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 ALICIA OSTRIKER 279

 I.

 When God calls you, you have some options. You can say, Here am I, like

 Abraham. You can be present, your soul an open book, you can make yourself

 fearlessly receptive and ready to be entered. Or you can try to hide like Adam,

 when God comes looking for you in the garden in the cool of the day, because

 you are ashamed of being naked. You can try to resist whatever it is God wants

 of you. Why me? says Moses. Me go to Egypt? Me talk to Pharaoh? With

 my speech impediment? (Exod. 3:4-10). Prophets commonly protest their

 incapacity when first confronted by divine command. Jeremiah fears that he

 is like a child who does not know how to speak (Jer. 1:6). Isaiah insists, I am

 a man of unclean lips (Isa. 6:5). In a way, the initial self-doubt of a holy man

 may be a sign of his holiness.

 Or you can run. Most of us run. We are busy people, we have a hundred

 things to accomplish every day, endless obligations to keep us running, too

 busy for anything like a still small voice - which might be Gods voice, might

 be our own, we really dont want to hear it. A plane to catch, cleaning to pick

 up, papers to plow through, car to get repaired, dishes to wash, calls to make.

 Kids to ferry, dinner, doctor, vacation, theater tickets. Beer to drink, pills to

 take. Possibly we sense a cold wind at our backs, the whir of wheels, but if we

 keep moving, whatever it is wont catch up. If we keep the internal volume

 raised, with all its useful cacophonous static, we may manage never to hear

 the strange deep voice.

 Jonah is somebody who wishes he never heard it. In 2 Kings 14:25, a

  Jonah son of Ammitai is called a prophet, and said to have lived in the time

 of King Jereboam, in the eighth century b.c.e. The apocryphal book of Tobit

 (14:4, 8) also refers to a prophet Jonah. But the Jonah of the book of Jonah is

 never called a prophet. An ordinary man, he does what most of us might do.

 His tale is packed with amazing events that are fiction-candy to children and

 grownups, but instead of Odysseus or Superman, it has an antihero at its nar-

 rative center.

 Jonah runs. He hears one sentence and he flies. His name means dove,

which in Torah usually suggests good and auspicious things. A dove finds land

 for Noah (Gen. 8:11-12). In an image of salvation in Psalm 68:14, The wings of

 the dove are covered with silver / and her pinions with the shimmer of gold.

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