1.
Should we talk about the horrors of the times, about the horror of the Jewish street attacking Jews, about the destruction of statehood and the breaking of tools in almost every field? The public discourse is full of this until it explodes, and within me there is a movement of refusal towards the desire to drag us all into this madmana. We'll have plenty of time after the holidays to keep bickering. But here is Jewish time urging us to gather inward to ourselves, the individual self and the collective self, to leave the crumpled reality, to rise above the small contemporary accounts and look straight at eternity.
Yom Kippur is upon us. An opportunity to return to the roots, to correct our spirit, to prepare it for the new year. The atonement is the atonement, the lid placed in the Tabernacle on the Ark of the Covenant, meaning that it is laying a cover for our mistakes. But in order to reach the atonement, we are commanded to lift the veil and confess, to face our weaknesses and falsities, against our small and large rebellions, against the gap between what we are and what we would like to be – and to flood it out. To look with courage, not to be afraid, to examine the successes and failures, to look at the moments of grace and judgment that made up our year. Don't worry, it will pay off.
2.
For what is the sin if not the miss, the missed direction, the refusal to hear the inner voice calling to us? "Our Father, our King, we have sinned before You, have mercy on us": We have missed the goal, we have forgotten ourselves, and therefore in asking for mercy. Mercy is the womb into which we seek to gather and organize our powers, and then be reborn.
The Yoma tractate, which deals with the Yom Kippur service, ends with the words of the greatest Tannaim, Rabbi Akiva ben Yosef (first half of the second century CE): "Blessed are you, Israel! Before whom do you purify, and who purifies you, your Father in heaven, who is said (Ezekiel 35:25): 'And I threw pure water upon you and purified you,' and says (Jeremiah 17:13): 'Mikvah Yisrael Hashem - what mikveh purifies the unclean, even God purifies Israel.'"
And what is hope if not a womb that contains mercy? Just as immersion in a mikveh is involuntarily purified, passing through the time tunnel of Yom Kippur purifies all of us, who participate in public fast and those who leave it. For not only a personal religious day of atonement is before us, but a national day of atonement. The entire nation is purified.
3.
In the midst of the day, the Mincha prayer reads the Book of Jonah. In the third chapter we read about repentance from the evil way and from the hams that characterized the life of the inhabitants of Nineveh. They fast and cover themselves with sackcloths and call out to God strongly, "Who knows, may God return and comfort him, and return from His wrath and we shall not perish." Thus it happens: "And God feared their deeds, for they had returned from their evil ways, and God consoled (repented) for the evil which he had done ..., and had not done." On the face of it, here is the direct reason why the story is read on Yom Kippur.
It is worth looking at the beginning of the story: God calls Jonah and gives him a mission, and he refuses to listen. He runs away. Escape is the main theme. Sometimes we have to run away from home, from family, from homeland, far from ourselves, because we don't believe that this is the right voice for us. Jonah escapes from the mountains to the lowlands, and from there escapes to the sea. "And Jonah arose to flee Tarshisha from before the Lord, and he went down to Jaffa and found a ship coming from Tarshish, and he gave her reward, and he went down in it to come with them Tarshisha..." Twice the decline is emphasized, and perhaps the deterioration.
Again, it is precisely in the process of escape that he finds (reinvents) himself. The sea represents the hidden part of our personality, the unconscious, the realm of dreams, repressions and missed opportunities. The repressions are not necessarily forbidden things we wanted and hid, but also the right directions that we once knew but eliminated below the threshold of consciousness in the heels of life, the pressures of society and work. It is the inner voice of the authentic self that resides deep within us, and which we have ignored. That's where Jonah escapes. "Anna shall I go away from your spirit, and Anna from your face shall I flee? If I ascend to heaven - there you are, and I offer Saul (and if I go down to Hades) - you are!" the psalmist describes the escape from ourselves, which will turn out to be an effort in vain to abandon the melody that returns to us and that will return us to ourselves. This is how Nathan Alterman begins his great poetic project: "The melody that you abandoned in vain returns." He tried to escape his vocation as a poet, but to no avail. It is stronger than him: "In vain I will create a wall for you, in vain I will set up doors," and therefore "forever I will protect you."
4.
Jonah also can't escape the call to him. On the way he escapes, in the middle of the sea, a storm endangers his life. Man runs away and his life swirls, swirls and is devoured. At first he denies their cause: "And there was a great storm in the sea, and the ship thought of breaking," and what the escapee does: "And Jonah went down to the stern of the ship, and lay down and fell asleep." Interestingly enough, perhaps unconsciously, he goes more and more inward: he sleeps (dreams) in the stern of a ship rocking at sea: womb (sleep) inside womb (ship) inside womb(s). Still, this is not enough. He asks to be thrown into the abyss of the sea: "And he said... Shawnee and cast me into the sea, and the sea will be silent above you, for I know that this great storm is ripe..." It's a loss request! Does he give up in the face of mental distress?
It is precisely then that His salvation comes. It is swallowed in the stomach of a large fish (fourth uterus). Only here does he encounter his God, that is, the deep self of his personality. Then he prays: asks to return home and promises to accept his destiny, to hear the inner voice calling to him. How many reincarnations a person goes through in his escape until the moment of long-awaited birth. "And the Lord said to the fish, and he vomited Jonah to the land." Returning home, to ourselves, is not easy. The moment of discovery is a violent moment, described as vomiting. Man is thrown against his will, until he finds himself standing on his own shores, kneeling on the shore of forgiveness, to hear the silenced voice.
5.
The 19th-century Italian writer Carlo Collodi turned the story of a dove into the story of Pinocchio, a wooden doll, fleeing from his carpenter father. His escape also creates storms. In order to ignore the father's call, Pinocchio is dragged into various temptations that divert him from the path and bring him to the point of forgetting himself (he almost becomes a donkey due to his pursuit of the material). The climax of the escape takes place in the stormy seas. He is swallowed by the belly of a large fish, and it is there, to his surprise, that he meets his father, who has gone in search of him. In the story of Collodi, Pinocchio rescues his father from the belly of a fish, which teaches that sometimes God also needs man to rescue him from concealment to revelation, or in the language of the occult: in order to cause awakening in heaven, man must first wake up below. Only when Pinocchio is truly introduced to his father does the wooden doll become a flesh-and-blood child. Only after Jonah becomes acquainted with his heavenly Father does he return to his prophetic destiny. Will we hear the voice?
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