Jonah and Erica and the Whale

by Jennie Rose Halperin

On Rosh HaShanah this is written; on Yom Kippur this is sealed; how many will pass from this world; how many will be born into it; who will live and who will die; who will reach the ripeness of age, who will be taken before their time… who by earthquake and who by plague; who will be tranquil and who will be troubled. But through return to the right path [teshuva], through prayer [tefilah] and righteous giving [tzedakah], we can transcend the harshness of the decree.

Unetaneh Tokef, stanza 4, Mishkan HaNefesh)

At the concluding service on Yom Kippur, Erica and I read the story of Jonah in front of the congregation, a tradition we started shortly after our bat mitzvahs and continued through high school. By the end of the day at our Reform synagogue, the number of people had usually dwindled, and the Haftorah portion was the only thing standing between the community and break-the-fast kugel. The only person still listening was Sol, an elderly religious man who went to every service and sat in the front row.

Erica and I were childhood best friends who had drifted apart as teenagers, but we still felt close, and the holiday gave us an excuse to hang out. After the service, we would take a plate of food to our former Hebrew school classroom where we’d learned the story of Jonah, though neither of us remembered learning anything in Hebrew school at all.

In the portion, God tells the Prophet Jonah to warn the people of Nineveh to repent of their “evil ways” to avoid destruction. But Jonah knows that God would never be so merciless and also hates the Ninevites for some reason, so instead, he sets sail for Tarshish with some friendly sailors. God promptly attacks the ship with a storm in order to force Jonah complete his divine mission; the sailors cast lots and figure out that Jonah is to blame for the storm, which he admits; reluctantly, the sailors throw him overboard. 

Jonah is famously swallowed by a big fish (whale) and is stuck in its belly for three days and three nights. Within the whale, Jonah faces death. He experiences hell on earth, reporting that “the bars of the earth closed on me forever.” But then, through the eyes of the fish, he sees visions of the Holy Temple, and he receives God’s light like “two glass windows” (in the telling of Rashi).

Based on these visions, and at the end of his rope, Jonah himself repents of his earlier disobedience, begs for death, and is vomited (“spewed”) out. 

God’s voice commands him yet again, and this time Jonah returns to Nineveh, where he succeeds in turning the people from their evil ways without much trouble. He preaches the need for repentance, and they fast and wear sackcloth, even putting sackcloth on the cattle. Jonah leaves Nineveh, an “enormously large city,” after his speeches and walks east. But he quickly becomes distraught; saving the Ninevites was too easy! It was not worth the brush with death, so he asks God to die yet again. God responds by making a plant grow over Jonah’s head for shade and comfort, and then quickly destroys the plant with a worm. Jonah, still tortured, sits in the hot sun and becomes faint, begging to die once more.

God reminds Jonah that he cared about the shade plant, which he had not worked to cultivate, and which grew and died overnight. Should God not likewise care about Nineveh, filled with more than “a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many animals as well!” 

Even taken solely as a narrative of faith and redemption (teshuvah), I find the story of Jonah deeply strange and unsettling, the central character selfish, the story brutal and surreal. It’s unclear whether Jonah finally decides to do as God asks because of his conscience, or just because he is just tired of being tortured—preaching repentance is a relatively easy task, after all, in comparison with being trapped in a giant fish. And Jonah says repeatedly that he does not actually want to save the people of Nineveh; he is coerced into repentance, and angry when the city is saved. He trusts in God enough to deny his divine mission, but he also fully believes he will die inside the fish, which means the people of Nineveh will die as well.