Miracles: now you see them, now you don't

Those members of the Jewish people who follow the weekly Torah readings through each yearly cycle will know that we are right in the middle of the season for miracles. Over the past fortnight we’ve had all of the Ten Plagues and we are shortly to embark upon the splitting of the Reed Sea and the subsequent drowning of the pursuing Egyptian charioteers.  Later we encounter the provision of manna from heaven—and more besides.

These miracles share a common factor: they are all visible, perceptible to the naked eye.

At Avot 5:7 we meet a list of ten miracles which, our sages teach us, God provided for our forefathers in the Temple. The list looks like this:

לֹא הִפִּֽילָה אִשָּׁה מֵרֵֽיחַ בְּשַׂר הַקֹּֽדֶשׁ, וְלֹא הִסְרִֽיחַ בְּשַׂר הַקֹּֽדֶשׁ מֵעוֹלָם, וְלֹא נִרְאָה זְבוּב בְּבֵית הַמִּטְבָּחַֽיִם, וְלֹא אִירַע קֶֽרִי לְכֹהֵן גָּדוֹל בְּיוֹם הַכִּפּוּרִים, וְלֹא כִבּוּ הַגְּשָׁמִים אֵשׁ שֶׁל עֲצֵי הַמַּעֲרָכָה, וְלֹא נִצְּחָה הָרֽוּחַ אֶת עַמּוּד הֶעָשָׁן, וְלֹא נִמְצָא פִסּוּל בָּעֽוֹמֶר וּבִשְׁתֵּי הַלֶּֽחֶם וּבְלֶֽחֶם הַפָּנִים, עוֹמְדִים צְפוּפִים וּמִשְׁתַּחֲוִים רְוָחִים, וְלֹא הִזִּיק נָחָשׁ וְעַקְרָב בִּירוּשָׁלַֽיִם, וְלֹא אָמַר אָדָם לַחֲבֵרוֹ: צַר לִי הַמָּקוֹם שֶׁאָלִין בִּירוּשָׁלָֽיִם

No woman ever miscarried because of the smell of the holy meat. The holy meat never spoiled. Never was a fly seen in the slaughterhouse. Never did the High Priest have an accidental seminal discharge on Yom Kippur. The rains did not extinguish the wood-fire burning upon the altar. The wind did not prevail over the column of smoke [rising from the altar]. No disqualifying problem was ever discovered in the Omer offering, the Two Loaves or the Showbread. People stood crowded together but had ample space in which to prostrate themselves. Never did a snake or scorpion cause injury in Jerusalem. And no man ever said to his fellow "My lodging in Jerusalem is too cramped for me."

There’s a difficulty with some of these miracles in that they cannot be perceived in a meaningful manner. If you see a woman having a miscarriage, for example, this is likely to be an extremely unpleasant and probably unforgettable experience. However, if you see a woman not having a miscarriage, this fact is unlikely to impinge on your consciousness at all. The same goes with flies in the slaughterhouse: you will see them if they are there and may note their presence but, unless you are thinking about flies at the time, you may be quite unlikely to notice their absence. The same goes with several of the other miracles listed here: they may exist as quite remarkable statistical propositions, but not as something an onlooker can or need recognize through casual visual perception.

Maharam Shik comments on this. In effect, though we don’t see miracles manifesting themselves before our very eyes, that doesn’t mean that we can’t sensitise ourselves to the fact that something is happening beyond the merely natural, mundane operation of the world.  Even statistical propositions can take the shape of perceptions of hashgachah peratit—God’s personal supervision of a world that normally runs smoothly in accordance with the laws of nature. 

In short, according to Maharam Shik, all we have to do is to keep our eyes open. On any given occasion when we find ourselves in a fly-free slaughterhouse we may have no reason to spot anything unusual. But if it happens again and again, but doesn’t seem to happen in other slaughterhouses, the penny might eventually drop that something special is happening.

Being aware of hashgachah peratit takes many forms even today, even though there is no Temple service and most of us are far from holy. But you have to believe in its existence or you may not detect it. Here’s a trivial example: one occasionally hears a person, not necessarily Jewish, saying things like “I must have been doing the right thing when I decided to do X, because all the traffic lights on the way were green”. If things like this happen even once, it feels great but one is unlikely to read any great significance into it. But if they happen every time, one begins to wonder.

The standard daily Jewish prayer format of the Amidah incorporates within its text the idea that miracles come in different shapes and sizes, possessing markedly different effects. In the “thank you” section, in the blessing that opens with the words modim anachnu loch (“we thank you”), we express gratitude for “miracles that are with us every day” and for God’s “wonders and favours that are in every season—evening, morning and afternoon”. On this basis we say thank-you even for those miracles that are too small to notice, and for those that cannot be seen at all.

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Crowds: it'll take a miracle...

My first real experience of serious crowds came some years ago when I was running a course for lawyers in Lagos, Nigeria, on anti-counterfeiting law and practice. Planning to cross a road, I stood poised at the street’s edge, scouring the pavement on the opposite side of the road in search of a spare inch of space on which I might set foot. I could not see one.

Jerusalem is not supposed to suffer from the effects of overcrowding. There is a Mishnah (Avot 5:7) that lists 10 miracles that were said to have been performed in the Temple. The tenth and final miracle is that “no person ever said to his fellow ‘this place is too hard for me to stay overnight in Jerusalem”.

Over the past fortnight Jerusalem has been rocking. After two sad, quiet years of Covid, the festival of Sukkot has blazed forth in all its glory. Tourists from the Jewish diaspora as well as Israelophile non-Jews from all over the world have poured into town. There has been much gaiety and partying, in keeping with the ancient tradition of the Simchat Bet HaSho’evah, the water-drawing celebration of Temple time that is so vividly depicted in the Talmud.

Sadly, while every practising Jew prays for the restoration of the Temple and its services, we have yet to merit the return of the miracle mentioned in our Mishnah.

In my local butcher’s shop, the demand for meat for festive meals was immense. Although the store had twice as many people working there as it normally did, the line of impatient big-spending customers stretched out well into the street and moved at a snail’s pace. I only had to wait an hour and a quarter to be served, but those who queued up behind me were not so fortunate. On of the regular customers exploded with rage that the store had not made special provision for the locals, who supported it every week. How dare they make their loyal and faithful customers wait while serving mere holidaymakers? Across the road, a little later, I listened to the grumblings of a pair of visitors from abroad, irritated and indeed exasperated by the remoteness of their prospects of picking up a swift coffee and bagel when there were so many people in all the eateries.

While one can sympathise with anyone who has to wait a long time to be served, there is in general little to be gained—and much to be lost—by intemperate speech and the raising of angry voices. The inconvenience of overcrowding is not an objective that is keenly sought by local businesses: it is a consequence of something that we should all be prepared to tolerate and indeed welcome and, while making constructive suggestions for its alleviation, it is something we should be prepared to bear with patience and fortitude—at least till we are treated to a return of our miracle.

Fire that the rain won't extinguish

As I watch the rain trickle down my window on this wet Jerusalem morning, I am reminded of the teaching in Pirkei Avot (5:7) that ten miracles enhanced our enjoyment of the Temple in times gone by. Number 5 in this list is this:

“The rains did not extinguish the wood-fire burning upon the altar’s woodpile.”

Miracle or no miracle? Water and fire are “opposites” in that they do not naturally share the same space. This is why the plague of hail, inflicted on Pharaoh and the Egyptians for refusing to release the Children of Israel from slavery, was miraculous (the Torah describes the hail as descending together with fire: Exodus 9:23-24).

But is this truly a miracle? Readers may have personal experiences of their own regarding bonfires and camp fires that have continued to burn notwithstanding the rain. They are not alone. The same phenomenon has been noted on a far larger scale too (see Jake Spring, “Rain will not extinguish Amazon fires for weeks, weather experts say,” Reuters, 27 August 2019, here).

Only if there is sustained and heavy rain will a well-established fire be at risk of being extinguished. The fire on the altar’s woodpile, being carefully prepared and dutifully tended, should therefore stand a good chance of surviving any given downpour. Be that as it may, the persistent survival of this fire in the two Temples for an aggregate of nearly a thousand years does rather suggest something more than chance or coincidence: this mishnah therefore attributes it to divine intervention.

There is surely a bigger message in this mishnah, and I would suggest that it is this.

The symbolism of fire and water in this miracle cannot be ignored. Some commentators have taken the Temple to be a metaphor for man, or even as an allegory of man’s relationship with God. Fire represents flaming desire, a passion in man’s heart: where those flames are kindled on the altar of man’s service to God, they cannot be extinguished.

A second explanation is founded on the symbolism of the word used here for wood, עץ (etz, “wood” or "tree"), together with that of גשמים (geshamim, “rains”). The etz here is an allusion to Torah, described as “a tree of life to those who grasp it,” (Proverbs 3:17) and the גשמים here allude to גשמיות (gashmi’ut, “materialism,” “non-spiritual matters”). Employing this symbolism, the dedicated student who lays himself out, as it were, on the altar of Torah will be ablaze with the fire of Torah, a fire that the waters of materialism and the pleasures of the physical world cannot extinguish.

This imagery is both powerful and attractive. However, even though it is accepted that learning Torah is something that requires divine assistance as well as human effort, some may be a little sad to think that, if a serious Torah student pursues his studies so enthusiastically that he cannot be derailed by the distractions of gashmi’ut, we should have to regard that as a miracle.

The moral behind the miracle: a crowded Temple and the need to make space for others

One of the more mysterious mishnayot in Avot is 5:7, which lists 10 miracles that are said to have taken place in the Temple. Some commentators examine them simply in terms of their miraculous content. Others however, mindful of the role of Pirkei Avot in conveying moral instruction, look beyond the miracles on the ground, as it were, and seek to frame them within a larger or more contemporary setting. 

A good example of this can be found in relation to the miracle that, though the Temple was extremely crowded and the order of the day was "standing room only", there was always enough room for worshippers to bow down. Rabbi Eliezer Prins (author of the second half of the Lehmann-Prins Pirkei Avoth) explains this part of the Mishnah figuratively, sending out a powerful message to late 19th century German Jewry that has a curiously contemporary ring to it:

 [W]e see that this miracle still happens today. When all people stand up and oppose one another, there is never enough room for everyone; but when each individual gives way to the next man, all find a place. It is ironic that our fathers managed to earn their daily bread in the narrow ghettos into which they were crowded, and yet had time to maintain their spiritual life, to learn and fulfil the Divine Torah; our generation, however, enjoys the freedom of the whole world but complains that the world is too narrow, competition too great, the fight for existence too severe to allow study of the Torah and fulfilment of its precepts!

A point well made, if ever there was one.