Jonah: His Story, Our Story; His Struggle, Our Struggle: Commentary on Paper by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg

Abstract

The Book of Jonah, one of the best known of the biblical tales, is much more than a children's fable about a man and a whale. This brief narrative about a prophet who refuses to be a prophet is our story—how we too often give in to our nature which pulls us toward resentment, parochialism, and narrowness, too often avoid what we need to face within ourselves and our responsibilities, too often are crippled by our inability to transcend our anger and forgive. After examining Aviva Zornberg's analysis of the Book of Jonah in which she argues that the message, like the latent dream à la Freud, is obscure, I argue that the meaning of the Book of Jonah is clear. Psychic unity requires that we face our objects—God and conscience, Nineveh and storm and mother, self and other—struggle with them, stare at them, allow them to breathe and live in the same room. As God, Jonah's “psychoanalyst,” argues, it is only then that we can find our way to where His analysand Jonah never quite arrives—forgiveness of the self and of the other.

Notes

¹This parable paraphrased here, although centuries older in the oral tradition, was first reported by Rabbi Israel Lifshitz of Danzig in his 19th-century commentary to the Mishnah.

²For an examination of the psychological genius of the biblical Book of Genesis, see Shulman (2003).

³ Bruno Bettelheim (1977) discussed the biblical Jonah in his chapter on Little Red Cap (Little Red Riding Hood). Comparing the wolf's eating Little Red with the fish swallowing Jonah, Bettleheim wrote, “An adult's reassurance to a child that Little Red Cap did not ‘really’ die when the wolf swallowed her is experienced by the child as a condescending talking down. This is just the same as if a person is told that in the Bible story Jonah's being swallowed by the big fish was not ‘really’ his end. Everybody who hears this story knows intuitively that Jonah's stay in the fish's belly was for a purpose—namely, so that he would return to life a better man” (p. 179).

⁴The midrash imagines Jonah as one of the disciples of the prophet Elisha (Ginzberg, 2005).

⁵2 Kings 14:25.

⁶An exception to this position is Yehezkel Kaufmann (1972, see pp. 282–286). He argued that the Book of Jonah was written as one of the biblical works of “moral speculation” and composed in the 8th century BCE, around the time that the historical Jonah lived.

⁷For content evidence concerning the dating of the Book of Jonah, see Boadt (1984), Driver (1913), Pfeiffer (1941), and Seltzer (2003). In Norma Rosen's (1987) essay on Jonah and in the Encyclopaedia Judaica paper (Cohn et al., 2007), the grammar and vocabulary of the text is seen as confirming a postexilic dating of this biblical book.

⁸Jeremiah 1:6.

⁹Jeremiah 20:9.

¹⁰Exodus 3:10–11.

¹¹This is my elaboration of Abraham Joshua Heschel's (2007) brilliant description of the prophet: “Others may suffer from the terror of cosmic aloneness; the prophet is overwhelmed by the grandeur of divine presence” (p. 134).

¹²The Talmud refers to Jonah as “he who suppresses his prophecy” (BT Sanhedrin 89a).

¹³See especially Bentzen (1952), Eissfeldt (1965), A. Lacocque and Lacocque (1981), Pfeiffer (1941), and Seltzer (2003).

¹⁴For Rashi's and Ibn Ezra's commentary on Jonah, see Mikra'ot Gedolot (pp. 1206–1236). For John Wesley's commentary, see Wesley (1990).

¹⁵ Paul Kahn (1994) in his literary analysis of the Book of Jonah, wrote, “We must conclude, then, that Jonah's flight was not from God's authority, but from His presence, that is to say, His compassionate providence” (p. 91).

¹⁶ Uriel Simon (1999) pointed out how Jonah's sleep in Hebrew (va-yeradam) also involves a going down.

¹⁷Some scholars associate the “vomiting out” (vayekei in Hebrew) of Jonah onto the dry land (Jonah 2:10) with the vomiting out (also vayekei) of the Israelites from the Promised Land (Leviticus 18:25 and 18:28). They argue if Jonah got his way and Nineveh was overthrown in his time then Assyria would not have destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel 60 years later (see Kahn, 1994).

¹⁸ Kaufmann (1972) referred to fasting, the wearing of sackcloth, and sitting in ashes as pre-biblical, pre-Israel universal symbols of sorrow and remorse (p. 285).

¹⁹See “The Repentance of Nineveh” (Ginzberg, 2005).

²⁰The Hebrew for angry here and throughout the Book of Jonah is “charah.” This adjective derives from the verb “charar” ‘to blaze’ or ‘to burn up’. The biblical choice of word here leads us to understand that Jonah's anger was a raging fire.

²¹ Norma Rosen (1987) argued that Jonah is dissatisfied with the ending God has written and wants to write his own ending for the book that bears is name (p. 501).

²²The rabbis of the midrash could not stand Jonah's silence at the end of the book. Quoting Daniel 9:9, they imagined a Jonah who fell on his face, yielded to God, and then said, “Please God, go ahead. Conduct Your world according to the attribute of mercy” (Midrash Jonah).

²³Genesis 1:27.

²⁴See Heschel (1998, p. 188), and Abraham Joshua Heschel NBC interview by Carl Stern, recorded 3 months before Heschel died in 1972.

²⁵Like Freud, Michael J. Eisler (1921) understood the Jonah–whale metaphor as an image associated with pregnancy. In his clinical presentation of a male hysteric with an oral pregnancy fantasy, Eisler wrote, “The archaic conception of oral birth is most impressively represented in the biblical story of Jonah, where the hero is spat forth by a whale” (p. 279).

²⁶ Stuart Asch (1966) similarly viewed the Jonah–whale image in his discussion of claustrophobia and depression.

²⁷ Peter Thomson (1980), in his paper on the receptive function of the analyst, described how the image of Jonah and the whale as a whole object within the maternal/paternal womb held a central position in his countertransferential claustrophobic anxiety with his resistant patient (p. 193).

²⁸I am grateful to Meredith Lisagor, M.Div., for her careful reading of this paper, generally, and for her comments on this Jungian material, specifically.

²⁹Also see Jung (1968).

³⁰For a critical analysis of Jung's approach to Jonah, see A. Lacocque and Lacocque (1981) and P. E. Lacocque (1984).

³¹A similar argument concerning Jonah's isolation and protection is found in Fromm's (1957) “The Nature of Symbolic Language” chapter. In this chapter, Fromm also discusses the distinction between the manifest and the latent content found in the Jonah narrative and in other cultural texts. “But if we understand that the writer (of the Book of Jonah) did not intend to tell us the story of external events—but of the inner experience of a man torn between his conscience and his wish to escape from his inner voice (God)—it becomes clear that various actions that follow one after the other express the same mood in him, and that sequence in time is expressive of the growing intensity of the same feeling” (p. 22).

³²Jonah 4:10–11.

³³ Zornberg's (1996) first book, The Beginning of Desire, offers an analysis of the biblical book of Genesis. Her second book, The Particulars of Rapture (2002), is an analysis of Exodus.

³⁴In my paper in which I argue that clinical psychoanalysis, as Freud conceived of it, owes a great debt to midrashic method (Shulman, 2005), I describe midrash. “For the (rabbinic) sages, midrash was not only a genre of literature, but also a method of inquiry. As a genre of rabbinic literature, the midrash is a loosely-organized anthology of sermons and biblical exegesis, rooted in the text of the Hebrew Scripture. Midrash as a method of inquiry always begins with a finely-tuned and nuanced scrutiny of the biblical text. … It is precisely the midrashic method and tradition that enable the Jew to have an ‘I—Thou relationship with the text, and with God’” (pp. 38–39).

³⁵Zornberg's method of biblical analysis shares much with Freud's method of dream analysis. In both, the focus on the narrative (text or dream) as a coherent whole is de-emphasized, while the attention to the individual narrative component is stressed. For an excellent and balanced review of the history, description, and critique of this Zornberg—Freud method that emphasizes the molecular over the molar, see Lewis Aron's (1989) paper “Dreams, Narrative and the Psychoanalytic Method.”

³⁶Genesis 1:1.

³⁷Genesis 1:27. It is interesting to note that man and woman are formed 12 chapters before there is an Abraham, 12 chapters before there is a Jew. For a discussion of this and its far-reaching ethical implications, see Shulman (2003, p. 29).

³⁸Jonah 1:8–9.

³⁹Zornberg's principal points concerning Jonah's fleeing and his death wish are reminiscent of Elie Wiesel's (1983) critical “biography” of Jonah found in Five Biblical Portraits. Wiesel wrote, “And so Jonah would appear to be the perfect illustration of the anti-hero in Scripture, having been a complete failure all his life and in all his endeavors: he fails as a prophet, since he chooses to become an anti-prophet; he fails as a fugitive, since he does show up in Nineveh. He even fails in his death wish: twice he asks to die only to survive and live in remorse. Has there ever been a more frustrated prophet in the Bible?” (pp. 136–137).

⁴⁰At the end of the Book of Jonah, God's attribute of mercy overtakes His attribute of justice. In the Babylonian Talmud, the rabbis discuss whether God prays or not. Citing biblical sources as evidence, they conclude that He, in fact, does. Then the question is posed, what God prays. Relevant to the Jonah text, the Talmud answers, “God prays: May it be My will that My mercy should suppress My anger and that My attribute of mercy should dominate all My other attributes, so that I may conduct Myself with My children with mercy, and that I should deal with them, not according to the strict letter of the law, but do for them more than they have rightfully earned'” (BT Berachot 7a).

⁴¹Jonah 4:2.

⁴²Jonah 4:8.

⁴³Freud (1900/1901) conjectured that the work of the dream as masking what the dream is really about (the latent content) in order to preserve the sleep of the dreamer. Describing this “dream-work” Freud writes, “The Prince (Hamlet) in the play, who had to disguise himself as a madman, was behaving just as dreams do in reality; so that we can say of dreams what Hamlet said of himself, concealing the true circumstances under a cloak of wit and unintelligibility” (p. 444).

⁴⁴For additional discussions of the value of emphasizing the manifest content of the narrative (dream or text), see among others, Aron (1989), Giannani (2003), Malin (2004), Pulver (1987), and Stolorow (1978).

⁴⁵See, for example, Beck (1952), Schorsch (1999), and Thomas (1922).

⁴⁶This is the point of view of those who subscribe to the “documentary hypothesis” or “higher biblical criticism,” which maintains that the Hebrew Bible is a collection of texts that originated in different communities and at different times within ancient Israel (J, E, P, and R). The scholar who first advocated this position was Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). For a more detailed discussion and critique of the documentary hypothesis in relation to the biblical creation narrative, see Shulman (2003, chap. 3).

⁴⁷Genesis 18:32.

⁴⁸Exodus 34:6.

⁴⁹Leviticus 10:1–2.

⁵⁰Numbers 11:33. Pfeiffer (1941) referred to God in this, and some other Torah passages as a “pernicious wilderness deity.” In a similar vein, Hyam Maccoby (1983) refers to God in this narrative as a “sacred executioner.”

⁵¹Jeremiah 9:22–23.

⁵²For an examination of this conceptual shift from a communal to an individual biblical ethic, see especially Hermann Cohen's (2002) discussion of the distinction between the earlier and later prophets.

⁵³Jeremiah 31:29–30.

⁵⁴Ezekiel 18:20.

⁵⁵It is interesting to note that it is precisely the prophetic theodicy—that God is just and therefore, if one suffers, he/she has sinned—that is the core of the argument put forth by the “friends” of Job.

⁵⁶Theodicy is the branch of theology that defends God's goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil.

⁵⁷For a discussion of universalism versus particularism within Judaism, see especially Jacobs (2007, p. 516).

⁵⁸Notable here in considering the relationship between oppression of the Jews and particularism is the preeminent biblical commentator Rashi's (1040–1105) first comment on the first verse of the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Written at a time when Rashi's Jewish neighbors were being massacred by the Crusaders, Rashi asserted (quoting from one of the many possible interpretations from the classical midrash on Genesis) that the reason why God began with creation (and not a law) was to make the point that since He created the world, He could decide to give a piece of that world, i.e., the land of Israel, to anyone He chose—and God particularly chooses the Jews.

⁵⁹King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple, and exiled the vast majority of the population of Judah in 586 BCE.

⁶⁰The date of Ezra's and Nehemiah's return to Jerusalem is controversial. In this passage, I am using the dates described in Paul Johnson's (1987) A History of the Jews and the Encyclopaedia Judaica article on Ezra written by David Marcus (2007).

⁶¹Nehemiah 4:17–18.

⁶²Freud was well aware of these reforms instituted by Ezra. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud (1939) writes, “These reforms (by Ezra) took seriously the regulations that aimed at making the entire people holy; their separation from their neighbours was made effective by the prohibition of mixed marriages; the Pentateuch, the true book of the laws, was given its final form and the revision known as the Priestly Code brought to completion” (p. 41).

⁶³I am indebted here to Seltzer's (2003) insightful conjectures regarding Ezra's motivation to turn toward particularism (see especially pp. 128–130).

⁶⁴Ezra 9:1–10:5. Also see Nehemiah 13:23–27 and Malachi 2:11–12.

⁶⁵See Footnote 8.

⁶⁶Another biblical example of a text, like Jonah, that is in ongoing dialogue with Ezra, and that also vehemently argues against his particularism, is the Book of Ruth. Ruth is a Moabite woman who marries Boaz, a Jew. The Bible rewards this intermarriage. According to the Book of Ruth (4:13–22), it is Ruth and Boaz who are the forebears of King David and, by both Jewish and Christian traditions, the future Messiah.

⁶⁷Compare Jonah 4:10–11 to Jonah 3:10.

⁶⁸The Bible refers to all non-Israelite societies as “nations.” In Hebrew, “nations” is “goyim.”

⁶⁹Isaiah 42:6.

⁷⁰Ann Lamott, the contemporary leftist Evangelical Christian writer, said, “You know you have created God in your own image when you discover that He hates the same people you do.”

⁷¹Exceptions to this are found in the Books of Leviticus and Numbers where sin offerings are, in some cases, commanded to be accompanied by confession and reparation. See especially Leviticus 5:5 and 16:21–22; and Numbers 5:6–8

⁷²Repentance is not explicitly described in relation to the Genesis patriarchs, matriarchs, or even the children of Israel in Exodus and Numbers when they sin as a community, for example, construct and worship the golden calf. It may be argued that repentance is implicit in the biblical narratives involving Judah, Joseph, Jacob's wrestling match with the angel, and even in God's behavior after the Flood. For a discussion of repentance in particularly the Book of Genesis, see Shulman (2003, chap. 6).

⁷³Genesis 4:9–10.

⁷⁴Genesis 4:13–14.

⁷⁵See Genesis Rabbah 1:7.

⁷⁶ Maimonides (1983) “Hilkhot Teshuvah” (Laws of Repentance). Also see the Babylonian Talmud Pesachim 54a and Nedarim 39b.

⁷⁷Almost 2,000 years ago, the talmudic rabbis chose the Book of Jonah to be read in every synagogue on the afternoon of Yom Kippur (BT Megillah 31a).

⁷⁸This clinical material is from the beginning of my first session with Joan, March 11, 2003. It was reconstructed from detailed process notes, transcribed immediately following the session.

⁷⁹Jonah 1:6.

⁸⁰Jonah 1:10.

⁸¹It is important to note here that the author and original readers of the Book of Jonah did not have a concept of the afterlife. There is general scholarly consensus that the concept of the afterlife did not find its way into Jewish religious belief until at least the Hasmonean period (circa 166 BCE) about 200 years after Jonah was written. Therefore, when Jonah seeks death, he is seeking a state of total silence, a true escape, where both the voice of God and Jonah are no more.

⁸²Jonah 2:5–7.

⁸³Jonah 4:11.