Column by Mary Lee Talbot
One sabbath a rabbi was preaching, and in the middle of his sermon, he slammed the pulpit and said, “Everyone in this congregation will die.” The people in the pews all sat up straight, except for one man in the front who giggled. The rabbi doubled down and slammed the pulpit and said, “Everyone in the congregation is going to die.” Again, the people sat up straight, except the man in the front who giggled.
The rabbi walked over to the man and said, “Everyone in this congregation is going to die. What is so funny?” The man answered, “I know, but I am not from this congregation.”
“At Chautauqua, we are all from the same congregation,” said Rabbi Peter S. Berg. Berg preached at the 10:45 a.m. Sunday morning worship service in the Amphitheater. His sermon title was “What Was Jonah Afraid Of?” and the scripture text was Jonah 1:1–5.
God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and to tell the people there to shape up or ship out. But the look on Jonah’s face was like “one who just got a whiff of trouble in the septic tank.” Jonah immediately bought a ticket to Tarshish. “It was like God telling him to go to Buffalo, and he would have gone to Beijing,” Berg said.
When the ship floundered, the sailors threw Jonah overboard, and he was rescued by being swallowed by a big fish. Jonah gave the fish acid indigestion because “he had the disposition that could curdle milk.”
Berg asked, “What was Jonah so afraid of? He was not the only prophet to be afraid. Moses wanted someone else to speak to Pharoah, Jeremiah thought he was too young, Amos was afraid he was too insignificant and Isaiah was afraid he was too sinful to do God’s work. What was Jonah afraid of?”
Berg suggested that fear, induced by exhaustion, could have been the cause. Jonah was overwhelmed. It was not simple to be a prophet in Nineveh, a city with the toughest problems.
“We know the feeling of being overwhelmed today, of the world being completely out of control,” Berg told the congregation. “It is hard to care when we care too much. We end up with secondary PTSD or compassion fatigue.”
He continued, “There is too much need in the world, and it is difficult to know what we can do. In the face of the task of human redemption, sometimes we just do nothing.”
Then there is the terror in the world, the horrors in Ukraine, Israel and Gaza. The threat of nuclear war with Iran nearing nuclear capability and North Korea already having the capability.
Another stressor is the lack of truth around us. “We live in a post-truth era; that was the Oxford Dictionary word of the year. An example is the United Nations resolution that the (Jewish) Temple never existed in Jerusalem. Government officials make up stories for whatever they want,” Berg said.
He noted that Adolf Hitler’s favorite Latin proverb was “Mundus vult decipi ergo decap-iatur: The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived.” Maybe, Berg said, “Jonah ran out of compassion fatigue.”
Berg shared a story about a philosophical clock that was thinking about its future. “It had to tick twice each second, 120 times a minute, 7,200 an hour, and 172,800 times every day. This added up to more than 63 million times each year and in 10 years, more than 630 million times. It became so overwrought by fear of what lay ahead, that it collapsed from nervous exhaustion.”
He told the congregation, “This is our story, too. We are overcome by fear, and our minds refuse to guide us, refuse to do one more task.” Or, he countered, was Jonah afraid of the other, the unknown, as the people in Nineveh were? People are spewing hatred of each other all over the place.
Berg cited an incident between Zell Miller, former governor and U.S. Senator from Georgia, and Chris Matthews, former “Hardball” correspondent on MSNBC. Matthews was pushing Miller for an answer to a question about John Kerry, and Miller got angry. He said, “I think we ought to cancel this interview … get out of my face,” and declared, “I wish we lived in the day where you could challenge a person to a duel.” (Miller later said, “That was terrible. I embarrassed myself. I’d rather it had not happened.”)
There is a new fear in 2025 — interparty marriage. Berg said that about 50% of Republicans don’t want their children to marry Democrats, and almost one-third of Democrats don’t want their children to marry Republicans.
“Most of us hover in the middle, but the edges of extremism are aimed at us,” Berg said. “The world is brimming with intolerance, and it is not much different than the time of Hitler in the 1930s and ’40s. Intolerance breeds the belief that my views are right over all others, and the ‘other’ is the enemy.”
Berg suggested there were three factors to intolerance. The first was insecurity or hidden fears. These could be trivial, like what will I wear today, to more serious fears like being out of work. In a homogenous society, fears are either personal, yours alone for which you bear responsibility, or societal, for which the whole group must take the blame.
“In a stratified society, it is easier to dump on those who are different. The fear of immigrants is that they will take away our jobs or our lifestyle, but we are actually enhanced by them — they enrich our society. Let us not be weighed down by insecurity,” he told the congregation.
The second factor is a false sense of pride in our own culture. As individuals, we had nothing to do with what our ancestors accomplished. “Just because our ancestors were successful does not mean the world owes us everything. It is not one race, one culture, one country, one religion that has gotten us here, but the collective achievements of the human race, a great many minds, that have gotten us to where we are today,” Berg said.
The third factor in intolerance is the perceived injustices against us. Germans felt they were victims of the treaties at the end of World War I. “They coupled these grievances with perceived Aryan superiority to write the tragic history that still haunts us today,” he said.
The hidden fears, false pride and perceived injustices have fueled the increase in antisemitism and racism. “This past year has been one long screaming match about who we are more afraid of and who is more correct. And we seldom admit that we have some responsibility or may even ourselves be wrong,” Berg told the congregation.
He continued, “If we believe in only one truth, violence and death will follow. Those who claim to know the absolute truth, those who demonstrate blind obedience, those who claim to be the sole owners of truth, terrorize us every single day.”
Berg said that at the top of the list of things we are wrong about, the idea of error is at the top. “Being wrong is not a sign of intellectual inferiority, but to err is critical to our well-being. We have to decide if we want to win every confrontation or have family and friends. Good luck doing both.”
As we are privileged to live in a democracy, he told the congregation, we should be able to speak out without unleashing intolerance, to speak not by authority but by reasoning and finding common ground.
“How do we say and do that? We ask questions, we look for understanding. The rabbis tell us that the Bible has 70 different faces; one Torah verse appears one way to one person, another way to another person,” Berg said.
As an example, he told a story of going swimming with his sister at the beach. There was a sign that said, “Warning No Swimming Allowed!” They read it as “Warning? No. Swimming Allowed!”
The rabbis said a person needed to examine all 70 faces of a Bible verse to begin to approach the nuance that the truth demands.
What is the antidote? To expand our perspective, acknowledge the legitimacy of another view. “Jonah was afraid, but we should not be. Maybe Jonah was afraid that God was more merciful, more generous and more forgiving than Jonah was. Maybe Jonah was afraid that God was bigger than he was.”
If God loved Nineveh, if God loved the “other,” that puts us to shame and calls into question our ability to love the “other.” “If God can love Nineveh, then God can love China and North Korea. The wideness in God’s mercy puts Jonah’s narrow view to shame,” Berg said.
He continued, “And if God could see into the hearts of the people of Nineveh, God could also see into Jonah’s heart, and Jonah knew he needed forgiveness as well. If God is a God of mercy, then maybe it exposes Jonah’s own need for mercy.”
The one overarching fear of all our fears is to stand naked before God, who knows who we really are and who forgives. The only way to find real freedom is to stop deceiving ourselves and know our real selves.
“The first step in overcoming our fear of failure is to be honest with ourselves,” Berg told the congregation. “If God is big enough to love and forgive Nineveh, God is merciful enough to love Jonah and is compassionate enough to love and accept and forgive us.”
He continued, “When we know we can’t fail in the eyes of a merciful God, then we are free to look at ourselves. We need to expose our inner selves to our outer selves. If our inhibitions have made us less, we have deceived ourselves as we are not trusting in the mercy of God.”
Berg returned to the story of the philosophical clock. The clock was repaired and began to tick again. The clock realized that to function efficiently, it only had to tick one tick at a time. And it worked perfectly for 100 years.
“When we are absolutely exhausted, know that God’s mercy is inexhaustible,” Berg said. “God made all the people of the world, made us neighbors. The psalmist says God ‘is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love … as far as the east is from the west, so far … God removes our transgressions from us.’ ”
He ended by saying, “Let us have the courage to face each as God’s gift. We are no longer prisoners of our past, if we do this work well, we can walk out of here as the people God wants us to be. We will all have a reason to thank God for the new life God has given us.”
The Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, senior pastor of Chautauqua, presided. Rabbi Samuel Stahl, former theologian-in-residence for Chautauqua, read the scripture. Renee Anderson, former president of the Hebrew Congregation of Chautauqua, led the congregation in prayer. The prelude was “Fest-Präludium, Op.37, No.1,” by Louis Lewandowski, played by Joshua Stafford, director of sacred music and the Jared Jacobsen Chair for the Organist, on the Massey Memorial Organ. The Chautauqua Choir sang “They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships,” music by Herbert Sumsion and text from Psalm 107:23–30. The choir was conducted by Stafford and accompanied on the Massey organ by Owen Reyda, organ scholar. The anthem after the scripture reading was “Silent Devotion & Response,” by Ernest Bloch. The Chautauqua Choir was directed by Stafford and accompanied by Reyda. The choral benediction was “T’filat Haderech,” by Debbie Friedman, arranged by Nancy Wertsch. The Chautauqua Choir performed the benediction under the direction of and accompanied by Stafford. The postlude was “Prelude for the Opening of the New Synagogue in Berlin,” by Hugo Schwantzer. Stafford performed the postlude on the Massey organ. Support for this week’s preaching and chaplaincy is provided by the Harold F. Reed, Sr. Chaplaincy and Samuel M. and Mary E. Hazlett Memorial Fund.
