I am Yonah

I am Yonah Because I run. 

I have spent much of my life running. I ran by becoming useful, capable, productive, and needed. I ran by filling every silence, carrying what was not mine, and building lives around truths I wasn’t yet ready to face.But no one can outrun Hashem’s plan.

The Yonah story is a powerful analogy for people who run. While most of us don’t run off to Tarshish with a suitcase in hand, we run into work, relationships, caretaking, achievement, spirituality, even healing. We call it responsibility. We call it loyalty. We call it survival. And sometimes it is.

But beneath all that movement is a truth we may be keeping hidden from even ourselves. How many of us are trying to put distance between ourselves and the life, voice, mission or calling that already knows our name?

The story of Yonah begins with a name. Yonah ben Amitai.

Yonah, the son of Amitai. The son of emes. The son of truth.

The Vilna Gaon famously reads Yonah as a metaphor for the soul. His story is not only about a prophet running from Hashem. It is the story of every neshamah sent into this world with a purpose, every soul that hears a call and discovers how terrifying it can be to face what that call requires.

The story begins not with flight, but with identity. Yonah comes from truth. Perhaps we all do. But how many of us can face the truth when it calls us by name?

I am Yonah Because I have been called.

The truth about who we are, what we know, what must change, the life we have outgrown, and the life asking to be lived.
And so we run.
Does everybody receive a call?
I believe so.

To be called is to trust that our presence here is not incidental. That beneath the accidents, choices, losses and strange turns that shape a life, there is something the soul came here to meet. Something it came to learn, repair, reveal or give.

In the Gra’s reading, Nineveh is the great city of embodied life, the complicated human world into which the soul descends to complete its work. The call to Yonah is therefore not only an instruction. It is a mission.
You come from truth. You came here to bring more of it into the world.

A calling is not always glamorous. Sometimes it arrives as a reality we cannot avoid. The wound that keeps asking for attention. The pattern that follows us into every interaction. The truth that refuses to be silenced.

Sometimes the work of the soul grows from precisely what we would never have volunteered to endure.

I see this in the people I work with, who believe their purpose is hidden outside them, waiting to be found. But it is more often revealed as a thread already woven through relationships, bodies, fears and gifts, asking the same question in a hundred forms; Where do I abandon myself? What truth do I keep wrestling with? What have I survived that is asking to be transformed?

Calling is not always a voice from heaven announcing the next step. Sometimes it is the growing inability to continue living in a way our souls already know to be false.

When I follow that thread through my own life, it leads me through places the younger version of me could never have imagined. She would not have imagined the sleepless nights, the mornings filled with dread or the hours spent crying on the bathroom floor. But she also would not have imagined a life filled with Torah, raising my children, teaching, and devoting myself to breath, truth and transformation.

I didn’t choose most of the experiences that taught me how to enter those worlds. I would never have called them preparation while I was living through them. But over time, the pattern became impossible to ignore. The very experiences that wounded me were also shaping the questions I would spend my life learning how to answer.

The very fires I ran from became the furnaces in which I was forged.

The Yonah story brings to mind an old joke my father loves. A man dies and asks God, “Is it true that we are Your chosen people?”

“Yes, My child. You are the Chosen People.”

The man hesitates. “Well, would You mind choosing someone else for a change?”

Even as a child, I understood the pressure in accountability. There is a part of us that longs to know we are special. And yet, to be chosen is to be loved into responsibility. Perhaps this is why being chosen feels as frightening as it does sacred. A calling asks something of us. It demands that we grow large enough to hold what has been entrusted to us.

And some of us run from the very mission our soul was crafted for, gifted and tasked with accomplishing. We run from the blessings we have prayed for, for fear that in the process of receiving them, we might be forced to break open what our limited vessels can no longer contain.

Yonah fled. As I have fled.
He sought out a vessel. So did I.

We are always choosing vessels. Bodies. Marriages. Identities. Professions. Communities. Practices. Some vessels help us carry the soul’s assignment. Others carry us away.

The question, then, is not only about what we are called here to do, but whether the life we have built can hold us while we do it. Whether our bodies can remain present. Whether our nervous systems have the capacity to stay with what is. Whether our relationships can survive the expansion required when the soul begins to take up more space.

Much of what I explore in my course, aptly called Vessel of Truth, is how to build that kind of life: one capable of holding what we once fled from.

The tragedy is not that Yonah needed a vessel. Souls need vessels.
The tragedy is that he asked the vessel to take him away from himself.

I’ve also built vessels hoping they could be an escape. Hoping they would take me where I wanted to go rather than to where Hashem wanted me to be.
Consciously and unconsciously.

And like Yonah, I paid the price.

I am Yonah Because I have paid the price. 

Yonah is only four chapters and forty eight verses, yet every word carries weight.

And Yonah rose to flee Tarshish, away from Hashem. He descended to Yaffo, and found a ship going to Tarshish, he paid the fare, and descended onto the ships with the others to flee from Hashem, to Tarshish.

Borrowing from the Gra, I have learned to read the text as a map of the soul’s journey, allowing each descent, each silence, each strange turn to speak beyond the story itself.

Vayakom –  he rose.
Vayered – he descended.
Vayeetein sechara – he paid the fare.
Vayered ba – he descended again.

He descended. He paid the fare. And descended again.

I know that movement. I have told myself I was rising even as I began to fall. I have chosen vessels and convinced myself they were carrying me somewhere necessary, while moving further from what I already knew.

There is always a price. Sometimes it is obvious; a relationship, a home, money, time, health. Sometimes it is more subtle, appearing as the distance between who we are and who we pretend to be, in the exhaustion of maintaining a life our soul has outgrown or tolerating abuse in the name of loyalty.

We do not only pay for the choices we make.
We pay for the truths we postpone.
We pay for every year spent asking the wrong vessel to carry us toward the right life.

I am Yonah Because I sleep.

This sleep rarely looks like laziness. Often it looks like competence.

A woman manages the home, anticipates everyone’s needs and remains endlessly useful while sleeping through the knowledge that she has disappeared from her own life. A facilitator regulating every nervous system in the room while refusing to notice the panic beating in her own chest.

We can remain remarkably productive while spiritually unconscious.

It is amazing to me how the text tells us that as the storm ravaged, our protagonist was deeply asleep. Sleeping while a storm emerged specifically to wake him up, to redirect him, to shatter his illusions and bring him back on track.

I am careful about naming the purpose of anyone else’s storm. I only know that some of mine eventually showed me what I had been unable to see in calm weather.

Perhaps that is what it means to be Yonah.
A storm does not always come to destroy the life we have lived. Sometimes it sends us directly back into it. This time awake.

How many storms have I slept through? How many wake up calls were not enough when I stubbornly insisted on clinging to sleep?

It is an outsider, the captain, who finally rouses Yonah, urging him to “Call upon your Hashem!”
All along our storms ask for one simple thing.

Wake up.
Talk to Hashem.
The Eternal Hashem.
Come back to the conversation.

I am Yonah Because I have been swallowed whole.

Every storm has demanded a surrender. Possessions. Dreams. Relationships. Friendships I still grieve. Cherished memories now disfigured, parts of myself I have had to release into the raging sea.

I have drowned before in my life. I have been consumed to the point where I wondered, like Yonah, whether I would ever again gaze toward Heichal Kodshecha, Hashem’s holy place.

משמרים הבלי שוא חסדם יעזבו.

“They who cling to empty folly forsake their own welfare.”

I have always been amused when an English translation accidentally seems to call my name. In one rendering of Yonah’s prayer, the words “empty folly” appear, and I hear Fally.

There is a Fally who was long ago emptied of anything vital. She was built from coping mechanisms and inherited stories that once helped her survive but no longer help her live.

Still, I have clung to her, trying to force myself back into the broken vessel of who I had been, a fully formed self attempting to return to a womb that can no longer contain me.

I know I’m not alone in this. Feeling as though we are drowning, we reach instinctively for the person we used to be. The woman who tolerated more. The mother who needed less. The wife who withered away to keep a marriage whole. We mistake the familiar for solid ground, even when it’s little more than driftwood.

We believe we’re fighting for our lives, while expending all our strength on a shattered vessel that can no longer keep us afloat. And from inside the struggle, it’s not easy to know whether we’re fighting for air or fighting against the transformation that might finally carry us to the shore.

But the body usually knows first. The breath becomes shallow. The nervous system goes on high alert. The same conflict returns. The same grief rises. The same truth emerges from the depths.

The lots we cast come up with the same name over and over again.

We cling to empty things because those vessels were once full. A role once gave belonging. A offered protection. A relationship once felt like shelter. A coping mechanism meant life.

Survival strategies don’t always know when their work is complete.

The belly of the fish is the place where Yonah can no longer outrun that truth. There’s nowhere left to go, nothing left to prove and no old identity large enough to contain who he’s becoming.

Only darkness and the terrible mercy of coming face to face with himself.

I am Yonah Because I pray. 

There were years when it was hard for me
to pray.

I struggle to read Hebrew fluently, and prayer carries the baggage of my childhood. The fear of mispronouncing a word, taking too long, losing my place, hearing my voice falter.

And beneath all of that, the fear that I might
finally find the courage to ask and Hashem might still say no.

So I withheld my words. Not trusting my voice enough to offer them. Who wants to hear a voice this hesitant, this fractured, this unsure?

“I do,” Hashem has answered, patiently, consistently, lovingly.

The Hebrew word lehispallel, to pray, is reflexive. It has long been understood as an act of self examination. Prayer asks us to face ourselves, to stand before Hashem without the stories and carefully constructed versions of who we think we should be.

Perhaps this is where healing and prayer meet. Both begin in the moment a person is finally able to look inward and tell themselves the truth.

I have called from the darkness, from places where the distance between myself and Hashem felt immeasurable, even when I knew that I had participated in creating that distance. Yonah, too, was instructed to use his voice and fled instead. Only when every other avenue of escape disappeared did his voice remain. And what a voice it became.

Yonah’s words are halting, visceral poetry. A prayer from the belly, from the murky, wordless, seat of intuition. In the belly of the whale, Yonah is finally able to hear himself.

I know something about that. I have felt the pounding of my heart become so loud that it drowned out everything else. When there was no other sound left to follow, I began to hear the voice within me that was no longer arguing with His.

Somewhere beneath Yonah’s terror, the truth he reaches is gratitude. Gratitude that even there, he is still in conversation with Hashem.

I do not remember much of my twenties. But I have spent most of my thirties on my knees, praying for escape, rescue, relief and change.

Lately, I have begun to thank Him too. Even while crying on the bathroom floor. Even while hiding from my children because I cannot bear for them to see how close to the surface the drowning still feels. Even while the circumstances remain unresolved.

Gratitude has not always pulled me from the water. Sometimes it has simply reminded me
that I have not disappeared beneath it.

I am still breathing.
Still speaking.
Still heard.
Still loved.
And sometimes, that is the
first form deliverance takes.

I am Yonah Because I have been given another chance. 

ויהי דבר ד’ אל יונה שנית לאמר

Hashem speaks to Yonah a second time.
Yonah is a story of second chances.
A reminder that Hashem’s word is eternal and His plan for us is great.

In the Gra’s reading, the second call is the soul being sent again to complete what remained unfinished. Whether we understand this as gilgul across lifetimes or recognize smaller returns within one life, the pattern is familiar.

The same truth returns. The same wound appears in another relationship. The same boundary asks to be drawn with a different person. The call arrives wearing different details because the work is still ours.

I have watched students believe their hesitation disqualifies them. They imagine the call belongs to someone more confident, aligned or perfect.

But Hashem’s second call to Yonah is almost identical to the first.

The assignment is not withdrawn because the prophet was not ready.

“I’m still here,” I have felt Hashem say. “Whenever you’re ready, the mission is still yours.”

I have sometimes wished Hashem did not believe in me this much. But there is nothing more humbling than getting up off the bathroom floor, facing my tear streaked reflection, and understanding that while the mission has not changed, I have.

I am Yonah Because I have found my voice.

Another forty days.

These are the words Yonah carries through Nineveh, a city so vast it takes three days to cross, with a message so brief the text records only five Hebrew words:

עוד ארבעים יום ונינוה נהפכת

Another forty days and Nineveh will be overturned.

I know what forty days feel like.

How many forty day cycles of Nishmas have I completed?

If you must know, twenty two.

Because every time I finish one, a voice inside me says the same thing.

םוי םיעברא דוע

You can do one more.

One more morning. One more prayer. One more chance to continue the conversation.

Perhaps this is the miracle. When a person who believes her world is ending commits to another forty days of prayer; determined to imagine herself forty days from now, still praying, thanking, beginning again.

Yonah enters Nineveh and speaks. The text gives us no polished sermon or extended theology. Only five words.

And the city listens.

We imagine impact depends on perfect language. We labor over wording, delivery and timing. We believe we must become confident enough, articulate enough and healed enough to speak.

But perhaps the power of Yonah’s message is not in its sophistication.

Perhaps it is in the fact that the messenger has finally stopped running from the message.

And perhaps, if I may take my amateur and irreverent reading one step further, say “Nineveh” aloud and tell me that Nineveh overturned doesn’t sound like “heaven.”

A heaven created when a city becomes willing to turn itself over. When people examine the violence in their hearts, step down from their soapboxes and make a change.

Yonah warned that Nineveh would be overturned.

And it was.

But not destroyed. It was transformed.

Maybe that’s what heaven looks like in this world. A life willing to overturn itself before destruction becomes inevitable.

The voice Yonah once refused to use becomes the catalyst for an entire city to reconsider.

I have witnessed cities overturn. Families. Marriages. Classrooms. Diagnoses.

I have watched a client say, “I cannot keep living this way,” and make the decision that changed the course of her life. I have watched students confront the places where fear had compromised their integrity and change how they practice. I have watched mothers stop disappearing inside their families and begin teaching their children what it looks like to remain whole.

Transformation sometimes begins with a handful of words, in a voice that shakes.

The power was not in the perfection of Yonah’s voice.

It was in his willingness to finally use it.

I am Yonah Because I still question.

The Gra’s reading does not end when the city changes.

It would be nice to end there. The soul receives a mission, resists, descends, prays, returns, fulfills its purpose and is redeemed.

But Yonah is not redeemed into certainty.

The prophet delivers the message. The city overturns. The people listen. Hashem has mercy. And Yonah is distressed.

In the Gra’s telling, the soul has finally accomplished the work for which it was sent. It has returned, completed its correction and fulfilled the mission it once tried to escape. But it is still pained by the fate through which it had to accomplish it.

I understand this too.

I know what it is to see suffering become meaningful and still refuse to call the suffering good. I know what it is to recognize the wisdom I have gained while wishing I had been allowed to learn it more gently. I know what it is to watch other people receive something valuable from the trials I have endured and still ask Hashem why so much of life had to hurt.

Purpose does not always reconcile us to the price. The work, impact, and gratitude can be real. And the question can remain.

Yonah leaves the city and sits outside it, waiting to see what will happen. Hashem causes a kikayon to grow over him, offering shade from the sun. Yonah is delighted. Then, almost as quickly as it appeared, it withers.

Once again, Yonah is left exposed.

The calling, the storm, the fish. The mission, the mercy, the kikayon. The sun, the shade, the wind. Again and again, Yonah encounters elements of a life he cannot control.

I have spent years believing that if I answered the call correctly, perhaps the shade would remain. That enough prayer, enough courage, enough work and enough willingness to serve would earn me some form of lasting shelter. A marriage. A home. A reprieve. A version of the future I thought I had finally secured.

But the kikayon is not salvation. It is temporary shade. Real and beautiful while it lasted, but unable to promise permanence.

Hashem asks Yonah whether he is right to grieve the plant so fiercely. Yonah says he is. And then Hashem asks the question with which the entire book ends.

“You care about this plant, which you did not labor over and did not grow, which appeared in a night and disappeared in a night. Should I not care for Nineveh? Should I not have compassion for a city filled with human beings who do not know their right from their left?”

Yonah does not answer. The narrative simply ends.

There is no final surrender, no perfect lesson and no climactic moment in which Yonah admits that Hashem was right all along. There is only the unanswered question.

Perhaps the final stage of the soul’s journey is not certainty. Perhaps it’s the capacity to remain in relationship with Hashem while the question stays open.

Can I accept that redemption may look nothing like the ending I predicted?

Can I grieve what I hoped would last a lifetime while honoring that it never could?

Can I fulfill the mission and still tell Hashem the truth about what it cost?

This is the Yonah I know best. The one who believes and still argues. Who obeys and also resents. Who speaks for Hashem and yet questions Him. Who fulfills the mission and remains deeply, painfully human.

I do not think Hashem’s question is evidence that the soul has failed.

Perhaps it is evidence that it is still listening.

I do not have answers that make every chapter of my life beautiful. But I have a relationship. An ongoing conversation. I am held by Hashem, who does not end the story by silencing Yonah, but by asking him to look again, widen his compassion and loosen his grip on the need for closure.

To consider that Divine mercy may be larger than his understanding of justice.

The Book of Yonah ends without his answer because perhaps the answer was never meant to belong to Yonah alone.

It belongs to every soul who has heard the call, run, descended, prayed, returned, spoken, watched the world change and still found itself sitting outside the gates with questions.

It belongs to me.

I am Yonah because I run.

I am Yonah because I return.

I am Yonah because I still question.

And perhaps I am Yonah because, after every answer and every argument, Hashem and I are still in conversation.