Over the past weeks the plague of
locusts in a relatively minor form has infested our area of the world. The
locusts apparently did do great though not catastrophic damage to crops in
Egypt before crossing the Sinai peninsula and turning north to invade Israel.
The Israel Agricultural Ministry has sprayed extensively from the air to
destroy the streams of aggressive locusts and has achieved success in
controlling the situation without any great harm to Israeli crop fields. Since
this event happened in our season of the Pesach holiday and since the plague of
locusts is listed in the Bible as being one of the ten plagues that the Lord
visited on Egypt leading to the exodus of the Jews from slavery, the arrival of
the locusts in Egypt and here received wide public interest and media coverage.
Which led me to think about the plagues as recorded in the Bible that befell
the Egyptians. Were they all miraculous completely or were they natural or at
least semi-natural events that the Lord ordered to occur at that time and at
that place? Rambam seems to view almost all miracles as being miraculous as to
the time and place of occurrence while event itself is part of the order of
nature. He allows only for rare exceptions to this view. Other great rabbinic
scholars took issue with this view and saw the entire matter of miracles in the
Bible as being outside the purview of nature entirely. The matter of miracles
thus remains miraculously mysterious until today though most Jews probably
follow the latter view presented here than the Maimonidean opinion previously
advanced.
What if Pharaoh would have
possessed pesticides and spraying airplanes would he have been able to overcome
the plague of locusts that invaded his country?
What if he would have possessed an extensive electricity grid that
encompassed his country would the plague of darkness have truly affected him
and the Egyptians? If he would have had an outstanding medical dermatological
faculty would he have been able to deal with the plagues of lice and boils? In
other words, were all of those plagues that visited the Egyptians and finally
broke their slavery hold on the Jewish people effective only because they
happened thousands of years ago to a country and civilization then lacking
modern technology and scientific knowledge? Or would the plagues have been of
so miraculous and supernatural a nature that they would be uncontrollable even
today as well? The answer to this intriguing question is naturally dependent
upon how one views and defines miracles. In Marl Twain’s famous book, A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the Yankee outduels Merlin the
Magician par excellent of King Arthur by simply introducing more modern
technology and scientific knowledge into a mainly illiterate tenth century
civilization. What was a miracle to King Arthur is electricity to the
nineteenth century Connecticut Yankee.
Yet can we not view electricity as being a miracle? We are able to
explain how electricity operates but not why it works that way. In Halacha the
great rabbinic scholars are still wrestling with achieving an halachic
understanding of electricity. The mystery of electricity itself renders it to
be almost miraculous in its essence.
I have felt that the mystery of
God’s handiwork in nature and our vast universe that is slowly being revealed
to us through our advancing technology and scientific knowledge and research is
itself miraculous. The more we know, the more amazed we become at the
complexity and beauty and order of our world and its mysteries. Judaism views nature
itself as being purely miraculous. That is really the root cause as to why it
has been so difficult to define miracles to everyone’s satisfaction. If
everything is miraculous then really nothing is miraculous in the popular sense
of the word. That is really the basis of Rambam’s view of the matter. Only the
locality and the time of the event make it extraordinary. The event itself is
only one item in the continuing and ongoing miracle of nature and creation. So
we could therefore say that the fact that Pharaoh did not possess crop-spraying
airplanes is what made his plague of locusts miraculous and dreaded to him and
his society while our experience with the locust swarms that invaded our
country is merely an interesting newspaper item. However, I feel that the fact
that 3325 years later the people of Israel commemorate their exodus from Egypt
in the same manner and precise detail as did their ancestors over all of that
length of time is certainly to be considered miraculous.
Shabat shalom
Chag kasher v’sameach
Berel Wein
