1.
Should we talk about these terrible times, about the horror of the Jewish street attacking Jews, about the destruction of statism, and about how rules and boundaries are being broken in almost every field of our lives? Public discourse is saturated with such talk to the point of nausea. On a personal level, I feel I should not drag us further into this mire. We will have plenty of time after the holidays to go on arguing. But now, Jewish time urges us to withdraw into ourselves, both our individual and collective selves, to leave behind our ugly reality, to rise above our petty desire to settle scores in the present and look fearlessly to eternity.
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Yom Kippur is upon us. It is an opportunity to return to the root, to heal our spirit, and to prepare it for the new year. Atonement is the kapporet, the cover on the Ark of the Covenant, meaning it is a cover for our errors. But in order to reach atonement, we are commanded to lift the veil and confess, to face up to our weaknesses and falsities, to our internal insurrections – large and small, to the chasm between what we are and what we would like to be. We must observe and contemplate ourselves courageously; we must not be afraid, we must examine our successes and failures over the course of the year and look at our moments of grace and judgment. Don't worry, it will pay off.
2.
For what is sin if not taking the wrong direction (sin in Hebrew is "chet", which derives from "hachta'ah", meaning missing the direction), refusing to hear the inner voice calling to us? "Our Father, our King, we have sinned before You, have mercy on us": We have gone astray of the goal, we have forgotten ourselves, and therefore we ask for your mercy. Mercy is the womb (womb in Hebrew is "rechem", connected to "rachamim", i.e. mercy) into which we seek to be gathered into and where we can renew our powers, and then be born again.
Video: Herzog speaks on the clashes during Yom Kippur / Credit: President's residence
The Yoma tractate, which deals with the Yom Kippur service, ends with the words of the greatest of the Tannaim, Rabbi Akiva (who lived in the first half of the second century CE): "How fortunate are you, Israel; before Whom are you purified, and Who purifies you? It is your Father in Heaven, as it is stated: 'And I will sprinkle purifying water upon you, and you shall be purified' (Ezekiel 36:25). And it says: 'The ritual bath ("mikveh") of Israel is God' (Jeremiah 17:13). Just as a ritual bath purifies the impure, so too, the Holy One, Blessed be He, purifies Israel.'" And what is a mikveh if not the womb that contains mercy? Just as immersion in a mikveh purifies involuntarily, passing through the time tunnel of Yom Kippur purifies all of us, those who participate in public fast and those who exempt themselves. For Yom Kippur it is not only a personal religious day of atonement, but a national day of atonement. The entire nation is purified.
3.
At the height of the day, the Minchah, afternoon prayer cites the Book of Jonah. In the third chapter, we read about repentance from the ways of evil and of the evil-doing that characterized the life of the inhabitants of Nineveh. They fast and cover themselves with sackcloth and call out to God, "Who knows but that God may turn and relent? God may turn back from wrathfulness so that we do not perish. God saw what they did, how they were turning back from their evil ways. And God renounced the punishment that had been planned for them, and did not carry it out." On the face of it, this is the reason why the story of Jonah is read on Yom Kippur.
Nevertheless, let us look at the beginning of the story: God calls Jonah and entrusts him with a mission ("Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me"), but he refuses to listen and runs away. Escape is the main theme. Sometimes we have to run away, far from home, from family, from homeland, far from ourselves, because we don't believe that this is the right voice for us. Jonah flees from the mountains to the lowlands and from there he takes to the seas. "Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord; and he went down to Jaffa, and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish..." The descent is emphasized twice and hints the decline.
And again, it is precisely in the process of escape that he finds (reinvents) himself. The sea represents the hidden part of our personality, the unconscious, the realm of dreams, of repression, and of missing out. Repression is not necessarily of forbidden things that we wanted and hid, but of the directions, we knew were right but removed below the threshold of consciousness because of the pressures of society and work, because of life. It is the inner voice of the authentic self that resides deep within us, it is the voice that we ignore. It is there that Jonah fled to. "Where can I escape from Your spirit? Where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there; if I descend to Sheol (the abode of the dead), You are there too." Thus the Psalmist describes the flight from ourselves, which ends up as a failed effort to abandon the nigun (the song of the soul) that comes back to us and will bring us back to ourselves. This is how Nathan Alterman begins his great poetic project: "The melody (nigun) whom you abandoned in vanity, comes back." He tries to flee his vocation as a poet, but it is stronger than him: "To avail I shall besiege you with a wall, to avail I shall erect doors!" and thus "forever I shall play your melody."
4.
Jonah, too, cannot escape the voice that calls him. As he flees, on the high seas, a storm endangers his life. Man runs away and his life swirls and becomes groggy and delirious. At first, he denies the reason: "But the Lord hurled a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the sea so that the ship was like to be broken." So, what does Jonah do? "But Jonah was gone down into the innermost parts of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep." Interestingly, perhaps unconsciously, Jonah goes deeper inside himself: he sleeps (and dreams) in the belly of a ship rocking in the sea: a womb (sleep) inside another womb (a belly of a ship) inside yet another womb (the sea). And still, it is not enough. He asks to be thrown into the depths of the sea: "Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you; for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you." It is a suicidal request! Has he given up hope in the face of his mental distress?
It is precisely then that salvation arrives. Jonah is swallowed in the stomach of a great fish (a fourth womb). Only here does he encounter his God, that is, the deep self of his personality. Then he prays: He asks to return home and promises to accept his destiny, to hear the inner voice calling to him. How many changes and challenges must a man go through from the time he flees to the moment of his long-awaited rebirth? "And the Lord spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land." Returning home, to ourselves, is not easy. The moment of discovery could be sometimes a violent moment, described as vomiting. Man is cast out against his will, until he finds himself standing on his own shores, kneeling on the shore of forgiveness, to hear the silenced voice.
5.
The 19th-century Italian writer Carlo Collodi turned the story of Jonah into the story of Pinocchio, a wooden doll, fleeing from his carpenter father who created it. His escape also creates a tempest. So as to ignore the father's call, Pinocchio follows various temptations that divert him from his path and bring him to the point of forgetting himself. The climax of his flight takes place on stormy seas. Like Jonah, he is swallowed into the belly of a large fish, and it is there of all places that, to his surprise, he meets his father, who has gone in search of him. In Collodi's story, Pinocchio rescues his father from the belly of a fish, which teaches that sometimes God also needs man to rescue Him from his state of concealment and to reveal Him, or in the language of Kabbalah: in order to cause an "awakening from above" (in heaven), man, down below, must first awaken himself ("awakening from below"). Only when Pinocchio becomes fully acquainted with his father does the wooden doll become a flesh-and-blood child. Only after Jonah becomes acquainted with his heavenly Father does he return to his prophetic destiny. Will we hear the voice?
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