The Book of Jonah

TRANSLITERATION
Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu laasok b’divrei Torah.
TRANSLATION
Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of all, who hallows us with mitzvot, commanding us to engage with words of Torah.

Jonah he lived in a whale...he made his home in that fishe's abdomen...but it ain't necessarily so! - The Gershwin's

Cape Cod Times, 6/11/2021 by Doug Fraser
PROVINCETOWN — At a little before 8 a.m. Friday, veteran lobster diver Michael Packard entered the water for his second dive of the day.
His vessel, the “Ja’n J,” was off Herring Cove Beach and surrounded by a fleet of boats catching striped bass. The water temperature was a balmy 60 degrees and the visibility about 20 feet.
Licensed commercial lobster divers literally pluck lobsters off the sandy bottom, and as Packard, 56, dove down Friday morning, he saw schools of sand lances and stripers swimming by.
The ocean food chain was in full evidence, but about 10 feet from the bottom Packard suddenly knew what it truly felt like to be part of that chain.
In something truly biblical, Packard was swallowed whole by a humpback whale.
“All of a sudden, I felt this huge shove and the next thing I knew it was completely black,” Packard recalled Friday afternoon following his release from Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis.
“I could sense I was moving, and I could feel the whale squeezing with the muscles in his mouth,” he said.
Initially, Packard thought he was inside a great white shark, but he couldn’t feel any teeth and he hadn’t suffered any obvious wounds. It quickly dawned on him that he had been swallowed by a whale.
“I was completely inside; it was completely black,” Packard said. “I thought to myself, ‘there’s no way I’m getting out of here. I’m done, I’m dead.’ All I could think of was my boys — they’re 12 and 15 years old.”...

The question is: Why was this story chosen to be read on the holiest day of the year, and at its most sublime time, just before the Neila prayer in the closing hours of Yom Kippur?
The mystics explain that the story of Jonah must also be understood as a profound allegory. It is the story of our journey through life, and our essential purpose and mission in the world, and this is the ultimate theme of Yom Kippur.
The name Jonah means dove. The Talmud teaches that the Jewish people are called doves (Song of Songs 5:2), for a dove is eternally faithful to its mate. Thus we are all Jonahs sent into this world on a mission to transform this Nineveh of a planet into a world of goodness and kindness. Yet most of us look for ways to evade that responsibility by hiding in our “boats,” symbolized by our bodies that carry us through life. We spend our lives running from our authentic self, becoming engulfed in all sorts of distractions so we don’t have to face the truth of who we are.
But one can’t run forever; we all encounter storms one day that wake us up. For some it can be a crisis of health or employment, for others the feeling that our fellow brothers and sisters around the world are increasingly at risk, and Israel’s security once again threatened. Indeed, the world is shaking all around us, challenging us to confront our Jewish identity and realize that ultimately there’s no running from God.
Yet there is one day a year that calls to us and says although you may have been running or hiding all year, it’s not too late to come home
From Why do we read Jonah on Yom Kippur?
by Rabbi Shlomo Zarchi
https://www.jweekly.com/2014/10/03/torah-why-do-we-read-jonah-on-yom-kippur/

The Ba'al Shem Tov teaches: We may try to run away from our problems, but when we turn around our problems will be following right behind us.

From Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets pp. 286-287
"...the message of [God's] anger includes a call to return and to be saved. The call of anger is a call to cancel anger...There is no divine anger for anger's sake. Its meaning is...instrumental: to bring about repentance; its purpose and consummation is its own disappearance..."
"God's change of mind displeased Jonah exceedingly. He had proclaimed the doom of Nineveh with a certainty, to the point of fixing the time, as an inexorable decree without qualification. But what transpired proved the word of God was neither firm nor reliable. To a prophet who stakes his life on the reliability and infallibility of the word of God, such realization leads to despair...The prophet was now alone, angry with [hu]man[ity] and displeased with God..."
"God's answer to Jonah, stressing the supremacy of compassion, upsets the possibility of looking for rational coherence of God's ways with the world. History would be more intelligible if God's word were the last word, final and unambiguous like a dogma or an unconditional decree. It would be easier if God's anger became effective automatically: once wickedness had reached its full measure, punishment would destroy it. Yet, beyond justice and anger lies the mystery of compassion."