Rabbi Micah Citrin

December 22, 2006

We Still Need Miracles

We Jews are a people who love miracles.  In our tradition, one does not have to look very hard to find them.  There are the small miracles-year in and year out we eat matzah for 8 days, with only a little bit of kvetching.  Yom Kippur a day that shuns food and fun draws the greatest number of Jews to synagogue.  Two Jews can have a conversation in which both talk and listen at the same time. 

Then there are the big miracles, like Moses who encounters a bush that bu rn s without being consumed by flames, the 10 plagues that God brought upon Egypt , and wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, the splitting of the Red Sea so that our ancestors might pass to freedom.  And of course, tonight is the last night of our celebration of the Hanukah miracle, when the menorah bu rn s brightest. 

We have so many miracles in our tradition that the idea seems to lose some of its meaning.  Is a miracle simply a grand event, a product of divine intervention that happened long ago?  Is a miracle merely a fictitious tale, a buba mise, raised to the level of, well for lack of a better term, gospel, that we tell in order to bolster our faith?  If the answer is yes to either of these questions, then we must examine and reconsider what a miracle is, refill it with meaning because it is part of the very fabric of Judaism.  And we still need miracles.

Perhaps we get it wrong when we start our search for miracles with the extraordinary.  We become caught up with the grandeur of parting seas, thanks to Cecil B DeMills and Universal Studios.  After we have experienced the studio enhanced miracle, it can only be down hill from there.  What new fangled Jonny-Come-Lately miracle could compare?  But the origin of the miracle is not in the thunder and lightening of Divine fireworks.  No, the starting place of the miracle can be found in the mega-ordinary, the mundane. 

An example from my new favorite TV show is instructive.  The show is Joan of Arcadia, and unfortunately it was cancelled after two seasons; thank God for DVD’s.  The premise of the show is that Joan, a teenage girl, begins to be visited by God.  For the purposes of television, invisible, abstract God appears to Joan in human form (I know, not a very Jewish idea, but bear with me).  In one episode, God is a hunkie classmate prompting Joan to ask if it is ok to have a crush on God.  In another, God is the custodian at her school.  At other times God appears as a seven year old girl on the playground, or and old man on the street.  God asks Joan to do specific things in each episode, whose purpose is not immediately clear to her, in order to help people and make the world a better place.  To translate this into our parlance, she does mitzvot.  In the first episode, when God first appears to her, Joan doubts that she is in the midst of an encounter with God.  As she walks down the street with the Kadosh Baruch Hu, she asks for proof, for God’s credentials.  She asks to see a miracle.  “Right there,” the God character says as the camera captures God pointing to a tree.  Joan with teenage eye rolling attitude is clearly disgusted.  But we all know that God is correct.  The tree, root system and branches, lush leaves, and peeling bark, is a miracle.

Like Joan we expect that miracles will be beyond our realm of experience.  We expect miracles to live up to the well known narratives in which the unbelievable occurs.  Yet, perhaps we misunderstand the stories that we tell about miracles.  We get stuck on the plot, caught up in the story line, the special effects if you will, and miss the real point.  A miracle begins with anything that we experience with a sense of wonder.  In this way the genesis of a miracle begins with us and our perspective.

Our great 20^th century teacher, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, based his entire understanding of Judaism and religion on the notion of wonder.  For Heschel the ability to see the world and stand in awe, to even be amazed that we can see at all is the beginning of our relationship with God.  In the name of the great Hasidic Rebbe, The Ball Shem Tov, Heschel taught, “Replete is the world with a spiritual radiance, replete with sublime and marvelous secrets.  But a small hand held against the eye hides it all...We fail to wonder…This is the tragedy of every man: to dim all wonder by indifference.  Life is routine and routine is resistance to wonder.”  Rabbi Heschel reminds us not to loose our sense of wonder and not to see anything in the world, no matter how mundane, as routine.  We were meant to walk around with miracle spectacles, lenses that help us to focus on the miraculous world around us.  We came into the world wearing these lenses.  Joani Mitchell captures this reality in the first verse her song the Circle Game, “Yesterday, a child came out to wonder.”  We all start our lives in childhood looking at the world for the fresh miracle that it is.  Only later, in our cynicism do we doubt that miracles exist.  Tradition bids that we dust of our miracles glasses and see the world through its lens.

At the same time, the miracles at the center of our tradition also transcend the mundane, the regular, and capture a sense of the unbelievable.  Perhaps the unbelievable is also a necessary aspect of a miracle.  Some events occur in life are so amazing that we cannot believe that what we experienced truly took place.  The event becomes engraved on our memory, or a people’s collective conscience.  We reflect on it and the event grows in stature.  We come to appreciate its unique nature.  We come to terms with the reality of the event, but we realize that it could only exist with the presence of God at work.  So the experience of a group of downtrodden slaves freed from bondage in order to have a revelatory encounter with the Creator of all Life felt like seas parting.  The horizon of freedom, once so distant like the horizon on the ocean, became suddenly attainable, as if the sea opened up, its floor a straight path to that better future.

Those who recorded the Book of Maccabbees, emphasized the military victory of a small band of Jews over an imperial Greek/Syrian power.  Nowhere is a miracle of oil mentioned.  Some 500 years later, the rabbis of the Talmud, introduce the miracle of the oil.  The fact that the Jews overcame their oppressors and succeeded in their fight for their culture and identity could be likened to a small flask of oil that betrayed its amount to give fuel for a lasting light.  In hindsight the rabbis came to interpret the miracle not as the military victory of the underdog, but the will of a meager people to persist in the face of exte rn al pressures to assimilate.  We tell the story of the oil that happened bayamim hahem, in those days, but the miracle continues bazeman hazeh, in our times, with each of us.  This does not feel so extraordinary until we stop to consider it.

Miracles are real.  They are all around us if we open our eyes and take a perspective of amazement.  They are also events that appear unbelievable, but that happen in a very real way in this world.  These are some miracles that I have witnessed; these are miracles that strengthen my faith:  There is a Jewish State in the Land of Israel , rebuilt by our people after thousands of years, and we are alive to see it and be a part of it.  I watched my children come into this world a little over a month ago.  I watched as God breathed their souls into them, the breath of life.  As a rabbi I have witnessed a family gathered around an elderly relative who had just taken his last breath.  And God was there too, with the family, escorting this man out life with love.

One of the most important mitzvot of Chanukah is pirsum ha-nes, announcing the miracle of Chanukah.  We place the menorah in the window in order to show the light of the Chanukah miracle to the world.  As this season of light draws to a close, go home and place your menorah in the window.  Witness how the light reflects off of the glass, dancing in front of you.  May this light awaken us to the reality of miracles all around us.  May this light open our eyes and our hearts to stand in wonder at what we experience in our daily lives.  May this light teach us to live and relive the miracles of our people’s past that we might have a bright future of hopes, dreams, and endless possibility.