Jonah: A Fantasy of Flight

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Notes

¹Tarshish is identified by contemporary scholars as Tartesus in Southern Spain. See Simon (1992, pp. 43–44).

²The noun tardema signifies a coma-like state. In this condition, Adam had Eve extracted from his side, and Abram had his vision of the Covenant between the Pieces.

³The symmetry between the resolved evil and Jonah's rage is marked by the double ra'ah in each verse.

⁴Abarbanel describes this as “a sickness: in the sadness of his heart, he fell sick with a great evil.”

⁵See Genesis 4:5–6.

⁶The inversion of meaning is felt particularly since on other fast days the Thirteen Attributes passage from the Golden Calf narrative is the Torah reading for the mincha (afternoon) service. It is all the more striking that on Yom Kippur at this mincha service, when the community expects God's love and forgiveness to be invoked, Jonah's attack is read.

⁷Freud's description of the Rat Man's prayers, in which, “like an inverted Balaam,” he inserts curses and negations, is apposite here. As Lear (1999) put it, he is “launching a phantasized attack on his own prayer-making activity … primitively attacking his attempt at prayer. … He is actively disrupting his own thought” (p. 107).

⁸Classic interpretations of the narrative include, most prominently, the theory that Jonah deplores Nineveh's extraordinary repentance, because it shows up the recalcitrance of his own people, and the theory that he fears appearing as a false prophet, if his declaration of doom is not fulfilled. It is difficult to find support in the text for the first theory, while the second is rejected by Ibn Ezra, on the grounds that the people of Nineveh are sophisticated enough to understand that the purpose of prophecies of doom is to rouse the population to repent—and to invalidate the prophecy. This more sophisticated understanding is presumed to be current already in Jonah's time; in its light, Jonah can only emerge as an effective prophet, if his warning is heeded.

⁹This is Lear's expression, to be discussed later.

¹⁰See Simon (1992, pp. 9–10). In Bamidbar Rabba 18:17, Jonah is listed separately from the other eleven minor prophets, “since it is in a class of its own.”

¹¹For example, Psalm 69:3.

¹²Mechilta Shemot 12:1.

¹³B.Brachot 61a.

¹⁴This is the translation of R. Yehuda, cited by Ibn Ezra, for v'nafshi yoda'at me'od (139:14). See also Metzudat David.

¹⁵Pirkei d'Rabbi Eliezer, 10.

¹⁶It is striking that Josephus introduces this theme in his paraphrase of Jonah's prayer in his Jewish Antiquities, as do Philo, and Sephardic “piyyutim” for Yom Kippur. See Simon (1992, p. 27).

¹⁷See Psalm 107:27, where sailors are depicted as praying out of precisely this sense of the failure of any human ground of consciousness.

¹⁸See B.Brachot 34a.

¹⁹ Pirkei d'Rabbi Eliezer, 10.

²⁰ 1Samuel 2:6.

²¹B.Berachot 31b.

²²See J. Sukkah 5:1; Midrash Tehillim 26; Pirkei d'Rabbi Eliezer 33; Yalkut Shimeoni 550.

²³Zohar Hayyei Sarah, 121b.

²⁴ Caruth (1996) notes “the high suicide rate of survivors, for example survivors of Vietnam or of concentration camps, who commit suicide only after they have found themselves completely in safety” (p. 33).

²⁵The possibility that the first half of Jonah takes place in a dream is raised by R. Yosef ibn Caspi (1:1), who reports this as the view of some commentators.

²⁶See Rashi on 7:1; Kohelet Rabba 7:4.

²⁷It is significant that Moses, too, omits Emet when he first cites God's Attributes in his plea for forgiveness after the sin of the Spies (Numbers 14:17–19). His purpose is clearly contrary to Jonah's.

²⁸In Flannery O'Connor's short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” an oversensitivity to the problem of an unintelligible world leads to psychopathic violence. My thanks to Eleanor Ehrenkrantz for this reference.

²⁹See Targum Yonatan: Ha-lechada—“Are you very angry?”

³⁰ Pachad Yitzhak, Rosh Hashana, 5.

³¹See B.Brachot 29b; Mishna Berura 122:5.

³²B.Yoma 53b; B.Brachot 34a.

³³B.Sotah 22a.

³⁴ Netivot Olam, Netiv Ha-Avoda, 5.

³⁵B.Shabbat 10a. See Rashi.

³⁶B.Brachot 34a.