Welcome to Perek Shira. Today we study the song of the fish. The fish say,
קוֹל יי עַל הַמָּיִם אֵל הַכָּבוֹד הִרְעִים יי עַל מַיִם רַבִּים: (תהילים כט ג)
The voice of Hashem is on the water, God of honor, Hashem thunders on the great waters.
Obviously, the fact that it says Mayim/water refers to fish: fish live in the water.
I saw a beautiful explanation based on a famous Gemara in Masechet Berachot 61B: There was a time when the Romans made a decree against the Jewish people that they shouldn't learn Torah. But Rabbi Akiva gathered massive groups of people and created a yeshiva of sorts, out in the open, not hidden underground. Papus Ben Yehuda saw this and asked him, "Akiva, You're not afraid of them?"
Rabbi Akiva answered, "They say you're a wise man but you're not a wise man. Let me tell you a mashal: A fox, who's known to be cunning and deceiving, was walking on the side of a river and saw fish swimming away. The fox asked, Where are you running?
They answered, "We're running away from the nets and the traps." So the fox said, "Why don't you come up on the dry land and we'll live together like we did in the old days?" (This was a little odd because foxes and fish never lived together.) The fish replied, "They say about you that you're the wisest of the animals. But you're not wise, you're a fool. If we are afraid in the place of our life (which is water), then surely, in the place of our guaranteed death, without oxygen on land, even more so! We, the Jews, are the fish. We learn Torah and it says about learning Torah, That is your life. And so, we should surely be afraid if we stop learning !"
This is important. What does it mean that Torah is our life? There's a famous story about a group of rabbis who were talking, and one rabbi said, Torah is like oxygen. The famous Birkat Shmuel, Rav Boruch Ber Leibowitz got up and he said, "Torah is not oxygen. Oxygen is what enables us to live; Torah is life itself."
Torah is life itself.
And on that, the fish are saying, The voice of Hashem is on the Mayim. What's the Mayim? It's the Torah. The fish are telling us their song is, "Look at me. I thrive in my atmosphere. There's no way I could even contemplate having a better life on dry land. That's a guaranteed death."
Furthermore, it says in the Gemara in Avoda Zara 3B that Man is like a fish. In this case, man refers to the Jewish people. Why are Jews compared to fish? Because just like if fish go onto the dry land, they die immediately, so too, the Jewish people, when they leave Torah and Mitzvot, they die immediately.
Torah is called water, says the Maharal, and we Jewish people are like fish. We are fish in water. Just as the fish cannot survive without water, the Jewish soul cannot survive without Torah, our water, our atmosphere of living. The Jewish soul comes from above, and Torah comes from above. We are from that same atmosphere. Mishna משנה and Neshama נשמה have the same letters. That's the atmosphere of the Jewish person. And that's the voice of God that's on the water. The fish is saying, "Just look at me. I am your mashal."
What does it mean miyad hametim/ that the fish die immediately?
I first heard this from Rabbi Moshe Malka zt'l of Bnei Brak, who said, If you take a fish out of water, he's not dead right away. He's alive. He actually looks more alive than ever. He's jumping around, he's fully active. But he said, No, he's not fully active. When you see a fish jumping up and down, do you know what he's really doing?
He's gasping for air. He needs oxygen. He's jumping up and down because he's dying. But he's not dying. He's dead. Once you pull the plug, so to say, he's dead. If someone is on some space mission and his air tube gets disconnected, he's dead right now. It' just takes some time. It's like the concept in Jewish law/if an animal has a hole in the lung called of terefa, it's considered dead now. Similarly, if a human being has a terefa, a hole in his lung, and another person kills him, the killer doesn't get the death penalty because he killed a dead man. He was already dead. The fish out of water is dead, although he might look more alive than ever. Rabbi Malka had an unbelievable line. He said that sometimes you see people that are disconnected from Torah and you say, "But look at his life!" He used the vivid example of people in a nightclub jumping up and down. They look as alive as ever. But they're like that fish that's flopping back and forth, gasping for air. That's not life. That's the throes of death. And that's the message of the fish.
Kol Hashem Al HaMayim. Look at the fish and remind yourself constantly of what it means to be a fish in the water, and what it means to be a fish on dry land. What's a Jew with Torah, and what's a Jew without Torah? That is the Song of the Fish. Have a wonderful day.