Running Away is Deadly: Jonah and the Dangers of Absconding from Prophecy

This year, at the leftist Yom Kippur in Montréal, Jonah cried out to Hashem from a Real-Life Whale.

Specifically, my friend Shlomo, the Haftarah reader for Yom Kippur afternoon (when we read the Book of Jonah), went into a cardboard whale sculpture made by my friend Lily, during the parts of the Book where the prophet was swallowed by a giant fish. After being “spewed out” in the story, “Jonah” returned to the bima for the rest of the reading. The kids of our service loved it (though after the reading they spent the afternoon playing in and eventually destroying the whale), and all us Big Kids loved it too. Shlomo, a superlative chanter, regaled us that afternoon with a heartfelt, storyteller’s Hebrew, which brought me deep into the world of this minor prophet, whose “whale of a tale” is often slept through by those of us lucky enough to take a mid-Yom Kippur snooze.

A quick aside to catch up those of us who did take that nap, before I delve in further:

Jonah the Prophet gets called on by Hashem to prophesize to the sinful city of Nineveh. He’s meant to tell them to repent their ways, for if not, they will be destroyed. Jonah flees this responsibility, stowing away (and even sleeping through a storm! (1)) on a ship that almost capsizes due to his presence. He’s thrown overboard to save the ship, getting rescued by a divinely-provided mega-fish, from whose belly he cries out. After sufficient obsequience, he’s spat back on land, where he prophesizes to Nineveh, which then repents and is saved. In a post-script, Jonah gets moody: If Hashem was going to be merciful to Nineveh anyway, why did he have to prophesize against it? Hashem kills the tree Jonah was using for shade, and explains that if Jonah hates losing a tree he just sat under, imagine Hashem losing a whole city of the wayward children She raised!

What a banger of a book.

Back in Montréal, as I was reconnecting to this star-crossed prophet, and voraciously re-reading his adventures while half-listening to other parts of the service, I tried to understand his motivation for running away.

Absconding is a trait common to prophets. Moses, after already escaping a murder charge in the Midian Wilderness, demurs repeatedly at the call of Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh to go back and free his people; Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel even thinks that this is a core element of what makes a prophet a prophet: a reticence to prophesize. (2)

But though humility is a positive trait in anyone claiming to speak for a god, prophets serve a key role of social critique and struggle against power. And when they turn away – people die. Moses’ dereliction of duty left numerous Hebrews crumpled under their masters’ whips, and countless baby boys (rahmana litzlan!) at the bottom of the Nile. When Jonah took to the far edges of his known world to avoid prophesizing, an entire ship of people witnessed their impending death in a baleful storm, and only via casting lots did they uncover that Jonah was the culprit of their fate. By the time he’s thrown overboard, the ship is emptied of its cargo and wealth, and as far as these men know, Jonah himself has been sacrificed for their safety. (3)

Why did our aquatic anti-hero run away then, if the stakes were so high? R’ Chaim Jachter suggests in his modern commentary, Depths of Yonah, that it may be because Jonah didn’t want to see the evil city of Nineveh let off so easily, cheapening the worth of Hashem’s judgement. Rashi says it’s because he knew Nineveh would repent quickly, thereby implicitly shaming/implicating the Jews who always take so long to do so. 

Embarrassment and spite are powerful motivators. But the text also offers a simpler reading: Jonah is a human-being tasked with correcting the behavior of a city that is a three-day walk across. He’s overwhelmed and scared. What if they don’t listen? What if they drive me away? Am I worthy of such a task? As understandable as these doubts may be, his fear and reticence not only nearly doomed a city-full of would-be repentants, but also threatened the lives of the boat-full of people he chose to hide with. (4)

And how could it not be so. Jonah’s god, as he names Her when confronted by his fellow sailors, is the god of Heaven, Earth and Sea. All throughout this high holiday season, we’re reminded again and again, that our god is the one who rules over all, created everything, and runs the reality in which we find ourselves. How could one abscond from such a force? How could any of us deny it when it asks us to act? How could we assume that if we were called on to do something just, beautiful, and important on Her behalf, we could remain unscathed if we refused?

The task Jonah was assigned was a frightful one: to tell a city of 120,000 that their society was rotten. This is the terrible mission of prophets. To confront a world which does not know it is doomed, and provide them the news they least want to hear. It is something we are intimately familiar with in our activism against impending climate disaster, as well as other movements for justice and peace.

In the case of Nineveh, the effort was successful – the entire Assyrian polity returned its stolen goods, repaired its sinful ways, and even the nobility walked in sackcloth and ash. (5) But the job of the prophet is usually thankless – or worse, ostracizing. Even deadly. In almost every case, it’s the bearer of bad news that gets the brunt, rather than the accolades. (6) People accurately naming the ills of the day are, throughout history, the ones to be pilloried, deported, hung.

But even as the costs for prophecy are high, its role in society is irreplaceable (and mandated by Heaven). Running away from it dooms both the people we are tasked by god to save, and the ones we hide ourselves among. And thus we must know that the costs of avoiding it are much, much higher. 

In our day, the nightmares of our world can sometimes occupy our attention and phones. When they do so, many of us in this community know that it is time to act. But whether through our own willful ignorance, or the purposeful silencing of our algorithms’ masters, ongoing catastrophes can leave our timelines – and in an atomized world with a dearth of organized resistance, we can then terribly believe that we are no longer called upon. 

In those moments, just like Jonah, we are naively sleeping in raging seas. 

The grueling suffering of Gaza has shifted from a ‘war’ to a managed ‘situation.’ The numbers of Palestinians killed daily aren’t in the triple digits, and so don’t make headlines. (7) Activism around ameliorating such a ‘situation,’ along with being institutionally repressed, has thus withered. 

As ICE abandons blood-soaked urban occupations for behind-the-scenes collaboration with police, thousands of our community members are kidnapped, trafficked and killed, while city squares remain empty of angry crowds, and detention centers shuttle their human cargo, their ingress and egress unimpeded. 

The systems that stain our world with violence know that headlines are sometimes dangerous and therefore seek to achieve their aims without inspiring them. But you and I cannot rely on such a hide-and-seek, because the seeing eye of whatever moves us – the moral universe or Hashem – is much too keen to be fooled by a missing title on a front page. 

We seem to be fooled though, by time and distance. A nightmare lies far across the sea. The city or society that enacts it would take days, maybe even weeks to walk across. What if they don’t listen? What if they drive me away? Am I worthy of such a task?

Even more fundamentally – do such large or distant problems truly implicate me? This last question is ultimately the most self-defeating, and the one that damned Jonah’s vessel. The famous Shoah-poem reminds us in its coda: I did not stand up for them, and now there is no one to stand up for me. Sleeping through others’ catastrophes, only ensures that their aftershocks will capsize us wherever we slumber. And when the deathly tilt begins, the compatriots we’ve hidden with will wake us up and yell – Your God was the God of Heaven, Earth and Sea! How could you imagine that you could watch Her children suffer and that you would be left unscathed??

Even if those children are not the ones you’ve been taught to consider worthy of your care. The most eerie reason given by a commentator for Jonah’s flight comes from the medieval Portuguese philosopher, Abarbanel. He asserts that Jonah left in order to avoid the obligation of prophecy, because he never wanted the Assyrians of Nineveh to repent – he wanted them to perish, since they were the Jews’ enemies. 

In the end, Jonah only ensured his own near-death. (8)

There is no peaceful sea in someone else’s storm. I think the children of Montréal’s minyan were teaching us that, when they playfully shredded the cardboard of the whale. We cannot count on a maritime miracle to save us from these waves if we fall into them, this time.

At the end of the story, Jonah is exasperated (9): Why did I have to prophesize, if you will always save your children in mercy??  (10)

The answer from the book seems to be: Because prophecy inspires righteousness, which inspires mercy. Meaning that while Hashem’s holy flame is meant to protect us all, prophecy – social reproof and the large-scale changes it engenders (11) – is the flint that sets it alight. If we want that flame’s warmth, and not its wrath, we must follow the frightening path of Moses, Jonah and the best of our ancestors. Only through their brand of bravery and justice will the trees gently shade, the seas softly loll, and true peace, for all, be found.

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1. This is good halachic precedent for the midday Yom Kippur nap. It also serves as lyrical inspiration for this banger in Sefardi Slichot in the lead up to the High Holidays.

2. [The prophet] was often compelled to proclaim the very opposite of what his heart expected. Xix

None of the prophets seems enamored with being a prophet nor proud of his attainment. What drove Jeremiah, for instance, to being a prophet? “Cursed be the day On which I was born! … Because He did not kill me in the womb; So my mother would have been my grave, … Why did I come forth out of the womb To see toil and sorrow, And spend my days in shame?” The Prophets, Heschel, p. 17
The mission he performs is distasteful to him and repugnant to others; no reward is promised him no reward could temper its bitterness, p. 18

3. In a heart-rending moment of the narrative, even after realizing he’s the reason for their downfall, they still try to row with him to shore, in an unsuccessful attempt to show unearned mercy to this perilous stow-away.

4. By drashing on Jonah’s fare-payment before getting on the boat, the commentator Malbim believes that he bought out the entire ship in an attempt to lessen the number of passengers and therefore  the unintended casualties of his escape. In the end, he necessarily knowingly risks at least the crew.

5. To see a discussion in another thought-provoking context of Nineveh’s repentance, check Mishnah Ta’anit 2:1. And while it is gauche to cite oneself, I also obliquely discuss this episode in Jonah in my discussion of that Mishna in another HOTS here.

6.The prophet is a lonely man. He alienates the wicked as well as the pious, the cynics as well as the believers, the priests and the princes, the judges and the false prophets. The prophet bears scorn and reproach. He is stigmatized as a madman by contemporaries, and, by some modem scholars, as abnormal, p18

7. To name them, Osama Abu Khater and Mohammad Abu Elwan were two of the men killed two days ago, on Wednesday Sep 23. “A man” and “a woman” also succumbed to previous wounds, and “an infant” and “an elderly woman” were merely injured by direct gunshots. In the hierarchy of life, each instance of these is a crime that would receive a week of coverage, condemnation and a West Bank Pogrom if it happened to a Jew.

8. The idea that we can ignore the suffering of perceived enemies is confronted indirectly as heretical in Jonah’s self-critique from the Whale’s belly: They who cling to empty folly, Forsake their own love/kindness.

9. He says this as he is watching to see if the city will, at the end, be destroyed, and exclaims when it isn’t.

10. The theme of God’s fundamental desire to forgive is also repeated and further explored in the additional Haftarah from Micah that serves as a coda after Jonah for many communities on Yom Kippur.

11.The prophet is not only a prophet. He is also poet, preacher, patriot, statesman, social critic, moralist…The prophet was an individual who said No to his society, condemning its habits and assumptions, its complacency, waywardness, and syncretism. p.Xiv…Xix