|
|
Nov. 30, 2007
What makes for a real miracle?
Making the distinction between miracles and chance leads to a greater appreciation.
EUGENE KAELLIS
Dreidels are fun and who doesn't like latkes? But Chanukah can also be a useful time for reconsidering all miracles, not only the one we celebrate on the 25th of Kislev.
Everyone knows that, for a very long time, Chanukah was a relatively minor holiday. It took on added importance because it was celebrated around Christmas time and offered Jews, especially children, a time for exchanging gifts and enjoying merriment when the days were shorter, the temperature lower and people of all kinds needed some festive event to drive away the solstice blues and to reinforce the belief that spring, even though it invariably does, would return again.
It's important to keep in mind that in antiquity most people had only the vaguest conception of natural laws. Everything that happened, no matter how regular and potentially predictable, was a new, if repeated, manifestation of God's will. So, a good many cultures created some appropriate form of cheerful celebration around this darker and more frigid time, when the soil seemed so lifeless it was hard to believe that in only a few months it would be warm, enterprising and fertile again. Perhaps. Almost certainly. But not without the exercise of God's will, for which people were continually grateful.
Yet, even with a greater understanding of the presumably impersonal and independent forces that drive the seasons, there remains the celebration of the Chanukah miracle which, like Christmas, Diwali, Banbdi Chlor Divas and so many "pagan" celebrations, including the ancient Yuletide in Britain, is a festival of light at a time of the year when people, whose normal agricultural activities are seasonally suspended, need distraction and comfort by exposure to radiance and warmth, cheer, hope and the exchange of gifts.
A miracle is commonly defined as a highly improbable yet desired event, like one of the four letters on the dreidel coming up five times in a row. Some of the major events described in the Torah have been considered miracles, at least insofar as the Jews were concerned; for example, the 10 plagues, the parting of the Red Sea, the sun's stopping for Joshua and the fire sent down on Mount Carmel during Elijah's contest with the priests of Baal. The recurrence of spring is a regular event, but these were instances in which the expressions of God's will was both anomalous and directed specifically to attain an objective hoped for by the Hebrew people.
It is true that a sense of the miraculous has all but disappeared from contemporary western culture; everything now must have a scientific explanation, preferably in a way that produces reliable numbers, or else its validity is suspect or even denied. Yet just as science increasingly influences our world outlook, some scientists have gone so far as to predict that we are approaching the end of science. All the major laws of nature, they claim, have been discovered. Only the details remain, more precision by extending values a few more places after the decimal point. You can read about it in John Horgan's The End of Science.
Curiously, the same prediction, for the same reasons, was made in the 19th century and was so firmly ensconced that the U.S. commissioner of patents even suggested that his office be closed because everything that could be invented had been. People, it seems, periodically loose their bearings, so caught up are they in their proclaimed successes.
But science, in spite of its evident conceit, continues to observe phenomena that defy explanation by existing natural law. In the area of quantum physics especially, there are no theories that adequately explain the behavior of what are called twinned photons. Not only is there no theory that explains their behavior, the phenomena observed contradict certain basic suppositions in physics.
Allowance, in the form of practical humility, has to be made for the fact that science does and certainly will continue, to lag behind nature's ever-changing and infinite extent, variety and secrets. Who, in the mid-19th century, would have believed that radio waves could exist? Yet, in 1888, Heinrich Hertz's discovery of electromagnetic energy laid the basis for different kinds of wireless transmission and opened a whole new vista to physicists. How often will they – and we – continue to be surprised?
There is still another important aspect of miracles. Perhaps it is best revealed by reference to a true story, related critically by Tom Harpur, the liberal Canadian Christian theologian and author. An audience at a Gospel Businessmen's prayer breakfast heard an invited speaker who was the sole survivor of a terrible mid-air collision in which 593 people died. His explanation – "My Bible-believing mama asked me to pray with her for a safe return and I did. That's what made the difference."
This story tells us quite a bit about the survivor: God's exceptional mercy was extended, but only to one Christian, whose Bible-believing mama had to insist that he pray. It's much like saying, as many people do, "There but for the grace of God go I," when observing someone who has sustained a terrible disaster in life. Why didn't God's grace extend to the victim? This is not the kind of question to which anyone should offer a slick, self-satisfying response. Not only are such attitudes self-centred, they border on blasphemy by presuming on God's will, a will that is forever a mystery to us.
A stroke of luck is not a miracle; it is just a consequence of the statistical play of events. It can be transformed into a miracle only by its concurrence with the will and wisdom of the person, or people, who can benefit from it. If the speaker, instead of being grateful to his mother's insistence that he pray, had made an effort to determine the contributing factors for this collision, had insisted that the investigators find a flaw in the air traffic control system that made the tragedy possible and then took on a personal mission to bring about remedial changes, that would have been a true miracle – a case when an unfortunate event, by human understanding and effort, is converted into a means of reducing future tragedies. That is the essence of a true miracle: the process by which an unusual event is transformed into a great benefit by people with vision and fortitude.
A miracle grew out of the Holocaust when two things concurred: there was a great surge of determination by Jewish survivors that there would at last be a place of refuge for Jews who had faced and were facing acute discrimination or genocide and there was the so-called window of opportunity, a feeling – temporary, as subsequent events demonstrated – that the post-Holocaust world owed something to the Jewish people as some recompense for their centuries of suffering. That, combined with the expressed will of Jews, to have their own homeland, was a miracle, undoubtedly one of the great miracles of the ages.
The lesson for Jews is that potential miracles become actual when the opportunity is recognized and seized. To paraphrase Shakespeare, "there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune ..." or, which missed, can lead to disaster.
Eugene Kaellis is a retired academic living in New Westminster.
^TOP
|
|
