A Fish Story

Not so long ago, there was a father and son who loved each other very much and worked together in a family business. They would buy fish from the fishermen in the village where they lived and sell the fish to restaurants in the surrounding towns. The business was strong and the father and son grew prosperous together. They each had wives, and the son was raising a family of his own.
One day, God looked down from heaven on this father and son team and decided that things were going too well. God knew from taking the Jewish people out of Egypt that important lessons are best learned through challenging experience. When the people were afraid to enter the Sea of Reeds just before its waters parted, Nachshon ben Aminadav jumped in to the sea and set an example for all the people.
After the incident of the golden calf, God knew that the people would need a reminder for them to walk in his ways, so he took his Torah from the heaven and gave it to Moses to give to the people.
And now it was the turn of this father and son to learn the difficult lesson that the world is not full of strict justice. As it says in our Talmud, “If you seek to have a world, strict justice cannot be exercised; and if you seek strict justice, there will be no world…You can have only one of the two. If you do not relent a little, the world will not endure. (Genesis Rabbah 39:6)”
One day, the son let the father tend to the family business while the son met with the rabbi in advance of his eldest daughter’s bat mitzvah. The son was concerned that he would not be able to afford a party for the entire community to celebrate this joyous occasion, and the father wanted to help his son pay for the simcha.
In hope that he would find a good deal and make extra money, the father woke up early and went to the pier where the two of them would purchase their fish. When he got there, he noticed a big pile of fish lying on the side of the pier. The fish were not preserved on ice, but the fishermen assured the father that the fish were fine and he had no reason to worry. The fishermen were asking for so little money for these fish, that the father didn’t think twice. He didn’t ask any more questions about the fish on the ground and why they weren’t preserved on ice; he just bought them and moved them to the back of his truck to sell to the nearby restaurants. That night, the father gave the son the extra money he made from selling the cheaper fish to the restaurants.
The next day, the son rejoined his father and the two of them went to the pier to buy fish. They got there at their regular time and bought fish from the same fishermen they always bought from, but when they got to the restaurants they always sold to the owners greeted them in anger.
“What have you done to us?”
“All of our customers got sick yesterday.”
“You brought us bad fish.”
It didn’t take long for the father to realize that the fish he delivered the day before must have been bad and that this was the reason why everyone was sick. He had no intention of doing harm, but he was so excited about the inexpensive price of the fish and the possibility of helping out his son that he neglected his responsibilities and took fish he wasn’t sure were good and brought them to the restaurants to serve to people.
Instead of taking responsibility for his mistake, the father was so ashamed that he tried to put the responsibility for the sickness on others. “How can you say such a thing?” said the father, “I bring you the same fish everyday. Maybe you should be speaking to your chefs. Surely they have a bigger hand in this than I do.”
The owners of the restaurant could not believe their ears. They were so angry at the father and son that they said never to return with fish again. Not only that, but they shared their story with all the restaurants in the area, and soon nobody would buy fish from the father and the son. Business was so bad that the money the father gave his son to pay for the bat mitzvah would now need to be used just to put food on the table.
The father only had two mouths to feed, so the pressure was not so bad for him, but the son had to find a job as soon as he could and that meant travelling everyday back and forth to a far away city where he found work. He had little time for his family and no money for his daughter’s bat-mitzvah.
With little spare time, he tried to get to the bottom of the situation. He looked inside himself and searched for the reason behind his terrible luck. Then he remembered that the day his father bought the bad fish was the day he was visiting with the rabbi. He decided to go to the pier and ask the fishermen if there was something wrong with the fish they sold his father the day he was away. The fishermen told him that they never saw his father on that day. This prompted him to ask his father where the bad fish came from.
The father told the story of the inexpensive fish that were on the pier without any ice. He said that he bought it because he wanted to be able to help with the bat mitzvah. The son asked why his father wasn’t honest with the men from the restaurants, but his father didn’t give him an answer. This caused the son to go into a terrible rage. He didn’t want to disrespect his father, so instead of yelling at him, he simply walked away and stopped speaking to him.
The next year, as the Days of Awe approached, the son wanted desperately to forgive his father, but his father never came to apologize. Years passed and the son avoided his father. He was angry and didn’t want to act out of anger. He thought that by avoiding his father, he could avoid acting in a way that would be a bad example for his children, but he knew he was creating a bad example for his children by not seeing his father.
One day, on his way to work, he saw a man trying to stop a car so he could get a ride. He stopped his car and rolled down his car window. The man said he was going to the town where the son worked, so the son let him into the car. As they drove, the passenger asked what business he had in the town, and the son said that he was going to work. The passenger said he was on his way to forgive his mother.
The son asked, “Why are you going to forgive your mother? Did your mother apologize to you for something she did wrong?”
“No,” said the man, “my mother hurt me terribly and has never asked for forgiveness.”
“So why are you going to forgive her?” asked the son.
The man scratched his chin and said, “Since my mother hurt me, many things have gone wrong, and I eventually went for help. What I learned when I got help was that I only have control over my own decisions. If I wait for my mother to apologize I will never be at peace, but if I forgive her without an apology then I will have the peace I seek.”
As he listened, tears streamed from his eyes, and the next thing he knew his car had hit a tree. He woke up hours later in a hospital bed and saw his daughter sitting in the room next to him. He asked, “What happened to the man who was in the car with me?”
His daughter answered, “What man are you talking about, father?”
“There was a man with me in the car. What happened to him?”
The daughter explained that when the police found his car wrapped around the tree he was alone inside. This puzzled the son so much that he asked his daughter if she could bring the rabbi to visit him.
The next day during the rabbi’s visit, the son asked how it is possible that a man sat with him just before his car crashed into a tree, yet when he was rescued he was alone.
“What did the man look like?” The rabbi asked. But the son could not remember.
Then he asked, “What were you discussing that made you drive into a tree?”
The son thought this was an odd question, but he told the rabbi about the purpose of the man’s journey and how he intended to forgive his mother. This was all he could remember, the son told the rabbi.
Then, as if a light was lit in the rabbi’s mind, he stared to glow as he told the son that that wasn’t just any man, “that was Elijah the Prophet. Clearly you have been visited in order to receive a message.”
Suddenly, everything made sense. The son understood what he had to do. He got up from his hospital bed, didn’t even change out of his pajamas, and hailed a taxi near the entrance of the hospital. The taxi took him to his father’s house where he told his father that he forgave him and that they don’t need to discuss it. It was over.
When he got back in the taxi, he recognized the driver. It was the same man who was in his car when he drove into the tree.
“You did a good thing,” the taxi driver said to him.
The son looked at his driver and said, “Thank you. So did you.”