It has long been known that time is of the essence of so many human activities. Ecclesiastes (Koheles) says it succinctly: “Everything has its season, and there is a time for everything under the heaven” (Id. 3:2).
Many centuries later, Shakespeare narrowed the scope to human events: “There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune” (Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3).
Nowhere is the exact timing more noticeable than in events we label as miracles. Leytzim (scoffers) work overtime to cast doubt on Biblical accounts of history. Their view is best expressed by the song “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” sung by the skeptical character Sportin’ Life in Porgy and Bess. This musical agnostic note is a metaphor for the 20th century, although the scientific questioning of religion began with Darwin’s theory of evolution in the mid-19th century.
The clash of cultures is exemplified by the 1925 trial in Tennessee of biology teacher John Scopes, immortalized in the thinly fictionalized 1960 play (and later movie) Inherit the Wind. Speaking for the scientific view, defense attorney Henry Drummond (the avatar for Clarence Darrow) states confidently, “Yes, there is something holy to me! The power of the individual human mind. In a child’s power to master the multiplication table there is more sanctity than in all your shouted ‘Amens!,’ ‘Holy, Holies!’ and ‘Hosannahs!’ An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral… Darwin moved us forward to a hilltop, where we could look back and see the way from which we came. But for this view, this insight, this knowledge, we must abandon our faith in the pleasant poetry of Genesis.”
Inherit the Wind, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (not the Confederate general), was the prototype for scientific debunking of the Bible. The general approach was first to deny that any of the events chronicled in the Torah ever happened. There were even those doubters who said that Avraham, Yitzhak, Yaakov, and Moshe never existed – that they were figments of Jewish imagination. When that approach ran aground, such as the archaeological discovery of the remains of chariots and horses’ bridles at the bottom of a wadi at Nuweiba, across the Gulf of Aqaba (the Red Sea) from Saudi Arabia, and a human femur dated about 3,500 years old, the fallback position was to claim, in Amalekite fashion, that the events in question were purely natural processes which occur coincidentally at propitious moments.
In that regard, perhaps the most spectacular Biblical miracle is the parting of the Red Sea, as recreated in Cecil B. DeMille’s classic movie The Ten Commandments. In fact, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, zt”l, wrote in his column “The Power of Ruach,” reprinted in the January 26, 2024 issue of The Jewish Press, researchers at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of Colorado, neither of them bastions of Biblical scholarship, used computer simulations to show how a strong east wind blowing overnight “…could have pushed water back at a bend where an ancient river is believed to have merged with a coastal lagoon. The water would have been guided into the two waterways, and a land bridge would have opened at the bend, allowing people to walk across the exposed mudflats. As soon as the wind died down, the waters would have rushed back in.”
We have contemporary accounts of such miraculous events on a smaller scale involving Israel. For example, during the 1948 War of Independence, Syrian troops attacked a kibbutz populated by Orthodox German Jews. The defenders were able to hold them off until they began running out of ammunition. At that point they gave their remaining bullets to the best sharpshooters, while the others armed themselves with whatever weapons they could find – knives, home and garden tools, clubs and so on – preparing to make a last stand. While they were arming themselves, a storm sprang up and heavy rain began falling. The Syrian tanks bogged down in the mud, the Israeli sharpshooters picked off their officers, and the other troops ran away.
In fact, I found online a virtual library detailing 17 miraculous Israeli military victories. Later, I believe during the first Lebanon war, two Israeli soldiers saw a missile heading straight toward them. With no time to run, they began praying. Abruptly, the missile turned and flew upward to a great vertical height before passing over them and landing far enough behind them that although the blast knocked them off their feet, they weren’t seriously injured. Message to the scoffers: The soldiers’ account was corroborated by other Israeli chayalim who were close enough to see that wondrous event.
Many of these miracles, and especially the Red Sea crossing, can be interpreted in one of two ways, as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes. The more obvious interpretation is that these were events in which the laws of nature were suspended, as exemplified by the parted waters standing on end on either side like a wall. On the other hand, we could also say that the events were miraculous not because the laws of nature were suspended, but because these were natural occurrences happening exactly at the time they were needed. How can the scoffers explain that?
We conclude with Rabbi Sacks’s words: “A miracle is not necessarily something that suspends natural law. It is, rather, an event for which there may be a natural explanation, but which – happening when, where, and how it did – evokes wonder, such that even the most hardened skeptic senses that G-d has intervened in history. The weak are saved, those in danger delivered. More significant still is the moral message such an event conveys: that hubris is punished by nemesis, that the proud are humbled and the humble given pride; that there is justice in history, often hidden but sometimes gloriously revealed.”
At this time when the Jewish people worldwide are threatened by a mortal assault, although we are admonished not to depend on miracles, whatever hishtadlus we can do is dwarfed by the immense earthly power arrayed against us. Our collective survival over the centuries is a miracle, and now we must plead with Heaven for yet another miracle, trusting that Hashem will not allow His enemies, who are our enemies as well, and who brazenly strive to elevate themselves above the natural order revealed to Avraham Avinu and to Moshe Rabbeinu, to triumph. Let us pray.
