The Survival of Israel and the Art of Recognizing Miracles

As I write this, a historic event took place: Israel signed a peace treaty with the United Arab Emirates. After more than seventy years of being considered a pariah state by its neighbors, Israel is finally becoming an accepted reality in the Middle East. It is interesting in this context to recall Rashi’s comment on the question of why the Torah does not begin with the first commandment given by God to Moshe: “This month shall be to you the head of the year”; why does the Torah instead begin with “In the beginning God created heaven and earth”.[1] This great Torah commentator quotes Rabbi Yitzchak as saying,

If the nations of the world will say to Israel, “You are thieves, for you conquered the lands of the seven nations (of Canaan),” they (the people of Israel) should say to them, “All of the earth belongs to God. He created it and gave it to whomever He saw fit… It was His will to give it to them, and it was His will to take it from them and give it to us.”[2]

What is strange about this is that it is so easily refuted! If God decided to give the land first to the Canaanites and afterward to the people of Israel, He could again decide to give it to another people. If the Jews would then try to re-conquer the land, would that not be thievery?

The need for miracles

Rabbi Moshe Schreiber, most commonly known as Chatam Sofer (1762-1839), gives Rabbi Yitzchak’s comment a most intriguing twist.[3] In his opinion, the nations of the world do not object to the Jewish people’s owning the land of Israel, but they insist that the Jews can never have a legitimate claim to the land if it is not given to them by way of manifest miracles. The people of Israel are a nation that typifies the concept of miracles. If they conquer the land by aggressive force, their occupation of that land has no validity. Only if it is clear that God intervened and gave the land to the Israelites through overt miracles can there be a lawful claim.

This observation is not only daring, it is profound. Chatam Sofer explains that the Jewish response to the nations’ objections is reflected in Rabbi Yitzchak’s insistence that the Jews’ right to the land is rooted in the creation of the universe, and that the creation chapter teaches us how all existence is miraculous—ultimately inexplicable and forever mysterious. Consequently, all that happens within creation must be seen as supernatural. Even the laws of nature are nothing other than the frequency of miracles. We must conclude, then, that the conquest of the land by the Israelites was also miraculous, as was any re-occupation of the land in later days. This is not thievery; it is a supernatural expression of God’s will.

If everything is miraculous then nothing is!

This begs the question: If everything is a miracle, what is special about Israel’s miraculous settlement that justifies its claim to the land? When other nations occupy the land, is it not just as miraculous as when the Jews do?

It must be, then, that the Jewish claim to the land represents a different kind of miracle, one that does not pertain to the non-Jewish nations. Only in that case could the Jewish claim be justified. It must go beyond the argument that all of nature consists of a frequency of miracles.

Herein lies the crux of the matter. Israel stands out as a nation that experiences miracles that have no universal application. They lack frequency and as such cannot be called ordinary. Indeed, the ten plagues, which led to the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt, and the subsequent splitting of the Red Sea, are identical to the miracle of creation. Just as the creation occurred only once, so did many of the miracles experienced by the people of Israel. And even when they happened more than once, they happened only to the Jews and lacked universality.

When one carefully studies Jewish history, from the early biblical days to our own times, one can only conclude that, in spite of the many pogroms, the Inquisition and the Holocaust, Jews were constantly accompanied by highly unusual events, large and small. The fact that Jews survived these atrocities, outlived all their enemies throughout the millennia, and made it back to the Land of Israel is unprecedented. and a vexing conundrum for historians and sociologists. It is indeed miraculous.

The subjectivity of miracles

This doesn’t mean that there is no natural explanation for any of this. The most important quality of a miracle is not that it is supernatural, or super-historical, but that it is a moment which, even if it can be argued away in terms of science and brought into the nexus of natural phenomena and history, nevertheless remains miraculous in the eyes of the person who experienced it. The true power of a miracle is in the individual’s incredible experience of an event in which the current system of cause and effect becomes transparent, permitting a glimpse of the sphere in which another unrestricted Power is at work. Such experiences shatter the security of all knowledge and undoes the normalcy of all that is ordinary. It is the abiding astonishment that is crucial. We stand in wonder; no cognition can weaken our amazement. Any natural explanation will only deepen our wonder.

Besides the fact that we Jews have survived all our enemies, what stands out in particular is the extent of our contribution to Western civilization—from Monotheism, the Bible and its ethics, to the fields of science, psychology, technology, medicine, and the arts—all grossly disproportionate to our numbers. American writer and sociologist Milton Himmelfarb (1918-2006) once wrote: “The number of Jews in the world is smaller than a small statistical error in the Chinese census. Yet we remain bigger than our numbers”.[4]

It was Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), the famous Russian author and philosopher who asked his readers to take proper notice of this fact:

And, indeed, according to the materialistic and positivist criterion, this people ought long ago to have perished. Its survival is a mysterious and wonderful phenomenon demonstrating that the life of this people is governed by a special predetermination, transcending the process of adaptation expounded by the materialistic interpretation of history. The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history; all these point to the particular and mysterious foundations of their destiny.[5]

A higher Power?

For over seventy years, the State of Israel has been surrounded by more than a hundred million people living in numerous Arab countries, occupying more land than the entire area of the United States. And nearly all of them—even those ostensibly at peace with the Jewish state—considered Israel a cancerous growth, or at least a major problem in their midst. Israel has fought war after war to defend itself against these nations. Logically, this country should never have survived. The fact that it did attests to a higher Power.

It is this Power that now, once again, can clearly be noted. What is perhaps most astonishing is that even while in the midst of a war with various states and non-state actors, our day-to-day life continues as it does. Of course, we must never underestimate the tragedy of the loss of our soldiers on the battlefield and our citizens who have fallen victim to terrorism; nor do we trivialize the fear of those brave Jews in the southern cities, towns, and kibbutzim who face an almost daily barrage of rockets.

Yet, we must admit that at this time the people of Israel continue to experience a great number of miracles.

Resilience and optimism

Throughout Israel’s history, these miracles have given birth to optimism. In the dark days of the suicide bombings, almost as soon as the smoke had cleared, things got back to normal. Even during the daily rocket attacks in the south, only a few kilometers from where rockets hit the ground, people gathered in synagogues for evening prayers and Talmud study; met friends for coffee; and sung zemirot at the Shabbat table.

Arguing that life can continue under the circumstances only because of the Iron Dome is missing the point entirely. It confuses the hard facts with the abiding astonishment that something extraordinary is taking place. Although for the most part it is not verbalized, nearly every Israeli realizes it. An uninformed outsider visiting Israel for the first time would never know that a war is taking place.

This indeed reflects the nature of the people of Israel. Though it should not encourage a fatalistic attitude, for there is no way of predicting the future. Neither would it be right to simply rely on the continuation of these miracles, as miracles are not to be taken for granted. One needs to merit them and recognize them as such.

We must realize that miracles have been part of Israel’s history only as long as Jews, in and outside the land, have understood their uniqueness and have done everything possible to merit these extraordinary events.

It may be that after all these years, the nations of our region, too, are beginning to believe in miracles.

Questions to Ponder

1. Do you agree that the continued existence of Israel proves the existence of miracles?
2. “The true power of a miracle is in the individual’s incredible experience of an event in which the current system of cause and effect becomes transparent…” Have you personally experienced such events? How might you explain them away as natural occurrences? How would you convey the sense of the miraculous to someone who wasn’t there?
3. Do you agree with Rabbi Cardozo’s contention that our survival depends on our realizing that our existence is miraculous? Might it be that miracles can still occur to us even if we don’t see them as miraculous?

Notes

[1] Bereishit 1:1.

[2] It is not clear who Rabbi Yitzchak was, although it is believed that he was Rashi’s father. This view is supported by Rabbi David HaLevi Segal (known as the Taz) in Divrei David. However, the statement quoted by Rashi and attributed to Rabbi Yitzchak is also found in Yalkut Shimoni, Parashat Bo, Remez 177, quoting Midrash Tanchuma in the name of an anonymous source.

[3] Drashot on Simchat Torah.

[4] Quoted by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: “Love, Hate, and Jewish Identity,” First Things, vol. 77 (November 1997) pp. 26-31.

[5] Nikolai Berdyaev: The Meaning of History (Cleveland, OH: Meridian Books, 1962) pp. 86-87.