A couple of weeks ago, I walked around the Jerusalem aquarium, and I realised how peaceful and calming it is, to watch fish swim.

In our crazy, stressed world, where even trying to ignore all the ‘stressful stuff’ going on is a source of stress in itself, I decided that it would be a great idea to buy a fish tank, and watch peaceful, calm fish at home.

The problem is: I forgot the rule that pets resemble their owners.

Or maybe, I figured that rule doesn’t apply to fish.

But I was wrong.

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My husband took responsibility for sorting out the fish tank.

He set it up so nicely and methodically, with the gravel, the heater the filter, some bits of driftwood, a few real aquatic plants. It looked beautiful. We went to the fish place. He picked some angel fish, and some very colourful tiny fellows who spend most of their time motionless and staring at a wall.

At the last minute, I decided to add in two small koi carp, because I always liked the look of the fish in big ponds. How could it hurt?

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We brought the fish home, settled them in.

One of the koi carp seems to go kinda ‘nuts’ – it’s all over the fish tank, not calm for a second.

The next day – it croaks. It was Friday morning, and my daughter was here. She decided to ask Chat GPT how to save it, spent the next 45 minutes stirring the fish around in a bucket of clean water, put it back in the tank, because that’s what Chat GPT told her to do – it died two seconds later.

Lovely!

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So, we sent that fish to the big pond in the sky, one flush and it was there.

In the meantime, the other koi was going nuts in the tank.

I didn’t know if it was missing its buddy, or developing the same sort of ‘fish rabies’ that seemed to have taken out its friend, the day before. I decided to go back to the store, to buy it a new friend to swim with.

I get there, and there are four koi left in the tank – three of them look like they about to die.

Don’t buy another one today, I just gave them medicine, the fish owner told me, when I explained what happened. Wait for the new shipment to come in…

In the meantime, I was there in the store anyway, so I bought a pair of different fish, blue and coral-colored, that the store owner assured me were very chazak.

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I bring them home.

Now, I have 3 psycho fish in the tank.

The koi is still going nuts, it’s doing ‘laps’ from one side of the tank to the other, non-stop, like he’s on cocaine. Then, he gets the munchies, and starts eating all the carefully planted (and expensive….] aquatic plants.

What in the world?!

This fish tank is meant to be calming me down, and in the meantime, the koi is so stressful to watch I have to throw a towel over the tank…

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My husband, with his little smile on his face, reminded me then that pets resemble their owners.

His fish like to eat, swim a tiny bit, and spend a lot of time looking pretty, staring into space.

My fish don’t sit still for a minute, are in to every nook and cranny – and are clearly so frustrated, they are pulling the plants out by their roots.

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Sunday, I said to my husband:

Let’s get the koi a friend. He’s driving himself nuts looking for his friend…

We go to a different fish store this time, near Mahane Yehuda, who has a lot more stock, and a lot more plants.

My husband gets a few bits, I get a new plant to add to the ones the koi is killing, and then point to a tank where there are more tiny koi, to pick out a replacement to keep the psycho company.

Either the fish, or the plant. You can’t have both, the store owner tells me, pointing to the leafy green thing in my hand. He’ll just eat it.

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Aha!

So, now we know that the koi was born a psycho, and it’s not just PTSD.

What to do, what to do?

On the one hand, there is never a dull moment with that fish around, and as my son in law said on Shabbat (while he was watching him rip a plant out of the gravel by its roots…) he’s got a lot of character.

On the other hand…. The calming effect of the fish tank was not working as planned.

Over Shabbat and then Sunday morning, I was feeling stressed out of my skull.

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Yesterday morning, doing some hitbodedut in the AM, I suddenly realised that the awful, overwhelming feeling of ‘stress’ I’ve been having the last few days was coming from the outside, in.

What I mean by that, is that I suddenly realised that I was not generating the stress organically myself, something was coming in from the ‘outside’ that was making me feel, subconsciously and physically, stressed out of my skull.

As soon as I realised that – I calmed down.

Strangely, the fish also calmed down.

I started to wonder if the first koi was also picking up the ‘zapped’ vibe, and that’s why it started acting like a frenetic coke addict – before it croaked.

Hmm.

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In the afternoon, I got a call from someone in Jerusalem who saw two ambulances on two different occasions, trying to resuscitate people who apparently collapsed and died on the street…

Have you been feeling a bit unwell, the last few days? They wanted to know.

Truth is, I had.

I had been feeling totally exhausted and stressed out of my skull, but unable to sleep properly, since Thursday – Lag Bomer.

The day the first koi started acting like a psycho, mamash.

Hmm.

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The world is how we believe it to be.

If we believe that the ‘bad’ can get us – then it can.

If we believe that Ein Od Milvado, and that even the ‘bad’ is just God dressing up, then that is the reality we live, and life gets much more pleasant and easier to deal with, even when it’s stressful.

Between you and me – they seem to be spraying like mad every Thursday night and Friday, to give us weird ‘cloudy’ Shabbats.

All the ‘dust’ has been bothering me, on some very deep level, for a month. That’s why I bought the vac-mop thing, and I am using it twice a week on the floor, particularly after shabbats, the way the Rav said.

(It’s strange, that dafka the Rav says to mop AFTER shabbat…. Not at all how things usually are.)

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Cleaning the floor is helping my state of mind a lot.

Cleaning the car, every week, is also helping my state of mind.

I know weird stuff is going down all over the place, I know trees got fried from the inside-out a couple of weeks ago, I know there was a small plane flying so low over the roofs of Meah Shearim on Friday, repeatedly, round and round for half an hour, that looked like a crop-sprayer.

(There are no ‘crops’ in Meah Shearim. There is barely a tree or a blade of grass in Meah Shearim. What there are, is a bunch of ultra-chareidi, anti-State, anti-draft Jews, who are very disruptive and very motivated.)

You tell me, what that plane was doing.

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But in the meantime, life must continue.

Ladies need to continue to get their gel lac, guys need to carry on hiking in nature, we all need to find some good, grounding hobbies to do, to keep us sane and a bit more happily ‘down here’, while the madness continues to build.

Do what you need to do, to enjoy the world as much as you can, while waiting for the denouement that is surely on the horizon.

Don’t be a lying-to-yourself-fool, but also, don’t listen too much to any type of news, even truthful accounts of what is really going on.

The world, our world, is how we view it. We make our own reality.

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It’s sometimes quite an effort, to drown it all out, and to just focus on the every day stuff that is actually the essence of life – the prayers, the cleaning the floors, the getting the groceries, the conversations with spouses and kids and friends and others.

Underneath, we can all feel something is up.

But there is nothing to do, except to do some more hitbodedut, make some more teshuva, pay some more tzedeka to genuine causes…

I don’t want to croak just yet, or have a stress-induced heart attack.

I can’t stop the zapping, but i can sure do my bit to try to stop worrying about it, and to try to internalise Ein Od Milvado. If God wants me zapped, then so be it.

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As usual, the goldfish ended up teaching me a really important lesson.

We can swim back and forth, super-frustrated, ripping-up all the beautiful things in our environment – but we still can’t leave the tank.

We either make our peace with the reality, look for the good, and work on our bad middot and lack of emuna – or we croak.

The choice is ours.