For the Miracles and for the Wonders

Even though Israel’s existential war has not yet ended, it is fitting to pause to appreciate moments of spectacular and breathtaking victory.  There is no question that the highly-targeted beeper and walkie-talkie operation exclusively and successfully targeting Hezbollah terrorists, whose life’s focus was murdering Jewish people inside and outside Israel, was a unique and brilliant operation.  My colleague Professor Eugene Kontorovich dubbed it “the greatest covert operation since the Trojan Horse.” Similarly, Friday’s highly focused elimination of virtually the entire top command structure of Hezbollah’s Radwan Division, which had been planning an October-7th-style invasion of the Galilee (and whose arch-terrorist leader was responsible for the attack against the US embassy in Beirut in 1983) was likewise a masterful stroke of military intelligence.  In short, it was a great week for those who support Jewish survival in Israel and a bad week for Iran’s terrorist proxies and its fellow-travelers in the West.

Yet careful consideration of these amazing events demonstrates that what we are witnessing is more than just brilliant cloak and dagger operations.  Instead of the Trojan War, a more apt ancient parallel to these events is to be found in the Purim story of the Book of Esther and in the story of Hannukah.  Rather than looking to others’ ancient histories, we can look to our own and take stock of what has occurred in light of our own historical experience.

The Jewish people has survived for thousands of years, and it is impossible to have any perspective on that history without reference to the primary sources themselves: the biblical accounts as well as the Oral Torah handed down from Sinai.  Even in parsing those ancient sources, we need to exercise great circumspection:  Ancient texts like the Babylonian Talmud written in Hebrew and Aramaic are not simply boulders that may be struck with pickaxes to reveal the hidden treasures within.  (Those seeking to justify their own hatred of Jews are masterful pickaxe wielders.   Witness those non-Jews who falsely and maliciously claim to have discovered hatefulness towards non-Jews in the Babylonian Talmud, a text they understand not at all.)  Instead, the Torah is a highly intricate Divine construction of ancient wisdom that requires much patience, persistence, skill (including language skills most of the pickaxe wielders do not have), intellect, subtlety, and most of all, Divine assistance, to understand correctly.

Purim and History

The Purim story was the story of a time similar to that in which we live today.  The Persians (the forerunners of modern Iran, speaking the same Persian language) concocted a plot to destroy the Jews, who were at that time (as we are today) in exile, with no Temple in Jerusalem and no Divine King upon the Davidic throne in Jerusalem, Israel’s eternal capital.  As the Book of Esther relates, Haman, an Amalekite minister of the King Achashverosh, known among the Greeks as Xerxes, convinced the Persian king to annihilate the Jewish people, “from infants to the elderly,” men, women, and children.

And just as in the story of beepers and the walkie-talkies, in Purim, the ancient sources tell us that there was indeed wildly improbable subterfuge employed as a means of war.  In Purim, Queen Esther hid her identity from everyone besides Mordechai, revealing herself only at the moment when she could convince King Achashverosh to issuing orders allowing the Jews to defend themselves against Haman and his murderous agents who themselves had obtained a royal order permitting empire-wide pogroms to destroy the entire Jewish people.  In the end, the Jews rose up against their would-be slaughterers throughout the Persian empire (then encompassing the length and breadth of the Jewish diaspora), and the tables were turned.

Hannukah and History

The Hannukah story, too, involved a Jewish people who were under the yoke of the Hellenist Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes (as related in the Babylonian Talmud in Tractate Shabbat, Midrash, and in the apocrypha Book of the Maccabees, not officially part of the Jewish canon but useful for historical reference).  As in the current war, there were highly militant internal opponents in Israel attempting by force to impose their will on the majority of the Jewish people.  The internal opposition during the Seleucid occupation consisted of Hellenized Jews (Mityavnim) who opposed traditional Jewish Torah-learning, Divine service, and maintaining the Divinely-centered Jewish way of life that has characterized Jewish practice since Moses received the Torah on Sinai and instead wanted Jewish people to act just like the ancient Greeks of the time, a form of ancient assimilation.

Among the many Seleucid efforts to interfere with observance of Jewish tradition,  were imposing the death penalty for those who were Shabbat-observant, those who taught Torah, those who circumcised their children on the eighth day as has been the tradition since our Forefather Abraham’s time, those who commemorated the New Moon in the Jewish months, and of course those who would not bow down to the idolatrous statue of the Greek king himself.  Antiochus Epiphanes also set up idolatrous statues and instituted unholy sacrifices in the Temple in Jerusalem, for which purpose he appointed his own Hellenized stooge as High Priest.  The very last Seleucid outrage that ignited war was the legal order requiring routine violations by the Greek governor in Israel of all Jewish brides before their wedding day, against which the outraged and brave Yehudit famously and dramatically protested to  her Maccabean brothers who were then a line of illustrious priests, Matityahu Ben Yochanan and his sons.

When war broke out, the Jewish call to battle against the Greeks was, “Whoever is for the Creator of the world, join me!”  This was the same battle cry Moses used to call to the Levites hundreds of years before against those who transgressed in the sin of the Golden Calf.  In response to the rebellion, Antiochus sent his world-conquering shock-troops, some of them riding on elephants so as to instill terror, against Israel to subjugate the Jews in their Land and uproot their observance of the Torah.

Like the current war, the war that is the subject of Hannukah was not swift.  The Maccabean leaders in Israel were able after a prolonged war (the Hannukah war lasted three years) to turn back the tide of enemies at their gates, the Jewish army successfully defeating the Seleucids’ mightiest army in the ancient world at the time.

Giving Credit Where It Is Due

Significantly, the ancient sources place both the emphasis and the credit for the ultimate success of the Purim and Hannukah victories squarely not on the generals and the spymasters, but upon the Creator and stress that it was He, and not the brilliance of the Jews themselves, who ultimately caused the victory.  In both cases, the Men of the Great Assembly instituted a special prayer for both Purim and Hannukah:  “For the miracles, and for the wonders, and for the mighty acts, and for the salvations that You [the Creator] did for our forefathers in those days in this time.”  There was war, there were cloak and dagger operations, there was victory.  But the ultimate mover of all events, the Guardian of Israel, is recognized by the Jewish people to be the Creator and none other.  The Men of the Great Assembly address the Creator in the second person singular and credit him with the victory.  In both Purim and Hanukah, they stress that it was “You, the Lord” and none other who brought about the defeat of their implacable enemies.  They specifically note that the strength and number of the enemies was greater, thereby rendering the miracle of those enemies’ defeat greater:  “You gave the many into the hands of the few, and the strong into the hands of the weak,” in the words of the prayers instituted by the Men of the Great Assembly.

No Overestimation of Human Capacity, No Replacement Theology

Today, there are those who unwisely make the opposite intellectual choice to the approach of the Men of the Great Assembly, both within the Jewish people and in the non-Jewish world.  There are two such groups.  The first are those who deny the Divine Hidden Hand guiding the Jewish people.  Instead, they credit craftiness, strength, intellect or technology.  We will address their claims presently.

The second group of deniers are those who — using a kind of “replacement theology” — contend that that the Creator actually has abandoned the Jewish people (Heaven forbid), despite all His promises to us.  Those who espouse replacement theology claim that any Jewish self-defense and any military response is automatically itself evil, however laser-focused on actual terrorists and however humane and unprecedented in wartime (witness the provision of food to and pre-attack evacuation of Gazans).  They claim that their version of the Divine opposes the Jewish right of self-defense.

This second group is deluding itself as a simple matter of practical biblical literacy.  As Scripture states in the mouth of Bilaam, who himself was sent to attempt — unsuccessfully — to divert the Divine love of the Creator away from the Jewish people:  “The Lord is not a a man of flesh and blood that He should deceive, a son of Adam that He should change His mind.  Should He indeed make a promise [to protect the Jewish people and redeem them] and not do it?  Or speak and not uphold it?”  (Numbers 23:19.)  Indeed, as the Passover Haggadah assures us, “In every generation, they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, Blessed Be He, saves us from their hands.”  For this second group, nonetheless, there is no logical argument that will convince them.  In the words of the Psalmist, “they have set themselves against the Creator and his anointed.”  Those who have done so in the past — whether Hittite, Midianite, Canaanite, Babylonian, Ancient Persian, Ancient Greek, Roman, or National Socialist — have been both utterly unsuccessful and have been utterly destroyed.  And the Jewish people remains standing despite all those who hate and seek to destroy us.  Only by Divine love and protection.

Humility Rather Than Hubris

For the first group, who feel that mention of the Divine Hidden Hand constitutes mere primitive belief or mysticism, a few questions about the materialistic world view in which only the mighty warriors and spymasters are the movers of mortal events:  1.  Are our enemies not more numerous than we are, outnumbering us literally a thousand to one?  2.  Are we not from the beginning of our modern state surrounded by enemies on every side except the sea, whose consistent focus has been to destroy us?  3.  Are our intelligence services the only services in the world in which wily spymasters have played a key role, if it is the brilliance of those spymasters that is supposedly the main factor?  4.  Are our intelligence services either better funded or more numerous in membership than those of other states?  5.  Are there not innumerable imponderables that can contribute to the success of any covert operation? and 6.  Has any other people in human history miraculously survived so many implacable, cruel, repeated, and consistent efforts to utterly destroy it and still survived and thrived?  The answer to all of the foregoing questions is the same, a resounding “Of course not!”.  Let us therefore introduce a note of humbleness and realism before too rashly patting ourselves on the back:  If low-probability, high-risk operations are wildly successful, it is in fact always because of “the imponderables.”  Famous examples include: the bad weather on D-Day that convinced the Germans that no invasion would happen at that time (the Nazi commander Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was many hours from Normandy visiting his wife for her birthday and wasted precious key hours driving back to the battle, while other German commanders brought little ); the decision by Hitler to halt the tanks on the way to the cornered British Expeditionary Force and remaining French army units, allowing nearly half a million Allied soldiers to escape to England and live to fight another day; and the capture and code-breaking of the ENIGMA machine that allowed Nazi coded messages to be intercepted by the Allies, to name only a few.  And another way of saying “imponderables” is the working of that that Divine Hidden Hand.

It is our historical task as Jews to have precisely that perspective.  Lest we think that these kinds of historical comparisons come out of left field, and lest we think that appreciating that Hidden Hand is uncalled for, doing so is rather at the very core of our tradition.  The Psalmist King David, who was referred to by our Sages as the Sweet Singer of Israel, famously said, “I will express in meditation… the words of Your wonders.”  (Psalm 145:5, R.S.R. Hirsch translation.)   Meditation on the Divine actions in the world is required rather than shallow observation.  The Jewish people were not born in 1948.  We are a most ancient of peoples.  Indeed, the very word “Jew” in Hebrew (Yehudi) contains with it the double connotation of both acknowledging the presence of, and expressing gratitude towards, the Creator of the Universe.  That is our metaphysical task as the Jewish people as set forth biblically and in the Oral Torah from the beginning of our history.  The task of both acknowledging and thanking the Creator has remained a constant of the Divine service of the Jewish people since receiving the Torah on Sinai.  So let us not be bashful in saying, resoundingly, “Thank you, O Creator of the Universe, from the bottom of our hearts for protecting your people, Israel, from those who seek to destroy us and in so doing are attacking Your Torah and your vision for the peace and redemption of the world.”

We are called by the Torah a “nation of priests” (mamlechet kohanim) (Exodus 19:6) to express this Divine mission of revealing the hidden Divine nature of the universe to the world and to dedicate ourselves to His service.  The more we reveal the truth of that Divine Hidden Hand, the closer we will come to experiencing that prophecy reiterated in so many versions by Isaiah, the prophet of our redemption: “Instead of being abandoned and hated, as you were, with no one passing through, I will make you glorious forever, a joy for all generations.”  (60:15)