Like Fish on the Land

Like Fish on the Land
By Rabbi Ari S. Lorge

Despite our sensibilities as modern people, most of us put a lot of weight in blessings. We share them or exchange them especially in moments of transition and change. Sometimes they are casual, sometimes they are deeply intentional. They can be as simple as “Happy New Year,” or “Shabbat Shalom.” They can be as formal and public as “חזק, חזק, ונתחזק” or the Priestly blessing. And, they can be as personal as words we share with loved ones at a wedding, or graduation, or significant birthday.

On this Shabbat, we mark a powerful confluence between the secular calendar and the Torah reading cycle. Yesterday was New Year's Day for most of humanity. As we marked the beginning of 2026, friends, family, and strangers shared blessings with one another.

This week we finish a book of Torah and prepare for the next one. Our patriarch Jacob is dying. His words of blessing take up a vast section of the parshah.

While the Bible is full of beautiful poetic blessings, Jacob’s blessings are…strange.

There is one that might, at first glance, take the prize for worst blessing ever.

Here we go:

“May you proliferate like fish on the land.” (1)

I wish I could say, it sounds better in the original Hebrew, but the thing is… it doesn’t.

וְיִדְגּ֥וּ לָרֹ֖ב בְּקֶ֥רֶב הָאָֽרֶץ׃

Most of Jacob’s blessings fail to inspire, but this one line confounded our ancestors. We seem to have lost the meaning of this blessing in the poetry or the idiomatic nature of the text. And it's an important one, because Jacob is blessing his grandchildren, Efraim and Menasheh, Joseph’s two sons. It is clear he means to imbue them with primacy of inheritance and importance. Therefore, the blessings they receive matter quite a bit. But “may you multiply like a fish on land,” sounds more like a curse, than a blessing. In our day, being a fish out of water, is an idiom used to describe a bad situation. We would assume this was true in ancient times as well. But the context makes it clear this isn’t a curse. So, something fishy is going on here.

The thing is that most modern commentators don’t take the bait. They read the fish out of it entirely. They translate the phrase like, “May they spawn into a great number on the earth.” (2) Some commentators (3) note that the word דגה does not recur in all of Scripture except as the root of דג, fish. They felt there was no way around the image since the fish verbiage is so central. Moreover, we already have imagery for the patriarchal promise of descendants. Abraham was told by God, “I will … make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore.” (4) Torah loves to make intertextual allusions. Why wouldn’t it reuse this language? Why introduce new imagery here at the end of the story? The modern scholars who take the fish out of the interpretation are swimming upstream. Let’s look at ancient, medieval, and pre-modern commentaries.

The Talmud and Rashi suggest the verse is a wish that the evil eye will not impact Efraim and Menashe. Since most of you don’t know a lot about the Evil Eye and how it works, you probably can’t make heads or tails of this interpretation. Let me help. You see, fish, living under water, are immune to the Evil Eye’s effects. It appears water is a barrier the evil eye can’t penetrate. So by sharing the blessing: “may you be on land, like fish,” Jacob is wishing for good fortune and divine protection. (5) I suppose any-FIN is possible, but this all seems a bit farfetched.

Another interpretation from Rabbi Meir Uri Gottesman suggests that Jacob used the imagery of fish, because there is no way for a kosher fish to become unkosher. Chicken or cows are born kosher, but can become treif anywhere along the process of slaughter, inspection, soaking or salting. Not so with kosher fish. Therefore, Rabbi Gottesman says, this is a blessing that Jacob’s descendants will always be faithful to the tradition. While it is a nice drash, I think the whole kashrut business is a bit of a red herring.

Another interpretation might feel especially right for this moment. The Chatam Sofer, suggested that the verse means that the continued existence of the children of Israel is as extraordinary as fish living on land. There is something divine and miraculous about the survival and endurance of Jews throughout the centuries. This interpretation leans into the fishiness. May your endurance be as miraculous as fish surviving on land. While it resonates, its premise suggests that Jews don’t belong among the rest of humanity. It suggests we are so different, we could never be part of their world.

My favorite interpretation comes from Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. He believed this blessing conveyed a deep significance about what it means to participate in the fate of Israel. He wrote, “People standing on the shore are unaware of…the vibrant, contented life going on below in rich abundance, from generation to generation.” It is the same with the Jewish people. Most of the world has not met someone who is Jewish. They are unaware of the vibrant life teeming within Jewish communities. Hirsch understands this blessing to mean, “May your descendants live like fish in water, in the midst of humanity on earth.” We may be like fish on land, surrounded by other cultures, with their own values. But we build our own watery worlds on the land, when we swim in the ocean of Torah. The difference between Hirsch’s sensibility, and my own, is that he claimed the worlds we create are "impenetrable and unfathomable.” to those around us. I don’t think that’s right. Just as a person can marvel at the beauty of a coral reef and want to sustain it, strengthen it, and swim among it, so too can humanity love and appreciate Jewish life.

As we mark a New Year along with the rest of the world, as we mark this Shabbat where we move from Bereshit to Shemot, may Jacob’s blessing be at the forefront of our hearts and minds:

May we thrive among the peoples of the world, like fish in water.

May we live among all of humanity, while still living lives of Torah.

May we dwell in the beauty of two worlds, while wrestling them as close to each other as possible.

(1) Genesis 48:16
(2) JPS 1917 and 1985; Alter; Richard Elliott Friedman; etc.
(3) S.R. Hirsch for example
(4) Bereshit 22:17
(5) Rashi on Bereshit 48:16 and Berachot 20a.