On Jonah – Yom Kippur 5787
Delivered by Grace Harris at the youth-led service
In the Book of Jonah, conflict is central, what interests me most is not the conflict between Jonah and Nineveh. It is the conflict between Jonah’s understanding of justice versus God’s.
Jonah does not hate Nineveh for no reason. He knows what Nineveh represents. He believes that people who have caused immense harm should face consequences. So when the people of Nineveh repent and God chooses not to destroy them, Jonah is not relieved. He is furious. He would rather die than accept that the people he believed deserved punishment have been given another chance.
That reaction is difficult to dismiss because there are things people do that demand consequences. Repentance does not undo what happened. Forgiveness does not make someone innocent. A person can genuinely change and still have caused damage that cannot be repaired.But there is definetly a difference between wanting justice and wanting suffering.
That distinction becomes much harder when the person who has caused the harm is someone we feel no obligation to sympathise with. It is easy to believe that punishment is justice when we are certain that someone is guilty. We can become less interested in accountability than in seeing the person suffer enough to make the punishment feel proportionate to what they have done.
We see this in the justice system. There are crimes for which punishment is necessary: to protect people, to acknowledge the victim, and to establish responsibility. But there is also something deeply human in the desire for punishment to hurt. We sometimes want a sentence not only because it is necessary, but because we want the person who caused suffering to experience suffering themselves.
I recognise that instinct personally. I often feel like forgiveness becomes less like moral courage and more like being asked to accept an injustice. There can be something almost comforting about believing that eventually the other person will get what they deserve. Their punishment becomes evidence that what happened to us mattered.
Jonah is caught in exactly that kind of thinking. He is not struggling to understand that Nineveh has done wrong. He is struggling with the possibility that wrongdoing might not be the final thing that defines a person.
God then gives Jonah a plant, which grows over him and gives him shade, God kills the plant the next day. Jonah is devastated by its loss. God uses the plant to rebuke Jonah’s argument, how can he care so much about the death of a plant while finding it almost impossible to care about the lives of people he believes deserve destruction.
The plant and Nineveh are obviously not morally equivalent. That is not the point. The point is that Jonah’s compassion has become conditional. He can feel loss when it belongs to him. He finds it much harder to recognise the humanity of people he has already decided are beyond compassion. Which is super relevant to the world today.
There are Israelis and jewish people who have suffered the murder, kidnapping and terror of October 7th. There are people in Gaza who have lost parents, children, homes and entire communities. None of that suffering cancels out the other. Recognising the humanity of one group does not require denying the humanity of another.
But in a conflict this painful, it can become very difficult to say that. People can begin to treat compassion as a political position. If I acknowledge their suffering, am I betraying mine? If I mourn their dead, am I excusing what was done to us? If I believe that someone who has committed terrible violence can change, am I somehow asking the victim to forget what happened?
the book of jonah does not give us an easy answer to those questions. And I don’t think we are ever asked to abandon the idea of accountability. If anything I think we are encouraged to resist the idea that another person’s humanity ends where our anger begins.
In Yalkut Shimoni, the rabbis imagine asking different sources of authority what should happen to a sinner. Wisdom points towards punishment. Prophecy towards death. Torah towards atonement. But when God is asked, the answer is that the sinner should repent and find atonement.
I don’t read this as saying that wrongdoing does not matter. It is almost the opposite. Teshuvah matters precisely because the wrongdoing matters. If nothing had happened, there would be nothing to repent for.
There is a similar idea in Bereishit Rabbah, in the Midrash about Cain. After murdering Abel, Cain encounters Adam and tells him that he has repented and reached a settlement with God. Adam is astonished by the possibility of repentance. The Midrash introduces the possibility: that
someone can do something terrible without being condemned to remain exactly the person who did it.
And I think it is one of the hardest things to believe about other people. It is much easier to divide the world into people who deserve our sympathy and people who do not. It is easier to believe that some people are simply bad, and that justice means making them pay.
But people are not only the worst thing they have done.
That does not mean every act can be repaired. It does not mean every victim has to forgive. It does not mean every person who repents should be trusted again. Sometimes justice has to involve punishment, distance, protection, and consequences that cannot be avoided.
But justice should not end there.
God’s final question to Jonah is about the people of Nineveh: thousands of human beings whom Jonah has reduced to the thing they have done, or the threat they represent. God asks whether Jonah can really feel nothing for them.
And the book ends before Jonah answers, and we are not told whether Jonah changes his mind.
When I think about justice, I don’t want to lose sight of the people who have been harmed. Their suffering deserves to be recognised, and wrongdoing deserves consequences. But I also don’t want justice to become another word for revenge. I dont want retribution to overpower reconciliation.
There is a difference between saying, “What happened was wrong, and someone must be held accountable,” and saying, “I need them to suffer because otherwise my suffering will never feel acknowledged.”
Because if justice is only about making someone suffer, then there is no point at which it is enough. But justice that includes accountability, protection, repentance, and the possibility of change is much harder because It asks us to believe that what someone has done can be terrible without believing that it is all they can ever be.
Thank you for listening and Gmar Tov
