Jonah and Yizkor

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Yom Kippur — Monday, September 28, 2009

Contemporary psychologists studying happiness have made an interesting observation. They have found that for most people, the worst that life throws us won’t kill us and the best won’t really make us that much happier. The prophet Jonah whose book we just read as our afternoon Haftarah is a good example this modern observation:

Jonah is the most successful of all the prophets in the Bible and the most unhappy. He is the only one who achieves the full scale conversion of an entire community and he does so with just five words: “Od Arbaim Yom VeNinevah Nehefechet- Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown”. Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Malachi, speak thousands of words to the Jewish community, and achieve very little, at least within their own life times.

Yet Jonah is the most unhappy of all the prophets. Jeremiah is imprisoned and but remains optimistic. He buys land in Judea even with an army about to conquer the country. He has hope that the fields and vineyards would again be bought in the land. Hosea finds his prophecy a terrible personal burden, alienating him from his family, but he perseveres. Elijah and Moses are understood by some commentators to have burned out because of the burdens of prophecy, but at least they began with great enthusiasm. It is only Jonah who from the time he is called as a prophet and through the moment of his greatest victory seems to be so depressed as to be suicidal. Why does Jonah care so little for his own life?

I think it is because Jonah is alone. Lo Tov Heyot HaAdam levado- it is not good for the man to be alone. Where are Mrs. Jonah and all the Jonah juniors? Other than the mystery man who gives Joseph directions when he is looking for his brothers, (and he appears in only one verse in the Torah), it is hard to think of another Biblical character who is as totally disconnected as Jonah. Where is the band of prophets to which he belongs? Where is the mentor, or disciple that many other prophets had?

In thinking about the prophet Jonah as a loner, I began looking at the rest of the book. Actually, if you think about it, there aren’t really very many characters in Jonah at all. God appears, but has just a few lines. The great fish doesn’t say a word. The people of Nineveh play a role, but they are clearly bit players. If this was a movie, they would be extra’s hired just for the day.

I’m not saying the people of Ninevah aren’t important. They are models of repentance. Their repentance was deep, not just superficial acts, the wearing of sack cloth and ashes and words of prayer; theirs was a repentance of deeds: “turning back from their evil ways and from the injustice of which they are guilty.” But because we see no evidence of their inner life or conflicts, because we don’t really get to know them in the book, they may not seem to us like real people.

Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, with whom I happen to disagree on many things both theological and political, still makes an interesting point in his new book, Righteous Gentiles in the Hebrew Bible.

Discussing the non-Jewish characters in the book of Jonah, he insists that they are the ones we are meant to learn from in this text. In particular, Rabbi Salkin argues that the sailors are really the ones to watch. The sailors, incidentally, are called in Hebrew malachim, a homophone for the Hebrew word for angels, malachim.

The sailors are Jonah’s opposite. For starters, they want to live. They struggle hard to survive the storm. They are also bound to each other. When the crisis comes they work together, literally, pulling the oars in the same direction. Together they pray, calling upon their gods. They have learned the lesson, many of us are taught in sports- there is no I in team.

Jonah, the loner, hasn’t learned that lesson. Without any personal connections he feels no empathy for anyone else. A great city is saved, and he feels no joy, only concern that others might judge him a fool in that his prophecy of Nineveh’s destruction was not fulfilled. Perhaps that is why the book ends with the strange verse: “Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons, who do not yet know their right hand from their left, and many animals as well.” Even cute little children, bunny rabbits and puppy dogs, aroused no sympathy in Jonah’s heart, though they do arouse God’s compassion.

Modern psychology tells us that we are happiest when we have other people in our lives to whom we are connected, and this, more than money or success or any other material thing, is the greatest predictor of the joy in our lives. Interestingly, though lifelong profound relationships play a role in happiness, so do other forms of human contact that are not as deep: casual friends, acquaintances, work associates, and neighbors are all part of our happiness team.

Many of us are here this afternoon, because we have lost someone who was a very important part of the happiness in our lives. We may feel like Jonah, detached and unable to enjoy the successes we are achieving in our lives. We may feel like we will never again have as deep a relationship as we had with our spouse, or our parents, as important a relationship as we had with our child- and that may indeed be the case. But what we can learn from the sailors in the book of Jonah and from modern psychology is that other kinds of relationships are also important.

Harold Kushner, in the book I mentioned last night, talks about how, even if it is not the love of our life, it is good to have a hand to hold. He tells the story of watching two children building a sandcastle at the beach. They work on it for a long time. But eventually the tide begins to come in, and all their moats and waterworks can’t protect what they have built. As the water sweeps over their turrets and towers, he expects them to cry, but instead they take each other’s hand, run up the beach, and start rebuilding in a different spot. The conclusion he draws from this is that it is easier to laugh at misfortune, when you have a hand to hold.

Another important quality of the sailors in the Book of Jonah, is that they cared not only about each other, but also about Jonah. Though he had not responded to their call for everyone to help, though he was a stranger, from a different ethnic and religious group, still they were concerned about him and didn’t want to throw him into the water. They persisted in endangering their own lives and the life of everyone on the boat, so as to try and spare his life.

Our wellbeing depends not only on having friendships in our lives, it also depends on our being able to care about others. Our lives are particularly enriched when we are able to act on that caring.

I learned this story from the Quakers. A cart man’s horse suddenly stumbled and fell dead in the middle of town. To the cart man this was a catastrophe. He depended on his horse for his livelihood. A crowd gathered observing the poor man’s predicament, shook their heads sympathetically, mumbling,” too bad, too bad”. One man among the observers removed his hat, placed ten dollars in it and said: “Friends. I am sorry for this man- ten’s dollars worth. How sorry are you?”

When our interest in other’s lives is deep enough that we roll up our sleeves and get to work, then it enriches our life as well. Standing on the sidelines and muttering about how terrible it is, does nothing for them, and only increases our own anxiety. Fixing a meal, visiting, driving, using our God given talent as an organizer, musician, artist, fix-it person, techie, whatever, or sharing the gifts God has bestowed, that is what it means to be engaged with others.

Finally, we need to remember that sometimes we accomplish our goals without our necessarily from succeeding in what we thought we were doing. In one view of things, the sailors didn’t succeed. Remember, they did eventually have to throw Jonah in the water. Yet they did their best and it was enough to wake Jonah up and to prepare him for the next stop on his life’s journey. My favorite book about Caring for Aged Parents is called, Your Best is Good Enough. We must focus on what we are able to do, so that we can sleep at night , and be present in the ways we can be for those who need us.

Sometimes we get over involved in what the ideal multiple and complicated things we could be doing are, and forget the value of the simple things we do merely by being there.

I’d like to share a story about Victor Frankel, a very famous psychiatrist who wrote many bestselling books in his field. He is well known for his work on the importance of having a sense of purpose, of the meaning in our lives.

One night in the wee hours the phone rang at the Frankl home. On the line there was a desperate man threatening to commit suicide. He insisted that Frankl give him a good reason why he should not kill himself. Frankl offered every reason he could think of and finally he persuaded the caller to meet at an all night coffee shop in a nearby neighborhood.

The two sat and talked for a while. Frankl asked, “Why did you call me? Had you read my books?”

“No,” answered the man. “Actually I’d never heard of you. I was in trouble and needed someone so I went to the psychiatrist listing in the phone book and to be perfectly honest, I picked your name at random.”

Frankl was a little taken aback. “Well, which of my arguments convinced you?”

“Dr. Frankl, I don’t mean to offend you,” the man said, “but not a single argument of yours changed my mind. None of them were good enough to persuade me to live.”

Frankl was a bit exasperated and asked, “So why did you decide to live?”

The man answered, “I called you in the middle of the night. You didn’t know me from a hole in the wall. But you spent hours on the phone with me and then you even agreed to meet me in the middle of the night in this coffee shop. I figured that if my life could mean so much to a complete stranger, it ought to mean something to me too.”

It was not the great professor who saved this man’s life, it was just a fellow human being. Perhaps that’s who was missing in Jonah’s life, just another person, a fellow human being who cared for him and for whom Jonah could care in a particular way.

Perhaps that what we are supposed to learn from this little book. This is who we are supposed to learn to be- learned from the sailors, who as you recalled, are called malachim, emissaries from the Divine.

On Yom Kippur we are reminded several times that before praying to God for forgiveness we must forgive all those who have offended against us in the past year. I worry sometimes that this reminder will cause us to focus on all those hurts on this holy day. I think that we should also be remembering the ways that others have shared gifts with us, remember all the blessings that come to us through the people in our lives.

I have been thinking lately about how much I have learned over the years, from you, members of this congregation. I have learned from older members of the congregation, who are my elders, but not my parents. I have learned from watching those a decade ahead of me in life. I have watched you raise your teens and send them forth, meet their fiancées, and engage with your grandchildren. I have learned from our younger families, who are facing different circumstances than I faced as a young wife and mother. From members of the congregation I have been prepared to be a better family member when my niece and other family members came out of the closet.

Most particularly this year, I have been prepared by my experiences with this congregation to better welcome my non-Jewish son-in-law-to -be into our family. I have learned from the good things I have seen you do, and from the horror stories some of our non-Jewish members have told me about their not so warm welcome into the Jewish world.

A congregation is one of the few places in life that we get to know people who are not our age, who don’t necessarily live near us, or share common interests or even points of view. And because of that, being a member of this community, can stretch us in ways that our regular friendships do not. And so as we review this year, let’s focus not just on the hurts that need to be forgiven, but also on the blessings that need to be acknowledged.