The Story of Jonah and the Whale, Circa 5768

From Guest Blogger, Jill Miller Zimon, an essay for Yom Kippur, the "Day of Atonement," the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, which begins tonight at sundown:

"As a young girl, I used to sit in my family’s den early on Sunday mornings and watch Davey and Goliath. This children’s show, which started in the early 1960s, used claymation and the familiarity of the biblical characters, David and Goliath, as its hooks. In the televised incarnation, Davey was a young boy and Goliath was his dog, who often spoke and said, “Aw, DAY VEE!”

On most of those mornings, just as a crucifix-like cross flashed on the screen with the production credits, I’d be called in for breakfast and then head to my synagogue’s religious school. Not once did anyone ever suggest that I shouldn’t watch the show or that there was anything incompatible with a Jewish child watching a Lutheran, church-sponsored program.

Not that any prohibition would have mattered. I loved that show. And I remember the look, the sound and the lessons of several of the episodes vividly.

Why do I connect this memory to Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur?

Ah. Well.

You see, another one of my memories from this era is of a similarly-styled claymation show that, unlike Davey and Goliath, scared the behoosis out of me. It involved a boy, inside a whale, who was spat out and then wandered into a desert and rested under a tree until the tree died and the boy almost died as he walked in the desert.

Images from that program still haunt me although no amount of Googling has unearthed which program it was. But when I rewind and play it in my mind, I can still see a claymation person dragging his claymation limbs across the sand, while his claymation tongue hangs out in search of a drink.

Oddly, a few years ago, when I started to focus on the story read to us each and every Yom Kippur, rather than on the hunger consuming me during the holiday’s signature fast, I had a revelation: those images in my childhood memory depict the story of Jonah and the whale . And now, this connection - between my young girl memory and this story that is so central to the study of Judaism and what it is to be a Jew - is something that, with each Yom Kippur, I appreciate and re-interpret, year after year.

Although I must confess, the images of that Jonah claymation-styled person limping through the desert? They still creep me out.

L’shana tovah again, and may you and yours be inscribed in the Book of Life."

^{(cover art courtesy of Starlight Videos)}