Why is God at all interested in forgiving? In the Haftorah portion we traditionally read on Yom Kippur -- the section from the prophets that goes along with the Torah portion -- we learn an answer to this question on two levels: the individual and the communal. I want on this holy day to retell this story in a way that focuses on the question of why human repentance might be so important for divine forgiveness.
The basic story is pretty familiar. This guy named Jonah receives an order from God: "Go to the great city of Nineveh, go now and denounce it, for its wickedness stares me in the face." It seems in the traditions of the prophets, this was a pretty common thing, that guys like Jonah would be instructed to inform a city of its failings and impending doom. Jonah knows this is a thankless task, so he tries to do what any of us would do if God asked us to do something extremely unpleasant: run away!
Jonah tries to escape his duty by hopping on a ship to Tarshish. But there is no escape; God lets loose a terrible hurricane, and in order to save the lives of all the sailors, Jonah tells them, "Take me and throw me overboard and the sea will go down. I know it is my fault that this great storm has struck you." In desperation, they toss him overboard, and the storm abates.
Meanwhile, presumably because Jonah has recognized the futility of his disobedience, God has a great fish swallow Jonah. For three days and three nights Jonah iss in the belly of the fish, where he had an opportunity to reconsider his behavior. As the famous Gershwin song puts it:
Ol' Jonah, he lived in the whaleHis narrow escape from death, his regret at the thought that he was banished from the sight of God and might never see the holy temple again, and his miraculous rescue by the great fish all restore Jonah's determination to obey; he returns to God and his sense of mission -- he repents. So, when the fish spews Jonah out on dry land and the word of God comes to him again to go and denounce Nineveh, he obeys immediately.
Yes, Jonah, he lived in the whale
The man made his home in
A fish's abdomen
Ol' Jonah, he lived in the whale!
Now we have the communal part. Jonah denounces Nineveh, and the people actually listen to him and believe the word of God. Everyone in Nineveh, from the King and his nobles to the ordinary people and even the beasts and herds and flocks, participates in a public fast, and wears sackcloth and ashes, and abandons the wickedness that had offended God. In short, they all return to proper practices and consciousness -- they all repent. God sees this and decides not to destroy them.
Jonah doesn't take this at all well. He says to God: "I hate to say 'I told you so,' but this is what I feared when I was in my own country, and to forestall it I tried to escape to Tarshish; I knew that thou art a god gracious and compassionate, long-suffering and ever constant, and always willing to repent of disaster, and I knew if you forgave the repentant people of Nineveh I would be the laughingstock of the city. I'd be better off dead." (Perhaps Jonah's experience with the storm and the fish made him repent of his disobedience, but it did not make him give up his pride.)
But rather than repeat the drama of the storm and the fish, God teaches Jonah a second time about the preciousness of a people who repent, and the power of forgiveness, with a much more subtle experience. The angry Jonah stomps out of Nineveh and goes to sit on a hillside. God causes a vine to grow overnight to shelter Jonah, for which he is grateful the whole next day (it's a very hot and sunny and windy spot). The next night, though, God sends a worm that makes the vine wither, and Jonah is exposed and angry again; he again says, "I should be better dead than alive."
At Jonah's complaint, God says, "Are you so angry over the vine? You are sorry for the vine, though you did not have the trouble of growing it, a plant which came up in a night and withered in a night. And should I not be sorry for the great city of Nineveh?"
This is the most mystifying part of the portion, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it means, and why the story ends with this funny little episode of a dead vine. But I think it has something to do with this: God's desire to forgive the repentant -- whether it is Jonah or the entire city of Nineveh -- comes from a deep compassion for humanity, a compassion based in a desire for a real relationship. After all, God created human beings for the express purpose of joining in the never-ending work of sanctifying the world -- lonely work, the creation; impossible work, the sanctification, without aware human beings.
The straying inattention of any people is the obstacle to that joint divine/human project of sanctification, and God threatens destruction so people will pay attention, choose repentance, right action, choose life. That is the only way divine forgiveness can be manifest in the world, God can cherish the creation, and God and people in partnership can create holiness through the wise choices of repentance and forgiveness.
God has the last word in this story, not Jonah, and my last word is simply that we can have faith in forgiveness if we sincerely repent and if we realize that God needs us to help make goodness happen in the world, and would be terribly sorry if we did not take every opportunity for learning and awareness. This Holy Day is our opportunity to cast our transgressions into the water (just as Jonah was cast into the water) and to come out of our time of contemplation ready to seek forgiveness (just as Jonah learned to pray in the belly of the great fish). Perhaps the point of this closing part of the Days of Awe is to present ourselves as precious to God and open to the importance of our part in the holy relationship. And perhaps the key to the Day of Atonement is to offer repentance and accept forgiveness as the basis of a humble, active, continuous, sanctifying relationship with the Source of Goodness. At least, that is my offering to you.