Fishy tale shows we've forced God to move in more mysterious ways

SCEPTICS keep telling me that there is no God, because there's no proof. If He exists, they taunt, why doesn't he show himself?

I never try to argue with these people. If you can stand beside a river on a beautiful spring day, as I was doing a few moments ago, the reality of God is very close indeed.

And if you pray sincerely, as I try to do many times a day, it is impossible not to hear the voice of God. But to a sceptic, who won't pray and who sees a river on a spring day as a meaningless flow of H2O molecules bathed in radiation from a distant fireball of gases, how can God show Himself? Appear in a vision to pilgrims?

Ineffectual - most people write off visionaries as religious cranks. Take out a full-page ad in the New York Times? A waste of space - everyone would dismiss it as the ravings of a nut. Defy the laws of physics? I've tried it - the sceptics dismiss the evidence of their own eyes as a conjuring trick.

Inspire ordinary people to become saints, healing the sick and feeding the poor? Counter-productive - the world sneers at clerics who get above themselves, such as Rebbe Schneerson, Padre Pio or Mother Teresa.

If God is going to be noticed in our slapdash, sceptical world, a manifestation of transcendent creativity is required. We paid attention when statues of the Hindu elephant God Ganesh began to drink milk. We confessed ourselves baffled when oil dripped from the paintings and icons of the devout Santo family in Massachusetts, where their teenage daughter Audrey has lain in a coma for 15 years.

And now, despite our sophisticated cynicism, we are forced to listen when a carp - destined to be gefilte fish - starts shouting prophecies of doom.

Zalmen Rosen is a 57-year-old father of 11, one of 7,000 Chassidim of the Skver sect in New Square, about an hour north of Manhattan. He is a fish-cutter at New Square Fish Market, and on January 28 Zalmen was startled to hear his co-worker, a born-again Christian named Luis Nivelo, start screaming, ''It's the devil! The devil is here!''

Zalmen ran to the front of the store, to find Luis hunched against the wall in terror, clutching the rubber mallet he used for clubbing fish as he pulled them from the ice barrel. On the slab lay a 20lb carp. It was not dead. It was shouting. In Hebrew.

Zalmen later told the New York Times: ''The fish said 'Tzaruch shemirah' and 'Hasof bah', which essentially means that everyone needs to account for themselves because the end is near.''

Zalmen said he tried to kill the fish, but in his lather of fear his knife slipped and he sliced his own hand. The fish flopped back into the ice barrel.

When Luis returned to work, after seeing Zalmen into an ambulance with his hand bandaged, the fish was silent. Luis gutted it.

Zalmen told others in the Chassidic community of the miracle. He said the fish had identified itself as the reincarnation of a New Square man who had recently died, and that it warned him to pray, study the Torah and ready himself for the end.

He soon regretted mentioning it. Word of the phenomenon spread outside the tight-knit community, reaching journalists who reacted as they always do to true proofs of God's real presence: they laughed and they mocked, but they couldn't ignore the tale.

By the time Corey Kilgannon of the New York Times had contacted the fish market, Zalmen was heartily sick of the whole episode.

''Enough already about the fish,'' he complained last week. ''I wish I never said anything about it. I'm getting so many calls every day, I've stopped answering.''

Luis is just as reluctant to discuss it. He doesn't believe in reincarnation, and fears the carp was literally the devil.

''I don't believe any of this Jewish stuff. But I heard that fish talk. It's just a big headache for me. I pull my phone out of the wall at night. I don't sleep and I've lost weight.''

Rabbi C Meyer of the New Square Beth Din of Kashrus is dismissive: ''Listen to what I'm telling you. Only children take this seriously. This is like a UFO story. I don't care if it is the talk of the town.''

But I take it seriously. I can even tell you of a similar story: three years ago, a Tel Aviv friend sent me photos of a koi carp with verses from the Torah inscribed on its scales. I was mystified - why would anyone want to use a fish as a sefer? My friend insisted no one had been writing on the fish . . . the letters had appeared naturally, a discolouration on one side which no amount of trickery could imitate.

This fish was luckier - it was not ground up for gefilte and, as far as I know, it is still swimming happily in its owner's koi pond. It made a good life choice, for a carp: many koi are pampered pets, living a life every bit as luxurious as a lapdog's.

We have all heard of things equally as strange - the Koran verses that appear when a pomegranite is sliced open, the damp patch on the wall of a church which makes an unmistakable portrait of Jesus, the bagel that tumbles from the oven in the rotund form of a Buddha.

What is strangest of all is that humans have become so immune to wonderment, so sceptical of the spiritual, that God is compelled to move in ways that are not merely mysterious, but jaw-droppingly odd. We have forced God to be a fish.