A fishy story TB Baba Batra 73

Daf TB Baba Batra 73 begins three pages of Aggadah. Rashbam comments that these difficult Aggadot serve three purposes.1, They teach us “How great are the works of the Lord-מַה גָּדְלוּ מַעֲשיךָ ה' (Ps. 92:5); 2, they teach us about the reward that the righteous will receive in the world to come; and 3, they explained difficult verses in the book of Job.

 Here is just but one example that I think we should not understand literally. “And Rabba bar bar Ḥana said: Once we were traveling in a ship and we saw a certain fish in whose nostril [be’usyeih] a mud eater [akhla tina], i.e., a type of insect, had sat and killed him. And the waters thrust the fish and threw it upon the shore. And sixty districts were destroyed by the fish, and sixty districts ate from it, and another sixty districts salted its meat to preserve it. And they filled from one of its eyeballs three hundred flasks of oil. And when we returned there after the twelve months of the year had passed, we saw that they were cutting beams from its bones, and they had set out to build those districts that had been destroyed.” (Sefaria.org translation)

When we lived in Springfield, Massachusetts, we had a fish tank in the playroom. When the fish tank needed cleaning, Judy filled the bathtub with water and transferred the fish there so they could feel that they were swimming in the ocean once again. Even in my relatively small fish tank, the variety of fish and their colors were awesome. I used to like to daven in front of the fish tank because God’s great works aided my kavvanah, intention.