20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Miracle

Miracle Allan Arkush T he Bible reports the wondrous ways in which God redeemed Israel from slavery, gave it a law and a land, and guided its subsequent life as a nation. It tells us, on occasion , how the Israelites reacted when God performed signs and wonders for their sake. Observing the Egyptians dead upon the seashore, for instance, "Israel saw the wondrous power which the Lord had wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared the Lord; they had faith in the Lord, and in His servant Moses" (Ex. 14:31). The "wilderness generation" saw and believed. Later generations are expected to believe without having seen. It is true, of course, that''in every generation a man is obligated to see himself as if he had gone forth from Egypt," 1 but that is an obligation he can shoulder only if he already has faith in the veracity of the biblical reports. Many things stand in the way of such faith. There is, first of all, the idea of nature, unknown to biblical Hebrew but eventually introduced to the Jews by the Greeks. Acquaintance with this concept inevitably leads to the question of whether the wonders reported in the Bible are consonant with 622 MIRACLE the known nature of things. Skeptics have good reason to argue that they are not. Defenders of the faith, in turn, have two basic ways of responding to the skeptics' charges. They can attempt to show that the biblical narrative , properly understood, does not report unnatural occurrences at all, but only highly unusual ones for which there are natural explanations, or they can acknowledge that the biblical wonders contravene nature, but maintain that it is within God's p~wer to do so. These two responses are not mutually exclusive. Moses Maim~nides, for example, sought to explain biblical wonders , as far as possible, in accordance with the natural order. But where naturalistic explanations seemed hopelessly irreconcilable with the biblical text, he was prepared to invoke the supernatural power of God. Those who share Maimonides' belief in God's power to contravene nature have no difficulty in accepting the possibility of any of the miracles recorded in the Bible. Belief in the possibility of miracles is not, however, sufficient reason for accepting the historicity of those particular miracles. There may be a God who can suspend nature but who never did so for the benefit or edification of the Israelites. What proof do we have that he ever did? We have no proof, says the Jewish philosophical tradition, but we do have the unimpeachable testimony of the Bible that multitudes of our forefathers witnessed the defeat of the Egyptians, the giving of the law, and the other miracles of central importance to our faith. This may be sufficient for those who believe that the biblical wonders were fully consonant with the natural order. It is also, in principle, an argument acceptable to those who believe that God has rendered the impossible possible. But to others, who do not share such beliefs, the biblical accounts of miraculous events threaten to undermine the authority of the Bible. To Baruch Spinoza, it is evident that the ancient Hebrews conceived of and reported events in a manner very different from the way in which they actually occurred. In order to know the truth about these events, "it is necessary to know the opinions of those who first related them, and have recorded them for us in writing, and to distinguish such opinions from the actual impression made upon their senses." If we do not do "this, we run the risk of confounding "actual events with symbolic and imaginary ones.,,2 Spinoza attempted to distinguish the opinions of the Hebrews from the plain facts they had observed. It was his belief that these opinions were nothing but the "prejudices of an ancient people."3 The Hebrews ignorantly imagined the power of God over nature "to be like that of some royal potentate''4 over his subjects. They believed that God loved them above all men, and was prepared to exercise that power for their sake. These preju- MIRACLE 623 dices distorted their perception of the events through which they lived, leading them to believe that they had witnessed impossible things. Spinoza's attack on the credibility of the biblical Hebrews is entirely persuasive only to those who share his belief that natural law is inviolable. Believers in the...