As Chanukah approaches with yet another war now raging in Israel, I keep recalling a previous time when my then nineteen-year-old son Meir had been a soldier stationed at a military outpost in Lebanon. Taped securely on to his gun was a small note I’d written with these vital words:
“Hashem Hu Elokim, ein od milvado.” Hashem is G-d; there is none else.”
After reading a story about the Brisker Rav and his son who escaped from the Nazis while focusing on the words of this segula, I had told Meir about it, insisting he must say it if he ever felt his life was in danger, chas v’shalom.
Suddenly Meir looked up to see an anti-tank missile hurtling directly toward him.
He and his friend Dani were being shot at by Hezbollah terrorists positioned above them on a nearby mountain. At the time I’d no idea what a missile actually looked like, envisioning a sort of round object similar in size to a basketball. Later I learned that a missile is almost seven feet long and carries over thirteen pounds of warhead, capable of piercing a tank or the concrete outpost where my son and Dani were standing.
For one agonizing moment, Meir thought his time in the world was about to end. But glancing at the note taped to his gun, he quickly murmured the words: “Hashem Hu Elokim, ein od milvado.”
Then, a few meters in front of Meir, the missile changed direction in midair, as if it struck an invisible force field. He, Dani and several other soldiers stationed on the nearby hills watched in disbelief as the missile veered upwards, defying gravity, and flew 65 feet straight up, making an arc over their heads and landing behind the outpost.
The force of the explosion did knock Meir and Dani off their feet, but amazingly the only injuries they sustained were small bits of shrapnel in their legs.
After the battle was over, the platoon held a discussion. The soldiers, including a few experienced officers who had witnessed the missile’s astonishing trajectory, could not begin to explain what they had witnessed before their eyes. In their entire military careers, they had never seen a missile behave in this peculiar way. Their only explanation was it had to be a miracle.
It appears there are two kinds of miracles. Some events are exceedingly unlikely, but still possible, according to the laws of nature. Other events, such as a missile’s strange behavior in midair or the famous Chanukah miracle of a small jug of oil sufficient for one day but which burned for eight, are simply impossible according to natural order.
These laws operate constantly except when Hashem chooses to make an exception, which is called “a miracle.” He wills reality into existence at every second. That’s what the words taped to Meir’s gun means: “Hashem is Elokim, there is nothing besides Him.”
As Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler, wrote: “The truth is that there is no essential difference between the natural and the miraculous. Everything that occurs is a miracle. The world has no other cause but the will of Hashem. We call His acts a ‘miracle’ when He wills an occurrence which is strange and unusual which consequently makes us aware of the hand of Hashem. Nature is an illusion which Hashem created in order to give human beings free choice to recognize him or not. Nature has no objective existence.” As the Torah states: “Ein od milvado.”
Now we can understand why the mitzvah of Chanukah is to kindle eight lights, rather than seven. After all, the Maccabim found one little jar of oil enough to burn naturally for one day, so the miracle was actually for seven days, not eight.
Yet even the burning of the oil on the first day was a miracle for the fact that oil burns at all is not a given of nature, but a miracle of Hashem.
We can also understand how a 19-year-old soldier on a hilltop in Lebanon could help work a miracle that saved his life. It was not the words of the verse which magically deflected the missile. Rather, the words of the verse, “Hashem is G-d; there is nothing besides Him,” reminded Meir of the truth which he had learned: that Hashem who makes missiles fly straight can also make missiles do strange leaps in midair which is exactly what happened for him.
Of course, I did not know any of this at the time. As an ordinary Jewish mother on Chanukah, I was busy frying potato latkes for my younger kids and decorating doughnuts, while simultaneously davening and worrying about Meir, freezing on a Lebanese hilltop who couldn’t even light a Chanukah candle as it would reveal his whereabouts.
I continued to murmur Tehillim 27, “Hope for Hashem, be strong and He will give your heart courage…”
I kept stirring the big pot of vegetable soup cooking on the stove, noticing how thick and delicious it looked, just the way Meir liked it and felt sorry for him to miss it and not being at home for Chanukah.
And then I heard the front door open and in walked my own miracle… Meir, exhausted but grinning, his gun slung across his back, with the segula note still securely attached.
May all our brave soldiers now return home as safely as he did.
