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Nancy Halevi

Jonah – A Man of His Time… And Ours

I read a synopsis of the meaning of Yom Kippur and it really spoke to me.

It said, “On Yom Kippur, when we stare our wrongdoings in the face, guilt and shame can overwhelm and push us into an emotional pit where we feel like there is no way out. We must recognize, however, the Jewish approach to reflecting on wrongdoings is not to despair. We try to hold onto hope and persevere, recognizing the only way forward is to keep moving. In life, we dip or sway and even move backward at times, but as long as we are moving somewhere, we are on a path toward growth”. (www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jonah-yom-kippur/)

The story of Jonah is a great reminder of this. In this story, God tells Jonah to travel to Nineveh, a city of moral depravity (described in the Torah as a city that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand) and to warn them of their impending doom as a result. Jonah’s initial response to God’s call is to catch the first boat out in an attempt to run and hide.

Like Jonah, God (or perhaps our conscience if you prefer) calls out to us and sometimes our first instinct is to not listen, look the other way, rationalize our choices, or like Jonah, run away. Ultimately however, we, like Jonah, must answer the call for when we do not we risk both the potential negative impact it will have on society as a whole and as significantly, the negative impact it will have on the well-being and growth of our own soul.

The types of calls we hear vary over time and vary from person to person. Sometimes it may be a call to forgive—which is not always easy, sometimes a call to back down and manage anger—also not always easy, and other times it may be a call to action of another sort.

It is interesting that Jonah is considered a “minor” prophet. If that is so, why did the Rabbis choose him as the reading on the holiest day of the Jewish year? Maybe it is because we all, like Jonah, sometimes miss our mark on the first call. It is a reminder that as human beings answering the call is not always easy and sometimes it takes a few calls to get us going.

Perhaps it is also a reminder that there is not one among us who is “minor,” unimportant, or inconsequential. We may sometimes think that our choices are not as impactful as those who have greater stature in society. But Jonah shows us otherwise. Jonah, the humble son of Amitai (or “truth” in Hebrew), tells us that in fact we are all children of truth, required to sometimes speak “truth to power” even when we are initially reluctant to do so.

We live in a time in history when this feels truer than ever. Like Nineveh, our societies seemed to have turned a blind eye to truth and act rather in utter opposition to the divine will of goodness. We are living in Alice in Wonderland’s surreal view through the looking glass where left is right, good is bad and up is down—a time when once again, we cannot discern our right hand from our left hand. A time when victims are called perpetrators and violent, villainous perpetrators are given a free pass and are even encouraged and called heroic.

We live in a time when Israel is cast as a colonizer—negating thousands of years of Jewish history– and those, on October 7th 2023, who heartlessly killed the elderly and children and raped women before murdering them are boldly deemed “resisters” of evil. We live in a time when international courts and organizations castigate and indict Israel, the only true democracy in the Middle East, and appoint terrorist regimes to sit on human rights committees, a time when Zionist speakers are denied the chance to speak at universities (because their message is deemed too offensive and they are shouted down by their foes) and yet these same anti-Israel foes can call for the actual murder of Zionists on campus and close down schools through their aggressive protests, and yet escape consequences of any kind—and all in the name of free speech. You could go crazy trying to decipher any logic to the current scenarios that play out daily before us.

The inversion of the moral clarity of our time echoes that of Nineveh in Jonah’s time and could not be clearer. Thus, we live in a time when the call to be the modern day “Jonah” has rarely felt more profound or required. And, as in days past, being the “Jonah” requires a tremendous amount of courage. For to speak out against injustice, misappraisals, obfuscations and outright lies is to risk being castigated, and in modern parlance it is to risk being cancelled completely.

To heed the shofar’s call to do right requires having the courage to acknowledge that remaining silent is akin to running away. Attempting to sit out the current chaos by “taking to the high seas” as Jonah did, or sitting in the belly of a whale, is akin to sinking into denial of what we are being called to do.

It is a denial of what it means to answer the shofar’s call. It is a denial of the Yom Kippur commandment to return and atone. It is a denial of what it means to be a Jew.

And just as significantly, it is to sink into the shame and despair we naturally feel when we do not rise to the best version of ourselves that our tradition requires and that we ourselves know to be essential.

May the sound of the shofar this year pierce our callous, fearful and benumbed hearts and souls and awaken within us the pride, courage and tenacity required to answer the call of the ages to stand for our people and our God.

May the sound of Jonah’s divinely ordained plea to Nineveh singularly and reverently reverberate within us, as we stand today, humble in the ways in which we have fallen short, but resolved to answer the call that our times and our faith demand.

Let us stand united and committed to heed the call, to speak the hard truths of our time with moral clarity and conviction so that goodness can prevail and peace ensue.

About the Author
Nancy Halevi is a clinical psychologist living in Hawaii.
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