Q&A: Do a righteous person’s blessing or promise really help?
Do a righteous person’s blessing or promise really help?
Question
I remember once hearing one of those stories about righteous men, about a man who had a headache and the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with him, and he came to some important rabbi, and the rabbi told him that he had a brain tumor and even said exactly where it was. And when the doctors came to operate, they found the tumor and saved the man.
I remember that at first I was amazed, but then I asked myself: if the rabbi can save so many people, why doesn’t he work full-time in a hospital? After all, there is a Torah commandment to save a person who is about to die: “Do not stand idly by your neighbor’s blood” (Leviticus 19:16).
And likewise with all the other supernatural abilities with which our rabbis are supposedly blessed—if they were real, our world would be a much better place.
Answer
Is there actually a question here?
Discussion on Answer
To the best of my understanding, no.
Rabbis don’t—only hasidic rebbes and miracle-working holy men have supernatural powers.
And the reason they don’t spend their time in hospitals is that if they did, the existence of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the powers He granted the righteous would become obvious to everyone. Then there could no longer be heretics and atheists in the world, because everyone would perceive with all their senses the actual reality of the Holy One, blessed be He. And if that happened, there would no longer be any test of whether to commit transgressions, and free choice to choose evil would be taken away. And that goes against the whole purpose of this world, which is the corridor in which we are meant to endure difficult trials so that we may merit entering the banquet hall, which is the World to Come, without the bread of shame.
If there is a significant accumulation of events that deviate from the laws of nature (“wonders”), and all of them are linked to a certain figure, the most plausible rational explanation is the existence of a supernatural power. Academically speaking, this is abduction (inference to the best explanation for an event), since the probability that such a sequence of events occurred by sheer chance is negligible. It would therefore seem that the righteous person has access to a transcendent layer of reality, and that is entirely rational.
Perhaps Rabbi Michi agrees with David Hume, who argued that no wonder is stronger than the regularity of nature itself. Therefore, it is always more reasonable that testimony about a wonder is the result of human error (subjective interpretation or psychological bias) than that a fundamental law of nature was violated.
Indeed. Except that first one has to trust the reliability of those giving the testimony.
Yes. Do rabbis really have supernatural powers in their blessings?