By Tzvi Freeman
It’s All A Miracle
Mother Nature is a coverup. It’s 100% authored, directed, engineered and powered by Elokim Unincorporated. Every moment, everything appears out of nowhere, miraculously. For those of you who believe miracles are absurd, dangerous, and a threat to the entire endeavor of science, Nature, it turns out, is nothing more than consistent miracles.
The problem is, you get used to the way things work, and begin to believe that all your interactions are with a closed system that’s just there because it’s just there. That this is all there is. You start confusing the show with reality.
So, along comes a miracle of the inconsistent variety. Maybe even an open miracle, shifting the most fundamental parameters of nature. Or better, a hidden one, dressed up as though it were perfectly natural.
Like one of those situations where things don’t look good. At all. And whatever direction you take only confirms to you that there is just no way out. To which everyone else nods their heads. Especially the experts. At which point the totally unexpected occurs, life flies for a moment on eagles’ wings, and you find yourself in a place better than you could have ever prayed for. You know you didn’t make this happen. You know there’s no one here on earth who could have orchestrated it. So you look up to the heavens and say, “G‑d, I love you!”
Whatever door just opened, you find yourself in interaction with the Director of the show. Which means you just discovered that this is a show. And that there is a Director. And that you are a character in this show. Okay, you have (limited) freedom within the script—so maybe it’s a game, and there’s a Programmer (who is also the User), and you are a sentient sprite. Whichever way, everything now changes.
Is that good change or bad change? Definitely, very good change. Because now your current existence is no longer just a natural consequence. Existence is a deliberate, voluntary act that does not have to be. Nothing has to be. Everything could be otherwise. It’s only this way because there’s a purpose in it being this way that it’s this way. Knowing it’s a show means you’re in constant contact with the Director of the show.
Knowing it’s a show just means knowing it all from a higher context. Context provides a possibility of direction, purpose and meaning—all of which could not be if this was just a place that just is because it just is. The universe, life, and the science of it all becomes a whole lot more amazing. It becomes actually worth taking care of.
In other words, a miracle comes to demonstrate that nature is also miraculous. Like Moses keeps telling Pharaoh, “So that you will know that the earth belongs to G‑d.”1
So, is Mother Nature a total fake? Only if you take her at face value. You need to know her deeply. Nature, we said in the last installment, is a modality of G‑d. G‑d as He is Elokim, in restraint and disciplined, so that He can get a real world. In that sense, Nature is real. So, science is real.
Miracles don’t make science irrelevant. They give science meaning.2
Miracles Versus Miracles
Now, if this is the purpose of a miracle, what would be the best way for the Director/Programmer/User to pull it off?
Should He shout, “Cut! Turn up the lights!”? Should he hack the game and make super-weird things occur?
Well, that would certainly shake your sense of reality. And it would tell you that He’s got a huge amount of power. But it doesn’t give you a sense that He’s running the show. Because it means that the only way He can get His way is by breaking the rules.
If, on the other hand, the Director/Programmer/User interacts with you within the system and through the system, directing it in every which way without breaking a thing, answering your prayers through means you would never have expected, responding to your behavior in the most surprising ways, and yet all within the realm of the natural world—then you know that, hey, He is truly the Master of All Things. He is the Master even as the things are running.
Indeed, the more pedestrian the miracle, the more impressive. The weird and the wonderful have their “wow” factor, but then life switches back to its normal humdrum, and you submit once again to the predictability of everyday life. It’s when you see that nature doesn’t lose a beat to perform the supernatural that you begin to seek its Master under every rock and behind every circumstance. It’s these seamless interweaves of miracle and nature, impossible and possible, Creator and creation that get G‑d what He’s really out for—that get G‑d down to earth.
Playing by the Rules
The difference in G‑d-consciousness that results from the two experiences is chasmic. For a true-life example, take the story of the spies whom Moses sent to tour the Promised Land.3
Moses chose brave, righteous and wise men for the job. Yet, out of twelve spies, ten came back thoroughly discouraged. “We can’t conquer this land,” they argued. “The people that inhabit it are stronger than us.”4
Given the story background, this is a very peculiar argument. These were men who had witnessed ten plagues in Egypt and an entire cavalry of Egyptians sunk in the Sea of Reeds, and who ate manna for breakfast and dinner. Egypt was the superpower of the ancient world. The balkanized Canaanite hinterland was chopped liver in comparison. If G‑d could make miracles in Egypt and in the Sinai Peninsula, what’s stopping Him from doing the same a little further northeast?
Nothing. Problem was, the spies had written off open miracles from the get-go. After all, they had been told to spy out the land. Which meant—in their minds—that the land was to be conquered by natural means. No plagues, no sea-splitting, no heavenly bread. Just lots of dirty warfare, human hard work and natural consequences. And if so, there simply was no way this was going to work.5
A thousand years later, a small band of Maccabees picked up their swords in revolt against the monstrous Greek war machine. They didn’t expect open miracles—and they didn’t win by open miracles. Neither did they expect that they would turn out stronger than their enemy. They simply knew that the same G‑d who created the world was still in control of it, and that He would grant them victory in whatever way He chose.
The spies sent by Moses knew a G‑d who had created the universe and could toss all the rules aside at whim. But the Maccabees knew a G‑d for whom rules do not need to be tossed aside—because they present no obstacle to begin with. They are His rules, created by His will. And so, He can get whatever He wants out of them.
As it turns out, the best way to demonstrate what an amazing instrument G‑d has in nature, its spectacular plasticity in His hands, its versatility to perform His bidding without missing a beat—open miracles are a letdown. Hidden, intra-natural miracles are the winner.
(That’s one way of looking at it. As I’m sure you expect, in a later installment I’ll present how open miracles win hands down. Both are true—depends what you’re looking for.)
Miracles on Six Strings
That’s one way of looking at miracles and nature—that miracles are there for the sake of nature, to provide nature a frame, a context. The other way is the reverse: That nature is there for the sake of miracles. It’s nothing more than a stage upon which miracles can occur.
And what’s the point of the miracle? The same as any great work of art: To express the ineffable.
Think of nature—of all the universe—as a wonderful musical instrument. Why would a Master Craftsman craft such an instrument? To prove that He can make an amazing instrument? To demonstrate His mastery over it?
Or, perhaps so that He can express that which could otherwise have no expression.
It’s an enigma, after all—one that has perplexed the philosophers for as long as they have been philosophizing: Why would an infinite, perfect oneness care to create a tightly bounded, fractured, material world? The philosopher is confounded, but the musician understands: G‑d crafted an instrument for the music of His soul.
What drives the human soul to create music? Or any art, for that matter?
Deep beneath the bedrock of human consciousness runs an undercurrent of knowingness, a torrent of emotions, red-hot magma highly pressurized by the strata that lie above. Until it finds a crack and then bursts as a geyser into our awareness, as a ceaseless stream of words, of images, of voices, colors and sounds.
Yet the origin itself remains unfathomed. As deep as we can dive into the well of our emotions and ideas, as far as we can journey back through the channel through which they emerged into our consciousness, we have no entry into their womb to see how and why these articulations of the soul were formed.
I am a musician. This is what I do: Rather than reach within, I reach outside of myself, hugging a delicate hunk of rosewood and mahogany so that I may squeeze that boundless rapture through the confines of three and a half octaves spread over six measured strings, much as a mighty river might be forced through the narrow sluices of a concrete dam, submitting to the tyranny of harmony and meter that I can only manipulate but never change, seeking every way possible for those fingers I have disciplined over many decades to break beyond the tortuous bounds of my instrument, much as a stream desperately seeks its many paths scurrying around the rocks and trees, literally straitjacketing a raging human soul into a small wooden box—
—and a being previously unknown emerges. I hear my own music, and it speaks to me of that which I had never been aware of. It tells me who I am. And I say, “Where on earth did that come from?”
The same occurs to the storywriter, compressing his fantasies into ordered sentences marching by the dictates of intelligible syntax; to the poet enslaving himself to the rigid structure of a sonnet; to the artist choosing a palette by which he must transform kinetic life into static colors and shapes upon a two-dimensional canvas; or with any other medium of expression. “From where do these words come?” the author so often asks himself, astonished again and again, as though some higher being had channeled itself through their art.
Who is that higher being? It is that silent origin of all thoughts and emotion, of all pleasure and pain, that which sits at the very core. In boundless emotion, it could not be known. In ordered symmetry, it would be completely lost. But in a struggle for two such opposites to harmonize as one, in that burst of creativity that ruptures the barrier between the bounded and the boundless, there that quintessence mysteriously emerges, an epiphenomenon of paradox.
This is the essence of art and beauty: Unbounded chaos is messy, even ugly. Bounded, perfect symmetry is dull. In beauty, the two combine in ways that mesmerize the human imagination, pointing higher and yet higher to that which transcends chaos and symmetry, the finite and the infinite, being and not being. To create art is to point beyond the bounds of reason at that which can neither be envisioned nor known.
The Universe As an Instrument
Now apply that to the Maker of All Things, who plays His music upon this universe He has crafted. He Himself is beyond being, so that the highest consciousness is nothing more than an emanation of His light, without substance, incapable of penetrating the mystery of its Origin.
So this Master Musician embraces a vacuous, finite space-time-consciousness, establishing within it a set order, bounds, parameters and rules. Creatures of many discrete sizes and shapes, which are assigned behaviors that cannot be crossed. This will be His instrument, His palette, the stage for His art. But it is not yet His music.
His music, His great art, occurs at that point of rupture when Creator and creation meet in utter war and love and struggle and resolution and dissonance, and all the impossibilities of an Infinite G‑d within a finite world.
That is a miracle: When He appears in your world in a mode by which He is speaking to you neither from the heavens above nor from your own soul within, in an experience which can be called neither spiritual nor truly physical, in which He is neither a presence nor an absence. Rather, at the intersection of all these opposites and more, the impossible unfolds. And G‑d is found in the impossible.
When is this symphony, this masterpiece of art, in its most exquisite form?
If an open miracle should occur, the instruments are barely extant—they are ignored as fictions, their limitations temporarily discarded. It is in the hidden miracle, clothed within the guise of nature, that you and your Creator come into true interaction, He as the musician, you and your world as the instrument; He as the artist, the nature of your world as His palette; He as a poet, your daily life as the meter and rhyme.
Systems do not answer prayers. Systems do not care to reward good deeds or accept your remorse over the past. This is not “the universe” responding, but the unbounded Master of All Things. You have escaped the universe.
You have escaped the universe, the system, all bounds and limitations, but you are still within them all. For it is no longer a system. It is a divine song.6
FOOTNOTES
1. Exodus 9:29. See also 8:18. There are many similar instances.
2. For a discussion of how miracles do not interfere with the predictability of science, see Rabbi Yehuda Loewe of Prague, Gevurot Hashem, second preface.
3. Numbers 13–14.
4. Numbers 13:31.
5. See Likkutei Sichot, vol. 4, p. 1044.
6. On all the above, see the Rebbe’s maamar Kimei Tzeit’cha 5712, as well as the other maamarim referenced in the first installment of this series.