Parashat Va'era: On Miracles

Why so many miracles? Why so many plagues that defy the normal order of the universe?

Training. These plagues were a kind of miracle-seeing training. This is a people whose ultimate job is to see God in the world, to bring out those divine sparks in every part of creation. But here they are, slaves in Egypt -- classically seen as the land of greatest defilement -- on the lowest rung of impurity, far from able to do any such thing. So what God does is make things clear to them. No subtle, disputable miracles here. Those are too hard to see at the beginning. You start by training the eyes, teaching them with large shows of power—bloody seas and frogs on every nose -- to see God in the world. It’s easier to see things writ large.

These are beginner miracles. The parsha starts by pointing out that God appeared differently to the patriarchs, who were more advanced miracle students. To them He was El Shaddai, which, as one midrash reads it, means – the God who said to the world dai, “enough,” the God who put limits on the world, created an order, the rules of nature. The patriarchs experienced God within this ordered framework and were able to see God’s hand without fantastic eye-popping sights like the splitting of the Sea.

The Israelites in Egypt, though, had sunk so low, that they were beginners, in need of the full sound and light show to be sure of God’s presence in the world. For their sake – and for ours – God broke the rules of nature, to show that those very rules – what normally keeps the frogs and lice and wild animals from overgrowing like a cancer – are themselves miracles, daily miracles of perfect order and balance. By breaking the rules, He showed that He also created and controls the rules, the daily working of the universe.

It is such daily miracles that it is our task to learn to celebrate. Those out of bounds miracles were a stepping stone for our people, a way to begin the process of a life devoted to perceiving the divine in the world around us.

Tradition offers us further forms of constant miracle-seeing training, the practice of saying simple daily prayers and blessings, meant to increase one’s awareness of the miraculous nature of every moment -- the daily rising and setting of the sun, the return of life to our slumbering bodies in the morning, the perfect balance of a body which takes in food and lets out waste. As we say in the Amidah prayer, we feel thankful “for Your miracles which are with us every day,” al nisekha shebekhol yom imanu. Every day, every breath is a miracle. It is partly our ancestors’ experience of the unnatural kind of miracle that paved the way for our appreciation of the natural kind.