Hi,
"And
Gd said to Yonah:
"You
had mercy on a kikayon [a wild shade plant] for which you did not work and
which you did not raise, which came in a night and was lost in a night. Should
I not have mercy upon Nineveh, the great city, which contains more than 120,000
people who do not know their right from left, as well as many animals?"
(Yonah
4:10-11)
Have
a great day,
Mordechai
I never understood this. Without even pulling out the well-worn holocaust argument, God kills millions of people in gruesome and horrific ways all the time. Why would pointing out an instance of mercy mean anything to Yona? The kikayon didn't sin. The whole argument is a tzarich iyun
ReplyDeleteAnonymous-
DeleteI didn't think the point was a lesson in Divine mercy. To me, it is a lesson about Yonah's mercy. If Yonah will cry out about the destruction of a kikayon [in which he is really expressing anger about his own suffering, of course], how dare he be angry about the forgiveness of Nineveh?