חדש באתר: NotebookLM עם כל תכני הרב מיכאל אברהם

Q&A: Miracles

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Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

Miracles

Question

Dear Rabbi Michael Abraham, hello,
I’ll briefly preface by saying that in general I do not believe stories about miracles performed by rabbis or various religious and spiritual figures. The reason I don’t believe is basically intuitive, and I have no actual proof for it. Mainly I rely on the rule that “the burden of proof rests on the one making the claim.” But since I live among people, almost all of whom believe in such things, I end up hearing miracle stories from every possible direction, and still I’m thoroughly sick of these stories—again, without any real reason. Since I’ve been following you for a long time, I know that you more or less think similarly.
My question is: do you think that in the end, even though every story can be explained one way or another, the sheer number of stories on this subject is still very strange, and perhaps the sheer number itself proves that it really is possible?
In addition, I’m curious whether, if you heard testimony from a person (not necessarily someone you know) who had been in the same room and saw such-and-such, you would change your mind about miracles. Since I know your style of giving very short answers on these topics (not in a dismissive way), I won’t leave my question general, and I’ll give an example from the last few days: I was recently with a friend whose grandmother used to clean the Baba Sali’s house, and she herself told me that she saw a case where a man in a wheelchair came to the Baba Sali, and the Baba Sali ordered him to get up—and he got up from his chair and started walking as if he had never been disabled. If you heard this testimony yourself, would you believe it? And if not, why?

Answer

I am skeptical about every such story, but I cannot rule it out categorically. The evidence I would require in order to accept it would have to be very strong, and testimony from such a person is not strong enough. People make things up, take things out of context, do not understand statistics, embellish stories about great figures (sometimes deliberately and sometimes unintentionally). For some, this is an ideology—holy lies. And in general, what is reported from memory is hard to rely on. It misleads us a great deal.

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