Rabbi Marc D. Rudolph

In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses assembles the Israelites and recounts the past forty years of their experience together. He reminds them of “the wondrous feats that you saw with your own eyes, those prodigious signs and marvels.” “Yet,” he continues, “The Eternal has not given you a mind to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear until this day.” (Deuteronomy 29:2-3)

What does he mean by this? Darkness descended upon the Egyptians, but not in the places where the Israelites lived. The Egyptian first born were killed, but the angel of death passed over the homes of the Jewish people. The Sea split, and the Israelites walked through on dry land. Manna descends from the heavens to feed them during their sojourn to the Promised Land. Moses is saying that those who experienced these miracles did not recognize them as miraculous!  Only forty years later, the “until this day” of the above passage, did the Jewish people have the “mind to understand” what they lived through. This teaches us that it may take time and distance from the event itself – in this case, forty years – to see the miraculous for what it is.

The Israeli poet Yehudah Amichai, who died in 2000, writes about this phenomenon in a poem:

From a distance everything looks like a miracle                                                      but up close even a miracle doesn’t look like that.
Even someone who crossed the Red Sea when it split
saw only the sweating back
of the man in front of him
and the swaying of his big thighs,
or at best, in a hasty glance to one side,
fish in a riot of colors inside the wall of water,
as in a marine observatory behind panels of glass.

From the proper perspective, “from a distance”, all of life can be recognized as a miracle. But when we are too close to it, when we are experiencing it, we often miss it. Even the Israelites, walking through the Red Sea, did not recognize it as a miracle when it was happening. The poem continues:

The real miracles happen at the next table
of a restaurant in Albuquerque:
two women sat there, one with a diagonal
zipper, altogether lovely,
and the other said, “I kept it together
and didn’t cry.”

The narrator of our poem, however, recognizes a miracle as he overhears a snatch of conversation between two women at a restaurant. “I kept it together and didn’t cry”. Was this woman talking about confronting her superior around a work issue? Was she leaving her husband? Was the miracle that she “kept it together” where she expected she might fall apart? Or, is the miracle the narrator perceives the fact that we can share our struggles with sympathetic friends, we can receive comfort and consolation from others following a difficult encounter or situation? We don’t think of that as “a miracle”, but perhaps it is. The poem concludes:

And after in the red corridors
of the foreign hotel I saw
boys and girls who held in their arms
tiny children born of them,
and they held
sweet little dolls.

The poet then moves to the red corridor of the hotel where he encounters another miracle. To the older narrator the mothers and fathers he sees with their children are merely, “boys and girls” – children themselves. The baby-dolls held by their children represent the future. One day these “tiny children” will themselves become parents! This is the miracle of birth and death; the miracle of “from generation to generation.”

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it another way. ““Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement… get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

Dear God 
Give me the mind to understand
The eyes to see
And the ears to hear
The miracles of everyday life.                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Shabbat Shalom

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