that it is a story of atonement, that if even the wretched city of Nineveh can atone, then so can we. Atonement is always possible and God will forgive. That’s an important message for Yom Kippur. But that message connects us to the people of Nineveh, and I’m not convinced that’s the purpose of the book. If it were, much more time would be spent in Nineveh. I think we’re meant to connect with Jonah and compare ourselves to him.
Jonah is, after all, the unwitting prophet. Even though he runs from the Divine call, whoever he interacts with ends up believing in God. Near the end of chapter one, once they have thrown Jonah into the sea and the storm immediately calms, the sailors “greatly feared the Eternal God and they offered sacrifices to the Eternal God and made vows to God.” [Jonah 1:16] In chapter 3, he ducks into the city of Nineveh, not even going into the center of the city where the institutions of power were to be found, he shouts five words and despite his lack of effort, the people all believe God. [Jonah 3:4-5] Jonah is the most successful of all Biblical prophets – all the people he encounters end up believing in God.
He's the most successful prophet and yet he’s the least religiously observant person in the whole book! In chapter one, all the sailors cry out to their gods, but during that time of real devotion, Jonah instead sleeps. [Jonah 1:5] His prophecy in Nineveh is offensively short. And he gets angry when the people of Nineveh repent because he knew they would – “Isn’t this what I said, Eternal God when I was still at home?” he complains. [Jonah 4:5] He’s had to schlep all this way, hardly done anything and the people have still repented, so he complains to God that it’s essentially been a total waste of his time.
We don’t like comparing ourselves to Jonah for one simple, obvious reason – we’re not prophets. We don’t hear God speaking to us. Moreover, it’s easier to mentally associate ourselves with the people of Nineveh because they don’t hear God and because they come to recognize that they’re all sinners, which is a message that is repeatedly directed at us in our own liturgy at this time. We associate with them, the sinners in the story despite the fact that Jonah clearly errs too – he goes against the word of God, he gets unjustifiably angry, he only thinks about himself and not the people who need his help. I think we are embarrassed by the idea that God calls to us. I feel like we subconsciously hold by the maxim that “If you talk to God you are praying, but if God talks to you, seek professional help.” [The original quotation, by Thomas Szasz, is “If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia.” I chose not to quote it in this way.]
There is an essential difference, though, between God talking to us and God calling us. Abraham Joshua Heschel writes [Abraham Joshua Heschel, To be a Jew: What is it?, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p.11] that “Israel did not discover God. Israel was discovered by God. Judaism is God’s quest for man. The Bible is a record of God’s approach to His people. More statements are found in the Bible about God’s love for Israel than about Israel’s love for God. We have not chosen God; He has chosen us. There is no concept of a chosen God but there is the idea of a chosen people.” Heschel is very clear that a chosen people is not better than any other people, but it means that God calls to us. “Religion consists of God’s question and our answer,” writes Heschel. [Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, p.137] “The way to faith is the way of faith…. Unless God asks the question, all our inquiries are in vain.” Existence for Heschel means being called. Not called by a booming male voice in the sky… that’s not even what the book of Jonah says happens! But we are called as a people, it’s just that we don’t want to hear the call because, just like Jonah, we’re way too comfortable in our lives to want to be inconvenienced by a sacred task. “This is the decision which we have to make:” writes Heschel elsewhere, “whether our life is to be a pursuit of pleasure or an engagement for service. The world cannot remain a vacuum. Unless we make it an altar to God, it is invaded by demons. This is no time for neutrality. We Jews cannot remain aloof or indifferent. We, too, are either ministers of the sacred of slaves of evil.” [Abraham Joshua Heschel, No Time for Neutrality, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, p.75] We are now richer than any of our ancestors, we live longer, travel further, have access to incomprehensible technology, which is why we wallow in generationally-earned indulgences. We have become more aware of more suffering around the world than ever before, and our response is to change our Facebook profile picture, because, like Jonah, we run from the call. It is inconvenient to our lives of luxury. Our ancestors endured the most terrible hardships, though, so aren’t we entitled to enjoy the kind of life they could only dream of? That response is essentially identical to that of Jonah – we hear the call but we’re too comfortable to want to respond positively. And, to be clear, it is not a call to an individual but to a people, the Jewish people. In the past, we responded positively “na’aseh v’nishma, we will do and we will hear” [Exodus 24:7] but now we hardly respond at all because we’re so busy atoning for our own personal sins that we haven’t even worked out how we might communally hear the divine call. Heschel writes [Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man, p.78] that “most vividly the Jews feel that the world is not yet redeemed, that the present order of things is appalling. There is no anxiety in Judaism about personal salvation. What matters is universal salvation. The task is important, not who does it.” That, I feel, is an essential difficulty with the High Holy Day liturgy – we pray in the plural form but we try to repair the mistakes that we made personally. But there was much anxiety in Rabbinic literature about personal salvation. Heschel is thinking Biblically, but the Rabbis, who framed the liturgy that we pray at this time, also very strongly thought about personal salvation.
We live in between two points in universal time – revelation and redemption. In Judaism, we are always moving toward redemption. But the remarkable thing about Jewish time is that if we don’t move deliberately toward redemption, it moves further away. The temptation is always to stay where we are, like the story of Rab Zusya reading the same page of Talmud again and again that I told on Rosh Hashanah morning. If our Judaism is to mean anything, it has to motivate us to respond to the call from God to humanity that has been repeated daily ever since the Garden of Eden – “ayeka, where are you?” [Genesis 3:9] We will do and we will hear. We are a people of action, not of reflective philosophy or, at least, our philosophy has to lead to action. Jonah’s didn’t – his led him away from action. God calls to us, but not with words. Not with a voice in one person’s head but with a compelling commitment of our entire people. A covenant was made not just with those standing at Sinai but also with us. [Deuteronomy 29:13-14] We have no choice but to act – the world needs it and that’s literally what it means to be a Jew… to be called upon. The world needs our active Judaism, our transformative Judaism. It needs us to hear the call and to answer it. The Hebrew teshuvah means repentance but it also means answer. There is a call, there has always been a call, the question is how do we answer? Not answering is an answer, and it’s not a good one. We are called upon to act. We are called upon to hasten the redemption of the world even if it leads to our own personal discomfort, because that call is communal and our response must be communal.
Teshuvah is by definition predicated in the past because it’s a response to something that happened in the past. If teshuvah is fixing the problems of the past, of perhaps covering over the effects of problematic behavior of the past, then it’s not really setting a vision of the future other than “not that.” It would be like a community engaging in a strategic planning process saying, “We commit that the future will not be like the past.” That’s really not much of a plan. How are we meant to move toward redemption when we’re just rectifying the mistakes of the past without any concrete plan on how to move forward? That’s another underlying problem, I feel, with the philosophy and theology of the High Holy Days – that it seeks to repair that which was broken in the past but doesn’t set a direction for future action.
Answering the Divine call necessitates recognizing that we are being called and then forming an answer to that call. Teshuvah must be predicated both in the past and in the future. If God calls to us today, how do we answer? With new, creative rituals? With new prayers? How are those going to be expressed and used? Do we answer God’s call with a particular focus on social justice or on education and, if so, how? How do we determine communally what God’s call is to us? Is it in committee? In prayer? In dialogue? Or do the clergy just tell the community what God says and the Board creates the response?!? If our lives are to be dedicated to service, which I profoundly believe is the quintessential Jewish position on the role of human beings, then does a Temple simply provide a multiplicity of ways to serve and encourage its members to choose what is appropriate for them? Perhaps that is, indeed, the role of a community such as ours, and this year that is probably what we should be working towards.
During this High Holy Day season, we need to do more than ask questions of ourselves. We need to also train ourselves as individuals and as a community to hear the eternal question that is asked at all times of all of us. We need to not be like Jonah who ignores the call, preferring a life of comfort. We need our teshuvah to consider the future. So, this year may our teshuvah look forward as well as backward. May we hear the call and answer it appropriately. May answering that call hasten redemption for all, and let us say, Amen.