Yom Kippur 2026, Jonah: Does God Speak Only Within Our Borders?

When I decided to write about the Haftarah, my first question was how can I, as a non-Jewish reader, engage with a text from another religious tradition without pretending to be within that tradition?

This book on Jonah was so much better than I thought it would be. It actually gave me something to think about with regard to my previous question.

I have been reading Jonah recently. Again, as I have many times before, I have been reminded of the unlikable and stubborn nature of the prophet. This time however, I was reminded of why he had been running in the first place. He was afraid of a God who was greater than himself and could not be confined to a building or to the people of a single religion. And when he did finally deliver the message, he wasn’t sent to the people of Israel or even to the people of Jerusalem, but rather to the outside boundary of Jewish religious life, to the foreigners of Nineveh: A city and people who represented the mighty and powerful empire, a constant threat to the people of God.

Jonah was sent to speak to foreigners, outside the normal boundaries of a prophet’s work, and in the end it was the outsiders, not Jonah, who took his message to heart and were changed by it. Jonah wishes to destroy the foreign city of Nineveh yet it is the outside sailors of a far off land that strive to save Jonah’s life. The people of Nineveh respond better than expected to the warning given by Jonah the prophet and within a very short time turn from their ways of great violence to become a greater and more
just people. It is after they have been saved that Jonah grows angry with the outsiders, for they have been given the chance to return to their ways of great wickedness, which in truth they had not.

I read this story as someone who does not belong to the Jewish tradition, yet I do not feel entirely outside the question it asks. Jonah does not require me to deny the differences among religions. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam genuinely disagree about Jesus, Muhammad, the Messiah, and whether prophecy has ended.

Honest dialogue should not hide these differences or ask people to abandon their deepest convictions in order to respect one another. Still, Jonah asks something more difficult of me: Can I accept that God may call people to justice, repentance, and compassion beyond the boundaries familiar to me? Could another person or tradition have heard something that I have not yet learned to hear? For me, this is what interfaith dialogue means. It does not mean declaring all religions identical. 

It means recognizing that none of us owns God. We can remain faithful to our own traditions while listening, with humility, to the religious experience of another. At the end of the book, God asks Jonah, “Should I not care about Nineveh?” We never hear
Jonah’s answer. Perhaps the story remains unfinished so that every reader - Jewish or non-Jewish -must answer the question personally. As a guest before this text, I do not have a final answer. But perhaps genuine dialogue begins here: not with the certainty that we possess the whole truth, but with a willingness to listen beyond our own borders.