Cantor's Corner by Eric Miller

It all started at the Purim carnival, when I mentioned to David Sigman an interesting New York Times piece about a giant Cheeto (if only all the news was so captivating). In turn, he recommended a Times article from earlier in the week about - I kid you not - a Hebrew-speaking carp who was predicting the apocalypse to a very frightened Hasidic fishmonger and his Ecuadorian Catholic partner. OK, I admit - this article would have been perfect last month - kooky enough for Purim, and with real Jewish connections, too. You see, the zodiac sign for the month of Adar (and Purim) is Pisces. And in various Jewish communities, the fish is quite prominent in Purim judaica, such as fish-shaped containers for sending out hamentaschen, or even fish-shaped molds for Purim cookies (would that make Haman's three-cornered hat a “Pike’s Peak?”). But I did a little more research, and realized that there were plenty of fish stories in Jewish tradition to match with any time of the year. So, while you're grinding out your bubbe's home-made gefilte fish for the seder, relax and enjoy a few Jewish fish tales while you work.

Concerning Pesach, there is a rather bizarre tale in the Talmud of fish who not only talk, but sing Biblical verses of praise to God (Hallel) which are later incorporated into the Haggaddah! According to Rabbi Natan, when the people Israel rebelled at the far side of the Sea of Reeds, expressing doubts as to whether the Egyptians had actually drowned, God ordered the Sea to eject their bodies on to dry land for the people to see. Meanwhile, the fish had been deprived of quite a large meal, so a few hundred years later (recounted in the haftarah that is matched to this story of the Sea, Judges chapter 4), God paid the fish back by drowning Sisera, the captain of the Canaanite forces and his army in the River Kishon. Natan relates that God induced Sisera and his soldiers to enter the River by sending down the stars to heat up their armor, causing them to jump into the river to cool down. The fish, upon being so generously “repaid” for what God had "borrowed," sang out in praise of God's trustworthiness (Pesachim 118b). What can this story teach us about the meaning of Passover? I'm not really sure, unless you plan on creating a Godfather seder complete with Pharaoh as Luca Brasi…

And what would Pesach be without gefilte fish? As Rabbi Lee loves to remind us, we can trace this 'delicacy' back to the Talmud itself, which speaks of having a little chopped fish as a way to fulfill part of the minimum requirements for a festive meal. But gefilte fish can even tell us more about where we came from and the way we communicate. In an article by Bill Gladstone for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he mentions a professor of linguistics who recently posited that there is a “gefilte fish line"” that ran though eastern Poland. He said this line roughly overlaps another important line: a linguistic divide between two major variants of Yiddish. Jews living to the west -- most of Poland, as well as Germany and the rest of Western Europe -- ate the sweet gefilte fish. Those to the east -- Lithuania, Latvia and Russia -- ate the peppery version. So your regional dialect was directly related to whether you liked your gefilte fish sweet or spicy! Interestingly, “gefilte” comes from the Yiddish word for “stuffed.” Yet today, we eat only the original “stuffing,” and not the larger fish it was put in! I suppose this bodes well for vegetarians on Thanksgiving a few hundred years from now…

Since fish were an obvious fertility symbol in Judaism as in countless other cultures, it’s no surprise that Jews were eating fish on Fridays to honor the Sabbath centuries before our Catholic neighbors did so. Hence, the Talmudic story of Yosef Machir Shabbat (i.e, “Joe Sabbath”), a poor, pious man who finds a large jewel in a huge (and expensive) fish he buys to honor the Sabbath, leading to the moral, “One who borrows for Shabbat is repaid by Shabbat” (Shabbat 119a).

One last story uses fantastic imagery to point towards a hope for the future. In the book of Job, there is a description of an all-powerful mythic sea creature that has roots in ancient Babylonian myth and is referenced elsewhere in the Bible as well (Psalms, Genesis, etc). The Talmud relates a fantastic legend of this “Leviathan” (this is the Hebrew term!) and the Behemot (mythical king of the beasts) entering into a duel with each other at the end of days. Eventually, both drop dead, behemot slaughtered by a blow of leviathan’s fins, and leviathan killed by a lash of behemot’s tail. But from the skin of Leviathan God will construct sukkot (tents) to shelter companies of the righteous, while they enjoy the dishes made of his flesh. What is left of leviathan’s skin will be stretched out over Jerusalem as a canopy, and the light streaming from it will illumine the whole world (Bava Basra 74b-75a). Let’s hope that universal light and peace can soon become more than a 'fish story' for us and the world.