Not Doing What Comes Naturally

Jonah 5782

Rabbi Sam Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ 

So, let’s just say someone asks you to do something you don’t want to do.  It happens to all of us regularly, doesn’t it?  What’s your typical response?

If you are a normal Jewish person, with the usual Jewish neuroses, you immediately feel guilty for not wanting to do it in the first place.  I mean, you don’t really want to do it, but you know that you should do it, right? 

Yes, people are always asking you to do things you don’t want to do, and you know it’s the right thing to do what they ask.  You are a mature, responsible person, and others can count on you.

Still, you don’t want to do it… so what if you just don’t do it?  Wouldn’t that be a relief?  Maybe you can just avoid the whole thing.

But then, your sense of responsibility wells up in you, and is accompanied by the usual sensations that accompany guilt—a hollow feeling in the pit of your stomach, a nagging sense you aren’t being the person you should be, a queasy prickling that you are letting someone down—and you start to tackle your resistance to doing what you have been asked to do.

I really should do it, shouldn’t I?  I really have to do it, don’t I?  But I really, really don’t want to.

Oy.  It’s enough to cause high blood pressure, isn’t it?  Or at least a significant stress reaction.  Maybe even a minor rash. 

Do you do that act, even though you don’t want to do it?

But let’s also say the thing you are asked to do is especially unpleasant, and will definitely result in damage to your reputation, possibly forever.  It’s not unethical—far from that, it’s clearly the right thing to do—but it’s not going to make you look good, either.  It’s potentially painful, difficult, challenging in the extreme.  In fact, you are certain to look bad doing it, and probably get some important people really angry with you besides.

Would you do it then?  Or would you head in the opposite direction?

I’ve often thought about Jonah exactly this way.  At the start of the book that Natalie is going to read today, Jonah is given a decidedly unpleasant job to do.  He is called on to tell the most powerful men in the world that they are acting badly and must change or be destroyed.  He is asked—actually, ordered—to speak truth to power, to try to convince the leaders of the world’s greatest superpower that they are doing the wrong things and have to change.  Talk about a thankless task.

There are two ways Jonah can envision this thing going.  One possibility is incredibly unlikely: the people he is tasked with fixing will actually listen to him, and quickly reform completely.  If that actually happens, he will look like a false prophet, a failure at his own profession.  He is told to predict doom, and instead life will go on with no sign of destruction or devastation. Jonah will lose his status as a successful prophet. 

The second way it might go is that the powerful people he is told to predict destruction and devastation for will simply, well, kill him, or at least lock him up.  Which would mean that when the annihilation he predicts hits the bad guys he will be swept away as well.

Two options: complete professional and personal humiliation or, well, violent death.  Bad 1 and bad 1A.

Now that’s a truly totally thankless task.

Imagine you were in his spot.  Picture yourself being told to go to Washington, DC to tell the president and his cabinet that their behavior was terrible and needed to completely reform.  I don’t care which recent president you picture yourself addressing this way—use your imagination—but I’m pretty certain it wouldn’t go well.  “Mr. President, you are all going to be destroyed in three days because your behavior stinks.” 

That’s assuming you could even get through the cordon of security services that keep you from getting close to him.  If you didn’t end up in a prison cell somewhere along the way or placed in a locked ward in a mental health facility.  Not a good situation.

Poor Jonah.  He is faced with a terrible choice.  And so, he does what a lot of us would do.  When looking at a situation with two awful options, he picks what’s behind door number three.  Jonah runs away.

Or at least he tries to.  He heads out and gets on a boat going as far away as possible. 

He would not be the first person to run from a bad assignment.  He won’t prove to be the last. 

But he’s the one we remember.  Part of that, of course, is because of the fish-tale quality of the story.  As the saying goes, Jonah is a whale of a tale. 

You will hear the famous story again in a moment.  When Jonah is called by God flees to the local port, and takes ship—not to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, super-empire of the ancient world.  That would be in the opposite direction.  No, he’s headed anywhere but Nineveh, in today’s Mosul, Iraq.  Instead, Jonah jumps on a cargo ship to go as far from there as he can get, to Tarshish, somewhere in the Mediterranean. 

You know the rest of the story; the brutal storm, the sailors praying to their gods, Jonah sleeping peacefully through it all in his cabin, the sailors reluctantly tossing the reluctant prophet into the waves at his own insistence, the big fish, the eventual journey to Nineveh, the great metropolis of evil.  You can run from God but you can’t hide, and sooner or later you have to face the music and do your job.

And of course, it all turns out one of the ways that Jonah had predicted: he proclaims destruction, and shockingly all the evil denizens of the worst city in the world suddenly reform.  Everyone is saved, but Jonah’s reputation as a predictive prophet is permanently shot.

He has, in the end, done what he was supposed to do.  And he has paid the professional price.  And boy, is he ticked off at God, who gave him this thankless task in the first place.  To make things worse, God hangs around with him afterwards and lectures him, like a Jewish mother or father; did you really think I should kill everyone in this city just so you would look better in the prophet ratings on Google?

So, what do we learn from Jonah?

Look, we all have jobs to do we don’t relish.  We all find ourselves in situations where we are asked to do things we would rather not do.  We all have responsibilities to fulfill, prices to pay, grown-up requirements that force us to be adults and take on tasks that are far from what we wish we could be doing with our time.

Fortunately, few of us are asked to wade into the deep waters that Jonah had to navigate.  None of us will have a great fish swallow us and dump us back where we can make good on our assigned roles. But all of us face smaller, similar dilemmas.

Yom Kippur reminds us that responsibility is part of our heritage, that we are obligated to do what we are truly commanded to do: live lives that are good, if not always happy; but the kind of people who do what they are asked to do, who hold up their ends of the bargain, who come through when they are needed.

Jonah teaches this in an antique, archaic, allegoric way.  But Jonah brings that lesson to heart on this holiest afternoon of the year: we are good people, and if wish to live as such, we have obligations to fulfill, work to do, miles to go before we sleep.

We are taught early on in Pirkei Avot: “Be not like servants who work for the sake of reward; be like servants who work without regard for the reward.”  That is, do the right thing, whether or not you benefit from it.

Kent Keith wrote a series of paradoxical commandments.  They are a good way to remind us of what Jonah forgot:

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.

Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.

Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.

Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.

Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.

Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds. Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.

Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.

Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.

Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.

Give the world the best you have anyway.

On this afternoon of Yom Kippur, may we remember to act as we should, to learn from Jonah that fleeing responsibility does not solve anything, and live in this still new year to the best that we have within us.