Yom Kippur Morning - Signs, Wonders & Marvels - Miracles or Seized Opportunities

    Long ago, Shlomo, a simple spice merchant, lived in Marrakesh, in Morocco.  He made his living by buying spices from different dealers and then selling them to his neighbors in the Mellach - the Jewish ghetto in Marrakesh.  He and his family lived a comfortable life and there was always enough food on the table for everyone, especially on holidays or on Shabbat.  Even enough for the passing beggars, who were never turned away empty-handed.  Shlomo, who was a pious and believing man, would always call out to Rabbi Mordechai Ben Atar, as was the custom, when going through the arched gates of the Mellach.  Rabbi Mordechai Ben Atar was known to perform many miracles, and his name was often called out by people for protection from evil or for good luck.
     
    Soon war broke out in Morocco and many items became scarce in the Mellach.  However, nothing was more scarce than spices.  Among the scarcest of the spices was black pepper.  Any black pepper that was found was either sold at outrageously high prices or confiscated.  The police would routinely make searches among all the spice sellers and if they found any black pepper, they took it, and then put the merchant in jail.  Shlomo felt that it was important to try and find this spice because it was one of the main spices used in Moroccan cooking.  He tried his best, but the only spice he could find to sell was red pepper, which was bought and sold for very little money.  Then suddenly, as if in answer to his prayers, there was a rumor of a new shipment of spices outside of the Mellach.  Without much hesitation, Shlomo hired a driver with a horse and wagon and left to meet the shipment.  As he rode through the main arch of the Mellach, he touched the side of the wall and called out to Rabbi Mordechai Ben Atar to watch over him.
   
    When he reached the market, he saw sack after sack of spices being unloaded.  He approached the supplier and asked what spices were being sold.  “Only black and red pepper,” answered the man in a booming voice.
   
    “How much for the red pepper?”  asked Shlomo.  “Fifty dirhams per sack.”  “And how much for the black pepper?”  Shlomo asked.  “A thousand dirhams per sack.” 
   
    Shlomo did not know what to do.  Should he buy more of the red and sell it for little, or should he buy the scarce black pepper?  If he bought the black pepper, he would make more money but would also risk being arrested or losing all his expensive merchandise, and possibly his whole business. 
   
    He decided to take a chance and bought twenty sacks of black pepper.  The man in charge, however, was very greedy and decided to take advantage of Shlomo.  he loaded nineteen sacks of the precious black pepper onto Shlomo’s wagon and, when Shlomo wasn’t looking, he substituted one sack of red pepper.  Shlomo paid for the twenty sacks of black pepper and began his return journey.  As he approached the gates to the Mellach, he saw police everywhere.  It was a surprise inspection of everyone’s wagon.  Shlomo’s mind raced with possibilities of what to do.  But, there were no real possibilities.  “Stop!  Check the sacks in that wagon!”  ordered the captain pointing at Shlomo.  Sitting under the arched gate, he called out to Rabbi Mordechai Ben Atar to help him.
   
    One of the officers approached the wagon and climbed onto the sacks of pepper.  He randomly chose one and knifed it open.  As Shlomo thought the worst, the officer yelled, “Let this man through!  He only has red pepper.” 
   
    Shlomo couldn’t understand what had happened.  He knew he bought black and not red pepper.  When he arrived to the Mellach, well inside, he stopped and check the sacks.  Indeed the one that was cut open had red pepper, but all the rest still had the black pepper he thought he had bought.  He realized he must have been cheated by the merchant.  And then, he thanked Rabbi Mordechai Ben Atar for watching over him, it was truly a miracle! he exclaimed.1
   
    A miraculous event, a life, a family, a business saved because of a cheating merchant.  Is this really what a miracle is?  Shlomo recognized that he was spared because of the cheating merchant replacing one of the bags of black with red pepper, yet he still calls it a miracle.  We can call miracles simply something that are wondrous...and yes, this tale is truly such an event.  Our story, the story of our people, is filled with such miraculous events, such stories of phenomenon that often pass our understanding, and even exceed our modern sensibility as authentic, as real.    
   
    The miracles in the Bible are the record of our people’s past experiences with the natural world being altered...altered by God.  Perhaps the greatest of them all, that moment on the bank of the Red Sea.  Our people, as the prayerbook says, “still bent from oppression,”  stood in a brief moment of despair.  Moses, the newly minted leader, unsure what to do.  And the midrash teaches us it was Nachshon ben Aminadav, unafraid, who stepped in up to his nose and only then did the sea part.  Our tradition regards this moment, when God responded, as the text goes, hearing the Israelites plea, as the greatest of miracles.  Am Yisrael - the People of Israel - witnessed a great miracle, it was awesome, but not for everyone.  In Exodus Rabbah, we learn about Reuven and Shimon’s different view.  “They noticed only that the ground under their feet was still a little muddy-like a beach at low tide.  “Yucch!” said Reuven, “there’s mud all over this place!”  “Blecch!” said Shimon, “I have muck all over my feet!”  “This is terrible,” answered Reuven.  “When we were slaves in Egypt, we had to make our bricks out of mud, just like this!”  “Yeah,” said Shimon.  “There’s no difference between being a slave in Egypt and being free here.”  “And so it went, Reuven and Shimon whining and complaining all the way to freedom.  For them there was no miracle.  Only mud.  Their eyes were closed.  They might as well have been asleep.”2
We have a choice.  They had a choice.  Were these miracles, or seized opportunities to recognize the power in our world?  Shlomo knew full well the cheating merchant swindled him out of one sack of black pepper, yet he exclaimed, “it was truly a miracle.”  And the Israelites, upon reaching the other side of the Red Sea, sang in joy to God - מי כמוך באלים יי מי כמוך נאדר בקודש נורא תהילות עשה פלא- Who is like you among the gods, O Adonai?  Who is like you wondrous in holiness?  Awesome in praise, doing wonders and marvels!  But not all of them...Reuven and Shimon, they saw it differently.  They failed to seize the opportunity to see the wonders around them - being freed from slavery and all that meant to their...to our people.
   
    It is our opportunity to be seized, especially on Yom Kippur, to take advantage of what has been laid before us...what continues to fill our interactions each and every day.  We can engage with the events in our lives looking up, engaging with the wonders around us - considering them as miraculous, like Shlomo and the Israelites.  Yom Kippur, this seemingly endless day, provides us with an extended moment to recognize every deed, every interaction, every encounter provides us the potential for a miracle.  While our people’s story is full of miracle moments, signs beyond understanding, wonders beyond explanation, what purpose do these events serve?  How can we make sense or meaning out of them? 

From the Flood to the Ten Plagues, from the event at Mt. Sinai to the earth swallowing Korach - and everything in between, these stories are often used to express God’s role in the story.  They invite God as a character in the Torah narrative that changes the course of history, that enacts punishment and that interacts with human beings.  On this Day of Atonement, we utter many prayers that beseech the Divine for similar intervention.  Yet, this is not the only belief in our Jewish tradition.  Many of us are challenged by this theology, this personification of a God that interacts, that intervenes in our lives, our world.  In one Talmudic tale, miracles are used to attempt to prove a point.  Amongst the great debates of our sages, one stands out as a turning point for our understanding of miracles, or events, wonders, and signs that are beyond our comprehension. 

In tractate Bava Metzia of the Talmud, we see an argument over the purity of an oven.  The majority of the sages say that the oven is unclean.  Rabbi Eliezer, however, thought that the oven was clean, and therefore okay to use.  Eliezer said, “if the halacha - the right legal position, is with me, let this carob tree prove it,” suddenly, that tree uprooted itself and the tree flew 400 cubits from its location.  The Sages were not convinced, so he said, “If the halacha agrees with me, let this stream of water prove it” and the water began to flow in the opposite direction.  The sages were still not convinced, so Rabbi Eliezer called upon the walls of the study house, and the walls began to crumble and fall (until they were told it was none of their business), and finally, Rabbi Eliezer called for the Heavens.  At that moment, the Bat Kol, the heavenly voice exclaimed that Rabbi Eliezer was indeed correct. 

After what can only be described as an amazing turn of events, you can imagine the Sages who had declared the oven impure weren't quite sure what to do, but Rabbi Joshua had the answer.  He quoted Deuteronomy, part of our Yom Kippur Torah reading, saying, “לא בשמיים היא, it is not in the heavens,” and the oven was declared impure, following the majority, and going against Rabbi Eliezer, his miracles and the Heavenly voice.3   

In this moment, after all the miracles Torah recounts had been done for our ancestors and for us, the sages reply, “It is not for heaven to decide!”

It is for us to decide.  And despite the prominent role of what we refer to as miracles, extraordinary phenomena, distinguished from normal and usual events, in our Torah narrative, there is no biblical Hebrew word for “miracle.”  Ronald Isaacs, author of Miracles:  A Jewish Perspective teaches us that the closest related words are מופתים - wonders and אותות - signs.4  We also have the word often translated as marvels - נפלאות and the word for miracle most of us are probably familiar with, נס as in נס גדול היה שם - the words on the dreidel - a great miracle happened there.  So what exactly are we do decide?  We are charged to understand the role of these wonders, signs, marvels and miracles not just in our storied past, but also in our world today.  Left to decide whether we see them, if we seize the opportunities to embrace the power we have as human beings.  With many names there are many understandings.  There are those, especially among our Biblical ancestors, who regarded the miracles as literally true and authentic.  Today, many of us look at them as inspiring allegory, as parables and perhaps as metaphors for something - a lesson to be learned.

The Rambam, the great teacher of our tradition regards miracles as something a bit different.  It was his rationalist approach that took issue with things that seemed to suspend the natural laws.  We have to remember that while our ancient ancestors took for granted that these miracles can and do occur, “a miracle was not thought of as a suspension of natural law, since, before the rise of modern science, there was no such concept that required suspension.”5  Maimonides found this tension, as he was the greatest scholar of Judaism, of the text and the tradition, yet he was also a learned man in science, medicine, astrology, philosophy and all the subjects of his day.  He regarded miracles as anything than changes the course of history, however big or small. 

For many of us Shlomo was saved from the police as he smuggled black pepper into the Mellach because of happenstance, because of the cheating merchant.  For others, even for Shlomo himself it seems in the story, it is his prayer to Rabbi Mordechai Ben Atar for safe passage that is answered, a miracle wrought by the saintly rabbi.  And still others strive to explain the parting of the sea as a strong wind event, something occurring, albeit abnormal, that does not suspend the laws of nature, but causes us to see it and understand it differently.  This is the many names, and many understandings.
   
In our own era, these miracles have been understood in even new ways.  It was Mordecai Kaplan who built upon the Rambam’s semi-rationalist approach and the reality of the modern age and saw in the concept that God performed miracles for the sake of the righteous holds something important for us to learn from.  It lifts up the idea that responsibility and loyalty to what is right is something for which we should, well..move mountains.  It is the telling of the stories of the miracles themselves, of changing the course of history through them, that is what we should be paying attention to. 

So if the story, the change, the general trajectory of the plot is the key, then we must ask how this plays out in terms of this day...the Day of Atonement.  If all of the stories within our tradition that we consider miraculous, or describing wonders and marvels are brought about by God, then it makes sense that we continue that imagery on this day.  The prayers, the penitential statements we utter, the confessions we articulate are directed to that same source of the miraculous.  We are asking for something to change, to change the course of history, our personal history.  We can view this as an alteration of what would be the outcome if, and only if, we were truly fearful of some form of divine retribution.  But I think it is safe to assume that we do not believe it happens that way, if it ever did. 

This still leaves us begging the question about what is the change, what is it that we want the miracle, the magic that happens on this day, to change.  Yom Kippur, this seemingly endless day, provides us with an extended moment to recognize every deed, every interaction, every encounter provides us the potential for a miracle.  The change is the miracle, but it is not the change brought about in a supernatural way, by a being beyond our comprehension.  It is the change within each of us.  It is the power each of us holds to make that change through our own lives, our own ways of living. 

Simply taking the time out of our day, an entire day out of the year, away from our technology, our jobs, our hobbies...whatever it may be, that is certainly one form of the miraculous; but it is more, it is using this extended moment to recognize that every deed, every human interaction, every encounter provides the opportunity to make a change...a change for the better.  What is the human miracle?  It is Teshuvah...the ability to change and to allow change, that is forgiveness.  When we engage with the challenging words and thoughts of this Day of Atonement, Teshuvah is the ability to be a miracle - to be something different, to change the course of our own history and be that better human being.  Maimonides, in his Guide to the Perplexed, wrote, “A miracle cannot prove that which is impossible.  It is useful only as a confirmation of that which is possible.”6 

It is our Torah portion for this Day of Atonement, it is our sages in arguing over the purity of an oven who exclaim לא בשמיים היא - It is not in heaven, it is not for heaven to decide.  It is for us to decide.  Yom Kippur, this Day of Atonement affords us the opportunity to recognize that human miracle, the ability we have to seek and grant forgiveness, to alter our way of being in the world, to turn - תשובה and recognize that every moment in the coming year provides signs, wonders and marvels...they are either miracles, and for some that is important, or their are seized opportunities to recognize a change in the course.  In the year 5774 let us all take the time to seize the opportunity to recognize our human power, our human ability.  Let us all be authentic in our recognition of that capacity that sets us apart from the rest of the creation and bring that miracle into our reality.

Shanah Tovah - G’mar Chatimah Tovah - May the New Year be a Good Year for all of Us!

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1 The Miracle of the Black Pepper, in Chosen Tales:  Stories Told by Jewish Storytellers, ed. Peninah Schram.  Page 286.
2 Ex. Rabbah 24:1.  Adapted from Ronald Isaacs’ Miracles:  A Jewish Perspective. 
3 Bava Metzia 59b, Babylonian Talmud.
4 Page 1.
5 Jewish Views on Miracles, by Louis Jacobs - MyJewishLearning.com:  http://www.myjewishlearning.com/beliefs/Theology/God/About_God/Miracles.shtml
6 3:24.