A modern-day encounter with Jonah’s ‘leviathan’

A crucial part of the Book of Jonah, which we read during the afternoon service on Yom Kippur, is the big fish that swallowed the prophet.

I think I can understand something of what Jonah felt when that creature approached him, because I once found myself in a somewhat similar situation in the Philippines.

I was so close to a whale that I could have reached out and touched it. Even now I find it hard to believe. I have always been wary of large animals, more than my wife is frightened of cockroaches.

As a child, I read Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick, and his descriptions planted a fear of whales deep inside me. From then on, a whale belonged to books, distant oceans, and nightmares. The closest a person like me usually comes to a whale is when, during Sukkot, we add to Birkat Hamazon the verse: “May the Merciful One deem us worthy to dwell beneath the shelter of Leviathan’s hide.”

Years ago, I took my children to SeaWorld in Orlando, where we watched a performance by Shamu, a trained killer whale confined to an enormous pool. He was immense, but he was behind glass, inside a world constructed for him and for the people watching.

So when I was invited to swim and snorkel with whales in the Philippines, I felt like someone accustomed to seeing lions behind bars, suddenly invited to walk through an open safari among free-roaming lions and tigers.

We arrived in Donsol late at night. The next morning I stepped out of my room and found myself on the shore of the ocean. The air was hot and wet. Salt hung in the air, mingling with the heavy, green smell of tropical vegetation. The sea was almost perfectly still, painted by the first light in shades of blue and gray. A few small boats rested offshore. Somewhere deep in the jungle behind us came the calls of birds, and the distant, muffled cries of monkeys.

Everything was too quiet. It was the kind of quiet that makes you feel something is about to happen. There, in that strange and beautiful morning, I prayed Shacharit alone, and studied my Daf Yomi.

'Dive! Go down!': A dark shape, a movement, a spout of water

Later, my companions woke, and we walked down to the pier. I could still smell the sea and hear the small waves tapping against the wooden pilings. None of us yet knew what the creature we were looking for would look like.

We climbed aboard a banca, a long, narrow Filipino boat fitted with bamboo outriggers for stability. Four passengers and three crew members occupied each boat. High on the mast, the spotter scanned the open water. He squinted into the glare, looking for a dark shape, a movement, a spout of water.

When he spotted one, the guide told us to jump.

We slipped into the water wearing the snorkel masks and plastic fins they had provided. We put our faces into the water and saw nothing. The water was extraordinarily clear. For the first two meters, I could see a long way, but the deeper we went, the blue grew darker, then almost black. There was no seabed beneath us. Nothing to orient myself by. Only water. A great deal of water.

Then the guide shouted: “Dive! Go down!”

I dipped less than a meter beneath the surface of the water. And then, from my right, something enormous appeared. A creature the size of a bus.

For a few seconds, my mind simply refused to understand what my eyes were seeing. It did not burst from a storm. No whirlpool, no sudden explosion of water, no warning. It simply emerged from the dark blue, immense and utterly silent.

Its mouth was wide open. Not like the mouth of a fish I knew, but like a vast black opening in the water, something cavernous and bottomless, moving slowly toward us. Its skin was black, scattered with pale markings as large as dinner plates.

I felt the fear before I could even name it. My body stopped responding. I froze. I could not kick. I could not turn. For one terrible moment, I could not even remember to breathe.

The creature kept coming. Slowly. Silently. Something deeply frightening about that silence. It was not attacking. It did not need to. It moved with the absolute confidence of an animal that feared nothing in its world.

And I suddenly understood something that made the fear worse: I was in its world.

It passed directly beneath me, perhaps a meter away. I could see its immense body sliding through the water, so close that every instinct in me screamed to get away. But there was nowhere to go. No ground beneath my feet. No wall. No railing. No boat to climb onto. Nothing. Just blue water between me and the surface, and that enormous black body moving underneath me.

I wanted to swim away. I couldn’t. I wanted to shout. I couldn’t. I was completely, helplessly still.

Only after I climbed back into the boat did I realize that my heart was pounding as though I had just sprinted a kilometer.

And then, with a strange excitement, I thought of Jonah. For the first time in my life, I realized that I had seen with my own eyes something like what he might have seen before the great fish swallowed him. The mouth of our fish was large enough, I thought, to accommodate three people.

There were two differences. It did not swallow me. And the waters of Donsol Bay are far clearer than those of the Mediterranean near Jaffa.

My biblical thoughts were interrupted by the guide shouting that we should prepare for another dive. Another fish had been spotted.

We jumped.

Again came that impossible vision: an enormous head approaching through the water, a black body stippled with white, moving beside us, and my heart beginning to beat faster than I would have liked.

As I watched the great head pass beneath me, I suddenly saw its dorsal fin approaching me directly from the left.

This time fear was not a thought. It was a physical reaction. I swam forward as fast as I could. The fin passed just behind my legs. Water flooded my mask. It entered my nose. I scrambled upward and broke the surface, breathing hard.

'Like a kitchen grater with large teeth rubbing against the skin'

Later we learned that one of our group had not noticed the fin approaching him. It brushed against his abdomen. Had he been half a meter deeper, that enormous fin might have struck and dragged him.

Frightening…

He described the contact as “Like a kitchen grater with large teeth rubbing against the skin.”

The experience of swimming with the whales is called butanding. It is a whale shark, the largest fish in the world. Whale sharks come to Donsol Bay every year between March and July.

Later we saw two more. One rested two or three meters below us, as small as a family SUV. When we approached, it began slowly to move away. This time I was no longer afraid. Something inside me had begun to adjust to the sheer scale of the animal.

I swam above it for almost a minute without touching it. The guide had warned us to “keep your hands to yourselves” (shemirat negi’a), as though he was a mashgiach (supervisor) at a yeshiva.

The whale surged ahead of me, until its enormous body had completely passed beneath me. Then the fish slowed. It seemed almost as if it were playing with me, allowing me to close the distance. I continued swimming above it and diving beside it, and for about a hundred meters we moved together.

I remember the sensation clearly: I was a small man wearing fins and a mask, and beside me was a creature so enormous that it could have crushed me without the slightest intention of doing so. And yet, for those moments, I had the strange feeling that it was comfortable with me too.

Fear gave way to wonder. The experience was overwhelming and unforgettable. In some strange physical sense, I had fulfilled the verse: “There is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein,” from Barchi Nafshi (Psalm 104:26).

Since then, every Yom Kippur, when we listen to the reading of the Book of Jonah, I feel different from the way I felt before that extraordinary encounter with the whale shark, and different from what the congregation beside me is feeling and thinking.

And every Rosh Hodesh, and every holiday, when we recite the Barchi Nafshi, I have a different kavanah, a different intention, than I once did. I now know what a “leviathan” looks like. I know what it feels like when one passes beneath you in deep, silent water. And I know that a verse I have read dozens of times can one day step out of the prayer book, step out of the Bible, and swim directly beneath you.