From the heart of Jerusalem: Seeing Past the Spectacular

I used to be troubled a lot by the question of why G-d doesn’t reveal himself to us. If He wants our service, why doesn’t He demand faith through awe-inspiring demonstration and undeniable evidence?

The response I was given time and again, or at least my understanding of the response, was essentially that such a demonstration would make observance too easy. God intentionally withholds evidence of His power as a test to the struggling Jew, the purpose being that through confronting the test and taking the road of blind faith, the believer is ultimately fortified, his Judaism enriched.

But the obvious logical gap in this argument involves the Jew who struggles and, as a result, falls into a world of godlessness. It makes little sense that a loving and compassionate God would toughen one Jew’s faith at expense of another’s entire world of Judaism. A test may enhance Judaism for a narrow group but it drives the bulk of Jews away from the tradition altogether.

So the question remains: Why doesn’t God reveal Himself through supernatural occurrences?

As my response, I would like to suggest that, although when discussing G-d one must assume him to be omnipotent, the concept of supernatural intervention is actually inconceivable. This is because from our modern perspective any “supernatural” event would, upon actualization, cease to defy nature and instead redefine it. In the end of the day, if you define “nature” as that which exists and occurs, then any existence or occurrence, even contrary to our modern conception of nature, only becomes incorporated into next year’s science textbook. It is impossible to introduce the supernatural into a world that exists only on the natural plane while preserving any form of separation between the two.

Once the miracle is relabeled as nature, it joins the infinite collection of nature’s mysteries, indistinguishably unsolved. It therefore follows that until man understands (and knows that he understands) literally every facet of nature, he cannot distinguish the truly supernatural from the natural.

This brings to mind Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty. In 1927, Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that it is impossible to precisely identify an electron’s position and velocity simultaneously as it moves about the atom. While the technical details are irrelevant, what matters is that Heisenberg proved (using scientific method) that man’s knowledge is doomed to incompletion. Consequently, seeing as man will never know the full scope of science, man will never be able to differentiate the mundane from the miraculous.

The closest an occurrence can come to demonstrating the supernatural is by demonstrating vast coincidence. The continuity of the Jewish people and the establishment of the Jewish State defy statistical probability to a degree that verges on supernatural. Yet, in an objective sense, Jewish history of course exemplifies nothing more than unlikely circumstance.

That’s the problem with expecting G-d to show himself to you with miracles. We wonder why G-d doesn’t prove his existence and win our eternal servitude by defying nature before our very eyes. But our mental limitations make it impossible for us to witness such a demonstration and appreciate its true import. Manifestations of G-d’s existence can therefore only exist in the subjective, personal realm and cannot enter into objective argument.

This all made me wonder what kind of Revelation the Jews could have experienced at Mount Sinai as famously described in the Torah. It seems to me only sensible to say that this chapter in the Torah describes not a miracle in the conventional sense but rather a moment in which G-d bypassed the spectacular and directly implanted an intuitive faith into each Jew’s heart. In this article I won’t venture to address why God wouldn’t provide even this form of revelation in the modern day. But could we all intuit G-d if only we reassess our definitions?

Bear in mind, there is an alternative to this self-conceived world without even slightest spark of marvel. Instead of assuming all of the mysteries to be mundane elements of science, one can choose to view the world as wondrous. Until explained, let all of nature’s mysteries be miracles. Within this framework, the survival of the Jew becomes a miracle meriting infinite gratitude. Even life itself down to the minutest detail becomes a gift. He who lives with this perspective exists in a constant state of awe at nature’s magnificence.

In the Shemoneh Esrei, we ask God, “V’techezena einenu b’shuvcha l’tzion,” “And let our eyes behold Your return to Zion.” Rather than praying directly for the objective reality of G-d’s return, we pray specifically that our eyes are capable of seeing it when it occurs. We cannot take for granted our ability to witness God even in the most divinely-inspired moments. Rather we must make a conscious effort to see the hand of G-d. For only through our own vision can G-d enter into our lives.