Is Jonah Really a Story of Repentance? 

Repentance: It’s the entire focus of this time of year. So it seems to make sense that on Yom Kippur afternoon we read the Book of Jonah, a story about getting people to repent. Except that there’s something very strange here: Jonah, the main character, doesn’t actually repent. He runs away from God’s commands and never says he’s sorry.

The story of Jonah in a nutshell

Think about it: God sends Jonah on a mission, but instead he gets on a boat going somewhere else and ends up being swallowed by a fish. After the fish spits him out, Jonah finally goes to Nineveh, the way God told him to in the first place, and prophesies that the city will be overturned. The people of Nineveh repent, and God spares them. So yes, there’s repentance in this story. But is that really what this book is about? After all, it’s not called “the book of the people of Nineveh”! Jonah is the main character, the one whose journey we follow. And we don’t see Jonah repenting. He starts out disobeying God’s orders, and he’s still letting God know how angry he is in the last chapter.

What is the Book of Jonah trying to teach us? 

So that leaves us with two questions: If it’s not about teshuvah, repentance, then what could this book be trying to teach us? And if Jonah isn’t about repentance, then how did it become one of the readings for the Yamim Noraim?

Repentance and the problem of evil

The answer to those questions lies in the language clues the story gives us. Those clues point us to something we may not have realized about Jonah. If we read the verses carefully, we can see that Jonah is deeply troubled by the problem of evil in the world. Jonah doesn’t run away from God just because he’s lazy. He resists God’s commands because he has questions about Divine justice. Questions about how God can forgive evildoers, even if they repent. After all, they still did tremendous harm in the world! Where’s the justice for their victims, if God forgives their crimes?

Justice and mercy

The Book of Jonah offers a response to these burning questions, if we read it carefully enough. A lesson about the meaning of justice and mercy. It’s the meaning that Jonah was seeking when he ran away from God. And it explains why this book is so important for us to read on Yom Kippur. Rabbi Fohrman takes us through all these insights in the course linked below.

Intrigued by this take on the Jonah story? Find the complete course below.