Jonah's story is a call to global responsibility

In the late 1980s, a biosphere was built in Oracle, Arizona. This artificial, closed ecological system, Biosphere 2, was built to mimic the conditions of our planet and its capacity to maintain life through meticulously balanced ecosystems. It sat on 3.14 acres of land and remains the largest closed system ever created.

For two years, four men and four women had to grow their own food and live off their own recycled water and air that was sustained by their own small rainforest, savannah, ocean and farm. Careful planning had to go into its engineering because life on earth is a vast web of interconnected and interdependent elements that affect each other’s existence and survival. Everything is connected.

Biosphere 2 was largely successful, but there were significant complications; the most serious being an unanticipated loss of oxygen. Over seven tonnes of oxygen were lost within the biosphere.

CO2 that was meant to be absorbed by the plant life and converted to oxygen was instead unexpectedly absorbed into the concrete, causing severe oxygen depletion. This affected the blood chemistry of the inhabitants. They began waking at night gasping for air, suffering from sleep apnea. This, in turn, impacted negatively on their mood, creativity, problem-solving skills and interpersonal behaviour.

The web of existence on this planet is so complex and interdependent that any aspect that is altered has an effect on the totality. Because of the earth’s size, however, we do not always experience the effects of such changes immediately and we lose sense of the interconnectedness with the rest of the planet.

Becoming more aware of our place and interrelationships is essential to our personal growth and refinement. To genuinely address this, to live our most moral and ethical lives, we must try to understand how best to fit into the system by and in which we live. We aim to integrate not only within ourselves and our character but also with our world and the components of our environment. In doing so we achieve atonement.

Atonement is a powerful English word that denotes the action of making amends and reparation. Yet, in seeking atonement we not only look to repair misdeeds, but also to reintegrate and rehabilitate our relationships with others, the world and God. Atonement is at-one-ment.

This concept is brought out in our synagogue services on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. It is presented in the form of a story about Jonah, the reluctant prophet.

God’s mission for him is to warn a gentile nation, the people of the great city of Nineveh, that if they fail to repent from their iniquities they will meet their doom in three days’ time. In the end, after great resistance and tribulation, Jonah carries out the mission. The people promptly repent but the disgruntled prophet’s story does not end there. He has more to learn.

Jonah finds himself alone and suffering in the debilitating heat of the day with little shelter. God causes a castor tree to grow and provide him shade.

Jonah rejoices over this only to find that overnight it has gone, having been eaten away by worms. He is deeply angered and God speaks to him in what is probably the most rhetorical sarcasm in the Bible:

“Then God said to Jonah, ‘Are you good and angry about the plant?’

“‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘so deeply that I want to die.’

“Then God said, ‘You cared about the plant, which you did not work for and which you did not grow, which appeared overnight and perished overnight.

“‘And should I not care about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a 120,000 persons who do not yet know their right hand from their left and many animals?’”

God keeps drawing Jonah’s attention towards the world around him. He is to care for a nation of gentiles even though he is a prophet of Israel. He is to bond with a plant and to care for a large population of animals.

He must learn that he cannot live on the planet and serve as a prophet to a nation that is meant to be its custodian if he is not sensitive and attentive to its whole population and the elements that contribute to the planet’s equilibrium.

We all interact within a global ecosystem. To lose sight of this opens us up to what Einstein called an “optical delusion” — a false sense of being autonomous.

A central aspect of our return to truth and clarity — which is the essence of teshuvah (repentance) — is to come to greater awareness of the true nature of our existence; acknowledging the interrelationships that not only occur in our lives, but that also provide for our very being.

Torah teaches us that on Yom Kippur we must re-examine the nature of our involvement with the world and seek to repair where we have become cognitively disengaged.

We aim to free ourselves from the optical delusion of disconnection and emerge from the prison of the self into a wider world in which we are sensitive to the robust, interconnected nature of our lives.

So, on this Holy day, may we all find our necessary At-one-ment.

Joseph Dweck is the Senior Rabbi of the S & P Sephardi Community