By Shor M. Masori in San Diego
Do we actually want our enemies to atone and become better?
I first heard the story of Jonah in the library at Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School from our librarian, the late Nomi Levy. The kids’ version got the main beats but took out much of the punch. I knew Jonah didn’t want to deliver a message. I thought it was neat that he got swallowed by a big fish, like Pinocchio’s three friends whom he had to save.
But I never questioned why he’d refuse when God was directly telling him to go. Now I can appreciate the philosophical struggle: a prophet sent to help his enemies atone who can’t allow himself to forgive them.
The biblical prophet Jonah is placed in the eighth century BCE. Assyria conquered the northern kingdom of Israel around the same time in 722 BCE and deported many of its people, giving rise to the tradition of the ten lost tribes. Nineveh became Assyria’s capital a couple of decades later, around 700 BCE. Scholars generally date the book of Jonah centuries after the prophet’s lifetime. For later readers, Nineveh could evoke the empire behind that destruction and diaspora. Reading it against that history makes Jonah’s anger hard to dismiss. Asking someone to help save those associated with their community’s suffering is no small thing.
Nineveh repents so thoroughly that even the animals end up in sackcloth, the coarse fabric worn as a sign of mourning or repentance. God sees the people turn from their violence and spares the city. Jonah is still furious. That leaves a painful question for any long-suffering community: can we allow our enemies to repent, and become willing to forgive them when they do?
It’s a heady question, so let’s bring it to a personal level. Suppose your roommate always finishes the house olive oil and leaves the empty bottle for you to discover halfway through cooking. You’ve complained for months. Then they replace it before it runs out. You might be relieved. You might also find yourself waiting for them to slip up again. Sometimes that suspicion is justified. But sometimes another person’s change threatens a story we’ve been telling about ourselves: I’m the reasonable one; they’re the problem. If they move, I have to move too, and I don’t want to because then I’d be wrong!
A community can become deeply attached to that story. We know who belongs because we know whom everyone dislikes. We know we’re the heroes because the others are clearly villains. Admitting our own faults becomes harder when so much of our identity depends on their role within our story.
Yom Kippur asks us to make that admission together. In Leviticus, the high priest confesses the people’s wrongs over a goat that carries them into the wilderness. The English word “scapegoat” comes from this ritual. When we scapegoat someone today, we usually shift blame onto them. In the ancient ritual, the community’s own wrongs are acknowledged before they are sent away, blame included.
These rituals developed among neighboring cultures, each with its own ways of imagining purification and judgment. Other ancient Near Eastern societies used animals to carry away danger or impurity. Egyptian judgment scenes weigh a dead person’s heart against the feather of Ma’at, associated with truth and cosmic order. Later Jewish texts describe the weighing of merits and sins in a similar manner. These similarities invite questions about syncretism, the combining of religious traditions, though shared imagery alone cannot prove direct borrowing.
Ancient Israel and Judea lay along routes linking Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. Jewish life in the diaspora brought encounters with many more cultures, including peoples we remember as enemies. Our traditions grew through those encounters, in conversation with every empire hoping to conquer three continents. That history complicates any neat division between us and them.
Our practices also changed with our circumstances. After Rome destroyed the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, prayer and repentance, already part of Jewish life, took on greater centrality. The liturgy preserved the memory of the Temple service while communities continued the work of atonement without it. Whatever form that work takes, it comes down to how we behave toward other people.
I think of my godfather and sandak, Yoni, who is completely secular. At his favorite Ashkenazi deli in Bnei Brak, I asked if he fasted for Yom Kippur. He laughed: “Why would I choose to fast once a year then give myself permission to act however I want, when instead I can eat whatever I want whenever I want and wake up each morning choosing to be a good man?”
The Mishnah takes aim at that very excuse: someone who sins counting on Yom Kippur to erase it, receives no such automatic absolution. It also says the day does not atone for a wrong against another person until you have appeased that person.
Imagine someone embarrasses you in front of a group, then sends a thoughtful private apology. They understand what they did, but everyone who heard the original comment still believes it. A public correction may still be necessary as the repair has to reach the damage it caused.
Maimonides describes complete repentance as meeting the same opportunity, having the ability to repeat the wrong, and choosing differently because you have repented. We can ask for evidence of that change while leaving room to recognize it. Change doesn’t entitle someone to renewed access to the person they harmed. Trust takes its own time. Forgiveness can begin while we’re still deciding what a relationship can safely become.
Jonah gets room to change, too. After the fish releases him, God sends him back to the same mission. Later, even in his anger, God keeps talking to him. That’s one way I understand grace: being given room to change while you’re still being difficult. Lord knows I’ve needed that grace before I was ready to accept it.
For me, that also opens a way toward self-forgiveness. Shame can become another place to hide. We can spend so much time rehearsing how awful we are that we avoid the conversation we owe someone. You don’t have to become an entirely different person before you take one different action.
For Jonah, the challenge is extending that generosity to others. God makes a plant grow to shade him, then sends a worm that destroys it. Jonah is furious at the loss. God asks why Jonah cares so deeply about a plant he did nothing to help grow, yet objects to God’s concern for an entire city, including its animals.
Jonah’s warning helped people change, yet he resents the outcome. I recognize that impulse whenever I want a problem solved while also wanting the satisfaction of having been right about it forever. It’s the question I return to in discussions of purity politics and building communities of difference: would you rather be right, or be effective?
The book leaves Jonah’s answer to God unwritten. I want to carry that unfinished conversation into my next encounter with someone I’ve written off: what evidence of change would I be willing to notice and respond to? And what am I willing to change before asking the same generosity of him or her?
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Shor M. Masori is a San Diego-based freelance writer.