New York (VINNEWS/Rabbi Yair Hoffman) Did anyone notice this?  There is a pasuk in Sefer Yeshayahu (35:1) that for nearly twenty-seven centuries seemed to defy literal fulfillment: “Yesusum midbar v’tziyah, v’sageil aravah v’tifrach kachavatzeles” — “The wilderness and the parched land shall be glad, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the rose.” The navi continues two pesukim later: “Ki nivk’u vamidbar mayim u’nechalim ba’aravah” — “For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert.”

To the generations who read these words in galus, they were nechemta — consolation poetry, understood as metaphor. The aravah is, by definition, the place where water is not. The midbar is, by definition, the land that does not blossom. To promise that the desert would rejoice was understood as a promise that history itself would be overturned in yemos haMoshiach.

And yet, in our own days, beneath the Negev — that very aravah named explicitly by Yeshayahu — the literal pshat of the navi has begun to unfold.

The Mayim Nistarim Beneath the Aravah

In 1973, a frum geologist named Eliezer Issar drilled 2,300 feet into the sandstone beneath the Negev and struck water that erupted to the surface under its own pressure. No need to pump.  He had tapped the Nubian Aquifer — an underground reservoir holding an estimated 150,000 cubic kilometers of ancient waters, rainfall that fell during the last ice age and was sealed in stone before Avraham Avinu walked the earth.

There is a concept in the Gemorah (Megillah 13a) that Hakadosh Baruch Hu prepares the refuah before the makah. This also applies to the means of geulah long before geulah itself becomes visible.

Water that fell thousands of years ago, sealed beneath the very land that Yeshayahu would later name, waited in darkness for the precise generation that would need it. “Nivk’u vamidbar mayim” — the verb nivk’u, “burst forth,” is striking. The water bursts upward of its own pressure, exactly as the lashon of the pasuk describes.

The Two “Defects” That Were Brachos in Disguise

The water that burst forth had two characteristics that, initially, made it appear useless. It was hot — 99 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, heated by geothermal forces in the depths of the earth. And it was brackish — salty enough to destroy wheat and conventional produce.

The hot, salty water of the Negev could not grow wheat. But Hashem had created, in tropical river deltas across the world, fish – kosher ones — barramundi, tilapia, European seabass — whose entire biology was designed for warm, and yes -slightly saline water. These fish, dwelling in the river mouths of Australia and the Mediterranean, were waiting for the day they would be brought to the aravah and find that the “defective” water was, for them, gan eden.

Hashem prepared the fish for the water, and the water for the fish, thousands of years before either was needed.  And so they began farming fish in these pools that they had constructed from Eliezer Issar’s flow of water.

But, alas, yet another problem.  In the Negev, the fish produce ammonia as waste — a substance that, in concentration, poisons the very water they swim in. Conventional farming treats this as pollution to be filtered or discarded. Something that would cost enormous sums of money.

But let’s not forget that Gemorah about the yeshuah before the Makah.  An the bracha in Shmoneh Esreh – Attah chonain l’adam da’as.  Because a solution was readily at hand.

Ammonia is also nitrogen — the single nutrient that plants require most desperately, the nutrient for which the world burns two percent of its total energy supply manufacturing synthetically through the Haber-Bosch process.

And what poisons the fish feeds the tree.

Israeli engineers devised a solution where the water could flow from the fish tanks directly to the roots of olive trees and date palms — the precise two species named throughout Tanach as the signs of yishuv Eretz Yisrael. “Eretz zayis shemen u’dvash” (Devarim 8:8). The trees absorb the nitrogen, the soil filters the salt, and the water returns to the earth cleaner than when it emerged.

And the salt itself — the very mineral that was supposed to destroy the agriculture — turns out to be the brachah hidden within. Olive trees and date palms grow in the saline soils of Eretz Yisrael and tolerate salinity up to 5,000 parts per million. The Negev water sits at 3,000. Mild salt stress causes these trees to concentrate sugars and oils. The dates become sweeter. The olive oil becomes richer. “U’devash mi’tzur” — “and honey from the rock” (Devarim 32:13) — the sweetness drawn out specifically by the hardness of the conditions.

The holy prophet Yeshayahu (35:7) continues: “V’haya hasharav la’agam v’tzimaon l’mavu’ei mayim” — “And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.” The navi names the precise transformation: the place defined by thirst becomes the source of water.

One million tropical fish now swim beneath the Negev. The pioneering work was launched in 1992 at Kibbutz Mash’abei Sadeh, which built a three-hectare reservoir and a series of covered rearing ponds. It became the only kibbutz in Israel to breed Australian barramundi alongside Nile tilapia and, later, yet another fish. The recycled brackish geothermal water from the fish ponds at Mash’abei Sadeh is used in its final stage to irrigate jojoba, olives, and melons — the closed loop that Yeshayahu describes in living agricultural form.

A second pillar of the industry is Re’em Farm in the western Negev, which uses the effluent from its fish rearing ponds to irrigate 120 hectares of olive trees, supplying the groves with water year-round — ten cubic meters per hour per day in winter and as much as one hundred in the summer. The integration is so seamless that the olive grove and the fish farm function as a single unit..

The largest barramundi operation in the world today is Aquatech Fisheries, operating its Negev Ecological Farm on a 35-dunam site in southern Israel. Aquatech uses local geothermal water, which enters its system at 37 degrees Celsius — the exacttemperature optimal for barramundi — and produces 2,000 tons of barramundi annually using a land-based Recirculating Aquaculture System (RAS).

The water that exits the technological cycle is reused for irrigation of nearby olive groves, and the entire facility is powered by a photovoltaic solar array. Aquatech’s Israeli Barramundi brand is exported to France, Germany, and the United Kingdom — to the very European nations that, for two thousand years, watched the Land lie desolate as proof that the Jewish people had been abandoned. Now those nations purchase fish raised in water that erupted from beneath the desert.

Other significant players in the Israeli desert aquaculture industry include AquaMaof Aquaculture Technologies, whose RAS systems were developed in the Negev and are now exported to fish farms worldwide; Pure Blue Fish, which operates a zero-water-discharge RAS technology; and Phoenix Farm in the Negev, an indoor bio-secure facility breeding ornamental tropical fish for the global aquarium trade. Underpinning all of this is the academic engine of the industry: the Bengis Center for Desert Aquaculture (yes. Their patriarch was the brother of Rav Zelig Reuvain Bengis zt”l  – the Volozhin Talmid who became the Rav of the Eida Chareidis), the Jacob Blaustein Institute for Desert Research of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Be’er Sheva, founded and led for decades by Professor Samuel Appelbaum, whose research established the scientific foundations on which the entire field now stands.

Together, these farms and institutions produce over 3,000 tons of fish annually from the Negev.

The Ramban on Vayikra (26:32) makes a remarkable statement. He says that one of the proofs that Eretz Yisrael belongs to Klal Yisrael, and that the promises of Tanach are true, is that the Land refuses to flourish for any nation other than its own. For nearly two millennia under Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Crusader, Mameluke, and Ottoman rule, the Negev remained barren. The navi promised it would blossom — but only when its people returned.

The Negev fish farms are not carbon neutral — they are carbon negative. They remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they produce. The geothermal heat that costs nothing replaces gas heating that would otherwise emit two hundred tons of carbon. The date palms and olive trees sequester additional carbon. The closed loop is, in modern terms, a literal multiplication of brachah from input to output.

The pasuk does not say if. It says ki — because. Because the waters have broken forth, because the streams have come. “The wilderness and the parched land shall be glad, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom like the rose.”

The author can be reached at [email protected]