What is the connection between the opening of the piyut "Mah Lecha Nirdam" and the story of Jonah on the ship, and can that choice change the way the piyut is understood?

Performed by Meydad Tasa. From the Show Live channel.

The connection here is not merely “surprising”. The opening of the piyut is an almost direct reworking of the captain’s words to Jonah.

In the book of Jonah, while the ship is about to break up in the storm, Jonah goes down into the hold of the vessel and falls asleep. And then the captain comes to him and says:

“And the captain came to him and said to him, What do you mean, sleeper? Arise, call upon your God, perhaps God will give a thought to us, and we will not perish.” Jonah 1:6.

And now look at the opening of the piyut:

“Ben adam, mah lecha nirdam, kum kera betachanunim.” (Son of man, what do you mean, sleeper? Arise, call out with supplications.)

That is, the poet takes the call that was addressed to Jonah inside a sinking ship, and turns it toward us.

And here the depth begins.

On an interpretive reading, the piyut is in effect saying: you are Jonah.

Jonah sleeps while the world around him is storming. In the piyut, a person may be “asleep” spiritually while the days pass, the sins accumulate and the time for repair keeps growing shorter.

But there is something here that is even more striking.

At the beginning of the book of Jonah, the Holy One already says to Jonah:

“Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me.” Jonah 1:2.

The two central words are: arise and call.

And what does Jonah do?

“But Jonah arose to flee to Tarshish from before the Lord…” Jonah 1:3.

That is, he did indeed “arise”, but he arose in order to flee.

And then, in the middle of the storm, the captain brings him back almost to the very words with which his mission began: arise and call.

This creates a powerful literary structure:

The Holy One says to Jonah: arise and call.

Jonah arises, and flees.

Jonah goes down, and falls asleep.

The captain arrives and says to him again: arise and call.

And the piyut comes centuries later and says to a person during the selichot: you too, arise and call.

And this changes the understanding of the piyut a great deal.

Because on this reading, “sleeper” is not simply a tired person who got up early for selichot. It is a homiletic idea: a person can know perfectly well what he ought to do, and even be a believer, and still flee from the encounter with himself.

Jonah’s storm also becomes, on this reading, a parable of the soul. Outside, everything is already roaring, but inside, the person still manages to fall asleep.

And perhaps the sharpest detail in the whole story is that the one who wakes the prophet of God is not another prophet.

It is the captain.

It is precisely a stranger who has to tell the prophet: it is time to pray.

Abarbanel also dwells on this point and asks why Jonah, after the captain rouses him to call upon his God, does not simply repent and accept his mission. He describes the captain’s words as an awakening to repentance that was spoken even without full intent to do so.

And so the opening of the selichot can be read in a shattering way:

The question is not whether you are asleep. The question is whether there is a storm in your life that has long been trying to wake you, and you still prefer to stay in the hold of the ship.

This is interpretation and homily on the basis of the parallel to Jonah, not a quotation from a source.

And perhaps this is why the piyut does not open immediately with sins, with confession or with punishment.

It begins with the thing that precedes them all:

Wake up.

Because a person who is not awake to his condition is not yet able even to begin to repent.