Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer on Jonah 4 – “An Education in Universalism” - S1E104

Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, President of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, is Mark’s very special guest on the podcast this week. Yehuda is a leading thinker and author on the meaning of Israel to American Jews, on Jewish history and Jewish memory, and on questions of leadership and change in American Jewish life. He has also served as faculty member at Brandeis University, where he held the inaugural Chair in Jewish Communal Innovation. The chapter he has chosen to discuss with Mark is Jonah 4. Yehuda begins by summarizing the first three chapters of Jonah in order to set the scene for today’s passage where he and Mark share a variety of interpretations and readings of the text surrounding Jonah’s actions, attitude, and interaction with God. Essentially demonstrating that Jonah is more concerned with his own role rather than God’s bigger plan for humanity, which he seems unwilling and unable to fathom, Mark and Yehuda come to the agreement that God loves a good argument, something Jonah fails to provide, choosing rather to simply ‘check out’. Yehuda finishes by sharing the lessons he learned about humankind, and they lead to a further discussion about the split in voting habits among the Jewish people and how that relates to the whole point of a book such as Jonah’s. Today’s discussion is one in which both parties enlighten the other with variations on themes and readings, bringing the very essence of the Torah to life through questioning and challenging, precisely, as Yehuda states, ‘…what studying the Torah is supposed to get us to do’.  Quotes: “Word for word, the greatest book ever written, I believe, is the book of Jonah.” “I think it’s prophetic sabotage.” “He’s not the Genesis 18 Abraham.” “The whole thing is a satire of the prophets and the works of the prophets.” “Jonah is a narcissist.” “Prophets are social outcasts.” “People who are truth tellers are oftentimes insufferable.” “In some deep sense, sitting in the vulnerability of nature and observing the world is the normal condition in which we se