What is the nature of teshuva? What is teshuva all about? What is considered legitimate teshuva and what is not? A pattern of teshuva of some sort, Divine salvation, and a dialogue between God and Yona ensues. Yona may yearn for strict judgment, but God takes account of human fallibility and tempers justice with mercy. On Yom Kippur afternoon, we plead that God have mercy regardless of whether our teshuva is human and flawed, or objectively ideal.
Abridged and adapted by HaTanakh.com Staff from an audio shiur by Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein. Follow the link for the full shiur.
Yona, who not only disagrees with God’s command to warn Ninveh of its impending doom, actually disobeys, hiring passage on a boat going elsewhere. When the boat is tossed by a Divine storm and the sailors pray, Yona may believe that the sailors appeal to God for the wrong reasons--out of fear and out of a desire to save their skins, and that their teshuva is shallow. But they seem to be on a very high spiritual level in the sense that they have a strong sense of empathy for their fellow man, whereas Yona appears to be very detached from the enormity of what may happen to the people of Ninveh. Then Yona is forced to call out to God from his own dire straits, swallowed by a giant fish. God saves him, as He did the sailors and as He saves the people of Ninveh, whose teshuva is either very sincere – or an exaggerated parody of going through the motions. In either case, Yona is not satisfied—he strives for objective truth and strict judgment and God emphasizes the importance of justice along with mercy.
The placement of the reading of Yona on Yom Kippur afternoon is significant, too- there seems to be a pattern beginning on Rosh HaShana that oscillates between stories of sincere teshuva and well-deserved salvation and stories of Divine mercy coming because God is invested in us- God is invested in humanity.
Abridged and adapted by HaTanakh.com Staff from an audio shiur by Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein. Follow the link for the full shiur.