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.

 (Steve Greenberg)


    



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