What Do We Talk About When We Talk About Miracles?

In the key scene of “O Brother, where art thou?”, a comic and fairly free adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey” by the Cohen brothers, the protagonists are caught by the authorities who have been chasing them throughout their journey home. They stare at the gallows while gravediggers sing the death blues. The sheriff recommends they pray for a miracle. While Pete and Delmar, simple men, naturally mumble a prayer, even Ulysses (played by George Clooney) gets confused and loses his stoic atheism. He addresses the heavens in a passionate speech in which he reproaches himself for his sins and asks for a miracle that transcends nature.

And lo and behold, as an immediate response, the unbelievable simply happens, and a massive stream of water bursts forth, flooding the valley and saving the heroes from their fate. “It’s a miracle! We prayed to God and He saved us!” Pete and Delmar cheer while floating on an improvised raft. “Don’t be ignorant!” Ulysses retorts, as if suddenly awakened from his daze. “I told you they were flooding this valley. There’s a perfectly scientific explanation for what just happened.” His friends remind him that this is not what he was saying a few minutes earlier, when the literal noose was around his neck, and he responds that “any human being will cast about in a moment of stress”. He rejects the talk of miracles as complete nonsense. However, as he is saying this, he sees a cow grazing on the roof of one of the flooded houses – exactly as the blind old man predicted at the beginning of the film. “Maybe this is a miracle after all?” ask George Clooney’s terrified eyes.

We all long for a miracle

“I suppose each of us in a moment of real distress will long for a ‘miracle’,” says Gilad Diamant, who examined popular topics from a skeptical, evidence-based angle in his Hebrew-language blog “Sharp Thinking”, and compiled some of his research in a book called “Sharp Thinking: Between Reality and Illusion” (published in Hebrew). “A miracle is an event that amazes us. It can amaze us because it contradicts the laws of nature, like a person walking on water, floating in midair, an object suddenly disappearing or appearing out of nowhere. Another type of miracle is an event that is not necessarily supernatural, but improbable, rare, some kind of coincidence that strikes us with wonder. Usually, when people say ‘miracle’, they mean a one-time event that probably won’t happen again. But there’s another type: people with ‘powers’ who can seemingly perform miracles repeatedly – raising the disabled from wheelchairs, restoring sight to the blind, healing through incantations or amulets, predicting the future – repeatedly violating the laws of nature.”

What makes people believe in miracles?

“A miracle is a deviation from what we perceive as possible, and therefore belief in miracles is essentially a belief that everything is possible, that there are no absolute limits. This gives hope, because this means that nothing is ever a completely lost cause – maybe a miracle will happen. Beyond personal hope, if a person interprets a certain event as miraculous, it also strengthens their belief system. Look, fate’s hand guided this. Look, God saved me just at the right moment. Look, this is the consequence of the special actions I performed. We all really like to strengthen our belief systems. It gives us a sense of control, a sense that we are on the right path, that we are right.”

A matter of interpretation

Miracles are the primary raw material that holds together the upcoming holiday of Hanukkah. Just like on Purim, during Hanukkah we add a short prayer called Al HaNissim, “About the Miracles”, to the Amidah prayer and the grace after meals. This essentially is a reminder to give thanks for the miracle at the heart of the holiday. However, the case of Hanukkah is somewhat complex, involving a combination of different miracles: the miracle of the few Maccabees defeating the many Greeks; the miracle of the oil flask and the small amount of liquid in it being sufficient to light the Temple menorah for eight days.

These two miracles were not accepted by the Zionist movement. As poet, writer and educator Aharon Ze’ev wrote in the popular holiday song: “No miracle happened to us – we found no oil flask”. The worldview of the new Jews challenged the idea of miracles. They argued that our very own strength supported us, not help from the heavens.

Even in the original sources, there is a debate about the definition of the Hanukkah miracle, which raises the question of the criteria required according to Judaism for something to be considered a “miracle”. Rabbi Ilay Ofran of Kvutzat Yavneh hesitates to speak about a “Jewish stance” on any topic “because Judaism has many varied faces”. However, despite his hesitation, he offers a basic outline. “The main components are the questions ‘Who caused the miracle?’ and ‘For whom did it occur?’" explains Rabbi Ofran. “The understanding that ‘a miracle happened’ includes the belief that God intervened in the world and changed its course, and the belief that all this was done for or to the benefit of a specific person. In other words, as a condition for the experience of a miracle, a person must believe that there is a God who manages the world and wants the best for it. Since each of the assumptions in this sentence is deeply controversial, miracles do not occur that easily.”

Is a “miracle” necessarily something that transcends nature?

“A deviation from the world’s regular order is not necessarily supernatural. Most miracles we experience in our world are miracles of timing. That is, nothing impossible occurs, but rather something highly improbable happens. In this sense, the experience of a miracle is often a matter of interpretation – perceiving the event that occurred as a miracle from the heavens and not as a statistical coincidence. One could say that miracles occur only for those who believe that miracles occur.”

The possibility of interpreting miracles in various ways created surprising approaches to this matter among different thinkers. “Rambam, for example, systematically tries to minimize the recognition of miracles as much as possible,” reminds journalist Dr. Yehuda Yifrach, who taught  Hasidism and Kabbalah at various batei midrash. “He sees events involving miracles as products of prophetic insight – and not as a physical change that occurred in nature. Conversely, he distances prophetic insight itself and describes it as a product of divine grace that appears only to those worthy of it.”

An attempt to escape, in fact, from the supernatural

“An interesting different approach to this issue can be found in the teachings of Rabbi Dovber Schneuri, the second Rebbe of the Chabad Lubavitch Chasidic movement. In his great work “The Gate of Unity”, he builds a complete epistemological theory that aims to describe in minute details the structure of the soul and human consciousness and the complex relationship between consciousness and areas ‘beyond reason and knowledge’. There, in the highest plane, he identifies the root of prophetic insight and the root of the ability to perform miracles. One of his important conclusions is that there is a linear continuum between the planes. In other words, a miracle is ‘not really a miracle’, and prophetic insight is also part of nature, except that it is the ‘nature’ that is not accessible to most people due to the limitations of their perception or the gaps in their ethics. This is similar, for example, to infrared or ultraviolet light, light that the ordinary human eye cannot distinguish – not because it is of a different essence, but because our reception is limited. In his view, a tsaddik, a righteous person, is one who has expanded their spiritual work and energetic and mystical sensitivity, and therefore can operate within the hidden plane of miracles. When a person expands the boundaries of their consciousness, they can experience or perform actions that from another person’s perspective are miracles.”

Deus ex machina

Does Judaism differ from other religions in its view on miracles? Dr. Tomer Persico, scholar of contemporary religion and research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, believes that it does not. “Judaism does not deviate from the monotheistic paradigm,” he explains. “In monotheistic religions, miracles usually serve as evidence of God’s truth: the plagues of Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea and the Mount Sinai miracle on the one hand; Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and resurrection on the other – all provide validity to divine revelation. In contrast, in the Far East, the attitude toward the supernatural is much more mundane, and such events are not considered evidence of something especially divine. There are two main reasons for this: first, God is not perceived as external to the world, and therefore His intervention – that is, of one of the gods – in reality is not understood as a deviation from the normal course of events, but as part of the routine. Second, supernatural powers in humans are not considered to be that rare, and sometimes even indicate engagement with something lower, instead of the aspiration to the higher, which is the ultimate liberation from the cycle of births.”

Similar to Dr. Persico, Dr. Yifrach also believes that the original purpose of miracles in the Torah is related to the validity of divine revelation for believers, but he sees this as a starting point from which there is further development. “The miracles in the Tanakh undergo a process,” Yifrach describes. “The first miracles mainly mean ‘wonder’, namely, proof of the existence of a supreme power with will or interest, one that the person must consider in their decision-making process. For example, when Moses is sent to take the Israelites out of Egypt, he estimates that the people will not believe him – and receives the miracle as a semi-political tool, designed to help him win the public’s trust required to take a risk and embark on an unpredictable adventure in the desert. One must understand that in the miracles of the five books of Moses, there is no process of consciousness transformation accompanying the appearance of the miracle. The miracle in the books is not aimed at expanding consciousness, but is imposed from above like a heavy burden and unilaterally changes the course of history. Therefore, its effect is weak, as in the event of the golden calf, which appears in conjuncture with the miracle of Mount Sinai.”

And what happens to miracles when you go beyond the five books of the Tanakh?

“The later miracles, whose most prominent expression is in the events of the Book of Esther, are based on a completely different mental system. They appear more as providence guiding the political and social agenda from within, and less as a blatant external intervention a la ‘deus ex machina’. Such ‘miracles’ require special senses to recognize and identify them. It essentially demands the observer to be involved in an interpretive process that establishes belief in higher and non-empirical layers of existence. Such a miracle ‘respects’ nature and free choice more and requires human interpretive partnership to establish and recognize it.”

The Rabbi talisman

Rabbi Ofran wants to emphasize the difference in consciousness between the ancient period and our time and the difficulty of understanding and translating the ancient concept of miracles: “The biblical miracle, such as the miracles of the Exodus from Egypt or the miracles that accompanied the Israelites on their journey through the desert, are perceived in our non-biblical consciousness as miracles, but it is not clear whether they were perceived as such by the Israelites themselves. A fundamental component of the miraculous experience is the deviation from the regular order, the uniqueness of divine intervention. If you have a pillar of cloud moving in front of you by day and a pillar of fire by night, if you walk through the sea on dry land and eat the bread from the heavens, you lose the miraculous consciousness and start perceiving this as a cheap routine, which is indeed what happened to the Israelites. In the later biblical books, miracles become rare and exceptional and consequently receive greater recognition. These miracles are usually performed by the prophet or ‘man of God’. Later, during the time of the Sages, miracles become even more marginal and exceptional. They are usually entrusted to characters who are not part of the Talmudic halakhic discourse – such as Honi the Circle Maker or Hanina ben Dosa. Perhaps the process of pushing miracles from the forefront is related to a process of ‘spiritual maturity’ – the process in which the responsibility for managing the world increasingly falls on the individual, and they cannot rely on divine intervention to save them.”

An understanding with important theological significance of focusing on the person and their actions

“I think that the central pillar of the Jewish world is the person’s obligations, not their rights, their actions not their benefit, the commandments they must fulfill, not the reward they will receive for it. Therefore, the place of miracles as something that occurs top-down is relatively marginal in my belief system. A belief system based on miracles is an opposite worldview – a religion preoccupied with its rights instead of its obligations. ‘The ability of the righteous to perform miracles’ is to me an expression bordering on heresy. Miracles are performed by the One who spoke and the world came into being, not by the one who fulfills His words. Belief in a righteous person that replaces belief in God is a dangerous concept that we have already seen when Israel bowed to the golden calf, saying: ‘For this Moses, the man, we do not know what has happened to him’.”

The next stage of ‘spiritual maturity’, as Rabbi Ofran defines it, leads to skepticism in the contemporary religious attitude towards miracle claims. Unlike the past, when tales of wonders found their way to the heart of the masses without a critical community to examine them, miracle-makers of our time must contend with a skeptical public and a religious establishment trying to redefine itself in accordance with the spirit of the times.

“Modern religious establishment is modern by its name”, Dr. Persico says of the current situation. “Starting from the XIX century, the rabbinical elite and Jewish intellectuals have been distancing themselves from ideas that could be perceived as supernatural or miraculous, and an attempt was made to design a rational and respectful Judaism, more similar to Protestant Christianity and even to the deism of the Enlightenment. Therefore, institutions that were very common in all diasporas such as amulets, incantations, miracle workers, and Babas, became taboo and were considered inferior or even something foreign to the ‘true’ Judaism. To this day, one might hear completely secular people dismissing the Baba phenomenon because ‘it’s not really Judaism’. The historical truth is different. Currently, the establishment moves between completely rejecting the phenomenon and adopting it when it serves a specific goal – like, for instance, the Shas party’s use of Rabbi Kaduri as election propaganda. Sometimes there is full adoption, like in the series of miracle story books by Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu z”l, supposed to be legitimate and part of the consensus. Eliyahu is believed by many to have been a miracle worker, and there is no conflict for them with his being a highly respected halakhic and spiritual authority.”

Dr. Yifrach claims that “for those who know true kabbalists, it is not uncommon to be present at events that cannot be explained by any accepted empirical logic. Someone who works seriously on kabbalistic practices and dream work can reach a state where miracles are an integral part of their daily life. From their perspective, it is no longer a miracle, but an expansion of nature’s boundaries. Within this, one can of course create many distinctions, such as between a miraculous state of consciousness and the ability to act that goes beyond the state of action to the reality outside, but this world definitely exists, alive and kicking, even in our times.”

What is the Rebbe’s opinion on miracle, what purpose does the miracle serve?

“For significant Rebbes, miracles were often an integral part of their encounter with their followers. This is what made the encounter between the Hasid and his Rebbe so problematic. Sometimes the miracle helps the Hasid undergo a transformation or a defining spiritual experience, but sometimes a dependency on the miracle is created, which comes at the expense of human effort and the necessity to learn to work with natural tools. Then the tsaddik becomes a resource that they try to exploit. The decline that some of the courts in Netivot and Ashdod face can illustrate this problem. 

The myth buster

As part of his blog, Gilad Diamant dealt with all modern wonder stories and came to investigate the scientific truth of various phenomena – from astrology and graphology to miracles. “When I encounter a miracle claim and try to investigate it,” Diamant reports, “it’s very important to distinguish between a one-time event that has already happened, of which only an eyewitness testimony remains, and a claim that someone is capable of performing such miracles within their practice on a recurring basis.”

How do you investigate ‘miracles’?

“A one-time miracle is almost impossible to investigate. I can interrogate the witness, try to cross-reference their story with testimonies of other people who might have been present at the event, but eyewitnesses tend to make mistakes, interpret things through their own belief systems and concepts, and invent details that never happened. Since we are not aware of these biases, we are sure that we remember the event correctly, but the truth can be very far from that. Moreover, it is not difficult to cause entire groups of people to experience things that never happened. For example, in an experiment where people participated in a (fictitious) séance, the medium – who was actually an actor – declared that the table was rising into the air, even though the table did not move an inch. After about two weeks, a third of the participants remembered that the table had risen into the air – and there you have a miracle in every sense, a result of simple suggestion. In my book, I provide many more examples of the impact of expectations, preconceived notions, and various manipulations have on our experience and our memory of the experience.”

What about miracles that are essentially amazing coincidences?

“Here it is important to understand that we are all very poor at estimating probabilities. When we are stunned by a rare event, how rare is it really? Here’s a small exercise for the readers: You enter a classroom with, say, 23 students. What are the chances that two of them celebrate their birthday on the same day? It sounds like a very small chance, right? Well, it turns out the chance is about 50%. One can only investigate miracles that can be repeated to some extent – this is required in order to observe conditions in a controlled manner, document them properly and check if some known law of nature is indeed violated, or to collect more extensive statistical data and check how rare the event that seems rare really is. There are people who claim they can perform miracles repeatedly. This could be a healer, a seer, a therapist with various potions. When I encounter a person making such claims, I first look for whether controlled studies have been done in the field. Usually, it has already been investigated, and the results were negative. Whether it is fraud or self-deception, in the end, no person has yet been discovered who can perform miracles in a controlled environment. There are challenges around the world offering substantial cash prizes to anyone who can demonstrate any supernatural ability under controlled conditions. To this day, for decades, no one has come close to winning the prize. Somehow, people manage to perform these miracles only in an uncontrolled manner, or on entertainment TV shows.”

Despite the skepticism, do you feel you have ever experienced something that was a ‘miracle’ or close to a miracle?

Gilad Diamant: “Nothing that I can recall. Certainly various surprising coincidences or certain events that I had no explanation for occurred, but nothing I would define as a ‘miracle’.”

Rabbi Ilay Ofran: “Certainly. There are seven billion people in the world – what were the chances that the woman I love would love me in return and agree to marry me?”

This article was originally published in Hebrew.

Main Photo: An electric menorah in the Ramat Gan National Park\ Dr Avishai Teicher\ Wikipedia