A Whale Of A Time

Not your average Tuesday

Following “The Eagle Has Landed” and “The Elefant In The Room,” it’s time for another post with an animal aphorism in the title. But this time, the post is genuinely about the animal!

On Tuesday morning, a very rare event occurred in Israel. On the Zikim beach near Ashkelon, a dead whale washed up! I found out about it via my friends in the Nature Authority and zoomed over there.

They say that you should be prepared for whatever life may throw at you. But when I went to work that morning, I was not prepared for the possibility that I would end up in the ocean with a sperm whale. And so I was fully clothed instead of wearing a bathing suit. Lesson learned.

This was actually not the first time that I had encountered a beached whale. Five years ago, almost to the day, and also near Ashkelon, I had gone to inspect a fifty-foot fin whale. At the time, I said that having an encounter with a beached whale was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Apparently I was wrong (though I guess it was still a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the whale, to beach itself and have an encounter with me).

Still, this was a very different type of whale - a sperm whale. (And it was also still in the water, which made the entire experience very different.) Sperm whales are the blocky-headed carnivorous whales, the largest toothed predators on Earth, famous from Moby Dick and Pinnochio. At about thirty-five feet in length, this was half of the full size that this species of leviathan can reach.

Next week I will be posting a video in which I explain how, according to some, sperm whales are actually connected to next week’s parasha! But for today, here’s a video and some insights about whales in Tehillim, some photos and discussion about what happened with this whale, and a fascinating and revealing whale-charedim interaction that I observed: