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April 4, 2003/Nisan 2 5763, Vol. 55, No. 32
Can we recognize a miracle?
Torah study
RABBI NEIL GILLMAN
Tazria/Leviticus 12:1-13:59
The haftorah this week consists of two episodes from a cycle of tales describing miracles performed by the prophet Elisha. The first describes how a few loaves of bread sufficed to feed a multitude. The second describes the healing of an Aramean general, Naaman, from his leprosy.
Both stories turn on an apparently miraculous reversal of the natural order. In the first, Elisha's steward, Gehazi, protests that the few loaves could hardly feed such a large number, but they do. In the second, the leper protests that immersing himself in the waters of the Jordan could hardly be expected to cure him, but it does.
In a delightful detail, the narrative has Naaman protesting that if immersing in a river could cure him, why come all the way to the Jordan? He has rivers back in Damascus. He had expected that this miracle-working prophet would have performed some esoteric ritual such as invoking God's name and waving his hand toward his affected skin. But Naaman obeys Elisha and he is cured.
Reports of miraculous healing are commonplace, even in our day. Many of us tend to be skeptical of these reports. After all, God may have performed miracles in the biblical era. But today? We don't need wonder-working prophets. We have doctors and hospitals.
But what constitutes a miracle?
In both of these stories, the reversal of the natural course of events - a few loaves feeding a multitude and immersion curing leprosy - is ascribed to God.
In the first, God had said, "They will eat and have some left over." In the second, the cured leper, a pagan, undergoes a religious conversion: "I now know that there is no God in the whole world except in Israel."
But the skeptic can ask, how do we know that it was God who reversed the course of nature? In these stories, the Torah narrative tells us that it was God; Elisha serves as God's agent. But in other cases, we never really know.
For any miracle to take place, two factors are indispensable. God has to act, and we have to perceive God to have acted. Whatever God did in antiquity, God continues to do today. And if God does not do it today, God never did it in antiquity either. God has not changed. What has changed is our readiness to perceive God's activity in the world.
When I search for contemporary miracles, I think of the prayer near the close of our Amidah that begins with the words Modim anachnu lach, "We thank you Lord." What for? The passage continues, "For the miracles that are with us daily." Not for the dramatic reversals of the natural order, but for the everyday miracles.
We could thank God for the natural functioning of our bodies, the mysteries of the human brain, the birth of a baby, for a Bach cantata or Shakespeare's King Lear. We tend not to perceive any of these as miraculous precisely because of their everyday quality. We assign them to the realm of "merely" the natural course of events. We don't put God into those miracles.
But that assumes that we know what constitutes the natural. Ever so often, however, when nature does not function as we anticipate, we are shocked into the awareness that we should never assume that anything is "merely" natural. Those moments of radical amazement, to use Heschel's term, have the power to transform our sense of what constitutes the natural order.
They help us put God back into the picture.
Rabbi Neil Gillman is professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
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