Miracle or Disaster? A Question of Perspective |
As Pesach is coming to a close, we are preparing to celebrate and commemorate, on the seventh and last day, one of the famous miracles in history: the splitting of the sea. However, the word “miracle” itself, lately, has been strangely mistreated and often scorned to the point where it has become something of a trigger. Understanding what is at stake gives us a good entry point into the schism of Israeli society.
A couple of weeks ago, following an Iranian missile strike on Arad, standing in the middle of rubble in a destroyed kindergarten, the mayor pointed to the pictures of the prime minister and the Baba Sali that were still standing and spoke of a “miracle.” The anti-government media and their cohort, irate and contemptuous, lashed out immediately at the utterance, denouncing what they called primitiveness, naiveté, even stupidity. How could such a word be uttered in the face of destruction, injury, and fear?
The same scornful reaction appeared when similar statements were made in retrospect about October 7th, when some public figures dared to evoke the idea of miracle and were met with outrage. In a way, this reaction is understandable. Taken out of context, to describe events marked by death, chaos and suffering as miraculous can sound like a moral failure: a form of blindness, a way of minimizing tragedy, of evading reality and responsibility. The word has thus become heavily charged. It divides. Those who use it are immediately typecasted by those who reject it as messianic – another loaded term – fanatics.
At first sight, this division seems almost familiar: the old opposition between those who see the glass as half full and those who see it as half empty, between optimism and pessimism, even between faith and unbelief. The optimist perceives what remains, what holds, what did not collapse, convinced it is part of a greater, better plan. The pessimist insists on what failed, on what must be repaired, on what cannot be........