Jonah is unique in that we read of his prophetic journey - ups and downs, and the short book that’s named for him is unique among all minor prophets - it ends with a big question, a haunting interrupted dialogue between a man and God that echoes in our world right now:
Can love be bigger than justice?
And also: Can Jonah learn how to love?
The poet Zelda, living in Jerusalem, a religious woman famous for her precise pokes at religious imagery, imagining a rich mythology where past and present fuse wrote this poem about Jonah - the prophet who discovered mercy while the world drowns in isolation and despair:
“I wonder about the two men in the spaceship
Who did not see, on the face
of the glassy wasteland
Of the moon
The shadow of the prophet Jonah
Only a heart that abandoned the world
Is so happy for the companionship of the gourd-plant
Only a heart dwelling in the wasteland
Is content with such ways
With the mute affection of the leaves
And he asks to die
When the plants die
Though they were not sown by him
Jonah the prophet whose path to God
Is full of escapes
Inside the raging waters
Will ask for mercy on you
And on me
And on all those who are drowning.”
What is it about Jonah that so engages our poetic imagination even as empires such as ours drown?
The fourth and final chapter leaves these questions open and adds the biggest question yet -- can forgiveness overcome our hurts, can love be learned -- a bigger force than the yearning for truth and justice?
Jonah, apparently with no credit or fanfare, leaves the city that repented thanks to his courage and sets camp in the wilderness, distraught.
He wants to die and speaks to God with bitterness - why live if these evil people can say sorry - and escape their punishment? Is there no justice in this world?
A gourd-plant rises overnight above his head to give him shelter, then it dies as fast. The prophet is now mad and sad and with no shelter. And now he really really wants to die.
Then comes the final chat with the divine:
וַיֹּ֣אמֶר יְהֹוָ֔ה אַתָּ֥ה חַ֙סְתָּ֙ עַל־הַקִּ֣יקָי֔וֹן אֲשֶׁ֛ר לֹא־עָמַ֥לְתָּ בּ֖וֹ וְלֹ֣א גִדַּלְתּ֑וֹ שֶׁבִּן־לַ֥יְלָה הָיָ֖ה וּבִן־לַ֥יְלָה אָבָֽד׃ וַֽאֲנִי֙ לֹ֣א אָח֔וּס עַל־נִינְוֵ֖ה הָעִ֣יר הַגְּדוֹלָ֑ה אֲשֶׁ֣ר יֶשׁ־בָּ֡הּ הַרְבֵּה֩ מִֽשְׁתֵּים־עֶשְׂרֵ֨ה רִבּ֜וֹ אָדָ֗ם אֲשֶׁ֤ר לֹֽא־יָדַע֙ בֵּין־יְמִינ֣וֹ לִשְׂמֹאל֔וֹ וּבְהֵמָ֖ה רַבָּֽה׃
Then YHWH said: “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 animals as well!”
Jonah 4:10-11
This is how the story ends. YHWH talks of care - and what it is about is love. And yet, this dialogue is cut, mid conversation.
What are we to make of it?
Erich Fromm, like Zelda and many others, was fascinated by Jonah and what his story represents for our psycho-social life. His main takeaway is that Jonah’s tragedy was that he was not able to love.
That’s why he fled the call to save Nineveh in the first place. When he is in the big fish belly it’s
“the state of isolation and imprisonment that his lack of love and solidarity has brought on him.”
What angers Jonah in today’s chapter is that YHWH loves the evil empire and is willing to forgive those who truly change their ways.
Jonah’s full name is Jonah Ben Amitai -- and some suggest that his full name means he is the son of truth - Amitai from Emet. He wants the world to work like truth, and clockwork but what when it’s more complicated, and more messy than that? When love even overcomes what would be the truth of justice? Nineveh is spared - and Jonah’s truth is shattered - precisely because he just lacks the art of loving, the capacity to lean into love.
From Fromm’s perspective, the final words of the book are a how-to-love lesson:
“that the essence of love is to labor for something, and to make something grow; that love and labor are inseparable. One loves that for which one labors and one labors for that which one loves.”
It’s interesting that whoever wrote or edited the Book of Jonah does not give the prophet the final word. What may he reply to God? Some sages imagined him on his knees in supplication, grateful for the love-lesson. Some suggest that he then went on to Samaria to preach to his own people - with rage, truth - and perhaps with deeper love?
If the main message of this book is that people can repent and change their fate - it is the prophet himself who has to go through drastic transformation. In this case - to learn how to love.
We are invited to imagine how the story ends - what Jonah says and what he does next. And as we eavesdrop on this prophet’s conversation, we are challenged and invited to engage in transformation too. What will it take for us to learn to love, beyond the known, beneath the hurt, and embrace love as the lost art of our survival?
We bid farewell to Jonah - see you on Yom Kippur -- and we prepare to meet Micah, the man of Morasha, another prophet with a purpose and a cause.
Image: Jacob Steinhardt: Jonah and the Castor Oil Plant
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