Riches and Wonders: Jonah and the Courage to Change

Every Yom Kippur afternoon, as the sky begins to change and the long day starts moving toward its end, we read one of the strangest books in the Hebrew Bible: Jonah.

Most of us know the story. God tells Jonah: Get up and go to Nineveh. Jonah gets up—and goes in exactly the opposite direction. There is a storm with terrified sailors where Jonah is thrown into the sea. A giant fish swallows him. Jonah prays. The fish spits him onto dry land.

God tells him again: Go to Nineveh. This time Jonah goes. He announces that the city will be destroyed. And then something astonishing happens. The people listen. They change. They make teshuvah. And God changes, too. The destruction does not come.

That should be the happy ending. The prophet succeeds. The people repent. The city is saved. Except Jonah is furious.

He tells God: This is why I ran away in the first place. I knew You would do this. I knew You were compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abundant in kindness. I knew You would forgive them. And I cannot stand it. That may be one of the strangest accusations anyone ever makes against God in the Bible: I knew You were merciful. And that is exactly the problem.

We read this story every year on Yom Kippur because it is about teshuvah. But I have started to wonder whether the book is asking us a harder question. What if Jonah is not simply a stubborn prophet who needs to learn that God loves everybody? What if Jonah is someone whose entire understanding of the world is collapsing? One reading of the book suggests that Jonah stands at a turning point in the biblical understanding of teshuvah. Earlier biblical stories often seem to follow a fairly straightforward pattern: you do something wrong, there are consequences, you suffer those consequences, and perhaps afterward there can be repentance.

But Nineveh is different.

God warns them before the destruction. They change before the punishment comes. And because they change, the future changes.

That sounds obvious to us. Of course repentance can avert punishment. But imagine encountering that possibility for the first time. Imagine discovering that the future is not fixed. That prophecy itself is not necessarily destiny. That someone who has done terrible things does not have to remain the person who did those terrible things. That an enemy does not have to remain an enemy forever. That even God might change God's mind.

This is terrifying, because there is a strange security in believing that the world is fixed. Good people are good. Bad people are bad. Our people are our people. Their people are their people. We know what everyone is capable of. And we know what happens next.

Jonah knows Nineveh. Nineveh is not a sweet little village. Rabbinic tradition notes it is a place associated with empire and violence. Some of our sages imagine that Jonah is not motivated by simple hatred of foreigners. He is afraid for Israel. He knows what Nineveh represents. He knows what Assyria will become.

And suddenly God's command becomes much more frightening: Go to the people you fear. Go to the people you believe may someday destroy you. Warn them. Give them a chance to change. And if they change, recognize that their lives are precious to God.

That is much harder than saying, “God loves everybody.”

Because Jonah might respond: You don't understand. These people are dangerous. I know what happens when people like this survive. I know what my people have lived through. I know history.

And God says: Go anyway.

The book never tells us that Jonah's fear is imaginary. Instead, it asks something much more difficult: What happens when our fear is real, and yet the humanity of the person we fear is also real? What happens when trauma teaches us something true about danger, but something incomplete about possibility?

This is where I keep hearing another text. Not from the Bible, but from the Mountain Goats. In the song “Riches and Wonders,” there is a relationship that is loving and messy, abundant and desperate. And there is this image: “We hold on as hard as we can. Our knuckles are white.” I cannot hear those words without thinking about Jews.

We hold on. We hold on to Torah. We hold on to memory. We hold on to people who died centuries before we were born. We hold on to languages many of us barely understand. We hold on to melodies. We hold on to holidays. We hold on to each other. And somehow, impossibly, we keep holding on to God.

Our knuckles are white.

Because what exactly are we holding?

It is 2026. What does it mean for us to say “God”? Do we mean a supernatural being who intervenes in history? A voice from heaven? A judge? A parent? A presence? The force that calls us toward justice? The name we give to the deepest mystery of existence?

Do we actually believe that God is listening when we pray? Some of us do. Some of us don't. Some of us believe it at 9:15 in the morning and have serious doubts by lunch.

And yet here we are. Talking to God. All day.

Avinu Malkeinu. Our Parent. Our Sovereign. HaRachaman. The Compassionate One. Shechinah. The Presence. HaMakom. The Place. Ein Sof. The One Without End.

We learn foreign and exotic terms of endearment by which to address the One we cannot name.

We write letters to God. Some became Psalms. Some became the machzor. Some are the words you said silently this morning when nobody around you knew what you were thinking. Some are anger. Some are bargaining. Some are gratitude. Some are simply: Please.

Perhaps that is why Jonah's argument with God feels so Jewish. Jonah doesn't stop believing in God. He is furious with God. Jonah's problem is not that he has no theology. His problem is that he has a very strong theology. He knows how God is supposed to behave. He knows how justice works. He knows what enemies are. He knows what prophecy means. 

And then God breaks all the rules.

Nineveh changes. God changes. Jonah is the one who cannot.

That may be the great irony of the book. And perhaps that is why we read this book today. Because Yom Kippur makes an outrageous claim: You can change.

Not someday. Not after the consequences. Not after everything falls apart. Now.

Before the destruction. Before another year disappears.

Teshuvah says that what has been does not have to dictate what will be.

There is another moment near the beginning of Jonah that I love. The storm is raging. The sailors are terrified. Everyone is calling out. And Jonah? Jonah goes down into the bottom of the ship and falls asleep.

The captain wakes him and asks him to pray to his God. At the end of his words, the captain says: "Maybe the god will be kind to us and we will not perish.” Maybe—Ulai.

Ulai.

Maybe.

Maybe God will notice us. Maybe we will survive.

I love that word: ulai. Maybe.

The captain does not promise Jonah that everything is going to be okay. He does not say: Have faith, Jonah. I guarantee you this works out.

He says: Maybe.

Get up anyway. Pray anyway. Act anyway. Hope anyway.

I think that may be one of the most honest forms of religion available to us. Not certainty. Maybe.

Can this relationship be repaired? Maybe. Can I become the person I keep saying I want to become? Maybe. Can our community become more compassionate? Maybe. Can Israelis and Palestinians someday live without believing that the other's safety requires their own destruction? Maybe. Can we look at someone whose story frightens us and still recognize the image of God in them? Maybe. Can God forgive me? Maybe. Can I forgive myself? Maybe. Can this world change? Maybe.

And Yom Kippur says: That is enough to begin.

Get up. Call out. Do the work.

The Hebrew word teshuvah does not literally mean repentance. It means return. Shuv. Turn. Come back.

Our Muslim cousins have a strikingly similar word: tawbah, from an Arabic root that also carries the meaning of return. Two traditions. Two languages. Two communities that know the story of this strange prophet—Jonah, Yunus—who runs from the work God asks him to do.

Return. Come back. Turn again.

Maybe teshuvah is not about becoming someone completely different. Maybe it is about turning five degrees. Then five more. Then five more. Until one day we discover that we are facing a direction we once thought impossible.

The song closes: “I want to go home. But I am home.”

What is home for a wandering people? Is home where we live? Where our grandparents lived? Where they fled from? Where they dreamed of? Is it a country? A language? A synagogue? A table? A people? A story?

For Jews, home has never been simple. We know what it means to lose homes. To build homes somewhere new. To be told that a place is ours and then that it is not. To long for somewhere else while building a life here. To carry home with us.

And home is not simple for many people in our world. There are people whose longing for home collides with someone else's longing for home. There are people whose story of safety collides with someone else's story of safety. There are people who look across a border and see an ancestral home, and people on the other side who look at the same earth and say exactly the same thing.

No sermon can make that simple. Judaism should not make it simple.

But Judaism can insist that longing does not belong only to us. Grief and fear do not belong only to us. Human preciousness does not belong only to us.

God asks Jonah at the end of the book: You cared about this little plant. Should I not care about Nineveh? 

The book ends there. Jonah never answers.

Maybe we are Jonah's answer. Maybe every Yom Kippur afternoon, the question gets handed to another generation.

Can you care about people whose story threatens yours? Can you believe in teshuvah for someone besides yourself? Can you imagine a future that your trauma cannot yet imagine? Can you permit God to love someone you are afraid of? Can you permit that person to change? Can you permit yourself to change?

“We are strong, we are faithful. We are guardians of a rare thing.”

What is the rare thing? What exactly are Jews guarding?

Perhaps the rare thing is the covenant itself. The insistence that our lives are bound to one another. That memory creates responsibility. That liberation creates obligation. That the stranger matters because we were strangers. That time can be made holy. That bodies can be made holy. That ordinary relationships can become places where the Divine dwells.

That destruction is not inevitable. That repentance is possible. That return is possible. That there is always an ulai.

A maybe.

And that maybe is enough to demand something from us.

Near the end of “Riches and Wonders,” the lovers say: “You find shelter somewhere in me. I find great comfort in you.”

That too feels like Jewish theology.

Every day in the Amidah, we are asking whether God will shelter us. Ufros aleinu sukkat shlomecha. Spread over us Your sukkah of peace.

But maybe covenant goes both ways. Maybe God is asking: Will you make a place for Me to dwell? Will you make a little more room for mercy? Will you make a little more room for someone else's humanity? Will you make a little more room for the possibility that tomorrow does not have to repeat yesterday?

A sukkat shalom is not a fortress of peace. It is a sukkah.

Fragile. Open. Temporary.

You can see the stars through the roof. The rain can get in. It can fall down. And when it does, we build it again.

That is a much better image for peace than a fortress.

Maybe it is also a better image for our tradition.

We keep wanting certainty. God gives us a sukkah. We keep wanting guarantees. God gives us ulai. We keep wanting the world divided neatly into the righteous and the wicked. God gives us Nineveh. We keep wanting to know where home is. God says: Build something fragile. Sit together beneath it. See what happens.

The song says: “We hold on as hard as we can. Our knuckles are white.”

Maybe on Yom Kippur we can loosen our grip just a little.

Not let go of Judaism. Not let go of our people.

But loosen our grip on certainty.

Loosen our grip on the belief that we already know who everyone is. Loosen our grip on the stories in which nobody changes.

Because the shocking claim of Jonah is that Nineveh can change.

The shocking claim of Yom Kippur is that you can change.

And perhaps the most shocking claim of all is that God can change, too.

We are not trapped. The future has not happened yet. The decree or prognosis is not the same thing as destiny.

There is still time. There is still teshuvah. There is still an ulai.

Maybe.

Maybe the relationship can heal. Maybe the enemy can become something other than an enemy. Maybe we can become something other than what our worst moments suggest. Maybe Judaism itself can keep changing without losing the rare thing we guard. Maybe God is still becoming known to us.

Maybe home is not only somewhere we arrive.

Maybe home is something we make for one another.

We want to go home.

And perhaps, for one another, we can become home.

We turn. We return. We begin again. Just maybe.

G'mar chatimah tovah.