The Sullen Prophet: A Commentary on the Book of Jonah
Editor’s Note: The following is a guest post by Mark Kleiman.
The holiest day in the Jewish calendar is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, with its theme of repentance. And one of the synagogue readings for Yom Kippur is the Book of Jonah (in Hebrew, sefer Yonah). It is the custom in some communities to ask a stranger to offer a commentary—called a d'var Torah—on that text. A d'var Torah isn't quite a sermon, if a sermon is understood as a discourse that starts out from a text to draw a moral; it's more like a French explication de texte.
When Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller of UCLA Hillel invited me to give the d'var Torah on Yonah a couple of years ago, prudence would have counseled refusal. But I'm under several kinds of obligation to Chaim, and allowed that to serve as an excuse to give in to my natural hamminess.
If Chaim wanted a fresh view of the text, he could hardly have done better; as far as I can recall, I had never read it before, and my Hebrew is minimal-to-nonexistent.
The result is after the jump. It turns out that I more or less missed. Still, if you're looking for a solemn reading of what may in fact be a comic text, mine is perhaps as good as another.
