Haftorah This Week
Welcome to Haftorah This Week, the place where you will find thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on this week's Haftorah.
Yom Kippur (Minchah): The Book of Jonah
The Book of Jonah is read on Yom Kippur
in the afternoon service. It is a morality
play that conveys its message to and through the prophet.
Its fundamental message is that God pardons iniquity when sincere contrition
and repentance are present.
But there is another lesson carried
through the story not by the people of Nineveh, but by the prophet Jonah himself. It is Jonah's reluctance to go to Nineveh that is
the real mystery of this tale. What is it
that Jonah fears in Nineveh? What is he
supposed to learn in the belly of the whale? And
why is he so disheartened when he is successful in Nineveh?
Isn't this what I said when I left my own country?...For I know you are a
compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in kindness, renouncing
punishment. Please Lord, take my life, for I
would rather die than live. (Jonah 4:1-3)
It seems that it is difficult for Jonah to
accept that God's love is available to others. In
this story, the sailors and the people of Nineveh are all heroic. It is Jonah who, even at the end, does not
understand the extent of God's care for all God's creatures.
Could it be that toward the end of Yom
Kippur in the afternoon, our attention turns a bit from the private relationship
between Israel and God which needs to be healed to a spiritual danger inherent in the
special access we have as God's chosen ones. To
stand up as a Jew, proud and confident, means to speak a language of God's love that
includes the whole world and begrudges no one. Yom
Kippur is not complete till our personal reconciliation with God is itself not a
hoarded wealth, but a gift which invites all the world into God's loving arms.
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