A Reader on Reading

The first time I heard the story of Jonah, it was from a great-uncle of mine, who had the disagreeable habit of spitting into his handkerchief when he talked. He had a small claim to Jewish scholarship, which we believed did not go far beyond the few verses he taught us to memorize for our bar mitzvah. But sometimes he could tell a good story, and if you didn’t look too closely at the spittle forming at the corners of his mouth, the experience could be quite entertaining. The story of Jonah came about one day when I was being especially pigheaded, refusing to do something or other I had been asked to do for the one hundredth time. “Just like Jonah,” said my great-uncle, holding his handkerchief to his mouth, spitting heartily, and tucking the handkerchief deep into his pocket. “Always no, no, no. What will you grow up to be? An anarchist?” For my great-uncle, who in spite of the pogroms had always felt a curious admiration for the tsar, there was nothing worse than an anarchist, except perhaps a journalist. He said that journalists were all Peeping Toms and Nosy Parkers, and that if you wanted to find out what was going on in the world you could do so from your friends in the café. Which he did, day in, day out, except, of course, on Shabbat.

The story of Jonah was probably written sometime in the fourth or fifth century B.c. The book of Jonah is one of the shortest in the Bible — and one of the strangest. It tells how the prophet Jonah was summoned by God to go and cry against the city of Nineveh, whose wickedness had reached the ears of Heaven. But Jonah refused because he knew that through his word the Ninevites would repent and God would forgive them, and thus escape the punishment he thought they deserved. To escape the divine order, Jonah jumped on a ship sailing for Tarshish. A furious storm arose, the sailors moaned in despair, and Jonah, somehow understanding that he was the cause of this meteorological turmoil, asked to be thrown into the sea to calm the waves. The sailors obliged, the storm died down, and Jonah was swallowed by a great fish, appointed for this purpose by God Himself. There in the bowels of the fish Jonah remained for three long days and three long nights. On the fourth day, the Lord caused the great fish to vomit the prophet out onto dry land and, once again, the Lord ordered Jonah to go to Nineveh and speak to the people. Resigned to God’s will, this time Jonah obeyed. The king of Nineveh heard the warning, immediately repented, and the city of Nineveh was saved. But Jonah was furious with the Lord and stormed out into the desert to the east of the city, where he set up a sort of booth and sat and waited to see what would become of the repentant Nineveh. The Lord then caused a plant to sprout up and protect Jonah from the sun. Jonah expressed his gratitude for the divine gift but, next morning, the Lord caused the plant to wither. The sun and the wind beat hard on Jonah, and faint with heat he told the Lord that it was better for him to die. Then the Lord spoke to Jonah and said: “You are upset because I killed a simple plant and yet you wished me to destroy all the people of Nineveh. Should I have spared a plant but not spared these people ‘who do not know their right hand from their left,’ and also much cattle?” With this unanswered question, the book of Jonah ends.

I am fascinated by the reason for Jonah’s refusal to prophesy in Nineveh. The idea that Jonah would keep away from performing his divinely inspired piece because he knew his audience would repent and be therefore forgiven must seem incomprehensible to anyone except an artist. Jonah knew that Ninevite society dealt in one of two ways with its artists: either it saw the accusation in an artist’s work and blamed the artist for the evils of which the society stood accused or it assimilated the artist’s work because, valued in dinars and nicely framed, the art could serve as a pleasant decoration. In such circumstances, Jonah knew, no artist can win.