We Are In The Same Boat

The boat that Jonah sails on is caught in a storm. The sailors do everything they can in order to save themselves: They throw everything that they don’t need overboard, pray to their god, and of course begin to look for the one who is responsible for the situation.

However, at the same time… Jonah goes to sleep as if everything that is happening around him doesn’t concern him.

It is only later when he has no choice that he confesses that he is running away from a mission he has been given and asks the sailors to throw him overboard.

In other words, Jonah is even ready to die and not fulfill his duty.

But this doesn’t help either. In the sea, a big fish swallows him ,and after spending three days in its stomach, he is forced to agree to accept the mission he has been given.

It is the same today: the world is becoming a global village and it is as if we are all floating in one boat on a stormy sea and the nations of the world, the sailors, blame the one Jew on board, the nation of Israel, for all the crises, wars, terror, afflictions, and disasters in the world.

Just like Jonah, we are still sleeping. We are immersed in the Israeli reality and pride trying to ignore the fact that the nations of the world hate us. We close our eyes in the midst of the stormy Arab Spring when the ever accusing finger of the world is pointed at us, waiting for everything to somehow quiet down by itself.

We did wake up for a moment under the missile attack and felt that we were one united nation, sharing the pain of others as our own. We felt the threads of our common love between us, of our common fate, but now we are sinking into a dream again, and soon we will probably not even remember our last summer’s awakening.

Still, every war and every new wave of anti-Semitism shows us more and more clearly that our fate is inevitable, just like the fate of Jonah who was responsible for the storm. If the sailors tried to save Jonah then, today the sailors on the global boat only wait for the right moment to throw us overboard. We will not even have to ask them to do us this favor…
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