A Jonah for 2025

New for this Yom Kippur: a retelling of the Jonah story created for this year. After a prologue to set the scene, this script follows our two protagonists — the prophet Jonah, and his counterpart in Islam, the prophet Yūnus — through a journey of encounter, discomfort, grief, and change. Quotations from the book of Jonah and the surah of Yūnus are set apart by italics. Hebrew and Arabic are both included, as are trope markings for anyone who wants to intersperse the script with chanted parts of the story. The accompanying slides illuminate the quotes from Jonah and the Qur’an. May this offering help us in our wrestle with current events in Israel and Gaza, and inspire us to greater depths in our own journeys of teshuvah.

Here is a glimpse of how the script begins:

 

Download the PDF of the whole script:

MyChildren-Jonah2025

 

The accompanying slides can be previewed here:

Download the slides for your own use (the below link will prompt you to make your own copy of the slides):

Jonah Slides 2025

 

If you use this, let us know how it worked for you and your community!