Prayer

Rabbi Edward Feinstein, on The Book of Jonah

Jonah inverts God’s world. Death becomes life. Curse becomes blessing. The attributes of God—reverently celebrated in the Torah, and recited again and again on these holidays, Adonai, Adonai—El rachum v’hanun (God—compassionate, kind, forgiving), the attributes of God’s love—are derisively and sarcastically dismissed. They are rejected. He’d rather die than live in a world governed by a loving God.

God is astonished and asks him, “Are you so angry?” The Hebrew is more powerful. “Haheiteiv charah lach—Is your anger so dear to you?” Heiteiv comes from tov. Literally, the question is: Has anger become your goodness? Has hate displaced the good in you?…

The book ends with God’s frustration, God’s distress. It ends with God’s question. But it isn’t God’s question to Jonah anymore. It is God’s question to us. Why can’t you love?

The question isn’t asked out of rage, or disapproval. It is asked in tears, in divine tears of sadness—when God looks into the world and sees what we do to one another.

William Taber, from Four Doors to Meeting for Worship

“Another kind of new perception in the Light is that a person may be led to explore old memories in a dramatically new way, seeing the protecting, guiding hand of God in what seemed an unconnected chain of circumstances, disappointments, disasters, relationships, and small successes. In a similar way, this special state of consciousness sometimes opens up a whole new understanding of cause and effect, or, we might say, it develops and reinforces a whole new range of spiritual common sense. The cumulative effect of these new perceptions is to bring a profound but subtle change in the way we relate to ourselves, to other people, animals, and all created things. Thus, the ultimate test of our response to the Inward Work of Christ lies not in the way we feel during the meeting for worship, but in the way we relate afterward to our fellow humans and to all things in God’s Creation.”