Spending Yom Kippur in the belly of a fish
Photograph by David Baker via Unsplash
Jonah Mac Gelfand
Although my parents gave all their sons Torah names, my brothers Zachary and Samson and I never read the stories of our namesakes growing up. Sure, we knew the general gist of their narratives, but we never actually tried to understand our nominal heritage. Ironically, it wasn’t until a Baptist-turned-Hare-Krishna who was surprised I didn’t catch her Jonah reference urged me to “go read [my] story,” that I finally cracked open the pages and read it.
And what I found has slowly grown to be one of my favorite books of the Bible.
The Book of Jonah is a short four chapters that detail the life of the prophet Jonah, son of Ammitai, and is read every year on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur (“Day of Atonement”). But before we can understand Jonah, we must understand the holiday on which the rabbis decided to read it.
Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the Jewish calendar on which we fast and repent for a year’s worth of ways we might have missed the mark. Having spent the previous ten days since Rosh Hashanah (“The New Year”) repenting, we get the final chance to ensure our names end up in the Heavenly Book of Life for the following year. As the liturgy says, “on Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed.”
The Torah describes this day of “self-denial” as a Shabbat Shabbaton, a Sabbath of Sabbaths; a day of complete rest (JPS, Leviticus 23:32). On this day we are commanded to not only refrain from work — as we are on a normal Shabbat — but also from one of the most central human activities: eating. By putting aside our human needs on this day, we can focus entirely on teshuvah — a word often translated as “repentance,” but which more literally means “return.”
What is teshuvah? The medieval rabbinic giant Maimonides explains in the Mishneh Torah that while the Jerusalem Temple stood, people could atone for their sins through the biblically prescribed atonement sacrifices. But since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE by the Romans, “there remains nothing else besides teshuvah.” He goes on to teach that someone who has reached “complete teshuvah” refers to one who “confronts the same situation in which they previously sinned…and, nevertheless abstain[s] and do[es] not commit it [again].” Therefore, teshuvah refers not only to the psychosocial process of noticing where we have gone astray and making amends to those whom we have harmed, but also committing to not making the same mistakes going forward.
But what does any of this have to do with my namesake? Well, the more time I spent with the Book of Jonah, the more I saw how its teachings map onto the themes of Yom Kippur.
In short, the arc of the Book of Jonah depicts our titular character receiving a call from the Divine to prophesize the demise of the wicked city of Nineveh. Instead, he immediately flees by boat in the opposite direction. While Jonah is aboard, God sends a storm which threatens to destroy the ship. Jonah tells the frightened sailors that it is his fault, and they should throw him overboard. Eventually they concede, toss him into the raging sea, and Jonah is swallowed by a huge fish as the storm dies down. After three days and three nights, he calls out to the Divine from its belly. He is spit out onto dry land and again receives the call to go to Nineveh. This time he listens; the wicked residents of Nineveh immediately see the folly of their ways and repent, which ironically causes Jonah much displeasure.
When we feel “swallowed” by grief or shame, it is precisely from that place that redemption begins. It is from the dark belly of the fish that we must cry out. And if our call is sincere, Jonah reminds us, G-d will answer. We will be spit back out onto dry land.
So what does this strange tale have to do with Yom Kippur?
At first glance, the connection to teshuvah seems simple: Jonah initially runs away from his responsibilities, but eventually returns to play out his Divinely-ordained role. But is this simply a carrot-and-stick lesson — that if you don’t concede, then you will be punished with waves crashing over your deck? Are we therefore meant to spend each Yom Kippur cowering in terror of G-d’s wrath?
Or, alternatively, is there something more subtle — more spiritual — happening under the surface of this stormy sea?
The 16th-century mystic Rabbi Moshe Alsich unequivocally says yes. He beautifully teaches that the character of Jonah can be read as an allusion to the human soul, and the strange narrative of this short book details its descent from Heaven into our lower world of illusory desires — which pull our attention away from the Divine — and its subsequent process of returning to its Source.
To prove this, he goes verse by verse and shows how it can mystically be understood to be referring to the soul. For example, using classical rabbinic hermeneutics, he points out that the city name “Nineveh” is derived from the word neveh (“habitation”), and the repetition of the ‘n’ sound points towards two different habitations. Therefore, he rereads the call to “go to Nineveh" (Jonah 1:2) as the Divine telling the soul to “go down to My two temporary habitations,” which Rabbi Alsich explains to be the human body in particular, and the lower world in general.[i]
With this mystical framing, the entire Biblical narrative is restructured as a conversation between our inner souls (which are, in truth, a piece of the Divine) and the Godhead from which they are hewn. The Book of Jonah is thus re-understood as the imperfect longing of a soul to reconnect with its Divine counterpart.
And this is also the deeper meaning of the teshuvah we engage with on Yom Kippur. Rather than spending the day solely in terror of God’s potential punishment for our misdeeds, we read the Book of Jonah to remind us that first, on a simple level, even if we screw up like Jonah, we can still make amends, and second, on a mystical level, the path is always open for our soul to reconnect with its Source.
Perhaps Jonah’s most powerful teaching, then, is this: even — and perhaps most poignantly — when we feel “swallowed” by grief or shame, it is precisely from that place that redemption begins. It is from the dark belly of the fish that we must cry out. And if our call is sincere, Jonah reminds us, G-d will answer. We will be spit back out onto dry land.
But that doesn’t mean the Divine takes away the difficulty: They just give us the opportunity to save ourselves. After we have been spit out, we must then do the work to change our ways and “go to Nineveh.”
Jonah Mac Gelfand (he/him) is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Boston. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Gashmius Magazine, which publishes progressive neo-Hasidic art, poetry, and writing. Before starting rabbinical school, he got his MA in Jewish Studies from the Graduate Theological Union, where his research focused on neo-Hasidic leadership, and his writing has been published in both popular and academic journals.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily those of American Baptist Home Mission Societies.
[i] Voyage of the Visionary: The Commentary of Rabbi Moshe Alshich on the Book of Jonah, trans. Ravi Shahar (Spring Valley, NY: Philip Feldheim Inc., 1992), 80.
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