Here is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, The Fidelity of Betrayal. It is from a chapter in which I am exploring the idea of miracle within the Judeo-Christian tradition.
This [the Miraculous] is beautifully illustrated in the Hasidic story in which the Rabbi of Gur, during the Second World War, was invited to advise Winston Churchill about how to ensure the downfall of Germany. The story goes that this great Rabbi looked at Churchill and solemnly said, “Prime minister, there are two ways in which this could happen. The natural and the supernatural. The natural solution would involve a million angels with flaming swords descending upon Germany. The supernatural would involve a million Englishmen parachuting down from the skys”. The story famously ends with the line that, being a rationalist, Churchill first opted for the natural solution.
The key to understanding the enigmatic message of this story is to understand that if a million angels with flaming swords descend upon Germany then this would be an event that took place in the natural realm. In other words these angels would act like other objects in the world; they would be seen, heard and experienced. These angles, if they showed up as the Rabbi described, would inhabit space and time like any other object and so, while unlike other objects that we encounter in the world, would still be objects. In contrast the Rabbi speaks of a supernatural response to the Nazis war machine, namely a million British soldiers descending from the sky in parachutes. But what is it about this response that is supernatural in contrast to the image of angels descending from the heavens? Here one could say that the Rabbi is hinting at a deep change in the hearts of the British which would precipitate such a drastic response. This change, for the Rabbi, would be deeply supernatural in the sense that the change itself would not be something that could be captured in a laboratory or measured by reference to some purely utilitarian calculation (otherwise it would be a natural phenomenon), unlike the angels this change would not lend itself to be approached as an object to be reflected upon, it would not be made manifest to the senses like the angels with their flaming swords.
The point is not to exclude the idea that miracles can involve awe-inspiring, breath-taking spectacles, but rather to point out that if the event is purely spectacular, involving no real change in the core of ones being, then it is nothing more than a spectacle. Physical changes are natural insomuch as they take place in the natural realm. Our technology is constantly improving, and is able to heal in ways that would have seemed magical only a hundred or two hundred years ago. Vital as such healing is in today’s world, such a focus can eclipse what a miracle really is about. It is not something natural (although it will manifest itself in the natural world) but supernatural. It does not register as an object which can be recorded and beamed around the world on some religious cable channel, or witnessed at a local Charismatic healing service, a miracle worth its salt takes place in the world but is not of it. A miracle worthy of the name is so radical that while, on in the physical world, nothing may change, in the one who has been touched by it nothing remains the same.
Posted at 17:03 |
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