Miracles in the Torah

The Torah describes the measurements of the Holy of Holies as well as the measurements of the ark, and the ark is larger than the room it is housed in. How can this be? The answer lies in the fact that the laws of nature (time and space) only exist in physical surroundings. The Holy of Holies, on the other hand, is a place that is spiritual in nature, and is therefore not restricted by the laws of nature. The limitations of space have no bearing at all.

Note This brings up a whole slew of issues.

• Is it not the striking of the 10 plagues upon Egypt the first real “miracles” in the Torah? Thereupon, we have the splitting of the sea, the water from the rock and the penultimate revelation at Sinai. But was even the last one a “miracle” or something out of ordinary reality?
• Do miracles necessarily have a bad side to them? Like the splitting of the sea resulting in the drowning of the Pharaoh and his cohorts?

MIRACLE (; lit. “wonder” or “sign”):

By: Kaufmann Kohler

• An event which can not be explained by ordinary natural agencies, and which, therefore, is taken as an act of a higher power.
• Miracles are by no means identical with myths. Myths are primitive or pagan personifications (or rather deifications) of the powers, or forms of nature, represented as acting like human beings. Miracles, on the contrary, place all things in nature under the control of a higher power, which uses them as means of working out its holier designs; they are, therefore, essentially monotheistic.
• In the Bible every occurrence which contrasts with the ordinary happenings of life is counted a miracle or wonder. Note: [Ordinary, an unclear concept, could be better explained through the background of the concept of Consensual Reality (originating from the works of Mindell, I believe).]
• Every occurrence in nature is, in the Biblical view, an act of God–every work of creation is an act of His providence (Ps. civ.). Note:[Is this not what is termed panentheism?]
• Yet only an uncommon or inexplicable event makes man ponder and see “the finger of God”  (Ex. viii. 15). It was because of this miracle, the parting of the Red Sea, this defiance of all things rational and reasonable, that they “feared the Lord and they believed in the Lord.” (Ex. 14:30-31)
• The miracles of the Bible are performed either directly by the Deity—or by the messengers of God in order to prove their divine calling.
• Every theophany, in fact, is a miracle (Ex. xvi. 7-13, xxi. 17-19; Judges vi. 21-22), and accordingly the revelation of the Lord on Sinai is the greatest of miracles (Deut. iv. 32-36). A literal belief in the Torah, therefore, necessarily implies a belief in the miracles told therein.

Nevertheless, the Torah itself lays down the principle that miracles are no test of the truth of the thing for which their testimony is invoked.

Miracles do not prove a religious truth, as they are performed also in the cause of untruth (Deut. xiii. 2-4).

• To deny the possibility of miracles appears to the believing soul to be tantamount to a denial of the absolute omnipotence of God.
• Miracles, which occupy so conspicuous a place in the New Testament and in the history of Christianity, are viewed as matters of secondary importance throughout the rabbinical literature.
• The Talmudic sages made the very possibility of miracles a matter of speculation—miracles, instead of being interruptions of the divine order of things, are in reality foreordained by the creative Wisdom and appear only to man as something new.
• Miracles should not be invoked as testimony in favour of one religious opinion as against another is an halachic principle.
• Gersonides (see Levi ben Gershon), in the last part of his “Milḥamot” , ascribes miracles to the divine intelligence which foreordains all things, but denying the actuality of the performance within a given time.
• In the “Yad” (Yesode ha-Torah, viii. 1-3) Maimonides declares that the belief in Moses and his law was based on the actual revelation of God on Sinai and by no means on the miracles performed; since miracles may be the work of witchcraft and of other non-divine agencies, they can not be accepted as proof.

Consequently miracles are never adduced in support of the faith by Jewish writers

• Mendelssohn, in his answer to Bonnet, who referred to the miracles of the New Testament as proof of the truth of Christianity, declared in the name of Judaism that miracles may be appealed to in support of every religion and that therefore they can not serve as proof of any.

Modern historical research can no longer view the narratives of the Bible in the same light as did the medieval thinkers who could not discriminate between the objectivity of the facts narrated and the subjectivity of the narrator.

Ibn Arabi

“I ask You, but the secret with which you bring together the complimentary opposites, that You bring together for me everything that is disunited in my being in such a way that it lets me experience the unity of Your existence.”

“It is established amongst the seekers of truth (muhaqqiqun) that nothing else exists except G-d and, even if we exist, our existence is only through Him. The one whose existence is due to something else, is in reality non-existent.”

Ibn Sawdakin

“Whoever is informed about the secrets of these points is also informed about the secrets of the unity of existence with its ranks, relationships and detailed rules, and indeed about its compression and breakdown into a single point.”

Sadr ad-Din al-Qunawi

“The perceived diversity of existeing things that derive from the one existence is due to the diversity of the cosmic realities that contain them, not to the diversity of existence itself or to the fact that there are many existences that differ in their realities.”

“The most unclear and obscure are the pluralities that arise through the effects of the fixed entities in the one existence. One imagines that the entities appear in existence and through existence. In reality, however, only their effects appear in existence, not the entities themselves. And they will never appear. The coming into being only applies to existence, albeit under the conditions of multiplication with the effects of the entities in it. Concealment, on the other hand, is an intrinsic property of entities and also of existence with regard to the conceptual understanding of their unity.”