Miracles in Our Own Time
Rabbi Mark H. Levin, D.H.L.
March 31, 2007

A few weeks ago now I had a column in the Saturday Kansas City Star responding to a frequently asked question: Why doesn’t God do miracles today the way God once did in biblical times?

Wouldn’t that be terrific? You need a little more light to finish off a ball game, and God makes the sun stop in the heavens the way God did for Joshua in the Valley of Ayalon. You’re late for a meeting and God sends a chariot the way God did for Elijah, that transported Elijah up to heaven. You’re trying to get across a bay and instead of looking for a bridge God splits the water for you the way God did for Moses and the Israelites standing at the Sea of Reeds. But alas and alack, God just doesn’t perform miracles the way God once did in the time of Moses, Joshua and Elijah.

A child goes to religious school the first day and returns home at noon. His mother asks, “Sammy, what did you learn today in religious school?” Sammy says, “A guy name Moses led the Jewish people out of Egypt, and they got to this river, and suddenly Pharaoh’s soldiers and chariots were chasing them, and the Israelite corps of engineers came forward, and they built a pontoon bridge, and when all of the Israelites got to the other side they blew up the pontoon bridge and all the Egyptian soldiers drowned.” His astonished mother said, “Sammy, is that really what they told you?” Sammy replied, “Mom, if I told you the crazy story they told us, you’d never believe it.”

You know, when miraculous things happen, people often embellish a bit to make the point. So maybe it wasn’t 600,000 males and 2 million people overall who came out of Egypt. Maybe it was 1% of that: just 60,000. Who cares? The point is that miraculous things happened, and suddenly slaves became free. And isn’t that a miracle? Isn’t it a miracle when a small, downtrodden people suddenly bursts onto the stage of history by freeing themselves from slavery, and particularly slavery against the mightiest nation in the world at that time? Isn’t that a miracle, even if there weren’t exactly ten plagues? Who would have expected people enslaved for 210 years suddenly to march out of Egypt, cross the Sinai peninsula, and spend forty years in the wilderness, to receive revelation that would become the basis of Western civilization and to establish their own nation in their own land? Who could imagine such a thing? And does it matter that the exact events in the Bible perhaps never happened as written: isn’t Jewish survival culturally, linguistically, nationally, a miracle beyond human comprehension? How could such a thing happen, that 3 millennia later this small people appears daily on the front pages of newspapers all over the world, and influences the course of human events? Is that not a miracle?

And now, prepare for the most miraculous event of all: this same people, scattered all over the globe, despised by many nations, with one-third of their people murdered over just 6 years, suffering tragedy after tragedy, suddenly rises up and for the first time in 2000 years establishes their own country. Just 50 years after some visionary, assimilated Jewish journalist said, “If you will it, it is no dream,” suddenly the Jews have their very own tiny homeland in the very same place they have governed twice before in history.

And you tell me there are no miracles? Had you asked any Jew in 1870 or even 1900 what it would take to establish a Jewish homeland in the part of the Ottoman Empire known as Palestine, they would have said, “It’ll take a miracle.” But when the miracle happens what do people say, “How come God sends us no miracles today?”

You all probably know the story of the man on the roof of his house in a flood. A rowboat comes up and the occupants invite the man in. He replies, “No, I am a religious man and I am waiting for the Lord to save me. I have faith.” A helicopter comes and tries to save the man but he waves the savers away with the same statement. The man drowns. When he gets to the Pearly Gates the man says to God, “I don’t understand why you didn’t save me. I have been religious my entire life.” God replies, “What do you mean? I sent a boat and a helicopter.”

God sent Theodore Herzl, Asher Ginzberg, David ben Gurion, Haim Weizman, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, and many many others, and unimaginable events to redeem God’s own people. And still we ask, “Why doesn’t God send miracles?”

And do you know the greatest tragedy? We don’t recognize the miracle. We stare uncomprehendingly from North America at the imperfect country named Israel, just as only one-fifth of the Jews returned from the Babylonian exile. We know the outcome and we can say, “What were they thinking? God sent a miracle and they ignored and stayed where they were.”

And we, we who live in an age in which we can get to Israel in just one day even from the Midwest of the United States, many in our community never have been, don’t care to go, close their eyes to the miracle of our own day and ask, “Why doesn’t God do something?”

God sent us a lifeboat. But we wait for a miracle on our own terms rather than God’s terms.

Monday night at the seders we retell the story of the miracle of the exodus. Had we lived then, would we have been worthy of redemption? Or would we be among those in Egypt left unredeemed because we could not see? And more to the point, are we among those of our own day who refuse to recognize the miracle, or will we be among those who cry out, “Thank you God, for the miracles of our own day.”