Yom Kippur D’var Torah, Makom, 5784/2023
On Yom Kippur, we read the story of Jonah and the Whale. Jonah is trying to flee from God’s request that he go to Nineveh and instruct the city to repent. Through a series of events Jonah is swallowed by a whale, whose belly he lives in for three days. It is here that Jonah turns back towards God and repents, and God listens.
Jonah’s return to God came from facing his death inside of that whale. The whale is positioned as a threat to Jonah’s life, but was, in fact, directed by God to swallow Jonah, to save Jonah from drowning. The whale itself was in relationship to the divine, responding to God’s request when Jonah did not. This whale provided Jonah with space to repent, to turn back towards God. Jonah was trapped, but he was also safe and tightly held. Inside the world’s largest mammal.
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I often forget that whales are mammals. They have live births. They live in tightly-knit social groups, have complex relationships, work together for mutual benefit, talk to each other, have regional languages, look after each other’s children. As all living beings do in one way or another, they have a relationship to the divine.
In her book Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, our Durham neighbor Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes (and I’m weaving through her writing here):
In some areas, blue whales fast during the day…I like to think that we are all living in the long water prayer of the blue whales, that meditative sound that travels hundreds of miles underwater…
…. water holds sound… it can reverberate on and on and keep calling us. And so maybe the calls of the great blue whales who filled the whole ocean [at one time] are still blessing our water selves now… Imagine with me that the biggest sound on the planet is the prayer of a blue ancestor depth. What then?
If it's possible that we today could be living aside the long water prayer of the blue whales, could not Jonah have been living inside the prayer of that single whale? Could Jonah have heard that far-reaching chant and been moved to add his own voice to it? Could his prayer still be living in the sea, carried on and on by the breath of that whale who sheltered him for the three days needed for his return?
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In the summer of 2020, on the straits of Gibraltar, endangered Orcas began regularly attacking the rudders of boats. These Orcas live in a part of the ocean almost totally depleted of the fish they survive on, and the fishing industry continues to plunder what little is left, injuring or even killing the Orcas in the process. Even sailing boats and ferries travel with enough speed and cause enough noise pollution to cause fatal injuries. Clearly we humans are out of alignment.
During the covid lockdown earlier that summer, there were two months of respite. “No big game fishing, no whale watching or sailing boats, no fast ferries, fewer merchant ships.” The Orcas had two months of relief -- something most of them probably never experienced before in their lives -- and when it all came back, the Orcas came back swinging.
Some scientists speculate that the multitude of stresses these highly sentient cetaceans have endured, “years of grieving lost calves, injuries, competition for fish, coupled with a pause and reintroduction of human activity, could have affected their behavior.” But they admit there is a great deal they don’t know about Orcas.
Michaela Harrison, who has been in deep communion with whales for decades, says that these are not revenge attacks. Orcas are precise and powerful beings; if they wanted to injure any of the people on the boats, they would have no problem doing so. Instead, in every attack, the Orcas go for the rudder. It is a teaching, she says. They are saying, You are going in the wrong direction. Turn.
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Instead of going to Nineveh as God commanded, Jonah fled in the exact other direction, to Tarshish, which was thought to be at the ends of the earth, as far as one could go, to try to escape.
The biblical city of Tarshish is thought to be off the Coast of Spain, on what we know today as the Strait of Gibraltar.
The place of the Orcas’ attacks.
Could the call of that whale that swallowed Jonah, that held him through repentance and a turn back towards God, still be reverberating through the ocean, supporting their descendents today? And by extension, us? Are the whales today acting in holy relationship with the divine, trying to teach us the same lesson they have been trying to teach us for generations? To turn, to go the other direction? What would it mean for us to listen, to learn, to live inside of that prayer of blue ancestor depth?
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On Yom Kippur, we are instructed to turn -- back towards God, back towards alignment, back towards our best selves. Our community’s name, Makom, is not a static place, but place as a verb. We locate ourselves through our actions. In this coming year, may our actions be in alignment. May we be great listeners, to each other, and to all sentient beings whose wisdom is around us. May we be students and teachers to each other to turn in the directions we collectively need to go. And may we be open to those deep reverberations, adding our own voices to the eternal chant.
Sources:
“Whales and dolphins have rich ‘human-like’ cultures and societies “
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, 2020, Page 48
'I've never seen or heard of attacks': scientists baffled by orcas harassing boats’, Susan Smilie, The Guardian
