There can be miracles; was this one?

A text/post/quote you may have seen quotes Prof. Maximilian Abitbol, “who is also an expert in the defense industry”, giving a probability calculation postulating Divine Intervention in Saturday Night’s strike from Iran.

I can’t find any publications from Prof. Abitbol on recent events.

Prof. Abitbol doesn’t have an accessible account on either LinkedIn or X, and his last Google Scholar citation is from last year. He is, according to what I can find, a researcher of Cosmic Microwaves, and not, as the sources claiming to quote him say, an expert on the defense industry, as far as I can tell from his publications and writing.

I am not here to ridicule anyone, and if someone can provide the original, primary source material (not quoted from someone quoting, but direct from the source), I’ll be happy to rescind this remark; I mean this honestly. Part of putting this up here is to get to the bottom of this and find out where the piece was published, if it was. But here’s the point in bringing it up.

Number one, there are atheists in this world. All things to them are matters of rules and probability. For every action which is unsuccessful, there is a likelihood of one that succeeds. In which case, it is not odd that in one to a million odds, there was a scenario wherein the one case occurred. That was simply always an unlikely likelihood.

Number two, there are agnostics in this world who are willing to entertain the possibility that God exists. Some of them also entertain the possibility that He gets involved in the world. If someone is going to try and convince global agnostics of the presence of God, they should bring reputable sources, articles, and easily searchable and discoverable articles (and more importantly, videos if possible). In general, this is not a remark about agnosticism. It is a remark about our troubled times where facts are so easily manipulated into untruths.

Number three, there are religious people in the world. But there are a million different types of religious people in the world. Many of these religious people believe that miracles happen. Some reserve the term “miracle” for incredibly limited scenarios. Others, notably Hassidim and Kabbalists, under the assumption that God’s unlimited Presence can act on and in all things, and is always present, believe that all things are, in essence, Divine intervention, and as such, miracles.

There are also those who believe that God keeps to the rules of His universe (Rambam is a big proponent of this idea). Deists go one step further in what I call the Netflix theory: God set the world in motion and has since been eating popcorn on an endless loop of Netflix. In moments of wonderful circumstance, the thanks to God is directed more towards His design of Earth rather than His involvement in certain moments. It should be noted that many Jewish thinkers of this type still believe in a level of involvement in specific cases.

There are of course those who believe in a mix of the two. One doesn’t need to believe that pouring one’s coffee is a miracle to believe that other miracles happen. Some of us are a bit skeptical to call certain things miraculous.

This week my friends gave their son his Brit Milah, welcoming him into our people and the greater Jewish family, after years of a long and painful journey to that place. When a doctor tells you, having a baby is likely not in the cards, and a baby is born, after so much hurt and pain, there’s something too special to ignore. I touched the baby and started sobbing in front of his mother. I told her that even being the rationalist and unspiritual person I am, I had undertaken a couple practices which the traditions said benefited couples with difficulty conceiving. I didn’t do them because I believe they changed anything; I did them because one cannot allow themselves to forget that kind of pain. And as I sat there sobbing to her, the baby’s mother smiled at me while holding her child and said, he’s a miracle, right? And I told her yes, yes he is. This baby is a miracle because we all got used to a world in which he was impossible. But he was born despite that. My friends’ baby is a miracle.

The difference between Israel and her allies having the tech to deflect 99% of an airborne attack and the birth of this baby, is that despite trying new treatments, my friends didn’t expect to conceive. The idea of success didn’t exist, because the rules said it most likely wouldn’t happen. Physicists on the other hand, have cold hard rules which they know about the universe, and can use to predict or create realities in which circumstances are more likely. They can coordinate and organize a response to an action if they understand the necessary equal and inverse reaction. If you want to call it a miracle that we understand science at all, you likely also understand most things in this world to be Divine Intervention, and that is your prerogative.

Here comes the kicker on the matter of God and Politics. God is not part of a stable military philosophy, and He cannot be in a reasonable state.

One can argue that states need a secular religion. They need a code which is unbreakable (the rule of law), they need a vision of a Messiah (a better future anchored in the realization of key values and the success of the people), they need prophets (elected officials, or judges of some court), they need priests (civil servants, government employees). But states should not have an influential, interventionist God who resides external.

States act rationally. Even Iran, a religious state, has a level of objectivity to its actions. Case and point: isolated from the world in many aspects, Iran enters the classic security dilemma and the consequent arms building which all states do (the idea is, that you’ll always feel like as long as you’re weak other people will try to kill you so you move to a position wherein you can kill them first, and maybe you do it if the possibility presents itself), and creates nuclear bombs to level with the parties who deem it irrelevant. I don’t think we’ll see nuclear war in Western Asia, everything and everyone is too close to everything and everyone. But the arms race happened, and we’re seeing it play out now. The thing which Israel did to win the arms race was to build superior defenses, which paid off last Saturday night. And Iran played her hand as she did, because even a religious fundamentalist regime will not assume Divine Intervention should Judgment Day come upon them, imposed by stronger and more formidable armies. (I’ll let my friends who know more about Islam than me comment on how Qadar might play into this).

One thing the State of Israel did not do in response to the arms race: pray. While one may talk about how many Israeli people prayed during the attack (that was a truly interesting figure, and you have to love the Google search pictures), the military and government officials were doing the state secular religious ritual of doing service, the things they trained to do, and their role as the “priests” of the state.

The success rates are perhaps under compounded probabilities unlikely (though a friend who is both religious and an engineer said this was well done but not unlikely), but they were the intended result.

In other words, if you build something, you do that so that it will work. You don’t pray that it does, you test it a million ways and tell all your friends to help as much as they can with it, in the likely event that something goes wrong. You might pray for its success, but that’s in your off hours from work if you’re an engineer, or if you are a civilian who can do nothing to help the effort.

Israel was prepared for this attack, arguably, precisely because that was how Iran planned the maneuver, and that is a topic which one can see Fareed Zakaria about (his most recent GPS podcast was amazing on this topic). My friends had not prepared to conceive. Understandably, now that you know my perspective, you know about which circumstance I prayed harder, cried more, screamed specific words from davening about, and contemplated certain kavanot of scrambled letters over. When there is what for man to do, you look to man, and when man has nothing else to do, or wishes for help beyond his normal capacity, he looks to God.

וְאָמַרְתָּ֖ בִּלְבָבֶ֑ךָ כֹּחִי֙ וְעֹ֣צֶם יָדִ֔י עָ֥שָׂה לִ֖י אֶת־הַחַ֥יִל הַזֶּֽה׃ וְזָֽכַרְתָּ֙ אֶת־יְהוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ כִּ֣י ה֗וּא הַנֹּתֵ֥ן לְךָ֛ כֹּ֖חַ לַעֲשׂ֣וֹת חָ֑יִל

דברים – ח:י״ז-י״ח

“You will say in your heart, it was my [own] strength and the might of my hand which did all this valor for me; you will remember YHVH your God, for He is the One who gives you strength to act with valor” (Deut 8:17-18).

Tradition tells us that one must remember that human beings are only so strong. But valor, חיל, is a measure above normal strength, כח. If one shows חיל, one must have gone beyond the bounds of כח. One must exhaust their strength before reaching the level of valor. We have conflicting verses which talk about God’s Power (God’s Right Hand is uplifted in כח in Ex. 15:6, and does חיל in Ps. 118:16), but it is clear that humans can do the one, but require a bonus dose of it to do the other.

If one thinks we did חיל last Saturday night, then one should consider it a miracle. If one thinks our state did what it had trained to do, and we did it well, then perhaps there is nothing inherently wrong in assuming it was כח without חיל.

When Jules and Vincent don’t end up dead after the guy with the hand cannon empties his magazine into the wall, one can look at the wall in the scene, and see that the bullets didn’t miss the two assassins. The holes in the wall are where Jules and Vincent were standing. In a moment like that, yes, what happened there was a miracle, Sam L. Jackson’s character tells us, and he wants you to acknowledge it.

When what is meant to happen happens, I worry we (people of faith) will become disparaging for the wrong reasons towards those who don’t think the way we do about these matters. Of course I am glad and thankful that we were as successful as we were last week, but I don’t think we need to start throwing around questionably sourced pieces to prove that for some of us, yes, that is what a miracle looks like. And I don’t think a state needs to acknowledge miracles. Let the people be as religious as they each please; states, especially in our neighborhood, need less religion if possible, not more.

People can believe in a Hassidic God; Modern States should believe in a Deistic God.

In my personal prayers, I thank God. In my politics, I thank the IDF and the allies we have. Which of course reminds me that we must do what we can to not be left alone to scenarios like this, and that’s a discussion for another time.