Yom Kippur and Yonah, Part 3

A Book Like No Other - Aleph Beta

This episode of 'A Book Like No Other' explores the theological and narrative parallels between the story of Jonah and the flood narrative, focusing on God's dual

Key takeaways

• God in the Book of Jonah is portrayed as embodying both divine judgment (Elohim) and compassionate hope (Noah), reflecting a duality within the divine nature.
• The recurring use of 'maybe' throughout Jonah symbolizes hope amid despair, mirroring Noah's act of sending out the dove despite overwhelming destruction.

Main topics

• God's duality: justice vs. compassion
• The flood narrative as a template for Jonah

Notable quotes

"Justice is truth applied. For every act, there is a reaction."

"Maybe. Maybe there's some way out."

Conclusion

The episode concludes that the Book of Jonah reveals a profound theological depth: God is not only a judge of past actions but also a

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Look at you, preparing for Yom Kippur so early. Feels good, doesn't it? Speaker 1 (0:08) Meanwhile, Shabbos is coming. Doesn't matter which day it is when you're listening to this. Shabbos is never more than a few days away. So you might have what to say about this podcast. But what do you have to say about this week's Parsha? Good news. Aleph Beta has a whole library of Rabbi Foreman on the Parsha. So if you've been enjoying the way he reads Torah here, you can get that same kind of experience with Parsha. And a lot of the content is short, around 10 minutes. So you can actually squeeze it into your week. There's a link in the show notes. Check it out. Speaker 2 (0:43) Hey, we are back. And I don't know about you, but I am ready to try to unravel the Jonah story. Coming back to that little mystery about the God character, so to speak. What do you say? Let's dive in. Speaker 3 (0:58) Let's flood our way through. So. The God Mystery. Last episode, we landed somewhere kind of strange. God in the Book of Yonah isn't channeling one character from the flood story. He's actually channeling two. On the one hand, he's God, which makes sense. But he's also somehow Noah? And that makes less sense. And yet, you kind of can't deny it. God, just like Noah does, sends out a Yonah. His Yonah just happens to be a prophet instead of a dove. So the question is, what do we do with that? There's two very different characters, and they're converging into one. And it's like each one of these characters gives us a totally different lens on how to read this book. So what are those two different readings? And what happens when we try to hold them both at once? That's what we're going to get into today. I'm Emu Shalev, and this is a Book Like No Other generously sponsored by Shari and Nathan Lindenbaum. Speaker 2 (2:07) What I find is that whenever you have a cast of characters, one character that's a composite of two characters, it's not like those two characters are unrelated. They're not going to be like apples and watermelons. So the question I have for you is, when we look at the flood story, we look at God, the one who's going to decide the fate of the world, and we look at Noah sending that dove, what relationship would you say there is between those two characters in the flood story? To simplify that, let's just talk one at a time. God as God in the flood story. What are his priorities? What's on his mind? Speaker 3 (2:42) He is, his priorities seems to be the destruction of the world because of sin in the world. Speaker 2 (2:50) Yep. Pretty stark, right? God is the one who is prepared to bring the ultimate measure of justice to a world that has not lived up to its expectations. Okay. Now, what is Noah thinking? And we got into kind of the persona of Noah as Noah sends out the dove in particular, right? Speaker 3 (3:10) The message that's coming to my mind is hope. He doesn't know what's the status of the earth. And he's hopeful that something has survived. Speaker 2 (3:22) So hoping for sort of something other than destruction, right? So in a certain kind of way, there is... this really interesting tension between these two characters, right? The God character in the Noah story is the judge, right? And the jury. And Noah sending out that bird is anything but the judge. Speaker 2 (3:46) If you think about justice, I often think of justice as applied truth, right? There is a certain kind of truth that needs to obtain in the world, and justice demands that the world runs by rules. It's the great policeman for the world, and there's got to be consequences. Tell me what you did, and I'll tell you what the sentence is. It's like Newton's laws of physics. For every act, there is a reaction. These are the rules of truth. These are the rules of applied truth, of justice. But then there's Noah. If you would say, Noah, what do you judge to be the case after that bird came and surveyed every single mountaintop around and came back with the same story? There's no life here. So as a judge, you might dispassionately say, let's close the case. And yet... I'm hoping. Maybe. Fascinating that we've got a Jonah. Maybe is one of those words in the book of Jonah. Over and over again. The sailors, maybe. The people of Nineveh, maybe. And here, back in the flood, there's a kind of maybe. Maybe. Maybe there's some way out. Speaker 3 (4:53) You're saying the word maybe shows up again and again in Jonah? Yeah. You're saying that there's sort of a hope there. Speaker 2 (4:59) Sure. I mean, whenever there's Speaker 3 (5:00) a Speaker 2 (5:00) hope, the hope is couched in maybe the sailors. The sailors are going to die. There's this storm. There's 50-foot waves. It's a Mediterranean fishing vessel. Who's going to survive this storm? But they prayed to God. Maybe God will listen to us and maybe we won't be destroyed. Can I figure it out? I can't figure it out. Maybe. Speaker 3 (5:21) Maybe Speaker 2 (5:22) compassion has some sort of foothold. Noah is a man looking for a foothold for compassion and love in a world that seems to be dominated by the sterile waters of judgment. And that, I would say, is the connection between these two characters. Speaker 2 (5:45) And so now what would it mean to say that God is inhabiting both characters? That God is channeling some of the energy of God from the flood, but some of the energy of Noah sending that bird. What does that tell you about God in the Jonah story? Why is he sending that bird, that prophet, to Nineveh? Speaker 3 (6:02) It seems like he wants to see, he's like, okay, Nineveh deserves to be destroyed, but maybe they don't. Maybe they'll repent. Speaker 2 (6:12) And ask me to justify that. Let's say they repent. Will that then add up to the idea that they should be saved? Let's talk about what they did. There were 53,000 murders last year in Ninveh. 330,000 violent robberies. Speaker 3 (6:27) What you're saying is really interesting because I didn't understand where you were going when you were like, justice is truth applied. I'm like, okay, that sounds fancy. That's nice. But when you put it in that context of deserving, it makes tshuva. the concept of repentance almost seemed absurd because like, okay, so, you know, Tim killed, you know, Tony. Okay. Then Tim does Teshuvah. Like, very good for you, Tim. Like, Tony's dead. There's no Tony. You can't Teshuvah Tony. Right? Like, you killed him. And if you killed someone, then you deserve to die. There's a penalty for what you've done. And it's the truth. Speaker 2 (7:10) Yep, absolutely. And I think this gets to one of the fundamental mistakes we make when we think of Chuba at the time of year when Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah roll around. We approach Chuba a little bit too smugly, I think. We think that if we just do Chuba, then of course everything's going to be great. We totally deserve to get this new lease on life. We don't deserve anything. Chuba can't change the past. justice is all about the past. It's all about you tell me what you did, and I'll tell you what you deserve. How does Tshuva change what you did, right? So, there's no way that in a world of justice, Tshuva works. And one of the things that you have to uphold as God is justice, right? Now, in the Torah, we find, and in Jewish philosophy, this notion, we talk about these different midot of Hashem, these different aspects of Hashem, which of course is metaphoric, because Right? Theologically, we believe that God is one. He's a unified being that can't be divided into parts. But we human beings living in our fragmented world, when we think of God, we play a little game. We try to split God into parts. And God goes along with the game and says, okay, human beings, let's pretend. I've got a mirat harachmim, and I've got a mirat adin. I have a side of me that's compassionate, and I have a side of me that demands justice. That's... how you human beings living in a fragmented world can wrap your mind around the two priorities that are in tension for me, the priority of justice and the priority of Rahimim. And the Torah