Ghosting God, Ghosting Self
Day 78
I am stuck on Jonah for a minute, as you can tell. I want to address a part of Jonah’s character that many of we the people share: wanting someone who is a better human being, who knows the next right action, who speaks truth to power to fail, to “get theirs”, to stop throwing it in our face how low we can go, how small we are, how God wants our return, loves us graciously, and takes us back. This is something that began with Cain and Abel, where jealousy got the better of Cain so badly that he killed his brother, asking “Am I my brother’s keeper?” While that question is not directly answered in the text between Cain and God-he is, after all, only thinking about his consequences, it is implied that We the People are indeed our “brother’s keeper” and it goes on to explicitly tell us this in the Holiness Code.
One of the interesting pieces of the Book of Jonah to me is our lack of understanding how it applies to We the People, how we seem to ignore the myriad of ways our resentments are talked about, the amount of jealousies we harbor and our secret longing to be free of the inner judgements of ourselves, especially when we compare our self, our actions to those of decent people who have no guile, who just mind their own business, who “get ahead” by being moral, ethical and loving, open to TShuvah and doing their own. This makes me think of my Grandfather, Abe Borovitz, who never said a bad, mean word about anyone in his entire life! He wasn’t a monetarily rich man, he fathered no children, adopted one and took in 5 of his wife’s sisters children to raise during the depression. Unlike Jonah, he heard a call within him that he followed, his moral compass was so strong he would not let anyone talk bad about people in his presence, a trait that was not passed down so much. He is the gold standard in our family and maybe that way of being will pass down to my grandson, to my nieces and nephews. It certainly is still not valued in the ‘real world’-just look at how far Trump, et al, have gotten by hating the goodness of another, making fun and fodder of good people, and killing those who are seeking a better life. It is ironic that Trump of all people talks about “illegal” when he is the person who deals illegally with everyone!
When white men would not work for my father in his business because he raised the pay of Black men to be the same as white men for the same work(he was an equal opportunity employer way before it was talked about), my brothers and I were called N____ lovers! In Cleveland, Ohio, on the other side of town from his business-word of fairness, of treating all human beings with dignity travelled fast and, like with Jonah, was looked down upon. Some of the people who went to the Temple we went to, some of the people who were ‘pillars of the community’, participated in this name calling-my father was a poor man, he was a man who loved his family and it was painful for him to see his children being called such disgusting names AND, he explained to me that doing the right thing sometimes has a cost to it and it is a far less cost than doing the wrong thing in order to go along with the ‘status quo’.
My issue with the Book of Jonah is not what it talks about, not what it is showing us, my issue is with:
1) the ways in which it is explained or not explained,
2) the ways in which the Rabbis then and especially now ignore the inconvenient truths spoken about
3) Admiring the prose and not getting lost in the flowery words and the beautiful Hebrew
4) Praising of God’s ability to return and not acknowledging that Nineveh, aka, non-Jews, could hear the call to return and take action to return while the Israelites and the Judeans 20+ years later and up through 70AD, could not!
It is time for We the People to get off our high horses, to stop seeing ourselves as “the chosen people” conferring some special status on us, granting us immunity for our wrong doings. It is time for We the People to take the Book of Jonah seriously and stop HATING THOSE WHO DO GOOD, THOSE WHO ARE NOT WILLING TO FOLLOW THE MAJORITY TO DO EVIL! It is time for We the People to throw Bibi and his thugs, Trump and his thugs out of power, to end their reign of terror upon decent people, end their desecration of the teachings of Jonah, of the Bible, of Christ! It is time for We the People to realize the myriad of spiritual awakenings we have had and continue to have and STOP IGNORING THEM! It is time for We the People to realize the only way to “get ahead” is through being moral, through being decent, through “Return Again” as Reb Shlomo Carlebach sings to us.
ACTION STEP:
Look at the ways you are more like Jonah than you want to admit, admit this truth and return again to being more decent
GOD BLESS, STOP GHOSTING GOD, GHOSTING SELF, Rabbi Mark