Читать книгу Jonah Through the Centuries - Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer - Страница 17

Many scholars have pondered the issue of Jonah’s flight from God’s command in Jonah 1:3. In literature, Jonah’s flight is often used to explore the futility of fleeing from God and his calling. A good example is the Swedish novel Guldspiken (The Golden Nail) by Peter Nilson. Using the motif of a lay preacher seeking to escape his calling, the novel dialogues with the Book of Jonah in order to explore a person’s feeling of despondency when faced with the inability of avoiding their God-ordained fate.

Jonah’s flight and his ensuing time inside the fish is sometimes more widely understood to represent the human struggle with God and our sense of alienation from God and the world. Paul Auster, for example, employs the motifs of ‘being inside the whale’ as a leitmotif throughout his book The Invention of Solitude to designate the estrangement that characterizes much of post-holocaust Jewry. Jonah’s struggle with God is also the topic of several poems. Gabriel Preil compares himself to Jonah, as he describes an existence torn between faith and a desire to flee from it. Enrique Lihn likewise expresses his own sense of unease with the fickleness of his existence through the lens of the Book of Jonah.

A subset of these retellings deals with the Jewish experience of never being able to run away from being chosen by God. The notion of the Jewish people carrying a burden and having a responsibility towards God and towards the Gentile world is expressed poignantly by Kadia Molodowsky in her poem ‘Jonah’. It expresses in a heart-breaking manner the Jewish experience through the lens of Jonah’s calling. Jonah the Jew can never escape from being part of God’s chosen people.