Choosing Follows You

ויקם יוֹנָה֙ לִבְרֹ֣חַ תַּרְשִׁ֔ישָׁה מִלִּפְנֵ֖י יְהֹוָ֑ה וַיֵּ֨רֶד יָפ֜וֹ וַיִּמְצָ֥א אֳנִיָּ֣ה ׀ בָּאָ֣ה תַרְשִׁ֗ישׁ וַיִּתֵּ֨ן שְׂכָרָ֜הּ וַיֵּ֤רֶד בָּהּ֙ לָב֤וֹא עִמָּהֶם֙ תַּרְשִׁ֔ישָׁה מִלִּפְנֵ֖י יְהֹוָֽה׃

“Jonah, however, started out to flee to Tarshish from GOD’s service. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid the fare and went aboard to sail with the others to Tarshish, away from GOD’s service.”

— Jonah 1:3

“Jonah, appalled at the hostility he should raise, fled from his mission, and sought to escape his duty and his God by taking ship at Joppa. But God is everywhere; Tarshish he never reached… when the whale grounded upon the ocean’s utmost bones, even then, God heard the engulfed, repenting prophet when he cried.”

— Moby Dick, Chapter 9: “The Sermon,” by Herman Melville.

“I feel chosen again, even if only for disaster and insanity. I feel that I am not alone, that if you are chosen, you can be sure somewhere else there is at least a single being: the one who chooses you.”

— Solenoid, Mircea Cărtărescu (translated by Sean Cotter)

The Book of Jonah, which we will read on Yom Kippur in just a few weeks, tells the story of a man who was chosen by God and refused the call. He tried to flee, travelling as far as one could travel in those days, and ended up on a boat seized by a violent storm as it travelled. Jonah’s shipmates woke him up during the storm, told him to pray to his God, and then, sensing that he was the one the storm was coming for, tossed him overboard where he was swallowed by the Leviathan. There, he waited for several days, until eventually he prayed to God and the whale returned him to land.

In the epigraphs provided above, I brought together three texts that discuss the moment of being chosen. The first, of course, is from the Book of Jonah itself. This line describes the juncture when Jonah fled, refusing the call: he travelled מלפני יהוה, away from God. 

The second quotation is from Moby Dick, the novel which I began to discuss in my newsletter column last week. Moby Dick draws heavily on the story of Jonah and makes references to it at many points. The quote I provided is from a chapter before the narrator sets sail, when he is listening to a sermon at a church attended by other sailors. In the sermon in general, the preacher advises that Jonah should be considered a model of repentance; even after sinning (which we should all, of course, avoid,) he eventually heeded God’s call. The preacher also emphasizes that it was impossible to truly flee God. Even in the storm while he was sleeping, and even after multiple nights in the belly of the whale, God still reached him, and still heard his prayer, and Jonah had still been chosen. There is nowhere we can go to flee the call that chooses us; there is nowhere we are alone, in that sense.

The last epigraph I provided is from an entirely different book, a relatively recent novel by a Romanian author, Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu. I spent much of my summer with this 700-page work of autofiction, which was allegedly written in order in a single draft. Cărtărescu discusses being chosen in a sense that might seem fundamentally different from Jonah, but I am convinced is the same. As much as this meandering and psychedelic journey of a novel is “about” anything, Solenoid is about consciousness itself, and the narrator repeatedly says he is “chosen” after experiencing something disturbing or against the laws of science, like having a “visitor” in the night that is neither a dream, a real person, nor a simple ghost. Being “chosen” means being conscious of something anomalous, something that shakes the foundation of normal waking life, experiencing a break in the system.

I said to a friend recently, inspired by Solenoid, that I feel chosen in several degrees: first, because I exist, am endowed with a body, move through the physical world; second, because I am conscious, capable of having thoughts; third, because I can have thoughts about thinking, can engage in philosophy; fourth, because in the grad student lifestyle I have stumbled my way into, I essentially have nothing to do other than sit and think about thinking, and this ability has become my entire vocation.

To me, it seems like a fascinating assumption that God is the one who chooses. As with Jonah aboard the ship, or the sailors on the Pequod in Moby Dick, choosing is also a social endeavor. Jonah was elected by his shipmates as the most likely source of their misery, the reason for the curse that brought the storm against the ship. We know from the Torah that God chose Jonah before the moment that he was tossed overboard. But to the other sailors, who had not read the story, it was something they needed to figure out together, in the moment their own survival was threatened. And the sailors in Moby Dick all chose Ahab, in a sense, as their accepted captain--they didn’t organize mutiny, and they accepted the mission he gave them of hunting the white whale. They chose the whale as their target.

We choose each other constantly, we elevate each other into positions of power, and on the boat in the middle of the ocean when God brought down a storm, the other sailors chose Jonah as the most likely sacrifice. They knew that tossing him over was the likeliest way to save the ship. So while it is true that God chose Jonah, called down to him and gave him instructions, we can also say that we choose each other, that we form communal structures of choosing which are also not easily turned down, and do not escape us. Choosing is always social; if you are chosen, you are privy to the one who chooses you, whether it be a person, a group of people, or the divine.

And, finally, our “chosenness” in the sense of being conscious, of sensing both normal and anomalous phenomena, is something we share with each other as well. Like Cărtărescu writes, one is never alone if one is chosen, because there is always the other who chooses you. If you are awake, there is the force that awakened you; if you feel called to do something you cannot do, and wish to avoid it, you will never be without the one who chose you, whose choosing follows you, even in the belly of the whale.