How do you like your fish: Tilapia with a flaky crust? Baked salmon? Spicy Nile perch? Sweet gefilte fish? * The mazal of this month of Adar is fish, so we spoke with R ’ Aryeh Schneersohn of the legendary fish store in Kfar Chabad. * Between grinding carp, filleting salmon, and putting tefillin on with the deliveryman, we heard about the world of fish in Chazal, in Kabbala and in business. * About kashrus challenges in the modern era, some nostalgia, and a story about the love of Chassidim.
By Elad Yitzchaki
It doesn’t matter how you like your fish. This Shabbos we will all sit down at the Shabbos table and eat fish in honor of Shabbos kodesh.
“The custom to eat fish at a seudas mitzva and especially on Shabbos and Yom Tov, is widespread,” says R’ Aryeh Schneersohn, proprietor of the well-known fish store in Kfar Chabad. “It says that tzaddikim who still need a tikkun, come back to this world as a fish, which is a living creature that represents the avoda of tzaddikim. When a person eats fish that has the soul of a tzaddik in it, he merits a tikkun too, aside from elevating the soul that needs a tikkun.”
The story is told about a Shabbos meal in the court of the tzaddik of Vilednik, that a tray with two large fish on it were served to him. The tzaddik looked at the fish and said to his Chassidim at the table: Do you know how these fish came here? Two fish were swimming in the river and one fish asked the other, where are you going? The fish answered, to one of the towns in White Russia where a certain tzaddik lives. What about you? To Vilednik. How about coming with me to Vilednik. The other fish agreed and they both came here.
Since fish are the mazal of this month, one quiet afternoon at the beginning of the week, we visited the famous Schneersohn fish store. There, between grinding and cleaning, between ordering merchandise and planning the work before Pesach, we spoke with Aryeh Schneersohn who has been running the business in recent years. We wanted to hear about the history of the store and we left with a few new underwater insights.
Fish, of course, live in the water. They are coldblooded creatures that do not breathe air like humans, but have gills that filter the oxygen to the fish.
In the Torah, fish symbolize blessing because fish multiply in great numbers. The female can lay dozens of eggs at once. Yaakov Avinu blessed Yosef that his children yidgu (multiply like fish). On Rosh Hashana, many eat the head of a fish so “we be fruitful and multiply like fish.”
The large numbers of fish are understood by Chazal to be because no evil eye has control over them since they live under the water, far from people’s eyes, and “blessing doesn’t rest except on something hidden from the eye.” Furthermore, it’s explained that the reason proper procreation is analogous to fish is because fish, aside from being coldblooded, have a reproductive system that is different than in the world of mammals, which is why they are an analogy for tzaddikim gemurim (completely righteous) who have no physical desires.
In Chassidus, the world under the sea is called alma d’iskasya (hidden world), which represents such an elevated level of spirituality that man’s intellect cannot contain the abundance that flows from there. In the holy Zohar, outstandingly holy tzaddikim are called nunei yama (fish of the sea), for example, the Tanna Rav Hamenuna Saba, who was one of the elder Tannaim cited in the Zohar.
The Alter Rebbe explains the significance of nunei yama as referring to tzaddikim like Rav Hamenuna and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, according to what it says that fish that swim in the sea, swim in one swift stroke, i.e., they don’t use their appendages for forward movement, like other animals. An animal progresses in stages, while a fish seems to “fly” from place to place quickly. Those tzaddikim called “fish of the sea” reach high spiritual levels in one flight.