Jonah-- Stages of Spiritual Development Teachers

How do you understand Jonah's behavior: Going down into the hold , lying down and sleeping?

• Was it an active choice? (YES-MAYBE SINCE PHYS FLEEING NOT POSS, HE CHOOSES EMOTIONAL OUT)
  • If so, can you imagine his rationale?
  • If not, what caused it?

• Do you sometimes shut down when your life is tumultuous?
  • What do you do when you shut down? Is it something you can control?
  • What helps you emerge and recover from that state?

• • How does "shutting down" compare to self-care?
  • How does shutting down impact your life? And the lives of those around you?
  • How does "self-care" impact your life? And the lives of those around you?

FROM VIEW OF POTENTIAL PARENT:

• • When we talk about fostering and adopting from foster care, do you think people might “shut down”? Why or why not?
  • If so, what might help awaken people to the conversation?
  • Do we emulate the captain and say, “How can you be asleep to thousands of kids in a stormy sea?

• What might it look like for a children in foster care to "shut down" when their lives are tumultuous?
  • Is it something a child can can control?
  • What might help them emerge and recover from that state?

• • • How might the captain and the sailors be a model for helping someone emerge from that state?
      • Getting him to have a grasp on his place in the world—as simple or complex as it might be. Why does it help to say who you are/learn to say who you are?
• If the sailors asked us, “who are you”? What would we say? What’s your word or two?
  • What does that mean? Does that sense of identity empower us to take do things like fostering?
• From kids’ perspectives: What might the sailors’ questions teach us about helping someone calm the rocky seas of their souls?
  • Being able to tell on’e own story is being able to master one’s life.

How might not having or having the language to define yourself, even in great complexity, impact a kid in foster care?

How might Jewish families and communities be able to help kids with complicated identities, who feel they do not have “a place to stand”, to strengthen themselves in that way?

(Embrace and know complexity.)

I leave you with the gift of the poem attached here, by Nathen Garson, son of Second Nurture board member Willie Garson, on the occasion of Nathen’s high school graduation, June, 2018

Willie adopted Nathen at age seven from FC.

I wish you all gmar chatima tovah and a year of health, love, laughter and redemption.

Would someone please read Pirkei De Rabbi Eliezer?

• What elements does Pirkei DeRabbi Eliezer add?
  • Anguish of soul
  • Betwixt death and life (like YK-and you have to stand before God and pray/have intention)
• What do they mean?
• Why might PdRE have added those?
  • What does each suggest? How does it flesh out they story?

• What is “betwixt"?
• Are there times you have felt betwixt-not necessarily b/t life and death, but kin a kind of existential way
• As Jews, we have a long history of not being rooted, of living “on packed suitcases.”
• How did that play out in your family history? In your life?
• How has that affected us as a people?
• How would you describe Yom Kippur as living “betwixt”?
• How might this sense of straddling worlds impact our conversation about fostering and adopting?

• Are Jews better positioned or more obligated to take care of children outside of families because of our history?
• How might we uniquely understand
  • the internal struggle to feel safe?
  • creating identity while living "betwixt"?
• What might our families and communities offer children whose lives are in those in-between spaces?

JONAH STS YK

THought: Look at this from perspective of STS member re fostering and from foster kid—see how they converge…

Go to yourself, to Nineveh…We are all reluctant prophets

There was not even a moment between God’s command and Jonah’s felling from that command.

Are there goals/ideals that come to you, but that you flee from before the thought can even take root in your mind?

Jonah resisted b/c he believed that delivering this prophesy, one way or another, would harm him/his people. If they repented, he would be a false prophet—and that would show up Israel, who were slow to repent.

ADULTS RE FOSTERING/ADOPTING: We understand the holy obligation, but are afraid of how it might hurt us.

We are called to speak to a child who ….. “there is love, you are lovable, you can become your highest self…” but we run the other way b/c we do not believe they will listen or are worthy

Up, call upon your god! Perhaps the god will be kind to us and we will not perish.” (7) The men said to one another, “Let us cast lots and find out on whose account this misfortune has come upon us.” They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah.

.” As I learned in a teaching from Rabbi Alex Weissman, the captain doesn’t make any promises to Jonah. He doesn’t say “have hope, turn to God,” with a surety that things will turn out for the positive. Rather, he says, ulai, maybe. Maybe God will take notice. Maybe we will be saved. But, this giving in to despair, this allowing oneself to be paralyzed, sleeping on the bottom of the boat while the world around you falls apart, this is unacceptable. You’ve got to choose hope. You’ve got to believe in the may

What elements doe Pirkei d Rebbe Eliezer add?

The Czech writer and philosopher Vaclav Havel wrote this of hope: “Either we have hope within us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul; it’s not essentially dependent on the world or estimate of the situation. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart.” 2 Hope is not about an accurate reading of the situation on the ground; it’s not based on the likelihood of a certain outcome. Rather, hope is a state of mind. It is an orientation in which we choose to approach the world. We can choose to be hopeful, to transcend the situation of the world around us. Or, we can give in to despair.

While Jonah may have given in to despair, the people of Nineveh and the sailors on the ship did not. They believed in the possibility of ulai, the power of the maybe.

Weird time to sleep. How do you understand Jonah’s action? Was it a choice? If so, what might explain that choiuce? If not, what caused it? Clearly he has the capacity to make choices—he chose to disobey God!

“because of the anguish of his soul”

“behold, we are standing between death and life”

-death first b/c that is the direction that are moving in…

Sailors/Captain:

Addressing the problem—with kindness: Approached him with urgency but without malice or judgment.

Jonah responds with empathy and willingness to sacrifice.

So love, feel pain, prophesy, KUM BRACH EL ATZM’CHA FLEE TO YOURSELF ! (From JONAH, by Ya’akov Fichman)

Zornberg: “Jonah finds the world unintelligible — the dynamics of reward and punishment are arbitrary. There is a failure of reality to meet Jonah’s sense of emet, of truth, of rational meaning.”

At this point in the Yom Kippur journey, we are all Jonah. The task is too great, too daunting. We want, simply, to have a sip of water, to sit in the shade, to be undisturbed. And yet we know that Yom Kippur is coming to a close, that the gates will soon be shut, and there is some internal yearning within us, some unquenchable desire to achieve what we dream for ourselves, to rise to the challenges put before us.

We read Jonah during the Mincha service because we are Jonah at this point in the day. We have been functioning in the realm of belief that our prayers will lead to certain outcomes; that is, after all, the purpose of Yom Kippur. And yet, deep within us, in the desire to return home to sleep in our beds, there is the doubt, the anger, the knowledge that we can never understand how this world works, and what is the point in trying? We read Jonah to be reminded that this tumultuous, contradictory, difficult space is, in fact, the space of prayer and possibility.

Zornberg writes, “The enigmas that enrage and sadden Jonah are not riddles to be solved. They remain; God invites Jonah to bear them, even to deepen them, and to allow new perceptions to emerge.” unbidden. In a word, to stand and pray.”