This parashah helps establish that, due to our similarity to fish, the Jewish people are immune to the evil eye.

No, really.

Towards the beginning of this week’s text, before the long poem with blessings and maledictions, Yisra’eil blesses Yoseif’s children Efráyim and Mənasheh. As part of this blessing, he hopes that the two will be blessed וְיִדְגּוּ לָרֹב בְּקֶֽרֶב הָאָֽרֶץ | vəyidgu larov bəqérev ha’áretz | “and fishify abundantly in the midst of the earth” (Bəreishit 48:16).

Fishify? Fishify. Yidgu, the verb in question, shows up nowhere else in Tanakh. It comes transparently from the root דגה | DGH, which unambiguously means “fish”. (So, for example, when G-d sends a sea beast to devour Yonah, the creature in question is described as a דָּג גָּדוֹל | dag gadol | “big fish”, using this exact same root.) The grand old man of the expanding Israelite clan blesses two of his grandsons to do like the fishes do, and to do it a lot.

In common with other living things, fish tend to beget more fish. Before the advent of industrial fishing, their supply struck many as inexhaustible. There’s always another fish in the proverbial sea. And so this is normally how Yisra’eil’s blessing is understood: multiply abundantly, be fruitful, have lots of kids with lots of kids of their own.

But still, the word comes from the word for fish. And so Rabbi Yosei, in Bərakhot 20a, hones in on this and surmises that the children of Yoseif are immune from the evil eye, because fish, it turns out, are immune from the evil eye and Yisra’eil has just blessed these boys to be like fish. (The evil eye apparently bounces off water; hexing a fish with it is like trying to shine a laser thru a mirror.)

Well, OK, that’s the tribe of Yoseif. What about the rest of us? Psalm 77 comes to the rescue: Verse 16 identifies G-d’s people as being בְּנֵי־יַעֲקֹב וְיוֹסֵף | bənei Ya’aqov vəYoseif | “the children of Ya’aqov and Yoseif”, which is an important prooftext for Rabbi El’azar in Sanhedrin 19b to establish that person A can be called the child of person B even without a direct biological link between the two. In explaining this line from the psalms, Rabbi El’azar concludes of the Jews לְפִיכָךְ נִקְרְאוּ עַל שְׁמוֹ | ləfikhakh niqrə’u al shəmo | “therefore they are [all] called by his [ie, Yoseif’s] name”. So we’re good, we’re covered, we’re all children of Yoseif and all of us, like fish, are immune to the evil eye.

Is it such a good thing to be a fish in the middle of the land? I confess that every time I read this blessing, I imagine a trout flopping around in the desert and feel less than certain of the desirability of this blessing. Immunity to the evil eye is all well and good, but is that all there is to this?

Fish keep making other fish in part because so many things like to eat them. Seals, birds, bears, even other fish — to be a fish is to live in a world full of things eager to gobble you up. And, of course, fish eat other things in turn. There can’t be infinite fish not only because predators keep the numbers down, but also because there isn’t an infinite supply of food to support them. Their number is constrained at both ends.

The more standard Biblical verb for increasing is יָסַף | yasaf. Indeed, Yoseif’s name comes from this very stem, which is why you’ll sometimes see folks named Increase in certain corners of space and time. But Yisra’eil doesn’t use this stem when he blesses these two grandchildren. He uses the word for fish in a way used nowhere else, even tho he certainly knows the more common root (because it is, again, the name of his most beloved son!). Why?

Well, if he had, we might understand him as blessing the tribes of Yoseif to increase and increase and only increase, to increase without bound, squeezing out every other tribe, every other person, every other living thing until the whole earth is covered in descendants of Yoseif, a nightmarish monoculture obliterating any other way of being in the world. And that would be a malediction indeed.

Yisra’eil blesses them to teem abundantly, yes, but to teem abundantly like fish, fish that, as noted above, only teem in the context of their world. There are enough to fill their node in the ecosystem fully, but not more than the densely interconnected fabric of life can bear. Be like fish, Yisra’eil blesses: plentiful, but in balance. Secure in your numbers, but not at the expense of the rest of the world. That’s a blessing I’d keep and cherish. With that I’d gladly keep on swimming.