Collected Prose

that is the place where Anne Frank died.
    “It’s really a wonder,” she wrote, just three weeks before her arrest, “that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out…. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end….”
    *

    No, he does not mean to say that this is the only thing. He does not even pretend to say that it can be understood, that by talking about it and talking about it a meaning can be discovered for it. No, it is not the only thing, and life nevertheless continues, for some, if not for most. And yet, in that it is a thing that will forever escape understanding, he wants it to stand for him as the thing that will always come before the beginning. As in the sentences: “This is where it begins. He stands alone in an empty room and begins to cry.”
    *

    Return to the belly of the whale.
    “The word of the Lord came unto Jonah … saying, Arise, go to Ninevah, that great city, and cry against it…”
    In this command as well, Jonah’s story differs from that of all the other prophets. For the Ninevites are not Jews. Unlike the other carriers of God’s word, Jonah is not asked to address his own people, but foreigners. Even worse, they are the enemies of his people. Ninevah was the capital of Assyria, the most powerful empire in the world at that time. In the words of Nahum (whose prophecies have been preserved on the same scroll as the story of Jonah): “the bloody city … full of lies and rapine.”
    “Arise, go to Ninevah,” God tells Jonah. Ninevah is to the east. Jonah promptly goes west, to Tarshish (Tartessus, on the farthest tip of Spain). Not only does he run away, he goes to the limit of the known world. This flight is not difficult to understand. Imagine an analogous case: a Jew being told to enter Germany during the Second World War and preach against the National Socialists. It is a thought that begs the impossible.
    As early as the second century, one of the rabbinical commentators argued that Jonah boarded the ship to drown himself in the sea for the sake of Israel, not to flee from the presence of God. This is the political reading of the book, and Christian interpreters quickly turned it against the Jews. Theodore of Mopsuestia, for example, says that Jonah was sent to Ninevah because the Jews refused to listen to the prophets, and the book about Jonah was written to teach a lesson to the “stiff-necked people.” Rupert of Deutz, however, another Christian interpreter (twelfth century), contends that the prophet refused God’s command out of piety to his people, and for this reason God did not become very angry with Jonah. This echoes the opinion of Rabbi Akiba himself, who stated that “Jonah was jealous for the glory of the son (Israel) but not for the glory of the father (God).”
    Nevertheless, Jonah finally agrees to go to Ninevah. But even after he delivers his message, even after the Ninevites repent and change their ways, even after God spares them, we learn that “it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.” This is a patriotic anger. Why should the enemies of Israel be spared? It is at this point that God teaches Jonah the lesson of the book—in the parable of the gourd that follows.
    “Doest thou well to be angry?” he asks. Jonah then removes himself to the outskirts of Ninevah, “till he might see what would become of the city”—implying that he still felt there was a chance Ninevah would be destroyed, or that he hoped the Ninevites would revert to their sinful ways and bring down punishment on themselves. God prepares a gourd (a castor plant) to protect Jonah from the sun, and “Jonah was exceedingly glad of the gourd.” But by the next morning God has made the plant wither away. A vehement east wind blows, a fierce sun beats down on Jonah, and “he fainted, and wished himself to die, and said, it is better for me to die than to live”—the same words he had used earlier, indicating that the message of this parable is the same as in the first part of the book. “And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the Lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou has not labored,