Question: What is the connection between fish and songwriting?
In Jewish mysticism, the underwater world is known as “Alma d’Skasiah,” or Hidden World. I used scuba dive in the Channel Islands with a friend. We’d travel there by boat and weigh anchor near Anacapa Island in late summer when the water was clearest and the underwater current weakest. The island's name was derived from its Chumash Native American Indian name, Anypakh. In the morning fog and late afternoon heat, the three islets of Anacapa were said to take on a mysterious mirage-like appearance. Five miles long, these islets (East, Middle, and West Anacapa) can be reached only by boat. Even though they’re no more than an hour and a half from my house, the barren rock cliffs and the cerulean blue of the water always made me feel like I’d just sailed to a distant corner of the globe
From the stern of the boat, the surface of the dive site off East Island was a small, unremarkable lagoon. But once beneath the waves, a whole new universe opened up. It was a decent into dreamscape, a phantasmagoria of color. The wild sway of the kelp, the seamless ballet of darting schools of silvery fish, the breathtaking interplay of light and darkness, stillness and flight. All of it felt like transcendence.
The metaphor of “Alma d’Skasiah”
The world we inhabit is no more than the surface of a small lagoon. It is a pale half-existence when compared with what lays just beneath the water. Our conception of reality is but a skin, a veil which hides an infinitely deeper reality. Were we able to see beyond it, we would find a form of existence more vivid, more complex, and more staggeringly beautiful than anything we could possibly imagine. As for fish —they are “of” that hidden world. They are a manifestation from that other, non-temporal dimension of the universe. Fish are likened to our souls, the essential part of each of us — the animating force within us.
So now, back to the question I posed at the start: What is the connection between fish and songwriting?
At its most profound, the act of writing a song is a dive beneath the surface of our rote and normal way of perceiving the world. It’s a journey in which we are, for a flicker of time, able to bring to the surface insights and emotions that are not normally found in our day-to-day experience.
As for the more quotidian aspect of fish… Here’s a recipe for Moroccan fish, straight outta the Himmelman Family Cookbook. Dipping my wife’s fresh homemade sourdough bread into the rich and flavorful Moroccan sauce, and then taking a forkful of the tender, spicy fish is one my favorite ways to start a festive Friday night Shabbat meal.
As a special debt of gratitude to paid subscribers of my Substack (🙏🙏🙏🙏 thank you!) you’ll find a link to Volume One of the Himmelman Family Cookbook below. Each of the recipes are dishes my wife and I (and these days, our grown kids) have enjoyed preparing over the years. You’ll find that the cookbook is replete with step-by step instructions for making delicious kosher soups, salads, dips, vegetarian recipes, chicken, meat, and fish favorites.
As my Grandma Rose was wont to say in her Romanian accented Yiddish: Ess g’zint mine kindt. (Eat a lot my child!)
Be well,
Peter
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