Nine days of snow. Each morning, I would brush the snow off my tent by kicking it from the inside, and then crawl out of my -20 degree sleeping bag to greet the freezing, white day. I spent the depths of that winter in Central Oregon, working for a therapeutic wilderness program. In my role as field guide, I lived in the woods for nine-day shifts, supporting teenagers and young adults overcome the challenges of mental illness, trauma, and addiction.
It was the hardest job I ever had. And it was all based in the woods. No electricity, no toilets, no stores. Just the field guides, the students, visits from their therapist, the immense gift and burden of healing, and the beautiful landscape.
I have learned over ten years as an outdoor guide that nature is always honest. I get exactly what I give, and no more. When winter camping, if I do not collect firewood, I will be cold. If I do not change into dry socks, my toes are at risk of frostbite. Living in the woods forced me to reckon with my own vulnerability; it required me to rely on myself and my group members in tremendous ways. This is what makes healing and growth in nature so effective. There is no choice but to face who you are; there is no escape.
Eighty percent of the young adults I worked with struggled with addiction. Each student had their own processes of denial, grief, and growth. In everyone’s journey in the wilderness--there is a “rock bottom.” This phrase is commonly used in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, when people describe their unique journeys with addiction and recovery. Addiction has marked my family and, by extension, my life. The ups and downs of addiction and recovery impact the whole family system.
When reading the book of Jonah today, I think so much of the people I love and the students I was privileged to work with in wilderness therapy--the journeying and work they did in order to heal, in order to commit to a life of recovery. I see Jonah’s actions and think to myself “Wow. Jonah is absolutely ridiculous.” and, at the same time, “Wow. Jonah must be experiencing deep pain.” It is strange on Yom Kippur to read a story about someone who is not heroic. Jonah is an anti-hero; he messes up so much. But we read this story because it is profoundly human; it shows us what prophetic failure looks like. It shows us that the moment in which we believe everything has broken down is actually a new beginning.
The story opens with God’s call to Jonah ק֠וּם לֵ֧ךְ אֶל־נִֽינְוֵ֛ה--get up at go to Nineveh, and declare judgement upon the city. Instead of heeding this call, Vayakom Jonah Livroach--He wakes up to flee. There is no grand “hineni” moment. Jonah goes down to the port and buys a one-way ticket in the opposite direction of the call, shirking his responsibility.
After boarding the ship, things go from bad to worse as the ship is taken over by a storm. Fearing God, the crew on the deck throw their cargo overboard in order to relieve the ship, but it is no use. Where is our prophet, Jonah? The verse tell us:
וְיוֹנָ֗ה יָרַד֙ אֶל־יַרְכְּתֵ֣י הַסְּפִינָ֔ה וַיִּשְׁכַּ֖ב וַיֵּרָדַֽם׃
Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship, where he lay down and fell asleep.
It is Jonah’s second descent. He is blissfully unaware of--or trying to ignore--the strife going on above him. This verse made me think of the many mornings this pandemic when I just wanted to crawl into my blankets and watch Netflix all day, evading my chaos and the chaos of the world. When it is discovered that Jonah has fled God’s call, the crew members and captain cry out, saying “Why do you slumber? Call upon your God!” Everyone is impacted by addiction; even when the person suffering is sleeping in the belly of the ship, their crew of loved ones remain on the ship's deck, panicked and worried about the storm that surrounds them and their loved one. We want to shake the person in pain, wake them up, intervene, make it better. The first step in the 12 step process of addiction recovery is admitting powerlessness. We cannot make the storm better, only Jonah can. Ultimately, Jonah is heaved overboard by the crew, and the storm stops raging.
This story so far is a downward spiral; Jonah goes down to the port, down into the belly of the ship, and then is thrown down into the sea. The message is clear: Jonah is going in the wrong direction. His three-fold descent is not merely physical, his flight not just from Nineveh or from God; he is fleeing from himself. Like Jonah, addicts depend on something external which helps them flee from themselves. But at some point, there is nowhere left to go. We imagine Jonah’s body in the raging sea, the ship sailing past him into clearer skies. Nature is always honest.
But the story does not end there. God meets Jonah at the brink and sends a dag gadol--a big fish to swallow Jonah. The first time we hear of the fish, it is called “dag.” But in the verse following, is called “dagah,” the feminine ending suggesting a female fish. Our commentator Rashi weighs in:
It was a male, and Jonah could stand with plenty of room, so that he did not think to pray. The Holy One hinted to the fish, and it spewed him out into the mouth of a female fish, which was full of embryos, and it was crowded there, and he prayed there, as it is said: “from the belly of the fish, mi'me'ei hadagah.”
The context of wilderness therapy felt like the belly of this female fish, filled to the brim with the potential for new life. It was a sacred and entirely closed container of rehabilitation and safety, and also of intense vulnerability. The belly of the fish--the rock bottom--becomes a space of rebirth and renewal.
Indeed, Jonah realizes three days and three nights into his stay inside the fish's belly that he must pray to God--this is the second step in the 12-step process. Jonah came to believe that a Power greater than himself could restore him.
In Jonah’s prayer, he recounts his almost-drowning, saying תְּה֖וֹם יְסֹבְבֵ֑נִי--“the great deep engulfed me.” The great deep, the tehom. We see this word tehom in the second verse in our Torah, when all was chaos, God faces the deep dark tehom, just before creating light. Feminist theologian Catherine Keller challenges the concept of creatio ex nihilo--that the world was created from nothing--and inserts a divine feminine partner, represented by tehom. She believes that tehomic theology is one of potential and regeneration. Both the deep ocean and the belly of the fish are a metaphor for Jonah in a womb, from which he must emerge as a person and a prophet who does not flee from his calling...from himself. The rock bottom---the deep--is a beginning, not an end.
Immediately after Jonah offers this prayer to God, the big fish is commanded to spit Jonah on to dry land. He immediately gets up and completes the mission God gave him. This is the third step; Jonah made a decision to turn his will and life to the care of God as he understood God to be. So many times in wilderness therapy, a student’s worst week--marked by days of tears and threats of running away--were followed by their best, a renewed commitment to the work they had tried incredibly hard to avoid. But nature is always honest; you can only get out what you put in.
In living with, working with, and loving addicts in my own family, I have learned that there is more than one rock bottom. Perhaps Jonah’s rock bottom was being engulfed by the sea, perhaps being in the belly of the male fish, or the female fish. Even after committing to a life of sobriety, the journey of recovery is tough. It requires daily tending; the threat of relapse always looms. Jonah is re-birthed out of the belly of the whale but stumbles again; the entire book of Jonah is nonlinear and chaotic, with fits and starts, a rhythm those journeying towards recovery know well.
The rock bottom, and whatever follows it, are a time and process that require great compassion. Stigma creates an attitude of suspicion and fear toward addicts at the moments support is most needed. For Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender and Queer siblings and community in recovery, this is a two-fold experience of oppression.
In Hebrew, the word for “womb” is rechem. The root, Reish-Het-Mem, is the same as the word for rachamim, Mercy or Compassion. We’ve seen Jonah in the womb of the sea, the womb of this fish, these deep dark places from which he had to emerge, in which he had to find compassion for himself and ask for compassion from God. Nowhere else is this word stronger in our liturgy than during Yom Kippur. We bang on our chests and sing and cry out to God; have mercy on us! We ask God to bring love to our suffering, to see our failure, our individual and collective wrongdoings. We lean into them, enter a low point--hungry, tired, pleading. But we move through something, and on the other side we chant and dance and feast, grateful to be inscribed in the book of life. This journey is everywhere in our Torah and our world. May we merit the strength to bring love to our own suffering, the suffering of those we love, and the suffering of those we will never know. Gmar Hatimah Tovah.