ALICIA OSTRIKER 279

I.

When God calls you, you have some options. You can say, "Here am I," like
Abraham. You can be present, your soul an open book, you can make yourself
fearlessly receptive and ready to be entered. Or you can try to hide like Adam,

when God comes looking for you in the garden in the cool of the day, because
you are ashamed of being naked. You can try to resist whatever it is God wants

of you. "Why me?" says Moses. "Me go to Egypt? Me talk to Pharaoh? With
my speech impediment?" (Exod. 3:4-10). Prophets commonly protest their
incapacity when first confronted by divine command. Jeremiah fears that he
is like a child who "does not know how to speak" (Jer. 1:6). Isaiah insists, "I am

a man of unclean lips" (Isa. 6:5). In a way, the initial self-doubt of a holy man
may be a sign of his holiness.

Or you can run. Most of us run. We are busy people, we have a hundred

things to accomplish every day, endless obligations to keep us running, too

busy for anything like a still small voice - which might be Gods voice, might
be our own, we really dont want to hear it. A plane to catch, cleaning to pick
up, papers to plow through, car to get repaired, dishes to wash, calls to make.
Kids to ferry, dinner, doctor, vacation, theater tickets. Beer to drink, pills to
take. Possibly we sense a cold wind at our backs, the whir of wheels, but if we

keep moving, whatever it is wont catch up. If we keep the internal volume
raised, with all its useful cacophonous static, we may manage never to hear
the strange deep voice.

Jonah is somebody who wishes he never heard it. In 2 Kings 14:25, a

"Jonah son of Ammitai" is called a prophet, and said to have lived in the time

of King Jereboam, in the eighth century b.c.e. The apocryphal book of Tobit
(14:4, 8) also refers to a prophet Jonah. But the Jonah of the book of Jonah is

never called a prophet. An ordinary man, he does what most of us might do.
His tale is packed with amazing events that are fiction-candy to children and
grownups, but instead of Odysseus or Superman, it has an antihero at its narrative center.

Jonah runs. He hears one sentence and he flies. His name means "dove,"
which in Torah usually suggests good and auspicious things. A dove finds land
for Noah (Gen. 8:11-12). In an image of salvation in Psalm 68:14, "The wings of
the dove are covered with silver / and her pinions with the shimmer of gold."

This content downloaded from 162.89.0.21 on Thu, 10 Mar 2016 21:09:23 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions