It’s Hanukkah—holiday of light, candles, dreidels, latkes, sufganiyot, presents, and above all—miracles. When moderns hear a story like the one told about the Maccabees recapturing the Temple, finding one tiny bottle of kosher olive oil that would last only a single day, yet burned eight full days, some of us must be wondering—did that really happen, and should our skepticism overtake us, would that be the death of Hanukkah as we know it?
The Bible records what we would refer to as miracles, but never refers to them with the word nes, the Hebrew word we commonly use for miracle. The Torah is much more comfortable talking about otot, signs, or nifla’ot, wonders. Almost all the wonders of the Bible have been analyzed from a scientific perspective. And so the splitting of the Red Sea was due to a possible if unusual tidal phenomenon; the earth swallowing of the rebel leader Korah and his band of trouble makers might have been an earthquake; and the manna that daily fell from heaven and fed the Israelites for 40 years can be traced to a certain kind of edible secretion of insects found in the Sinai desert and gathered by the Bedouins until this day.
Interesting—but also, a little disheartening. When reading the Bible scientifically is motivated by an interest in explaining away miracles, or rendering the wonder less wonderful, then such an approach misrepresents the Torah’s meaning. The miraculous tales of the Bible do not necessarily ask us to believe in them literally, but only to recognize the hand of God operating within the world, and to be filled with a sense of wonder over what it is we see.
The rabbis’ ambivalence with supernatural miracles is reflected in a Talmudic tale (Shabbat 53b for those of you who would like to look it up), in which a nursing mother dies leaving behind her destitute husband and baby. The man was in no position to pay for a wet nurse to continue feeding his child, but Heaven suddenly altered his body so that he himself could feed his child in the exact manner as the deceased mother had. A miracle! Two rabbis respond to the miracle. Rav Yosef says—Wow, what a great man he was for Heaven to have performed such a miracle! Abaye responds by saying—On the contrary, this man must have been defective for Heaven to have altered nature in his behalf. In other words, don’t be so impressed with the supernatural; there are sufficient wonders within the natural world that should move us to be filled with awe and reverence for God.
G. K Chesterton, a prolific 20th century English writer put it as follows—“The whole order of things is as outrageous as any miracle which could presume to violate it.” So, in the end, what to make of that little bottle of oil that burned for eight days? If it happened, it was a miracle. But the real miracle is that the Jewish people, after 2000 years, still tell the tale and move others to look for the miracles in life. I hope you’ll find some otot, signs and nifla’ot, wonders, in your own life today, and every day.
