Q&A: Miracles in Our Times
Miracles in Our Times.
Question
To the honorable Rabbi, blessings and peace.
I watched an interview with the Rabbi in which he argued that in our time there is apparently no divine intervention in nature, and likewise no open miracles.
And I was very puzzled, for surely the living cannot deny the living: there are thousands upon thousands of stories of open miracles beyond the natural order among our holy rabbis, if not in the latest generation then in the one before it. Your faithful servant heard firsthand about people who visited our master the Baba Sali and saw him pour arak from one bottle for more than two hundred guests, or almonds from a tiny bag to a crowd far larger than its visible contents. How is that different from Elisha’s jug?
There is also the well-known story about Rabbi Meir Abuhatzira, brought in the following article (sorry I didn’t find a more reliable and orderly source; I wrote in haste).
Not to mention our teacher the Kehillot Yaakov, who openly acted with divine inspiration in countless cases (from the edge of my memory I’ll mention the case of a cigarette that was kosher for Passover, which
the moment it touched his lips he cried out loudly, “Libation wine!”, and it turned out that the tobacco had indeed been soaked in libation wine.) And it is known that divine inspiration is a spark of prophecy.
Of course there are many more cases Your Honor has heard of, and even if the lion’s share of them can be dismissed offhand and one can say these are folktales from ignoramuses,
there remains a significant portion that is based on reliable eyewitnesses (including cool-headed Lithuanians) who are not suspected of stupidity or naïveté.
I would be glad for an answer. Curious.
P.S. I would also note that the miracles of the Exodus from Egypt or the splitting of the Sea were also, כביכול, performed by our teacher Moses, peace be upon him, and from here my difficulty arises: how are they different from the wonders of our rabbis in the later generations?
Answer
Indeed, there are tens of thousands of stories. The same is true in every Indian tribe or any other group. Of several stories that I happened to hear and become familiar with, I saw the failures and mistakes/deceptions, and therefore I have no trust in those stories. Of course I cannot state categorically that this does not exist, but the burden of proof is on the one who claims that it does.
Discussion on Answer
This is exactly the kind of story I meant. In order to form a view about it, one has to check whether that was really the opinion of all the doctors, or only the ones you heard. Whether this particular Abuhatzira has consistent success, or whether this is just a one-off case (hint: absolutely not; I know of at least one case). Oren Zarif and Indian shamans also have such “proven” successes.
By the way, it does not necessarily involve lies. There are also mistakes and deceptions.
Here is what I found with a quick search: babies born at weeks 24-25 have a 60-70 percent survival rate, and 50 percent of the survivors are not expected to suffer significant disabilities such as cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, etc. By contrast, among babies born in weeks 33-36, the survival rate approaches 100(!)
For some reason the Rabbi assumes I’m a person who doesn’t check facts and passes along folk stories as though they were empirical claims. I’m not like that.
The above story was clear and proven beyond any doubt. That baby was born with damaged intestines, and the doctors removed the intestines in emergency surgery immediately after birth. All the doctors ruled that the infant had no chance of living, and certainly no chance of growing intestines out of nothing. And after the Rabbi’s blessing (he stated it clearly without any hesitation at all; he didn’t just give some vague blessing), it turned out that they were wrong. I personally heard firsthand dozens of stories about Rabbi David Abuhatzira (of course he is not God and his decrees are not always fulfilled, but people saw wonders with him tangibly, and especially with his uncle, the Baba Sali). So in this particular case I think the burden is on the Rabbi to disprove the evidence.
Still, I think it’s ridiculous to debate a specific case; rather, one should address the whole claim. There are hundreds of verified miracle stories from trustworthy eyewitnesses. How can that be? (By the way, as for those Indian pagan healers, in my view it could be that they too have impurity and the like there, and this is mentioned in our Torah; see Genesis chapter 25 verse 6 and Rashi there.)
I hope I’m not bothering the Rabbi with my persistence.
You are not bothering me. I answered what I think.
The way to test these miracles is to take all the cases, the successes and failures of the rabbi’s blessings, and compare them to similar cases without the rabbi’s blessings. If the rabbi has a higher success rate, that proves his blessings are beneficial. (And one should also take into account the effect on the patient of knowing that he received the rabbi’s blessing. That too can affect his recovery. You could test the cases involving babies, where that factor is irrelevant.)
It is worth noting that attempts to investigate this scientifically have been made quite a few times among Christians, and the results vary from study to study.
Without having read those studies, the contradictory conclusions lead me to suspect that the procedure was not perfect and free of bias.
My working assumption is as Michi wrote; my experience supports it, and the burden of proof is on those making the claim. Of course this is not comparable to massive testimony like the revelation at Mount Sinai, which, truth be told, is also not convincing on its own.
To Curious,
Greetings and blessings.
I would note that in the past I thought as you do. But over time (and with my eyes opening) I noticed a few points regarding many miracle stories:
1. Miracle stories naturally pass through people who believe in miracles. The natural tendency of believers in miracles is not only to believe in them but also to look for them, and therefore to find them even where they do not exist. This includes exaggerations, very specific interpretation, lack of critical thinking, etc.
2. In every such story, ask yourself who had an interest (honor, money, control over the public, competition between different groups, etc.) in making the public believe in the miracle. From there the road is short to exaggerations, biased interpretations, and the like—not to mention outright lies (sometimes).
3. In every such story, ask yourself whether there was some person who could have caused the “creation” of the miracle behind the scenes. For example, someone who passed information to the rabbi secretly. This does not have to come from malicious intentions to “create” miracles; it can genuinely come from a desire to help. I myself have been involved in such cases. When you are trying to help a person in distress (and rabbis of the miracle-working type meet many such people), sometimes the best way really to help him is to pass information indirectly behind his back. It can be to inform someone that he needs financial help, it can be to let someone know that he needs counseling and emotional support, and it can be to inform his rebbe about transgressions he committed in secret.
After you internalize the above points, check what real miracle stories you still have left…
Continuation:
In addition, it is important to know that doctors have a tendency to describe the medical situation as worse than it really is. This is due in part to reducing complaints from patients in cases where the outcome does not satisfy them, and even to preventing lawsuits in such cases.
Take, for example, cases in which doctors recommend an abortion (many miracle stories are based on such cases). When a borderline case like this comes to a doctor, he basically has two options: recommend an abortion or refrain from doing so. And what is preferable for him? If he recommends an abortion, he loses nothing. If he recommends avoiding it, he may face a lawsuit in the case of a mistaken diagnosis, and clearly mistaken diagnoses do happen.
So what is so surprising about cases where the doctor recommended aborting and the rebbe blessed that everything would be fine—and so it was?
Thank you for the response.
But here I’m telling you about hundreds of people who saw wonders with their own eyes and are still alive to tell about it. I’m not talking about Hasidic tales, but about stories every single day of medical miracles, foretelling the future, and even changing nature itself.
I think it’s not fair to dismiss these stories and call everyone liars.
Especially since the Rabbi is a great believer in the argument from testimony…
I’ll tell a firsthand story about my nephew, may he live long and well, who was born in week 26, and the doctors, experts and non-experts alike, every last one of them, had already said Kaddish for him. They removed his intestines and ruled that there was absolutely no possibility in the world that new intestines would grow for him or that he would live.
Rabbi David Abuhatzira heard and ruled without any hesitation: the child will live and be healthy like any other person. And behold the wonder: the child is alive to this day (almost a year old), with completely new intestines that grew out of nothing.