All the more miraculous
Shelah Lecha
Numbers 13:1-15:41
In this week's story, an Israelite military force returns from an intelligence gathering foray with the frightening news of Canaanite forces so fierce that victory over them is impossible. The reporters are punished for their "evil assessment" — but why? Armies depend on honest intelligence. Should the spies have lied?
The most frequent explanation is that they did not report just the facts; they passed inappropriate military judgment on what the facts entailed, as if doubting that God's power would prevail no matter what. But if God's miraculous deliverance was a foregone conclusion, why send scouts in the first place? Nothing they discovered could have mattered.
Buried in this tale is the broader question, "What is a miracle?" Certain victory orchestrated by God is, by definition, miraculous, but why? The Chatam Sofer says miracles are evident in God's decision to interrupt the natural order. The scouts were dispatched because the Israelites had to understand that their victory was utterly beyond what human power alone could achieve.
The Ramban, however, thinks that even miracles obey the laws of nature. Like armies everywhere, the Israelites required advance intelligence. God's miracle lay in outfitting them with the ability to gather the intelligence they needed.
So are miracles beyond the natural order (following the Chatam Sofer) or within it (following Ramban)? I prefer Ramban, because if God's miracles are beyond scientific explanation, we would have trouble finding God anywhere. The natural order has not "miraculously" changed of late.
So God's presence must be discernable precisely within nature. Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell was asked how he would plead if, after death, God accused him of disbelief. "I would claim," said Russell, "that God should have left me better evidence." Ramban would answer: "He did!"
Now, however, we have a second quandary. Laws are necessarily infallible — the sun, for example, doesn't rise just some of the time. Indeed, Sir Isaac Newton believed that if we had perfect knowledge of the state of the universe at any given time, we would be able to predict every second of its future. But if that is true, how can human beings have free will? If everything is determined from the beginning, free will is an illusion, based only on our having insufficient data to project the inevitable.
The rabbis want it both ways. "Everything is foreseen," the Mishna tells us, "but free will is given." How can that be?
An answer I like is that the "everything" that is "foreseen" is the necessary outcome of every possible set of human choices. Choice A entails consequence B; choice C leads inexorably to D. Further choices can negate those equations, but only because they too have necessary outcomes. Life is a dance of ongoing human choice and consequence, sometimes reversible by other choices, sometimes not.
God's ultimate miracle is providing the human capacity to deduce consequences. We are partners with God in the venture of advancing history toward ever-growing goodness, kindness, and love. Just as honest business partners open the financial records to each other, so God reveals to us the universal bookkeeping system that links consequences to behavior: how we personally rot at the core if we choose avarice over honesty, how cultures of inequity, mistrust, and violence make entire societies crumble.
Pachya ibn Pakuda reminds us that when God told Noah how to build an ark, the miracle lay in Noah's mastery of successful shipbuilding — not by means of a heavenly voice interrupting the normal sounds of crickets, rainfall, and traffic, but by our innate human capacity to discover the way things work. Similarly, when we hear that God told Noah how depravity would bring destruction, we should understand Noah as figuring it out for himself — no less a miracle than if God had dispatched inexplicable lightning rods charged with instant wisdom.
But the Chatam Sofer faults the spies also for seeking only such obviously military matters as the number and deployment of enemy troops, while discounting the intangibles of the holiness of their mission and the wisdom that comes by pursuing it — in traditional terms, "the holiness of the Land of Israel" (k'dushat ha'aretz), and how just being there "enhances wisdom" (avira d'eretz Yisrael mahkim). The scouting party sinned by ignoring the tactical value of knowing that we champion a sacred cause. The quality of the cause and our ability to recognize it are also part of nature.
Reducing the miraculous to the laws of nature is no reduction at all. It is miraculous to have an unfailing natural order in the first place, miraculous also that holiness and wisdom are part of that order, more miraculous still that human beings are motivated to pursue the sacred, and all the more miraculous that God opens the natural order to us, so that we can wisely and freely choose to do the right thing.
All rights reserved