Abstract
AbstractThe Book of Jonah depicts the tension between justice and mercy. Jonah's peculiar community, the “chosen” people, does not merely provide security and prosperity, but aims to shape the souls of its own members, and, eventually, of all human beings. The parable is optimistic about the possibility of justice in a world of distinct peoples. But on an individual level it is tragic, because Jonah himself fails to reach a practicable view of justice for imperfect but educable fellows and foreigners. He himself remains a distorted human being, deficient especially in his use of language, neither beast nor god, but, in the end, outside any community. As a reading on the highest holiday of the Jewish year, the story has a special place among Jonah's people. Neither homily nor sermon, it is an example of public storytelling as an instrument of education.
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