Rabba bar bar Channa and the Giant Re'em
Rabba bar bar Channa describes a day-old Re'em as big as Mount Tabor. The Vilna Gaon reads it as a warning about the student who skips the basics.
This week’s Gemara brings one such account from Rabba bar bar Channa (Rabba, the grandson of Channa). Rabba bar bar Channa relates:
I once stood at the edge of the horizon and saw something astonishing—a newborn Re’em, only one day old.
Even at that age, it was no ordinary animal. Its body itself was like a landscape, stretching across the earth, vast and immovable like Mount Tabor. To walk from one end to the other would take 136 miles.
Most striking of all was its neck, a massive column of muscle rising ten miles into the sky, piercing the lower clouds. When the creature lay down to rest, the place where its neck met the ground covered an area five miles wide.
The force of such a creature was enough to reshape nature itself. When the Re’em relieved itself, the sheer volume fell like a landslide, crashing into the Jordan River and forming a massive barrier that stopped the flow entirely, leaving the riverbed below dry and silent.
Taken at face value, this sounds like a wild story meant to stretch the imagination. But the Vilna Gaon and others teach that beneath the surface lies a carefully constructed metaphor. The Ben Ish Chai explains that this passage appears on our daf (Zevachim 113b), even amid a largely literal discussion of the Mabul, in order to sharpen the minds of students. No halachic or factual difficulty can be raised from the fantastical account of Rabba bar bar Channa.