Robert Alter - Israel At War - Yom Kippur of October 7th 2024 - Book of Jonah: "And Shall I Not Have Pity"? - Pity for the World vs Pity for Israel and the Jews? - Shall Jews Have Pity for Each Other vs Sinat Chinam? - Learning Dor L'Dor, By Generations, Jews Pass Along The Bible: Sefaria's Digital Sources and Animations

"And the LORD said, "You—you had pity over the qiqayon, for which you did not toil and which you did not grow, which overnight came and overnight was gone. And I, shall I not have pity for Nineveh the great city, in which there are many more than one hundred twenty thousand human beings who do not know between their right hand and their left, and many beasts?" - Book of Jonah 4:10-11

"God exercises magisterial control over storm winds, fish, livestock, and plants, as well as over human beings of all tribes and nations, and He asks the recalcitrant prophet why he should "have pity" for an ephemeral plant but not for a vast city of clueless human beings and their beasts." - Robert Alter - Introduction to Jonah, The Hebrew Bible

"Ultimately the Book of Jonah - the prophet who brought repentance to an alien nation - charges us to atone for our sins and realize our responsibilities to the larger family of man, as well as to ourselves." - Rabbi Soloveitchik, Art Scroll Machzor

"The choice of the verb "pity" is pointedly not quite appropriate. Jonah not does pity the plant for withering; rather, he is furious that he has been stripped of its vitally necessary shade. His "pity" ... is by no means disinterested, whereas God's pity for all the living creatures of Nineveh flows from His compassion." - Robert Alter, Note on last verse of Book of Jonah

"He definitely cheated himself by taking away the opportunity to go through the process of Repair." - Animation 'Repair' (Theme Apology) - Jewish Food for Thought - The Animated Series by Hanan Harchol - On Sefaria Education Collection - Digital Learning

[MS: Sometimes all we can do is try to parse out the questions and try to face them - no matter how contradictory they may be.

Our Traditions and foundational texts - like the Book of Jonah - present contradictions, without sugar coating, straw men or feel good answers. Life is too fraught for that.

Our history shows that we must live under terrible conditions with frightening choices, facing them head-on, like now Yom Kippur, October 7, 2024

Yet Tradition urges each generation to face them and not flinch. Why? If there are never final answers, then what is the point? The point is we must help the next generation of Jews thrive - in new ways - and help them overcome the Amaleck-enemies that arise to destroy us.

If Jonah must forgive Nineveh, surely all Jews must forgive our Jewish Nation for the terrible mistakes that left us open to carnage and war, and even to hating Israel or Zionism.

Can we overcome the evils of Sinat Chinam? This moral imperative is what I will be thinking about reading the Book of Jonah on Yom Kippur October 2024.]

/-/-/-/-/-/-

/-/-/-/-/

[MS: Robert Alter has created for coming generations a new way of seeing through to the plain meaning of the texts to explore all of its messages, for religious or not so much, for believers and the skeptics too, like the English with Shakespeare. See these themes in Sefaria's Robert Alter Collection MS Sheets.]

"All this has led scholars to scramble for labels to describe Jonah. It has been called everything from a Menippean satire to an allegory, but none of these identifications of Jonah is entirely convincing ... Jonah [is] ad hoc innovative narrative. It aims to recast traditional Israelite notions of prophecy in a radically universalist frame-work. The prophets of Israel all work in an emphatically national context

Their messages are addressed to the people of Israel, often with explicitly political concerns, and the messages are manifestly directed to the fate of the nation- its imminent destruction by foreign powers if it fails to mend its evil ways, the fulfilment of its hope for national restoration after the disaster has occurred.

The medium of the prophets is generally poetry, where all the powerful expressive resources of the Hebrew language could be summoned to convey the prophetic vision to the people. This may be one reason that Jonah is accorded no verbal prophetic message, only that single brief prediction of catastrophe which, if one is supposed to think of such considerations, he would have spoken not in Hebrew but in Akkadian.

Jonah engages with no Israelites in the story. First he has an exchange with the polytheistic mariners, then he addresses the Ninevites, and his closest connection is with two presumably insensate living things, a very large fish and a leafy plant.

The God with whom he has such difficulties because of his Israelite nationalist mind-set is not chiefly the God of Israel but the God of the whole world, of all creatures large and small. He is not a God you can pin down to national settings. Although He initially addresses Jonah somewhere within the land of Israel —perhaps even in Jerusalem, where the Temple, evoked in chapter 2, stands— His fullest dialogue with Jonah is on a promontory overlooking Nineveh.

While He does rebuke Jonah as the God of earlier Hebrew narratives and poems rebukes wayward people, the rebuke itself is oddly formulated, in keeping with the wonderful strangeness of this book. God exercises magisterial control over storm winds, fish, livestock, and plants, as well as over human beings of all tribes and nations, and He asks the recalcitrant prophet why he should "have pity" for an ephemeral plant but not for a vast city of clueless human beings and their beasts.

It is beautifully appropriate that the story ends with the beasts, and with a question. It is in no way clear how Jonah will respond to this question. Will God's challenge lead him to a transformative insight about God's dominion over all things and all peoples, or will it prove to be a challenge that is quite beyond the myopia of his ingrained prejudices? The trembling balance of this concluding ambiguity perfectly focuses the achievement of the Book of Jonah both as an enchanting story and as the shaking up of an entire theological world."

Chapter 4 - Notes

1. "very evil for Noah" - Various tanslations seek to to reconcile this clause with English idiomatic usage by representing Jonah here as "dejected," "depressed," or "displeased." But the repetition of the term raah, "evil," is important for the writer's purpose. When the Ninevites decide to turn away from evil, their very repentance so upsets Jonah that it becomes, ironically, an evil—which is to say, a bitter vexation for him.

2. hasten. The basic meaning of the Hebrew gidem is to anticipate something by acting before it can happen. ... there is an interplay between this term and migedem, "to the east of," in verse 5 as well as with the "east wind," ruah gadim, in verse 8.

These words are a direct quotation of Exodus 34:6. One may infer that by the late moment of the writing of Jonah, the Torah was already canonical and these words were familiar as a kind of doxology. Jonah, knowing God's compassionate nature from such an authoritative text, did not want to undertake the prophetic mission because he did not want to be an instrument in saving Israel's hated archenemies from destruction. At this late point in the story, he remains an unreconstructed Israelite nationalist, in contradiction to the universalist outlook of the book.

3. take my life. Facing the galling fact that he has enabled the despised Ninevites to survive, which was God's intention all along but not his, Jonah does not want to go on living. This becomes the story of a prophetic mission that is a great success (unlike those of the historical prophets), with the success being intolerable to the prophet.

4. Are you good and angry? God's response in this first exchange with Jonah is scarcely a response, only a provocation that leaves Jonah simmering.

5. till he might see what would happen in the city. Jonah hopes that either the Ninevites will yet abandon their repentance and suffer cataclysmic destruction, with him as a privileged spectator, or he will be confirmed in what he must see as God's perverse compassion as he watches Nineveh prosper. Jonah must be situated on a hilltop or promontory, so he has gone up after the repeated and emphatic going-downs. The verb "to go up" will be repeated in this episode, but it is not attached to Jonah.

6. Qiqayon plant. The term appears only in this passage. The King James Version render this as "gourd," which is as good as anybody's guess; however, since the plant has not been confidently identified, it seems prudent to preserve the esrew name in the translation.

Why does Jonah need the gigayon if he has already set up a shelter to give him shade? The most reasonable explanation is that the shelter assembled no doubt from the materials he could scrape together from what was on hand, provided rather imperfect shade whereas the gigayon, miraculously sprung up overnight, offered luxuriant foliage.

7. God set out. God in this story repeatedly assigns elements of nature to do is bidings alternately protecting and destroying.

8. slashing. The adjective harishit occurs only here. Because it appears to recall the verb heherish, "to be silent," one understanding, which becomes ensconced in later literary Hebrew, is that it means "silent" here. But that scarcely accords with the present context because the wind-the hot wind called the hamsin that blows from the eastern desert- has an obviously devastating effect. The translation guesses, picking up a cue from some of the medieval Hebrew exegetes, that the adjective is related to the verb harash, "to plow" and perhaps by extension "to shear or cut through something."

the sun struck Jonah's head. What happened to the shade of the shelter? Sasson plausibly suggests that the shelter was swept away by the powerful east wind.

9. Are you good and angry over the gigayon? God repeats the words he spoke in the earlier exchange, adding "over the giqayon."

Jonah bounces back to God the provoking words He has just spoken, adding, in a pattern of incremental repetition, “to the point of death.”

10. You- you had pity for the gigayon. God points an emphatic vocative finger at Jonah. by using the second-person singular pronoun, normally not required in front of the conjugated verb. With similar pronominal emphasis, He contrasts "I shall I not" at the beginning of the next verse. The choice of the verb "pity" is pointedly not quite appropriate Jonah not does pity the plant for withering; rather, he is furious that he has been stripped ofits vitally necessary shade. His "pity" for the gigayon is by no means disinterested, whereas God's pity for all the living creatures of Nineveh flows from His compassion.

/-/-/-/-/-/

Finally, Rabbi Soloveitchik suggests that Jonah provides an important balance to the prayers we have been reciting throughout Yom Kippur. Our prayers have been almost exclusively nationalistic, focusing on the Jewish people. .... In every Selichos service we sing: "For we are Your people and You are our God." These prayers highlight our separateness and our uniqueness from the rest of the world, as the Torah teaches,Behold itis a nation tht will dwell in solitude." (Numbers 23:9), meaning that Israel must remain separate and distinct from the nations in order to accomplish its mission. ...

However, regarding our ultimate purpose and mission as a people, our goals and aspirations are universal. Thus, we conclude every prayer service with Aleinu, which ends, "Hashem will be King over the world; on that day Hashem will be One and His Name will be One."

Thus, as the sun is about to set on Yom Kippur after twenty-four hours in which we focused on the spiritual needs of the Jewish people, we are reminded that all humanity are children of Hashem, and we are being charged to serve as a ... light unto the nations (Isaiah 42:6).

Our interaction with the rest of society and the nations of man in the workplace enables us to project the beauty of a Torah lifestyle, and to effect a Kiddush Hashem, a daily sanctification of His Name.

Ultimately the Book of Jonah - the prophet who brought repentance to an alien nation - charges us to atone for our sins and realize our responsibilities to the larger family of man, as well as to ourselves.

/-/-/-/-/-/

[MS: On this Yom Kippur 2024, a terrible year since October 7th 2023, I see generations coming with lessons learned from it.

There may be the greatness in the next generation - its energy and sense of purpose and not despair. Our historic task is to support them.

As much as the ugly past of Jew hating and war seems to never fully vanish from the Earth, Jews continue to learn and to innovate for more and better learning. This is part of our faith, our Tradition and our pride.

Robert Alter's lifetime of work is a major contribution to that resurgence. Below are some links and notes about this resurgence. We shall prevail.]

Video from Rabbi Sacks: https://rabbisacks.org/videos/time-animated-video/

National Library of Israel - Link here - Digital global Learning

Tari Kipnis was born near the sea and sailed around the world – only to settle in Kibbutz Be'eri with his beloved Lilach. He lived and breathed art and never stopped looking for ways to create it. When he was stricken with a chronic neurological disease, he began to paint. On October 7, he was murdered with his wife and his caretaker Paul – but he left behind breathtaking paintings, including those which tell the story of the Gaza border region.

Tari Kipnis was born near the sea and sailed around the world – only to settle in Kibbutz Be'eri with his beloved Lilach. He lived and breathed art and never stopped looking for ways to create it. When he was stricken with a chronic neurological disease, he began to paint. On October 7, he was murdered with his wife and his caretaker Paul – but he left behind breathtaking paintings, including those which tell the story of the Gaza border region.

Yom Kippur 2024