The Many Miracles of The Jewish Atlantis
What The Jews Became When They Learned To Breathe Underwater
A well-known tale in the mouth of the rabbis goes as follows:
The scientists determine with certainty that in three days, the earth will be drowned and every land mass covered in a hundred meters of water. A grand gathering of world leaders is held. A leader of the Christians stands and tells the billions watching that they must pray to our Father in Heaven to avert this crisis. A leader of the Muslims takes the lectern and says we must all pray to Allah for mercy. A leader of the Jews taps the microphone and declares, “Gentlemen, we have three days to learn how to breathe underwater.”
The Jewish genius has always been for survival—outthinking and outlasting the inevitable. So, of course, we learned to breathe underwater. But survival is not life. And it is certainly not redemption. So the story does not end.
The Jews split into two large camps with many fractious sub-groups. Both learn how to breathe underwater. The difference is in their dreams.
The first group dreams always of land and cannot ever find it. They are noble but wracked with terrible suffering, which always comes back to the fundamental truth that they live in the wrong place, that the water is not their home. For thousands of years they swim to and fro. Sometimes, they forget, for long periods, that they are land creatures living underwater. They find comfort in each other and various achievements beneath the waves. But in the end, there is always a calamity, and they pay a blood price. Every foul urchin and serpent of the abyss insists that the water is their fault, that they are not welcome. Drownings, and deaths by shark, fill their history books.
These Jews circle the globe. They plumb the depths and skim the shallows. Various “messiahs” lead them on grand forays to the alleged shore, which turn out to be underwater caves where gills are carved into children’s necks. So many Jews forget to practice their “walking” on the sea bed, their “talking” with mouths that breathe air. These are useless rituals, they come to believe. Even those who practice find their rituals hollowing out, taking on the air of folklore, tradition for tradition’s sake. It is good to remember, they say. It keeps us together. They say it builds character to be an obvious land creature practicing a strict regimen of land living even though your great great great grandparents were born in the sea. Some speak of a magical place you go when you drown that makes all the rituals worth it. An old man still moves his lips in silent prayer for return in some long-forgotten trench. His breath escapes as bubbles, pulled upward toward their home. The sea is deep, and silent, and in time, it forgets him.
The second group takes longer to emerge, but after a particularly bad time that turned all the seas red with Jewish blood, they noted, “We are only putting up with this because we dream of dry land. But that is a lie told by old women. Wasn’t there also once a promise that there wouldn’t be a flood? These are false hopes and false dreams.” They stop dreaming of an all-encompassing, endless supply of life-giving air. They reject tales of a mysterious force that roots you firmly to the floor. They roll their eyes at complex, scholarly dissertations on the alleged appearance and warmth of fire. A different dream burns in them. Never again.
With little else but their wits and determination, the second group builds something the world has never seen. By some miracle, they gain control of the area of the sea that was once their ancestral homeland. The marine creatures are united in their fury; everything beneath the waves was promised to them. There are many wars, but the Jews are mighty because they are blessed. They set mighty vents at their borders to keep the horrors at bay; they set lights upon every crag. Yet their great goal, of ending the flow of Jewish blood, taunts them.
They set their greatest minds to the problem. First, they realize their claimed area was too large, so they give up some real estate. But this just allows the armies of Triton to move closer to their border. They engage in endless discussions with various bottom feeders, but the discussions always break down on the fundamental problem—the Jews’ place is meant to be on land, not the sea, and even a single inch of the sea in Jewish hands is a form of theft. Creatures continue to infiltrate and maul the Jewish children, so they carefully watch every entrance. Giant crabs begin hurling rocks with tremendous force at the Jews’ cities, and they devise an ingenious system of harpoons to strike the stones from the air. No matter how hard they fight, the sea remains the sea.
But it is not all bad news. The Jews, by necessity and by their genius, become the most skilled, creative, and feared underwater breathers who ever lived. They laugh at old superstitions of a solid ground beneath the waves, of a sky where one breathes freely. “My grandfather told me that nonsense,” they say. “But my grandfather believed in things that never existed. It cost him. In the end, you have to deal with reality as it is.”
A small child, from the long-obsolete first group, swimming exhaustedly past the flood-lit, magnificent Jewish fortress of his cousins, asks a guard, “With all this wealth and know-how, couldn’t you just boil away the sea? Then no squids could bother you.”
The soldier laughs. “Do not be deceived by the appearance of the trespassing deep. There are no sea creatures or drownings within our borders; at least, we can make it that way. So, this cannot be sea. If you join us, you will breathe the free air. We are a nation of impossibilities, of wonders, and we do what no one else can or ever has. Like the ancient tale, we split the water. We walk on dry land.”