On the afternoon of Yom Kippur, which begins Wednesday evening, the book of Jonah is traditionally read in its entirety. Stuart Halpern surveys the way the book’s famous scene where the title character is swallowed by a “great fish” has been imagined and employed in Anglo-American culture—from Herman Melville to George Orwell. In an anatomically explicit poem, Aldous Huxley imagines the prophet “seated upon the convex mound of one vast kidney.” The talmudic sages, by contrast, were much less interested by the biological details:
The ancient rabbis, too, couldn’t help but imagine what it must have been like for Jonah to offer his devotion from the depths, but, unlike Melville and Huxley, they did not picture what it would be like to be caught in the viscous confines of a fish. Neither did they think, as Orwell did, of Jonah’s confinement as an allegory about the individual and society. Rather, the midrashic work Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer describes Jonah entering the fish’s mouth “just as a man enters the great synagogue.”
“And he stood inside,” [the rabbis explain]. “The two eye-windows were like windows of glass giving light to Jonah. Rabbi Meir said: One pearl was suspended in the belly of the fish and it gave illumination to Jonah, like the sun that shines with its might at noon; and it showed to Jonah all that was in the sea and in the depths, as it is said ‘Light is sown for the righteous.’”
In this rabbinic rendering, the belly of the fish is a shul in which Jonah prays for forgiveness just as the congregation does on Yom Kippur when the book of Jonah is read.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/philosophy/11650/depths-of-devotion/