By Rabbi Aaron I. Reichel, Esq.
One of the stories of agadita (Rabbinic folklore) that we studied last weekend (Bava Basra 73-75) that is particularly intriguing is the story where Rabbi bar bar Hana says, “Once we were traveling on a ship and saw a certain fish upon which sand had settled and grass had grown. We assumed it was dry land and went ashore and cooked and baked on the back of the fish, but when it grew too hot, it turned over. Were it not for the fact our ship was close by, we would have drowned” (73b).
Clearly, things in this world are not as they seem.
I cannot help but speculate about the events of October 7, which led many people around the world to assume that they were safe so long as they were far away from Israel and Gaza, despite the fact that antisemitism and pro-Hamas extremism have been growing all over the world. It seems to me that since October 7, life in the Diaspora is a lot like living on the back of a whale, thinking you are on safe ground while at any moment, the whale can turn over and upend our world just as we were starting to feel safe and secure.
There are certain Diasporic Jews who assume to their detriment that religion is outdated and the teachings of secular humanism are the wave of the future. Sadly, we have seen that even the most prestigious and “enlightened” Ivy League colleges have perpetrated massive distortions, perverting their educational mandates by teaching their students not to think analytically, but to repeat propagandized ideas ad nauseum via the tools of social psychology and political correctness. One of the most glaring examples of their failure to properly rationalize is their “moral equivalence” between actual torture and rooting out torturers.
On October 7, Hamas terrorists committed unspeakable acts of atrocities against innocent civilians, acts of terror that are never mentioned or spoken about by their apologists and sympathizers. Yet when the IDF attempts to root out the terrorists (who hide among civilians and use them as human shields), while taking unprecedented care to not harm the civilians, the pro-Hamas left calls the Israelis “genocidal.” This is so far from the truth that John Spencer, head of urban warfare studies at West Point, has stated that the IDF has done almost the unimaginable in that they have faced something no military has ever faced in the history of warfare, which is they are fighting an enemy that wears civilian clothes and intentionally puts civilians in harm’s way, and they are fighting an underground enemy that has built hundreds of miles of tunnels to conceal fighters and ammunition.
Incidentally, the Talmud goes on to give a brief geography lesson (74b). The Talmud provides some perspective relevant to Israel’s current wars with its enemies that now surround it, enumerating the seven seas and four rivers that surrounded and defined Israel proper. Many of the uninformed and misinformed who chant “from the river to the sea” may know the mantra, but they have no idea of how historic and complex the geography is, nor are many of them (especially American college students) fully aware of the consequences of the fulfillment of their mistakenly harmless chant for settling rights, even though Israel expelled its own Jewish settlers and gave the Arabs back all of Gaza in 2005.
For the record, the Talmud enumerates seven “seas” and four rivers that surrounded Eretz Yisrael as follows: the Sea of Tiberius, the Sea of Sodom (the Dead Sea), the Sea of Heilat, the sea of Heilata, the Sea of Sivkhi, the Sea of Aspamya, and the Great Sea (Mediterranean), as well as the Jordan River, the Jarmuth, the Keiromyon, and the Piga (which are the rivers of Damascus) (74b).
The modern State of Israel seems to be willing to settle for what may be less than the area between the seven “seas” and the four rivers, although we can’t be sure since we are not certain of the locations and routes of some of these since dried-up boundaries, but we are not counting on huge mystical or mythical monsters to save us. We pray for the help of Hashem to intervene in our historic military battles and we pray for unity among our people to hasten the route to victory and redemption. n
Rabbi Aaron I. Reichel, Esq., is a rabbi, attorney, author, and editor of many books, most notably, “Step Up to the Plate: Baseball and Judaism: How to Win the Game of Life” (Kodesh Press, 2017) and “The Maverick Rabbi.” He primarily writes biographies of men of action.
