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The buzzy novel ‘Whalefall’ offers a modern spin on the ancient Book of Jonah
(JTA) — If one were to imagine what the prophet Jonah saw on his way down into the gullet of the whale, it might be something like this:
He slides feet first into its mouth on two inches of warm slime, the effluvia of a thousand squids past. Tooth sockets above him now, rancid black pits. Teeth passing on either side, yellowed cones, one missing, one fractured, one putrid with rot…The quaking cave of the mouth…His bare foot plants into a cold mash.
The scene, however, is actually a passage from one of the year’s buzziest novels: “Whalefall,” by Daniel Kraus, tells of a 17-year-old diver named Jay Gardiner who is swallowed by a massive sperm whale, in whose innards he is forced to reconcile with responsibility for his late father’s last wishes while desperately trying to escape. The book has already been optioned for a movie by Ron Howard and Brian Glazer’s Imagine Entertainment.
Though billed by its publisher as “The Martian” meets “127 Hours,” “Whalefall” is actually a modern midrash on a very ancient biblical book — one Jews will read on Yom Kippur afternoon.
The novel is divided into two sections, “Truth” and “Mercy,” the tension between which the Book of Jonah sits. The ancient prophet, after all, is given a commandment by God to warn residents of the Assyrian city of Nineveh to repent, lest they be punished. Identified as “son of Amitai” — that is, “son of Truth” — Jonah objects to the possibility of repentance and God’s forgiveness, taking it to be a compromise of divine justice.
Refusing the order, Jonah flees by boat to Tarshish, a distant city. God sends a storm to toss the boat, yet an unrepentantly defiant Jonah heads to his cabin, content to sleep his way through a watery death. “Arise, call to your God,” comes the desperate cry of the sailors on the ship. “Why are you asleep? Perhaps mercy will be granted upon us by God and we will be spared.”
Jonah, under pressure, admits that he is the cause of the heavenly wrath, and the sailors, hesitatingly, haul him overboard. There, swallowed by a large fish, he cries out to God from Sheol, a netherworldly dark place of despair. Jonah yearns, in the fifth verse of the book’s second chapter, to merit reconciling with God by visiting his holy Temple.
“Whalefall” is also told with a dual structure, jumping between flashbacks to Jay’s childhood and frequent fights with his belligerent, zealous and neglectful father, and Jay’s race-against-the-oxygen-tank attempt to emerge from the whale. At one point, Jay falls out with his father and flees to the home of a girl named Chloe Tarshish, where he sleeps on a futon and watches foreign films.
In “Whalefall,” Sheol Landfill is on the outskirts of Salinas, California, where — a year before the suicide of Jay’s terminally ill father, Mitt — Mr. Sheol would let a 10-year-old Jay and his eco-warrior dad sift through the junkyard for castoff diving gear. Reassuring an anxious Jay that his father will emerge safely from the trash heap, Sheol comforts him: “This here’s my temple. Nothing happens without my say-so.”
The novel’s title comes from the scientific term for how a dead whale sinks to the bottom of the ocean. There its body is stripped by crustaceans and other sea creatures, sustaining an underwater ecosystem for years to come.
Jay’s own father chose a similar fate, as the novel reveals. A once vibrant and fit man — who would awaken Jay and his sisters with a daily call of “Sleepers, arise!” — he slowly descended into depression. A combination of cancer and melancholy over humanity’s destructive attitude towards nature led him to weigh down his body with diving weights and jump off of the side of a friend’s ship. When the friend, a kindly Jewish dentist named Hewey, informs Jay what happened, Jay can’t even bring himself to cry, so raw are his psychological wounds from his and his father’s quarrels.
Hewey, whose name is perhaps a punning allusion to the four-letter name for God traditionally unpronounced by Jews, embodies God’s moral argument for mercy in the Book of Jonah. And while at no point in the novel is Jonah actually named, it’s Hewey who brings him up: “Let me tell you the lesson of this prophet,” he says. “Truth never outweighs mercy.”
Jay is trapped in the whale during an ill-advised solo dive looking to recover his father’s body. Off the coast of Monterey Beach after dark, he encounters an Architeuthis, a deep ocean-dwelling squid. While sperm whales don’t normally eat humans, they do eat squid, and Jay is taken into the whale’s mouth in a whirl of water. A sequence of dangers compounds his rapidly depleting air supply, including floating sharp objects, the whale’s crushing internal organs and a carabiner that he can’t dislodge from his diving gear while attempting to swim to safety.
As the New York Times put it in its review, “At a certain point he begins to seem less like Jonah and more like Job — the hapless vessel for every bit of bad luck you can think of, and a lot more besides.”
As Jay processes what he still owes his father while desperately fighting to return to shore, subtle allusions to Jonah surface. For every memory of his father’s abuse, there is a recollection of the lives he saved — just as the sailors on Jonah’s boat were spared. The sympathy Jay feels towards the swallowed squid could be an allusion to God’s argument, in the closing verse of Jonah, about the grace he will grant not only to the thousands of Ninevites “who cannot distinguish between their right and their left” but also to the similarly deserving “many animals.”
More explicit is Jay’s internal wrestling with whether we can change our very nature — a central preoccupation of the Book of Jonah and, of course, Yom Kippur. After all, it is Jonah, the son of Truth, who is “displeased” when God spares the Ninevites. Jonah cannot accept that God has changed God’s mind, or that the Ninevites might be persuaded to change their ways. He cannot accept forgiveness of wrongs.
Kraus is a horror writer who worked with filmmaker Guillermo del Toro on the hit film “The Shape of Water” and created the books that inspired the Netflix series “Trollhunters.” Early in his career, he made documentaries about American workers including Rabbi Jay Holstein, Kraus’ former professor at the University of Iowa whose class “The Judeo-Christian Tradition” he said was among the most formative he took.
Alongside conscious allusions to Pinnochio, Moby Dick, John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” and Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” Kraus seems to offer a Christian understanding of Jonah. At one point Jay recalls his father’s noting that “a life of poor choices could be washed from you every time you dipped under,” a clear allusion to baptism. (It’s not a spoiler to say that Mitt’s body, like that of Jesus, is never found.)
Yet Jonah’s message in the Jewish tradition differs from Kraus’ reading. Forgiveness is not to be sought in superseding earthly existence and seeking rebirth through death. The pre-High Holiday custom to dip in the mikvah is a this-worldly charge to repair what has been sundered, in our relationships and in our environment, through our own imperfect individual efforts. We struggle, like Jay and like Jonah, with the obligations foisted on us by our ancestors. At the same time, we hope to find in ourselves the capacity to change and the mercy of God, that ability to forgive even when it feels untrue to our principles, as God did the Ninevites.
At one point, amidst the dark deep, Jay realizes he’s “got time to arrange his final thought. What would he like it to be?” When faced with the same choice, what will be our answer?
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The post The buzzy novel ‘Whalefall’ offers a modern spin on the ancient Book of Jonah appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Insists US Will ‘Take’ Gaza, Jordan’s King Stays Mum on Palestinian Relocation During White House Visit
US President Donald Trump meets with Jordan’s King Abdullah at the White House in Washington, DC, Feb. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
US President Donald Trump insisted that America will “take” Gaza and that other countries in the Middle East will absorb the Palestinians currently residing in the enclave while meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan in the White House on Tuesday.
“There’s nothing to buy. We will have Gaza. No reason to buy. There is nothing to buy,” Trump said.
The president suggested that the damage incurred by the ongoing Israel-Hamas war has corroded Gaza’s value and that the United States will simply seize the enclave. However, he did not detail how he plans to facilitate or finance the reconstruction of Gaza.
“It’s Gaza. It’s a war-torn area. We’re going to take it. We’re going to hold it. We’re going to cherish it,” Trump added.
Nonetheless, the president vowed that the US will energize Gaza’s economy and turn the territory into a “diamond” and “tremendous asset” for the Middle East. Trump maintained that Gaza possesses the potential to become a “great economic development” for the region, touting its scenic location on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
However, the president lamented that seemingly “every 10 years” Gaza erupts into explosive warfare, resulting in “death and destruction” for its civilians.
Trump added that he believes “99 percent” that the United States could strike an agreement with Egypt to relocate the residents of Gaza, where the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas ruled before the war and remains the strongest faction.
When asked what he thought of Trump’s ambitions to transfer Palestinian civilians to Egypt, Abdullah revealed that Egypt and other Arab countries are planning to meet in Saudi Arabia to discuss the future of Gaza. Abdullah refused to speak extensively about Trump’s stated goal of removing Palestinians from Gaza, advising reporters to “not get ahead of ourselves” and wait for Arab countries to deliberate about the matter.
“It’s hard to make this work in a way that’s good for everybody,” Abdullah said.
Though the Jordanian king would not commit to taking in large numbers of Palestinians, he said Jordan would be willing to “take 2,000 children that are cancer children or are in [a] very ill state” while Arab countries “wait for the Egyptians to present their plan on how we can work with the president to work on Gaza challenges.”
During Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House last week, Trump called on Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states in the region to take in Palestinians from Gaza after nearly 16 months of war between Israel and the Hamas. Arab leaders have adamantly rejected Trump’s proposal.
Last week, the US president expressed similar sentiments as he did on Tuesday, saying that the US would “take over” the Gaza Strip to build the war-torn Palestinian enclave back up. However, many members of the US Congress across both parties pushed back on Trump’s declaration, accusing him of endangering American troops, destabilizing the Middle East, and floating an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza. Trump has also stated that Palestinians would not have the “right to return” to Gaza after being relocated and said no US troops would be needed for his plan without elaborating.
Following his meeting with Trump, Abdullah took to social media to call for a permanent end to the war in Gaza and the creation of a Palestinian state.
“This is the unified Arab position. Rebuilding Gaza without displacing the Palestinians and addressing the dire humanitarian situation should be the priority for all,” he wrote on X/Twitter.
“Achieving just peace on the basis of the two-state solution is the way to ensure regional stability. This requires US leadership. President Trump is a man of peace. He was instrumental in securing the Gaza ceasefire. We look to US and all stakeholders in ensuring it holds,” the Jordanian king added.
The post Trump Insists US Will ‘Take’ Gaza, Jordan’s King Stays Mum on Palestinian Relocation During White House Visit first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Bowdoin College Clears ‘Gaza Encampment’
Anti-Zionist Bowdoin College students storming the Smith Union administrative building on the evening of Feb. 6, 2025, to occupy it in protest of what they said are the college’s links to Israel. Photo: Screenshot
Bowdoin College in Maine has negotiated an end to an anti-Zionist group’s occupation of an administrative building without acceding to any of its demands for a boycott of Israel, The Bowdoin Orient reported on Monday.
The group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)had installed an encampment inside Smith Union on Thursday night in response to US President Donald Trump’s proposing that the US “take over” the Gaza Strip and transform it into a hub for tourism and economic dynamism. The roughly 50 students who resided inside the building vowed not to leave until the Bowdoin officials agree to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
Following the action, Bowdoin officials promptly moved to deescalate the situation by counseling the students to mind the “gravity of situation” in which they placed themselves, with senior associate dean Katie Toro-Ferrari warning that their behavior “could put them on the path where they are jeopardizing their ability to remain as Bowdoin students.” No sooner had it sent this communication than it began issuing temporary suspensions to students who rejected appeals to leave Smith Union and return to normal student life.
“You will be placed on temporary suspension, effective immediately, pending a college disciplinary process,” Bowdoin vice president Jim Hoppe wrote to the protesters in a letter, copies of which were sent to their parents. “During your immediate suspension, you may not attend your Spring 2025 courses … Your family will receive a copy of this letter. This temporary status will continue until further notice.”
Facing threats of severer sanctions, SJP agreed to vacate Smith Union on Monday and shared that they had issued a plea for mercy in discussions with college officials which called for them to “understand a context of good faith for the students who have engaged in this action.” By that time, several students had already left the building, according to the Orient.
Republicans in Washington, DC have said that disruptive and extremist political activity on college campuses “will no longer be tolerated in the Trump administration.” Meanwhile, the new US president has enacted a slew of policies aimed at reining in disruptive and discriminatory behavior.
Continuing work started during his first administration — when Trump issued Executive Order 13899 to ensure that civil rights law apply equally Jews — Trump’s recent “Additional Measures to Combat Antisemitism” calls for “using all appropriate legal tools to prosecute, remove, or otherwise … hold to account perpetrators of unlawful antisemitic harassment and violence.” The order also requires each government agency to write a report explaining how it can be of help in carrying out its enforcement. Another major provision of the order calls for the deportation of extremist “alien” student activists, whose support for terrorist organizations, intellectual and material, such as Hamas contributed to fostering antisemitism, violence, and property destruction.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Hamas Rebuffs Trump’s ‘Worthless’ Call for Israel to Resume War if Terror Group Refuses to Release Hostages
Then-US President-elect Donald Trump makes remarks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, US, Jan. 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Hamas has rebuffed US President Donald Trump’s warning that he’ll “let hell break out” if the Palestinian terrorist group does not release all the Israeli hostages still being held in Gaza, saying that the American leader’s threats are “worthless and only complicate matters.”
“Trump must remember that there is an agreement that must be respected by both parties, and this is the only way to get the prisoners back,” Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhr told multiple press agencies, referring to the Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal between the terrorist group and Israel. “The language of threats is worthless and only complicates matters.”
On Monday, Trump advised Israel to cancel the ceasefire and said he would “let hell break out” if Hamas refused to release the remaining hostages. Trump’s comments echoed statements made by his national security adviser, Mike Waltz, last month that the White House would support Israel resuming the war in Gaza if Hamas violated the ceasefire agreement.
“As far as I’m concerned, if all of the hostages aren’t returned by Saturday at 12 o’clock … I would say, cancel it [the hostage deal] and all bets are off and let hell break out,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “I’d say they ought to be returned by 12 o’clock on Saturday, and if they’re not returned — all of them — not in dribs and drabs, not two and one and three and four and two — Saturday at 12 o’clock. And after that, I would say, all hell is going to break out.”
Trump cautioned that Israel might want to override him on the issue and said he might speak to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump’s comments came after Hamas announced on Monday that it would stop releasing Israeli hostages until further notice over alleged violations of the ceasefire deal. Hamas spokesperson Abu Obeida claimed that Israel has prevented Palestinians from returning to northern Gaza, conducted strikes throughout the Gaza Strip, and impeded the delivery of humanitarian goods.
“The resistance leadership has closely monitored the enemy’s violations and its failure to uphold the terms of the agreement,” Obeida said.
The Israel Defense Forces has insisted that its strikes were conducted for defensive purposes, saying that its soldiers have “operated to distance suspects who posed a threat to them in different areas of the Gaza Strip.”
“The IDF is committed to fully implementing the conditions of the agreement for the return of the hostages,” the military wrote in a statement, adding that their forces are “prepared for any scenario and will continue to take any necessary actions to thwart immediate threat to IDF soldiers.”
Meanwhile, Israel said last week that 12,600 trucks of aid had arrived in Gaza since the beginning of the deal on Jan. 19.
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the war in Gaza when they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during their invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in the neighboring enclave. The conflict raged for nearly 16 months until both sides agreed to last month’s ceasefire and hostage-release deal, the first phase of which is set to last six weeks.
Under phase one, Hamas agreed to free a total of 33 Israeli hostages, eight of whom are deceased, and in exchange, Israel would release over 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, many of whom are serving multiple life sentences for terrorist activity. Meanwhile, fighting in Gaza will stop as negotiators work on agreeing to a second phase of the agreement, which is expected to include Hamas releasing all remaining hostages held in Gaza and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the enclave.
So far, 16 of the 33 hostages in Gaza have been released within the first phase of the ceasefire.
The three latest hostages were released on Saturday. Their strikingly thin and emaciated bodies sparked international outrage about Hamas’s treatment of the hostages, with Trump comparing the captives to Holocaust survivors.
The details of the second phase of the ceasefire are still being negotiated. However, Israel has reportedly presented the White House with a plan to advance the truce with Hamas.
The post Hamas Rebuffs Trump’s ‘Worthless’ Call for Israel to Resume War if Terror Group Refuses to Release Hostages first appeared on Algemeiner.com.