Вы находитесь на странице: 1из 14

This article was downloaded by: [Universite Laval]

On: 10 October 2014, At: 02:47


Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,
UK

Psychoanalytic Dialogues:
The International Journal of
Relational Perspectives
Publication details, including instructions for
authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hpsd20

Jonah's Crisis: Commentary


on Paper by Avivah Gottlieb
Zornberg
a b c d
Jill Salberg Ph.D.
a
New York University, Postdoctoral Program in
Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
b
Stephen Mitchell Center for Relational
Psychoanalysis
c
National Institute for the Psychotherapies
d
Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy
Published online: 26 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Jill Salberg Ph.D. (2008) Jonah's Crisis: Commentary on Paper
by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, Psychoanalytic Dialogues: The International Journal of
Relational Perspectives, 18:3, 317-328, DOI: 10.1080/10481880802073504

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10481880802073504

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the
information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.
However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no
representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness,
or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views
expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and
are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the
Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with
primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any
losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages,
and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or
indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the
Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.
Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan,
sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is
expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 18:317–328, 2008
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1048-1885 print / 1940-9222 online
DOI: 10.1080/10481880802073504

Jonah’s Crisis
Commentary on Paper
by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

Jill Salberg, Ph.D.

In discussing Zornberg’s paper, Jonah’s Flight, the author uses Zornberg’s mul-
tifaceted midrashic analysis as a portal to offer an alternative reading of the
Jonah text. Using Relational and British Object Relations psychoanalytic
theories, the author explores Jonah’s state of mind, focusing on his profound
despair. Most notably she finds that his despair is indicative of traumatic dis-
appointment stemming from the sense of not being recognized by God, expe-
riencing an acute disconnection. Jonah is then seen as being in crisis: incapa-
ble of self-reflection, caught in a dissociated self-state, and unable to inhabit
and struggle with his own feelings. The result is alienation from himself, inca-
pacity to feel concern for others and estrangement from God. Using the spiri-
tual writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who believes that God is in
search of man, the author suggests that it is the need for an intersubjective
relationship with God that is at the core of this Biblical story.

I
HAVE LONG ENJOYED THE WORK OF AVIVAH ZORNBERG, WHO BRINGS
her unique brand of scholarship to multiple areas of discipline:
Midrashic and Talmudic commentaries along side of psychoanalytic,
philosophical and literary approaches to the interpretation of Biblical text.
Zornberg’s amalgam produces, like light through a prism, a multifaceted ap-
proach to exegesis that makes the text come to life and refracts the com-
plexity of life while providing illumination.

Jill Salberg, Ph.D., is an Analytic Training Supervisor, New York University Postdoctoral
Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Faculty, Stephen Mitchell Center for Rela-
tional Psychoanalysis and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies; she has taught at
the JCC in Manhattan; and she is a supervisor, Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.

317
318 Jill Salberg

With this in mind I eagerly approached Jonah, a small tight text found in
the lesser Prophets of the Bible, and one for which, despite reading annually
at Yom Kippur, I have not had a strong affinity. We all bring ourselves to
whatever text we read—in Bollas’s (1989) terms through our own personal
idiom. Zornberg’s idiom often starts with the language used in the text (bibli-
cal Hebrew) as she works her way through Midrashic and Talmudic com-
mentaries seeking the text’s emotional truth. Her use of traditional psycho-
analytic concepts has also been woven through her writing as she searches
for a deeper understanding in the text. For me, reading biblical texts and
midrash has been a long-standing interest. My lens is a Relational psycho-
analytic one, which I use both in reading the story of Jonah and in respond-
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

ing to Zornberg’s compelling exegesis. Since my reading of Jonah is some-


what different from Zornberg’s, I elaborate an alternative psychoanalytic
understanding of the Jonah text leading to different conclusions. In this
way I hope to open more fully the space that Psychoanalytic Dialogues has
created by inviting biblical narrative into their journal and into analytic dis-
course.
Zornberg states that the central enigma of the Jonah story is his flight
from God. Where else in the biblical narratives do prophets of God refuse
their mission, and literally flee? It is this flight that Zornberg traces and con-
tinuously tries to explain, pushing the text to open up. Zornberg tells us that
Jonah’s flight has a disturbing destination—death. It is Jonah’s final prayer
for death that reveals this true destination and for Zornberg suggests the
hidden suicidal desire in his flight. Given this, she is even more puzzled by
Jonah’s relationship to prayer. Zornberg (this issue) writes, “To flee from
God is to refuse to stand between death and life; it is to refuse to cry out
from that standing place. The opposite of the flight from God is, in a word,
prayer” (p. 279). This is an extremely interesting turn on the text that
Zornberg reveals for us—that Jonah is refusing to stand before God in
prayer.
In Judaism one literally stands in prayer, as Zornberg (this issue) further
explicates: “Standing—amidah—is the essential posture of prayer”
(p. 279). Amidah, also known as the “Shemoneh Esrei,” is recited at all three
daily services and contains the basic components of prayer: praising God,
petitioning God and thanking God. Zornberg notes that in the second
chapter of this four chapter text, Jonah’s prayer in the belly of the great fish
(see Jonah, 2:3–10) is in the past tense—thanking God for past help, an in-
teresting detail. She maintains that Jonah cannot pray for God’s help in the
present or for the future because he cannot exist in a transitional place. The
nature of this transitional place—a position where danger and desire
Commentary on Paper by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg 319

simultaneously exist—is a familiar trope in Zornberg’s other writings. In her


use of a Freudian psychoanalytic perspective she posits the simultaneity of
opposite desires that exist along side of powerful, unconscious hidden long-
ings barred from awareness. In Jonah, Zornberg ponders how prayer can be
non-prayer, how Jonah both engages in prayer without standing in prayer.
In posing this question Zornberg puts forward the possibility of paradox
but within a traditional conflict model. Here, I believe, paradox collapses
into a form of ambivalence that needs to be resolved. In an effort to
broaden the psychoanalytic dialogue in regard to the story of Jonah I utilize
both a British Object Relations and Relational theoretical approach.
Within those models, paradox can then be thought of as something that we
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

learn to incorporate as part of the way we function, part of a process of ac-


ceptance of our own and life’s contradictions and not something necessarily
to be resolved. Ghent (1992) took up the difficulty psychoanalysis has had
with the concept of paradox. He believes, “By introducing paradox into the
dry sobriety of psychoanalysis, Winnicott made room for spontaneity, ambi-
guity, illusion, and creativity as features that are essential to real living, de-
spite the lack of a proper place for them in standard metapsychology” (p.
136). Specifically, I question whether this is a true or false prayer and what
this can help us to understand about Jonah. I want to examine Jonah’s ca-
pacity to integrate difficult paradoxical feelings and varying states of mind,
and his ability to fully connect with and care about others. I propose that
what happens within Jonah should not be the singular focus but considered
within the context of Jonah’s relationship with God.
Zornberg continues her attentiveness to the paradoxical elements in the
Jonah story and further suggests that Jonah’s flight maintains a paradoxical
tension in which fleeing God is also pursuing God. Jonah prays both for
death and to be saved—another paradox. Ultimately Zornberg believes
that Jonah does, by asking to die, come to stand intimately before God: “His
flight had been an act of dislocation, repudiating his human vulnerability.
But precisely in his most withdrawn moment, speaking to himself of death,
he encounters God” (this issue, p. 19). She ends her paper suggesting that,
in fact, at the very depths of his despair, Jonah finally encounters the divine.
I am left wondering—what does it mean to repudiate an essential aspect of
humanness, one’s vulnerability? Further, what allows us to create the ca-
pacity to acknowledge and accept this vulnerability?
Zornberg’s persuasive paper has created interesting questions for me and
has opened up a text that I had been unable to engage. I now enter the Jo-
nah story and can see places to push the text further, psychoanalytically. I
find that the central enigma in my reading involves Jonah’s state of mind.
320 Jill Salberg

When we meet Jonah he is in a state of agitation, he must flee. What we


soon discern is that his state is one of despair, a despair so great that he seeks
out death. Why is Jonah in such despair? We are never told, but we do see
that in fact this does not seem to change in the story; it only gets deeper and
more desperate until, by the end of the story, Jonah pleads with God to let
him die. What does death offer Jonah that life in the service of God does
not?
I want to offer the possibility that Jonah seeks death as a way out of un-
ending despair. It is a state of mind in which one has no belief in the possi-
bility of hope and no ability to reflect on one’s feelings in any useful manner.
Zornberg brings our attention to Jonah’s inability to reflect on his own feel-
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

ings. She writes, “His flight, his death-wish, his anger—none of these rouse
him to curiosity about his own soul, its deep currents and cross-currents”
(this issue, p. 285). Zornberg is quite perceptive about this lack of interest
in his inner being. Jonah has no insight into his despair and yet God seems
to be the referent for it.
While I agree with Zornberg about Jonah’s lack of curiosity, I would
think about this differently. We need to explain what prevents Jonah from
reflecting on his inner states. I believe that he is currently incapable of such
self-reflection. His inner world is archaic, a split universe of good and evil,
what Klein (1952) and contemporary writers would characterize as a posi-
tion dominated by paranoid-schizoid anxieties. In a Kleinian universe one
must keep the good separate from the bad, preventing the bad object from
destroying the good. Jonah’s inability to integrate his split world and his in-
capacity for reflectivity—a failure in what Fonagy and Target (1998)
termed the process of mentalization—keep him in a persecutory universe.
He simply cannot comprehend a God who wants people to change—a God
of reparation and forgiveness, a God who tolerates and accepts ambiva-
lence. He needs a God who is rigidly consistent and consequently will not
disappoint him. In Jonah’s internal world, not only do good and bad need to
be kept apart, but he also needs God to organize and maintain the external
world in the same way. A reliable God would be a strict judge who consis-
tently punishes evil.
When we meet Jonah, he is still gripped by this persecutory inner world,
a world ruled by strict justice—there is absolute evil and it must be pun-
ished absolutely. Zornberg tells us, “Even before his flight, he [Jonah] al-
ready knew God’s nature, its deplorable compassion. … The God who is
celebrated as ‘renouncing evil,’ has acted true to form; and Jonah is mor-
tally sick because of it” (this issue, p. 275). Jonah is unaware of how his own
internal split world of good and bad is projected outward onto the external
Commentary on Paper by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg 321

world. He is not yet able to tolerate the ambiguity of depressive position


concerns that God proposes to him: Nineveh has sinned and should be
given an opportunity for repentance and forgiveness. God, although angry
and threatening with Nineveh, nonetheless wants reparative actions, not
punitive ones. In this context Jonah only sees Nineveh as unworthy of re-
demption. And so Jonah’s despair begins slowly to come into focus. He is
disappointed with God for not punishing Nineveh. I want to suggest that
this disappointment is world altering for Jonah, traumatic even. He can no
longer believe in God or in himself as a prophet, and consequently he flees,
both psychologically and physically.
Within Aggadic and Midrashic literature (legends relating to the Bible;
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

see Bialik & Ravnitzky, 1992) we learn that there had been prior missions
in which Jonah’s prophecy had not come to pass. Jonah is seen as fearful of
being considered a “false prophet.” I am purporting that Jonah’s flight has
less to do with the failure of his prophecy than with his flight from chronic
traumatizing disappointment with God. This kind of disappointment re-
sults from a moment of nonrecognition. Thus, beneath Jonah’s despair lies
a wound filled with anger. The problem of aggression and destructiveness
haunts the depressive position world. Winnicott (1963, 1965) captured this
when he stated, “Here being depressed is an achievement, and implies a
high degree of personal integration, and an acceptance of responsibility for
all the destructiveness that is bound up with living” (p. 176).
Although we are all moving from depressive anxieties into para-
noid-schizoid anxieties and back again, Jonah seems to be not fully able to
inhabit the depressive position. The challenges of this stage are engaging in
a reparative process that allows a dyad to reconnect after a rupture as well
as feeling a sense of loss than can be mourned. To do these, Jonah would
need to develop a sense of true concern and real regret for his own destruc-
tiveness. It is only with this achievement that he can mourn the disappoint-
ments that occur and then, begin to care about other people and their own
vulnerabilities. Jonah would need to relinquish his fearful refusal to inhabit
his own sense of helplessness, his vulnerability. Nineveh would then have
resonance for him, and he could appreciate God’s forgiveness and find em-
pathy for the people of Nineveh.
These achievements, the capacity for concern and the ability to make
reparation also hinge ultimately on the capacity for reflection and mutual
recognition. Benjamin (1990, 1998, 2006) saw recognition as the essential
aspect of intersubjectivity, writing, “Intersubjective theory postulates that
the other must be recognized as another subject in order for the self to fully
experience his or her subjectivity in the other’s presence. This means, first,
322 Jill Salberg

that we have a need for recognition and second, that we have a capacity to
recognize others in return—mutual recognition” (Benjamin, 1990, p. 35).
Benjamin (1998) further argued that this mutual recognition is co-created
between the two subjects, their dialogue forming the intersubjective space
of the third: “More broadly, [this] could be understood in terms of the dia-
logue as creating a third, something like the dance that is distinct from the
dancers yet co-created by them” (p. 28). We see from the actual story that
Jonah’s flight is an escape from dialogue with God. (Commentaries on Jo-
nah have suggested that Jonah flees to Tarshish believing that prophecy, lit-
erally God’s voice, can only be heard in the land of revelation; see Simon,
1999, p. 3, citing Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael). With his flight, Jonah attempts
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

to preclude hearing God and refuses to speak with God. In Benjamin’s


terms he has foreclosed the possibility of an intersubjective space.
This type of recognition and care for the other can be likened to what in
Hebrew is known as, chessed, translated as lovingkindness, which is one of
the essential attributes of God. In this way I believe we can think of God as
entering into an intersubjective dialogue and relationship with us. Aron
(1997) contended that Martin Buber developed a theological position of
dialogue, Buber’s I–It and I–Thou dichotomy, which is very close to the re-
lational psychoanalytic approach. Further, Aron argued that Buber’s ap-
proach was essentially one of mutual recognition. Aron (2004) wrote, “The
Jewish tradition, as I understand it, is radically relational in its assumption
of a mutual and intersubjective relationship between God and humanity”
(p. 445). I would agree and further argue that mutual recognition contains
an element of chessed. Within true recognition there must be an aspect of a
loving and kind acceptance of the other, a true interest in and concern for
an[other]’s subjectivity.
How can Jonah achieve this level of concern if, as Zornberg tells us,
God’s compassion is felt to be deplorable? And why is this the story that the
Rabbis chose as a necessary part of the Yom Kippur liturgy? Theologically
the motivation for one’s repentance rests on the belief that God’s compas-
sion will allow forgiveness for our transgressions. This is the compelling ra-
tionale for the Yom Kippur liturgy. We are to read and remember on this
Day of Atonement that God will forgive the sinner if their repentance is
heartfelt, if their day of fasting comes from an earnest wish to atone for
transgressions in the past year. Alternatively, the Hebrew word teshuvah, al-
though often defined as repentance is more accurately translated as ‘to re-
turn’. From a Chassidic point of view, within each of us is a divine spark.
Teshuvah is to return to the Godly potential within all of us, thereby return-
ing to God. I would further maintain that this return is to an
Commentary on Paper by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg 323

intersubjectively felt relationship with God in which God contains chessed


and we also experience our own capacity for compassion.
Jonah is incapable of understanding a God who can turn away from
wrathful retribution and show forgiveness. If prayer is a combination of
praise, a petition for one’s needs, and a show of gratitude, then Zornberg is
quite right; Jonah is unprepared to stand in the place of prayer. Jonah can-
not even begin to approach true prayer. Still at the mercy of his persecutory
inner world, believing that only retribution can set things right, Jonah has
not achieved the fruits of depressive position struggles. He is not psycholog-
ically or spiritually ready for what true repentance and forgiveness entail.
And, if Jonah is incapable of true prayer, then he is desperately alone in the
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

world, without access to God and without hope.


I want to suggest a possible backstory to this text, a story about Jonah’s
crisis and God’s need to help Jonah. In this enterprise I invert Zornberg’s
idea that Jonah is fleeing and paradoxically pursuing God. I am drawing
upon the work of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1955), who wrote, “This
is the mysterious paradox of Biblical faith: God is pursuing man” (p. 136).
What Heschel presents here is a truly relational concept. From Heschel’s
point of view, God created man to be in relationship with him. He wrote, “It
is as if God were unwilling to be alone, and He had chosen man to serve
Him” (p. 136). Man’s faith becomes the answer to God’s pursuit, and
Heschel believes that awe and mystery are the beginnings of true faith. Jo-
nah is despairing, perhaps even lacking in true faith, and God sees this. And
here, I believe, is the relational aspect to Heschel: that sometimes God de-
cides to get off the bench and get in the game. What if God gave Jonah this
very mission not because of Nineveh but because of Jonah’s despair? What
if God recognized Jonah’s need before Jonah himself was aware of it? What
if Jonah needed transformation and God believed that Jonah could not do
this alone? And what if Jonah needed an event or even a forum, that is, a
place for dialogue with God before he could even begin to explore his own
despair?
A clue appears for me when Jonah is on the boat that he thinks will take
him to Tarshish. Zornberg points us to the repetitive choice of verbs,
vayered, yarad, vayeradam, which in the Hebrew mean ‘descent’. She be-
lieves that his withdrawal and descent are related to his flight. I wonder if
what we are hearing can also be understood as the psychic movement into
the unconscious realm, perhaps, even to a dissociated self-state. As the
storm God sends threatens to destroy the boat and the lives of the sailors,
the men react with terror. Jonah, on the other hand, goes down into the
hold of the ship and falls asleep.
324 Jill Salberg

This is so peculiar a response as to warrant notice. Can this sleep possibly


be sleep as we know it, a rest after a long day to restore oneself? Or is this the
sleep of further flight, escape from dread? I query, is it sleep, or could it
rather be dissociation, a deadening of awareness? As Shakespeare so elo-
quently has Hamlet reflect,

To die — to sleep —
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die — to sleep.
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

To sleep-perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub!


For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
(Hamlet, Act III, Sc. 1:67–74)

Hamlet is terrified that even in death, he might still be haunted by


dreams. Similarly, Jonah cannot find escape in dissociation because what
he dreads to feel is still present, albeit in another part of him. As Bromberg
(2006) wrote, “The brain uses dissociation to inhibit potentially discrepant
views of reality held by different self-states, which, if ‘on stage’ at the same
time, would be more than the mind could contain without destabilizing” (p.
4). Even the captain is in disbelief when he wakes Jonah and asks how he
can sleep while a storm threatens to wreck the ship and kill them all. I be-
lieve that Jonah has gone into a dissociated state, a state of altered con-
sciousness or a hypnogogic state. Feeling unrecognized by God, Jonah is un-
moored, unable to comprehend this loss, and unable to know how to repair
the rupture. Jonah knows he is the cause of the storm and offers to sacrifice
his life to save the crew on the boat. He tells them to throw him overboard.
And here I ask, is this a suicidal move towards death, where his despair has
been headed all along, or is it a longing to reject a self in which he can no
longer feel alive—a wish to discard a sense of deadness? And beneath Jo-
nah’s despair, is there a dissociated self-state filled with terror that gets ex-
truded out and projected into the sailors who rightly cry out in fright,
“What have you done?”
What if we suppose that what follows is a dream, Jonah’s dream. The
scene on the boat (chapter 1), and then Jonah in the belly of the great fish
(chapter 2), has a phantasmagoric quality, already close to dreamlike. Rec-
ognizing that he has endangered the crew, Jonah then dreams of an escape
that will not injure anyone else. He insists on being thrown overboard to his
death. Does he long for rescue? Perhaps, in which case the great fish might
Commentary on Paper by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg 325

be his own dream symbol through which he imagines a heroic rescue by


God. Then Jonah can submit to God’s will, offer a prayer and be saved.
Here again, Zornberg alerts us to the idea that this is not a true prayer, that
Jonah is once again seeming to pray, but not yet able to stand in prayer. I
would agree, for it lacks the quality that I associate with true prayer.
As noted previously, Zornberg explores Jonah’s difficulties in finding a
true place of prayer and likens him to Oedipus, who refuses to know his un-
conscious meanings and conflicts. From a Relational perspective, it might
be useful to consider the tension between surrender and submission as an-
other way of understanding Jonah’s continuing disconnection from God. In
Hebrew the word kavanah is used to connote one’s state of mind, intention
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

that needs to infuse one’s praying. Jonah’s state of mind in the great fish
does not feel like a focused, intended prayer but rather a submissive prayer,
perhaps even a sudden, last ditch effort to remain alive. I want to suggest
that embedded within the idea of kavanah is the possibility of surrender to
prayer. A true heartfelt prayer has a focused intentionality but also a relin-
quishment of willfullness. This surrender involves a true receptivity to the
experience of prayer rather than a willful desire to be in prayer. Although
Jonah is praising God his praise is all in the past tense.
Jonah offers no desperate plaintive plea for help, nor do we feel his grati-
tude for God’s gifts. I believe that Jonah’s prayer is a kind of submission,
with the accompanying deadened affective state. Ghent (1990) distin-
guished between true surrender and a false surrender, what he terms sub-
mission. He wrote, “I imply that there is, however deeply buried or frozen, a
longing for something in the environment to make possible the surrender,
in the sense of yielding, of false self” (p. 214). In Ghent’s point of view, sub-
mission is a perversion of surrender, and this would mean a false attempt at
intimacy. Jonah, in submissive prayer, remains separate from God. True sur-
render would allow him to experience God’s presence.
Zornberg compares Jonah’s prayer to Hannah’s, who in the Bible is con-
sidered true in her piety. She astutely deduces that Jonah is unable to stand
in the liminal space of prayer between death and life. I would add that his
prayer suggests a state of separateness, a kind of anxious attachment, un-
moored and lacking hope. And after all, hope is what Jonah is too fearful to
dare to risk. Mitchell (1993), in writing about hope in the analytic situa-
tion, stated, “Old hopes, as Wordsworth suggests, are born from dread” (p.
221). How will Jonah ever move from dread to hope? Chapter 3 returns Jo-
nah and us to the storyline and the task he has to face. God continues to in-
sist that Jonah go to warn the people of Nineveh to repent their evil ways.
This time Jonah agrees; he delivers the message and Nineveh quickly turns
326 Jill Salberg

back from evil and repents. God sees that Nineveh has repented and de-
cides to show mercy and does not punish them. Had the story ended here
we might not feel uneasy, nor perhaps would we find it memorable.
The heat of the drama lies ahead in chapter 4. While God shows
mercy and does not destroy the city of Nineveh, Jonah’s despair returns
and deepens with rage. He is angry with God for being just the kind of
God Jonah knew God to be, and states, “You are a compassionate and
gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punish-
ment” (Jonah 4:2). He then asks for death for he no longer wants to live.
Perhaps given the Jonah we have read about this shouldn’t perplex us,
but we are left wondering yet again, how could Jonah find God’s compas-
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

sion so deplorable? Jonah then creates a private resting spot, a booth,


outside the city of Nineveh. A final drama unfolds with God providing a
tree with a gourd to shade Jonah from the heat of the sun. Jonah is
pleased. Within a day God provides a worm that kills the tree. Jonah,
wracked now with agonizing grief, implores God to grant him death. God
understands that Jonah, although deeply grieved for the plant, seems to
be unable to compassionately care about his fellow humans in Nineveh.
How could Jonah still not change? Even God is perplexed and ends this
drama and the narrative with what feels to be an enigmatic non-
resolution. God says, “And should I not pity Nineveh, the great city, in
which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand human be-
ings who do not know their right hand from their left hand, and many
beasts as well?” (4:10–11).
Zornberg suggests that the story of Jonah is neither historical nor truly of
the prophetic writings. She says that the text, on its own, belongs perhaps
to the arena of mythic or symbolic writings. I agree with her appraisal and
suggest that in many ways it is more like a wisdom book that challenges
one’s preconceived notions. My first few readings of Jonah kept bringing
Job to mind, the quintessential good person who has bad things happen to
him. Only Jonah feels like the inverse story to Job. Jonah is not tested but
runs from God. For me, the story of Job is one of true faith in the face of the
arbitrariness of life, its abundances and its misfortunes.
Then I realized that Jonah is a story of how true hope and faith are cre-
ated. In his paper entitled “The Area of Faith in Winnicott, Lacan and
Bion,” Eigen (1981) wrote, “If, for example, one’s emotional reality or truth
is despair, what is most important is not that one may be in despair, but one’s
attitudes toward one’s despair. Through one’s basic attentiveness one’s de-
spair can declare itself and tell its story” (p. 429). Often the movement in
Commentary on Paper by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg 327

analysis is from despair to hope, from a sense of deadness to aliveness. It is


only when Jonah can come out of his dissociation into the full force of his
own despair that he can even begin to dare to have hope and to have faith.
God understands that Jonah needs a transformation and that the way Jo-
nah can leave his despair has to begin with caring about others—recogniz-
ing both their frailties and his own connection to them. Furthermore, God
recognizes that the internal shift from the paranoid-schizoid position of iso-
lation to the depressive position space of engagement is the movement that
Jonah needs to make. This transformation is represented in the mythic im-
agery of rebirth symbolized by the great fish and water as womb with Jonah
being spewed out onto land.
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

Last, I want to suggest that, along with depressive position achieve-


ments, this kind of movement into caring engagement represents the cre-
ation of a true intersubejctive space. God is reaching out to co-create a new
space with Jonah. Can Jonah reach back? Shimon HaTzaddik (Simon the
Righteous), as recorded in Pirkei Avos (1984, p. 9), said that the world con-
tinues to exist because of three things: Torah study, the worship of Hashem
(name for God) and the performance of “gemilut chasadim,” acts of kind-
ness. God attempts to demonstrate what caring, mercy, in Yiddish
rachmonus, or true compassion looks like but Jonah is still unconvinced. It is
not God’s compassion that is deplorable; it is Jonah who is not yet capable
of integrating God’s acts of kindness.
The story ends enigmatically because we don’t know what ultimately
happens between God and Jonah. The narrative ends with a question from
God that leaves Jonah’s response unknown. Is Jonah moved out of his de-
spair, integrating internal splits and beginning to engage with others? Is it at
the very least hopeful because Jonah and God are finally in a dialogue? I am
left believing that this is the beginning of many conversations yet to be had
between God and Jonah and each of us. I imagine that the dialogue contin-
ues, perhaps one of us takes Jonah’s place whenever we relinquish our own
despair, enter a true depressive position and attempt to make reparation to
another. Recognition and acts of lovingkindness are what we yearn for and
can offer each other. In “Standing in the Spaces,” Bromberg (1996) wrote,
“a space uniquely relational and still uniquely individual; … a twilight
space in which “the impossible” becomes possible; a space in which incom-
patible selves, each awake to its own ‘truth,’ can ‘dream’ the reality of the
other without risk to its own integrity.” (p. 520)
I want to suggest that God is in those spaces between selves, between self
and other, not only in search of man but waiting to be found.
328 Jill Salberg

REFERENCES

Aron, L. (1997). A meeting of minds: Mutuality in psychoanalysis. New York: The Analytic
Press.
Aron, L. (2004). God’s influence on my psychoanalytic vision and values. Psychoanalytic Psy-
chology, 21, 442–451.
Benjamin, J. (1988). The bonds of love. New York: Pantheon.
Benjamin, J. (1990). An outline of intersubjectivity: The development of recognition. Psy-
choanalytic Psychology, 7, 33–46.
Benjamin, J. (1998). Shadow of the other: Intersubjectivity and gender in psychoanalysis. New
York: Routledge.
Benjamin, J. (2006). Beyond doer and done-to: An intersubjective view of thirdness. Psycho-
Downloaded by [Universite Laval] at 02:47 10 October 2014

analytic Quarterly, 73, 5–46.


Bialik, H. M., & Ravnitzky, Y. H. (Eds.). (1992). The book of legends: Sefer Ha-Aggadah, Leg-
ends from the Talmud and Midrash. New York: Schocken.
Bollas, C. (1989). Forces of destiny: Psychoanalysis and the human idiom. Northvale, NJ:
Aronson.
Bromberg, P. (1996). Standing in the spaces: The multiplicity of self and the psychoanalytic
relationship. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 32, 509–535.
Bromberg, P. (2006). Awakening the dreamer. Mahwah, NJ: The Analytic Press.
Eigen, M. (1981). The area of faith in Winnicott, Lacan and Bion. International Journal of
Psycho-Analysis, 62, 413–433.
Fonagy, P., & Target, M. (1998). Mentalization and the changing aims of child psychoanaly-
sis. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 8(1), 87–114.
Ghent, E. (1990). Masochism, submission, surrender. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 26,
108–136.
Ghent, E. (1992). Paradox and process. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2, 135–159.
Heschel, A. J. (1955). God in search of man: A philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Klein, M. (1952). Some theoretical conclusions regarding the emotional life of the infant. In
Melanie Klein, Paula Heimann, Susan Isaacs and Joan Riviere (Ed. Joan Riviere), Devel-
opments in Psycho-Analysis (pp. 198–236). London: The Hogarth Press Ltd.
Mitchell, S. A. (1993). Hope and dread in psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.
Pirkei Avos (1984). Ethics of the fathers, a new translation. New York: Artscroll Mesorah Se-
ries.
Simon, U. (1999). The JPS Bible Commentary:Jonah. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication
Society.
Shakespeare, W. (1969). “Hamlet Prince of Denmark” in William Shakespeare: The Complete
Works. Baltimore: Penguin Books, pp. 930–974.
Winnicott, D. W. (1965). Communicating and not communicating leading to a study of cer-
tain opposites. In The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. New York: In-
ternational Universities Press. (Original work published 1963)

155 West 71st Street


New York, NY 10023
jilsalberg@aol.com

Вам также может понравиться