A Tale of Two Prophets

A teacher of mine used to say: Poetry is the art of leaning two words against each other, and then listening in on their conversation. I love this description. And I think it accurately describes the power of poetry. A classic example comes from Homer, who frequently uses the phrase “the wine-dark sea.” Listen to the conversation between those words: we may not have thought of it before, but the sea is indeed as dark as wine – and also is as tempting and as dangerous.

On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we have the opportunity to lean not two words against each other, but rather, two characters from the Hebrew Bible – two characters whose stories are, in many ways, remarkably similar, and in other ways, wildly different. The two characters that we might compare are: on the one hand, Abraham, in the story where he argue with God over the fate of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah – and, on the other hand, Jonah, the protagonist of this afternoon’s haftarah reading, whom we might reasonably call the anti-hero of Yom Kippur.

In both stories, God approaches a Hebrew prophet in order to inform him of God’s plans to destroy a wicked city in which the prophet does not live. For Abraham, although he knows only one person in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah – his estranged nephew, Lot – he nevertheless argues with God over the fate of his neighbors. Jonah, by contrast, seemingly could not care less about the strangers in distant Nineveh. His philosophy seems to be: not my town, not my problem.

But the contrasts do not end here. The two prophets also each have their own theory of justice. When Abraham hears of God’s plan, he asks God to reconsider – arguing that even if there are as few as ten innocent people in the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, God should not follow through with the punishment. Notice that Abraham does not ask God to save the ten innocent people, and meanwhile let all of the rest of the cities’ inhabitants die – but rather to save the entire population on account of the ten innocent people. Abraham seems to believe that righteousness is contagious – that even as few as ten good people can help to restore all of their fellow citizens to goodness.

While Abraham believes that human beings can always improve, Jonah, by contrast, believes that all human errors should be swiftly and thoroughly punished. When the people of Nineveh do at last change their evil ways, and God decides not to destroy the city, it aggrieves Jonah greatly. He complains to God, saying that he knew that God would relent – that this was why Jonah had initially been so reluctant to take up his task. He seems to believe that if punishments are not consistently and predictably enforced, that human beings will have no compelling reason to do the right thing in the first place. We might say that Abraham believes in restorative justice and rehabilitation, while Jonah believes in punitive justice, a platform of law and order.

There are many other striking differences between these two Hebrew prophets – but I will conclude by sharing just one. In the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, it is Abraham who rebukes God, saying: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth act justly?” – while in the story of Nineveh, it is God who rebukes Jonah, saying: “You cared about the plant, which you did not work for. … Should I not care about Nineveh?”

This Yom Kippur, let us hope to be more like Abraham, and less like Jonah – concerned for our neighbors, even when we do not share their fate; believing that righteousness is contagious, that human beings can grow and change; among those who choose to rebuke the world, rather than those whom the world must rebuke.

Let us not be like Jonah, fleeing from his task, asleep in the belly of a cargo ship – as, meanwhile, the seas rage all around us. And as this holiday of Yom Kippur comes to an end, and we hear the final blast of the shofar, may we hear in that sound of the ram’s horn the words of the ship’s captain as he awakens Jonah from his slumber: “How can you be sleeping so soundly? Arise!”

The sea is raging. And only we can make it stop.