Q&A: Stories of Legends and Miracles
Stories of Legends and Miracles
Question
Hello and blessings,
I’m turning to you as a rational person who has read your books and enjoyed them quite a bit.
I’d appreciate it if you would be straightforward and answer me honestly: do you really believe that bizarre miracles that contradict all the laws of nature, like the Exodus from Egypt, “sun, stand still at Gibeon” (the sun stopping its motion), and the rest of the stories of the Hebrew Bible, really all happened until 2,000 years ago and then suddenly stopped completely? (It’s completely obvious that today, in the age of science, we’ve fully woken up from all the superstitions that existed in the past.)
This is such an absurd claim that it’s hard for me to understand how a rational person like you can make it…
2,000 years, in terms of the real age of the world (13.8 billion and not 5,700 according to the Torah), is basically yesterday, and to say that until then all the stories of the Hebrew Bible were true and not legends meant to reinforce faith among the people, but actual stories—it just seems blatantly irrational and completely unfounded.
Answer
First, it’s not a situation where they existed and then stopped completely. It was probably a gradual process. Second, the scale of the age of the world is irrelevant here. This is a decision of the Holy One, blessed be He, about policy. More importantly: as a rational person, do you believe that a baby grows within a year by fifty percent in length and by a factor of three in weight? After all, on the scale of its whole life that’s a very short time. https://www.israelhayom.co.il/article/374147
Discussion on Answer
Obviously He can. Who said otherwise?! The question is whether He does so, not whether He can.
I don’t see any point in reading literature of that kind. It never convinces me. Usually there are probabilistic fallacies there that untrained readers get taken in by.
There are no miracle stories in the Torah at all.
In your second book in the trilogy, No Man Rules the Spirit, you wrote that miracles stopped completely when the children of Israel entered the Land 2,000 years ago, and now everything proceeds in a natural way without miracles and without divine intervention.
Unfortunately, it seems that this claim is only because every rational person today understands that there are no miracles, now that science can intelligently explain how the world exists and how the laws of nature work in scientific terms. But before the age of science, when people believed in the god of rain, wind, rage, and the rest of that sort of thing, they accepted all the stories of the Hebrew Bible and the tales of the Sages just as they were.
I really don’t remember writing such a thing. I don’t think so. Providence became more natural, but it seems there still were miracles.
May the witches of Hades, god of the underworld, have mercy on me. Sometimes I feel like asking someone to pinch me, just so I’m sure I’m not dreaming. In the fifth of the 21st century we’re discussing mythologies as if they were real—and by a PhD in physics, no less.
How are those miracles different from miracles of rabbis and great rebbes in our own day or in the last two hundred years?
There are so many miracle stories in our times or in recent periods, like Shabazi’s “shortening of the Sabbath journey,” or tales about the Baal Shem Tov.
Why believe in miracles that happened 3,000 years ago and not in miracles from 200–300 years ago? Especially when there isn’t a single empirical proof that a miracle actually occurred. And something so far-fetched, that contradicts nature, also requires very strong evidence for its existence.
With God’s help, Erev Sukkot 5781
A. – Greetings,
Indeed, it is a great wonder that after thousands of years of persecution the people of Israel are still alive and enduring. Not only did they not lose their identity and culture in the harsh exile, but they returned to their ancient homeland and renewed their life there. We see, before our very eyes, the realization of the prophets’ vision of the ingathering of the exiles.
Indeed, it is a great wonder that after all the assaults of the Enlightenment, progress, and modernity, there is not just one PhD in physics, but millions of educated Jews and people with academic degrees, proud of their faith and devoted to their Torah. Before our very eyes we see the fulfillment of the Torah’s promise: “for it shall not be forgotten from the mouth of his offspring.”
We see God’s wonders before our eyes, and therefore Ben-Gurion was right when he said that regarding the people of Israel, one who does not believe in miracles is not a realist 🙂
With holiday blessings, Tzvi Tah
Yes, returned after a Holocaust. Don’t forget the word Holocaust. H, then o, then l, then o, then c, then a, then u, then s, then t. Millions? Where are you getting your statistics from? Open II Kings 22–23 and Nehemiah 8–10 and learn, before your very eyes, that the Torah had already been forgotten and kept being forgotten again and again, as brought in the Talmud.
Shabazi’s “shortening of the Sabbath journey” (:
“I saw the hand of God clearly in the Holocaust, I just did not understand its meaning. It was so clear, so abnormal, so unnatural, so illogical. I was not in Auschwitz, but I saw Jews being led there.
I saw entire battalions of Germans not being sent to the Russian front because the train cars were occupied by Jews, contrary to every military interest. Can this be understood? … In everything I saw the hand of God. It is not natural, it is not human. I saw the hand of God, but I did not understand its meaning.” (Rabbi Amital. True, the fact that he said it doesn’t make it correct, because here we’re discussing the claim itself and not the person making it, but this is a very powerful formulation.)
I recommend that you think about it. Every genocide I know of—and there have been many, and some are still happening, though not on the scale of the Holocaust—was not carried out by a state that was simultaneously at war against other armies while this damaged its war effort. So of course your answer will be that this stemmed from Nazi ideology, but in every human society victory in war is more important than realizing ideology (see Maslow’s hierarchy of needs). In short, here too one can see God, and one can also choose to ignore Him.
Enough with the feigned innocence.
There is no human difference at all between genocide and the murder of one person.
If murdering one person is a human act, then so is murdering an entire people.
If you do not see God in a single murder, then you cannot see Him in the Holocaust either. You are imagining it out of emotion.
I don’t understand what the problem with miracles is. If the Holy One, blessed be He, created the laws of nature, then He can also break them. (Maimonides, Essay on the Resurrection of the Dead, see there.) Besides that, there was an open miracle in the last generation—the Six-Day War. You’re invited to read Dr. Haggai Ben-Artzi’s appendix to the book The Scroll of the Six-Day War to see what miracles took place at the start of the war.