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Jonah, the whale, and the worm
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We’ve established by now that our son Mendel has food issues. It’s not enough to simply refuse it: he has to adamantly Deny, with grand and theatrical gestures. Food insults him, and so does the mother who dares to serve it.
The only thing Mendel likes is hearing stories about food. Not regular stories, no; that would be entirely too mundane. It’s stories about weird food he wants. He enjoys documentaries about lions ripping apart zebras, about giant pythons swallowing things whole, bugs eating bugs, penguins vomiting-then-feeding their young. Food, in other words, is only interesting to Mendel if it is disgusting, rotting, or obtained by bloody murder, giving the phrase: “is someone going to eat that?” an entirely new meaning.
Now that he attends preschool on a daily basis, Judaic studies are part of his curriculum. Most of it has gone in one ear, out the other; until it was time for Jonah. A whale eating a whole man: finally, Mendel pays attention. He comes home and retells the story over and over, skipping all those boring parts about the sins of the world, and repentence, and the threat of destruction to Nineveh; it’s the man-eating he wants to relive.
Then, I start noticing that he’s not only omitting whole sections; he’s adding new elements to the story. It’s not enough that the whale eats Jonah. According to Mendel, the entire ship’s crew went overboard and monster fish ate everybody. There are also worms. The worms eat things. What?
“A real worm, not like a gummy worm,” he insists.
I’m confused, but then, I don’t actually know all the details about Jonah, so I decide to look it up. I find out Mendel’s not making it up at all; there is indeed a passage about a worm chewing on a vine and making it wither and die.
Of course, he doesn’t have a clue what any of it means. He just likes to pretend to be a whale eating a man, or a worm eating a vine. In short, he likes to pretend eating. He also thinks the story would have been better had god allowed Jonah to be eaten by a shark instead of a whale. That Jonah wouldn’t have survived that doesn’t concern him at all. What does he care about the rest of the story?
“Maybe tonight, at dinner, you can pretend to be a whale, and the food is Jonah,” I try.
“No,” he says, “but maybe you can feed me underwater.”
I give up.
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