It was always going to be tough for us at the Biblical Museum of Natural History to match our phenomenally successful April Fool’s prank last year, which featured the Brazilian Strawberry Salamander. I try to come up with a gag that ties in to something in the Torah. And so given the famous Midrash about the giant frog in Egypt, along with the Rabbah bar bar Chana story about the frog the size of a village, I decided to set up a fake picture of a giant frog.
But how big should it be? A successful April Fool’s prank is one that succeeds in fooling most people, at least at the start, but which is ultimately absurd. If it’s so farfetched that nobody is taken in for a second, then it’s a failure. And if it’s so close to reality that it’s perfectly reasonable to believe it, then it’s pointless.
After some thought, I decided to photograph two of our staff holding our giant tortoise, and to ask a Photoshop whizz to superimpose a photo of our African pixie frog. He is one of the biggest frogs that I have ever seen, and graced the cover of the Jerusalem Post’s “In Jerusalem” magazine this past Shabbat. He weighs about two pounds, and we feed him on small rats - he once ate a baby Burmese python!
Still, for the purposes of the April Fool’s prank, we made our pixie frog about fifty times bigger. I had a good laugh with my colleagues on our social media team as we planned the Facebook post, and worked out which Facebook groups to share it with.
It was a miscalculation.
Sure, people were wowed, and the post got attention. But the reactions fell fairly neatly into two categories. On the reptile/amphibian hobbyist groups that we shared it with, everyone instantly knew that it was fake. And on the other groups and our regular page, pretty much everyone just believed it was real. And, it dawned on me, why shouldn’t they?
There’s all kinds of extraordinary animals in the world, including extraordinarily large ones. We even have some at the museum. There are insects that are over a foot long. There are salamanders that are five feet long. There are tortoises that weigh five hundred pounds. Why shouldn’t there be a hundred-pound frog?
Even if you’re scientifically knowledgeable, as long as you don’t know about the specifics of which frogs exist, it’s perfectly reasonable. It’s not like King Kong, who is biologically impossible for the same reason that elephants can’t jump (relating to how weight increases with size at a greater rate than muscle and bone strength). There may be biological constraints which determine why no frog gets larger than seven pounds, but as far as I could discover, nobody knows what they are.
Yet in fact, all this helps reinforce a point that I often make regarding rabbinic errors about physical reality. Some people are nervous that if you say that the Sages were wrong about something, then it is portraying them as being naive or foolish. But this itself is a mistake. There’s nothing naive or foolish in believing something false if it fully fits with everything else that you know about the world, and especially if it is presented by someone respected as an expert. And in the same way as it’s perfectly reasonable for people today to believe a museum stating that there is a hundred-pound frog, it’s perfectly reasonable for people 2000 years ago to believe naturalists saying that salamanders are generated from fire and mice from dirt.
The more interesting question arises with the Rabba bar bar Chana story about the frog which was the size of a village. While it may seem perfectly obvious to many people that this was not intended literally (as per the metaphorical explanation by the Vilna Gaon in The Juggler and the King), the fact is that there were great rabbinic scholars over history who did interpret such things literally. They believed that there were frogs the size of villages, they believed that Moses was fifteen feet tall and Og was hundreds of feet tall, they believed that the re’em was the size of a mountain.
Now, again, this does not mean that they were foolish. In a world where everyone correctly knew that there were all kinds of wondrous undiscovered creatures, there was no particular reason not to believe in such gargantuan phenomena. Still, it does appear that historically, people were generally more credulous. Their epistemology placed high regard to statements made by people of authority, and/or demanded a literal reading of texts, and there was little concern for scientific viability or empirical investigation. Many of Aristotle’s statements were accepted unquestioningly for centuries, even ones that were very easy to check and disprove.
In any case, one thing is clear: knowing what to believe can be more of a challenge than people think.
"Now, again, this does not mean that they were foolish... Their epistemology placed high regard to statements made by people of authority, and/or demanded a literal reading of texts, and there was little concern for scientific viability or empirical investigation."
I'm a little confused. Are you defending Chazal or knocking them? They're not foolish bit... they were gullible and didn't know how to do proper research?
I have to be honest, not trying to be a “killjoy”, but I’m not sure I understand the idea of a post designed to mislead people (even if only briefly). Especially coming from a well-known expert on the animal kingdom, it is inevitable that some people will be “taken in” by such a post. So what’s the point? To make those people feel foolish? To make those who “get” the joke feel superior?
As it happens, I have always felt this way about “pranks” (and practical jokes) in general—and society’s acceptance thereof—which strike me as fundamentally mean-spirited in that they seem to serve no purpose but to amuse the prankster at the expense of those he embarrasses or makes to look/feel foolish.
Am I mistaken? Perhaps you can shed some light for me on their purpose/motivation/justification.