I know we are still knee deep in our Language of Life series, studying the Divine depth and precision of Hebrew language, but I had an epiphany when studying the book of Jonah last Shabbat, and feel compelled to share it with you. I hope you find it meaningful as I did.
On Yom Kippur, the day of forgiveness and atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, the Book of Jonah is read at Mincha, the afternoon service.
Why? Of course, it’s about teshuva (repentance) — but most of Tanakh is about teshuva. It also ends in such a strange, anti-climactic way. It’s not even clear if Jonah himself repented. He seems to have ended right back where he started.
Rabbi Yehoshua ibn Shuaib (Spain, circa 1280-1340) explained that the role of the book is to broaden our vision outward — to the whole world’s repentance — since over the course of Yom Kippur we may have become too narrow in our focus — as if everything is just us Jews and God. This is how Rashi (the classic French medieval Biblical commentator) explained Jonah’s reluctance to enable Nineveh’s repentance: if they succeeded, it would make the Jewish people look bad for their weak teshuva record, and allow Assyria to become God’s instrument to displace the Jews from the Land of Israel. But Jonah was wrong. Moses refused to indict the Jewish people — but not at the expense of other nations’ repentance!
The Malbim (19th c. commentator) adds another layer. He explains that Jonah wasn’t opposed to helping even non-Jews repent — but only if it was real repentance — not some pro forma, “Disney repentance” that would last a week, while making for horrible optics for the Jewish people. No, Sir. He would not be accomplice in this mission.
Here’s my added insight, which I thought was worth interrupting our study of Hebrew for: Jonah was a black-and-white thinker. He is introduced as “Yonah Ben Amitai,” literally, “Son of my truth” — a man of truth — perhaps to a fault. If repentance wasn’t “real,” he wanted no part in it. So convinced was he of his absolute stance that he slept in the bowels of the ship while the waves crashed around them to get him to change his mind and return to his Divine mission. He even introduced himself to the pagan captain of his ship as “a Hebrew and I fear the Lord.” So sure was he that God was merely testing his resolve to not compromise the reputation of the Jewish people for the superficial teshuva of others. Only after three days at death’s door, squished inside the guts of a fish, did he shift — to repent, if you can even call it that. He agreed to go to Ninveh and do what he was told, but ironically, his own repentance is eventually shown to be incomplete.
Nineveh did a spectacular albeit partial repentance. They abandoned the sin theft altogether, returning stolen objects in their position, but not their idolatrous beliefs. Jonah cries out in frustration, “This is exactly what I was talking about!” Apparently, he hadn’t fully accepted God’s will after all.
And so Jonah asks to die. “What would be good is if I died — and don’t live.” There is no thought more black-and-white than this. The only objectively good outcome for Jonah at this point is for him to cease to exist.
God’s response? “Are you upset about a mere marginal improvement?” In other words: Would you have preferred that the 120,000 people of Nineveh remain exactly the same? Would that have been better than their incomplete but still meaningful step forward in spiritual living?
This question connects powerfully back to the very first act of repentance: Cain’s partial repentance after killing his brother Abel.
Right before he committed that first murder, God asked him: “Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you improve yourself, won’t you be uplifted?” (Genesis 4:6–7).
Cain was angry and sad. Angry at himself for failing, and sad over a reality his ego wouldn’t let him change. He was stuck. But God’s solution was clear: just improve — even marginally. Learn from mistakes, and you are by definition moving in the right direction. Cain’s stubbornness stopped him from accepting this advice. And yet, ironically, he is the one who ends up teaching his father Adam — the first human being that he’s not stuck. We can all change. Through Adam, and later the Jewish people, all humanity was taught about teshuva — that partial repentance is still called repentance. When Cain admitted, “My sin is too great to bear,” he modeled the first step towards return. You can’t go anywhere without taking a first step.
The episode of the kikayon plant God provided Jonah for shade drives home the same point: even temporary shade is better than no shade at all. Jonah doesn’t fully internalize this. But the fact that God’s last words to him are left hanging — with Jonah giving no answer — leaves open the possibility that he did accept, at least partially, that absolute good is not the only good. Improvement is also good — and a necessary good towards ultimate, global good.
And this is the message we need — not on Shabbat Shuva or the morning of Yom Kippur, when we aim high — but at the afternoon service of Yom Kippur, as we begin to accept that we haven’t fully repaired ourselves, let alone all of creation. This is precisely what we need to hear: perfect should not be the enemy of the good. Absolute good should not stand in the way of genuine improvement.
I want to share two stories with you about people I know personally.
A friend of mine, now a man extremely influential Jewish leader, was once a fairly not religious college student studying abroad in Jerusalem. One day, when visiting the Kotel, an Orthodox woman came up to him — he assumed to ask for money. She said to him, “I know that if I tell you to change your life and become fully religious, you’ll ignore me completely. So too, if I tell you to start keeping completely kosher. All I ask is that one time that you are about to eat something not kosher — you don’t.” For reasons unknown to him, he agreed. A month or so later, he found himself at Wendy’s ordering a double bacon cheeseburger. Again, inexplicably he correct his order, and asked the woman serving him to “hold the bacon.” Confounded but intrigued, he sat to eat his hot double cheeseburger. This is how he described the experience to me: “As I bit into that double cheeseburger, I felt waves of kedusha (holiness) wash over me, and so began my process of becoming religious. It was the holiest cheeseburger in history.”
Another couple, who were likely in their early 70s when I met them, shared with me that they started keeping Shabbat in their 60s. That’s fairly unusual, so I asked them to please tell me the story behind that life change. They said that the rabbi at the synagogue they were attending asked them a couple of years after they started going regularly for Shabbat, how they got to Shul. Slightly uncomfortable, they admitted that they drove. The rabbi, without flinching, recommended that they try driving the following week halfway. Puzzled at his bizarre suggestion, they agreed anyway. The next Shabbat, they drove halfway, parked on the side of the street, walked the rest of the way, prayed and enjoyed kiddush. On their way back, they got to their car, stopped and looked at each other. “Are we really going to get back in the car? We’re already halfway.” That was the last time they drove on Shabbat.
Like these stories there are hundreds of thousands of stories of people growing through small, incremental changes. In the face of big life changes, they would have stayed stuck forever.
The Vilna Gaon (also known as the “Gra,” 18th c.) pointed out that this is the deeper message of the book, which he understood was an allegory for the journey of the soul into one body, not being fully successful and needing to reincarnate to complete its mission. The whole concept of reincarnation (gilgulim) rests on the idea that no one repairs their entire being in one lifetime. Each lifetime accomplishes a partial rectification (tikun) until the complete rectification is achieved. In this way, Jonah’s prophecy is truly for the generations. Like Eliyahu the Prophet, to whom he owed his life for reviving him as a child, Jonah’s life work unfolds not in one moment but across Jewish history — one Yom Kippur afternoon at a time.
Gmar Chatima Tova.
Here’s the live class version if you prefer to listen: