Of Dilemmas and Responsibility

What the Book of Jonah can teach us about grappling with this moment.

By Michael Oren

Cities around the world have mascots. London and Jerusalem have a lion and Berlin has a bear. Baltimore’s mascot is an oriole or raven, depending on which team you’re rooting for.

I am grateful to live in the State of Israel, and in the truly beautiful city of Jaffa. We have some of Israel’s oldest ruins and some of the world’s hottest jazz clubs, but the symbol of Jaffa is not an ancient archway or a baritone sax. No, the symbol seen all around Jaffa is a fish. Why, you may ask, with all that history and music, would scales, gills, and fins proliferate the city?

Increasingly, every Jew must decide about the risks they are willing to take—social, financial, possibly even physical—in order to stand openly behind their Jewish identity and steadfastly alongside Israel.

The answer is simple. Near the port of Jaffa thousands of years ago, a very big fish indeed—not a whale—made a meal of one of the most enigmatic figures in our Bible, the prophet Jonah. The Book of Jonah is one of the Bible’s shortest books, barely a page and a half. Jonah is the only prophet sent to save a non-Jewish population—Nineveh, in present-day Iraq. And he is the only prophet—ironically—to succeed.

His name is different, too. Unlike Jeremiah—which means exalted by God—or Isaiah—which means redeemed by God—Jonah, Yonah in Hebrew, means, simply, Dove. For Jonah was incredibly dove-like, prone to take wing. He is tasked by God to go to Nineveh and warn them to repent or meet the fire and brimstone fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The assignment seems pretty clear-cut but then Jonah thinks to himself:

If I warn the people of Nineveh and they repent and nothing bad happens to them, then two years later they’ll say, “why did we have to give up all that fun and put on sackcloth and ash? That liar Jonah misled us!”

Or, he wonders, “if the people ignore my warning and are destroyed, then the world will blame me for that as well.” A successful prophet or a failed prophet, Jonah concluded, either way, he loses.

So, faced with this terrible dilemma, Jonah does what a good dove does and he flies away—to Jaffa. There he boards a boat that gets caught in a storm. Jonah gets tossed into the sea and swallowed by a big fish. He manages to get out and flee to the desert, but there, too, the ferocious heat reminds him that there is no escape from God, there is no retreat from responsibility.

In Israel, we’ve been confronted with multiple Jonah-like dilemmas every day. These decisions have forced us to choose between “Israel’s body or our nation’s soul.”

In Gaza, where every single building—every house, hospital, mosque, and school—contains a Hamas booby trap or arsenal or hides a Hamas tunnel, we had to choose whether to risk soldiers’ lives defusing those booby traps and locating the arsenals and tunnels, or to save our soldiers and destroy the buildings, in which case the world will condemn us for devastating Gaza.

We have had to choose between striking our enemies in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, and being accused by the mainstream media of warmongering or creating an impression of weakness and vulnerability in the world’s most dangerous neighborhood.

As of this writing, we have accepted President Trump’s 20-point deal for ending the war and releasing the hostages. But in doing so, we have had to release hundreds of convicted killers from our jails and agree to discuss a pathway to a Palestinian state which could gravely threaten Israel in the future. Hard choices indeed.

In present-day Israel, I think it’s safe to say, Jonah’s got nothing on us. But neither does he out-dilemma American Jews. They must decide whether to send their children to the university of their choice—the parents’ alma mater, a dream school that has too often become a nightmare for Jews—or to a fine Southern university where the sun seems to shine on everyone, especially Jewish students. They must choose whether to abandon those storied institutions to the antisemites or to stay and fight, equipping their children not only with hopes and opportunities but also with clear warnings about personal and communal safety. In short: Go and learn, or go and learn—and fight.

On the national level, American Jews must decide how to reconcile continued support of political parties that have become increasingly open to anti-Israel voices calling for an end to aid and military supplies to the Jewish state in the middle of a desperate war. Parties that are open to the disseminators of conspiracy theories about Jews, parties that are welcoming to card-carrying antisemites.

Increasingly, every Jew must decide about the risks they are willing to take—social, financial, possibly even physical—in order to stand openly behind their Jewish identity and steadfastly alongside Israel.

Compared to all that, even Jonah might admit, Nineveh is nothing.

And so we must ask ourselves, in the face of such pressing dilemmas, what are the answers? What is our path forward and, if possible, our way out?

I, alas, am not a prophet. I am merely a historian and, as a historian, I have enough problems predicting the past. But history, even more than clairvoyance, can help us.

I can recall how, on May 14, 1948—almost three years to the date after the end of the massacre of one out of three Jews in the world in the Holocaust—facing an invasion of five Arab armies intent on completing that genocide, David Ben-Gurion had to decide whether or not to declare a Jewish state. But the Jewish people returned to our ancient land precisely for that moment, to take responsibility for ourselves.

And Ben-Gurion took that responsibility. He declared Israel’s independence, and he led the Jewish state in defeating those invaders, in absorbing refugees from seventy countries, in creating one of the few states in the world never to know a moment of non-democratic governance, and in forging a nation.

Since then, Israel has grown to become one of the most successful nation-states in history, with a world-class universal healthcare system, seven of the world’s leading universities, and an army more than twice as large as the British and French armies combined.

But in addition to history’s history there is my personal history. Hard for me to say that it has been fifty-five years since I first came to Israel. The country I saw was a poor agrarian backwater—our biggest export item was orange juice—with no relations with India or China, no peace with Jordan and Egypt, much less Morocco, Bahrain, and the UAE. We had a friendly relationship with the United States but no deep strategic alliance. The food, at the time, was terrible.

Today’s Israel has been shown by the diaspora community and our allies an outpouring of generosity and love unequaled in decades of modern Jewish history—support that will remain an example of faith, fortitude, and generosity for generations to come.

This country, in spite of the indescribable challenges and heartache of the past two years, remains indomitable, hopeful, and fiercely patriotic. The hundreds of thousands of reservists who fought hundreds of days in this war, who served side by side with religious and secular, right and leftwing soldiers, who are steeled and intensely patriotic, will become Israel’s greatest generation and lead us to more astonishing accomplishments still.

The prophet Jonah eventually learned his lesson: there is no escaping responsibility. And, ultimately, he fulfilled his. He went to Nineveh, told the people to repent, and they did, saving the city. Nobody accused him of being either a false or a failed prophet. And, look, he made the big time. His book made the Bible!

On Yom Kippur, the day we assume responsibility, we will read the Book of Jonah. We take responsibility for our past actions and for the decisions we have yet to make, however painful they may be. On that day, we will pause and reflect, pray, and look inside ourselves.

Yom Kippur provides us with the opportunity to be aware of the uniqueness of this moment in Jewish history. Today, each and every one of us has the obligation, the duty, and the privilege of stepping up, and making a difference. We can make decisions which strengthen Israeli society while also fortifying American and Diaspora Jewry—for a strong and vibrant Jewish community abroad is a supreme moral and strategic interest of the State of Israel.

On Yom Kippur, we are said to stand before God, but today we also stand before Jewish history, all 4,000 years of it, and say, as Abraham and Moses said, and even as Jonah said, however belatedly, hineini—I am here.

Hineinu—we are here, all of us, whether in London, Berlin, or in Jaffa, whether our mascot is a lion, or a fish, our symbol is always the same. It is a bold blue Star of David, tattered sometimes, but still waving proud and proclaiming always, Am Yisrael Chai.