Was It G-d – Or Was It Them?
An undercurrent runs through the Jewish conversation this week, in the wake of the extraordinary miracle on Sukkos in which 174 lives were saved, and an unthinkable disaster was averted.
The moment we use the word miracle, some people become uncomfortable.
A miracle? Wasn’t this human heroism? Are we attributing it to G-d? If G-d was here, where was He on October 7? What about human free choice? Aren’t miracles something from Biblical times? We don’t see any splitting of the sea. Miracles are the mythical stuff of legends.
But perhaps the entire conversation is trapped inside the wrong paradigm.
We imagine a choice between G-d and man. Either G-d did it, or human beings did. Either Providence or courage. Either miracle or human achievement.
Chassidic thought teaches something far deeper, and the Rebbe devoted his life to making this concept real and relevant to our generation: life is a partnership between G-d and man.
G-d placed us in this world as His emissaries. He gave us free choice precisely because He wants us to act. He does not ordinarily run the world through spectacular supernatural interventions, because the purpose of creation is not for human beings to stand aside while G-d does everything.
He wants us inside the story!
That does not mean, G-d forbid, that He abandoned the world to its own devices. Everything is held within His Providence. But He created a world in which challenges arise – through nature, circumstance, and sometimes through the terrible choices of other human beings – and then asks us: What will you do now?
That is where the miracle begins.
A miracle is what happens when a human being confronts something that threatens goodness, life, dignity, and hope, and refuses to surrender to it. When someone looks at the challenge and says, “I will not become its victim.” I will rise to meet it.
Think of the Purim miracle. G-d’s Name does not appear once in the Megillah. No supernatural occurrence like the splitting of the sea, the thunder at Sinai, or the Clouds of Glory. Yet our Sages teach that Purim has a unique permanence, enduring even into the era of Moshiach. Why? Because Purim reveals the deepest kind of Divine presence: G-d’s plan unfolding through human beings who choose courage, responsibility, and goodness.
That is what happened aboard that plane. People recognized that something was terribly wrong, and they acted. They stepped forward. They used the capacities G-d had placed within them. And through that partnership, 174 people came home alive.
So where was G-d during the Holocaust? Where was G-d on October 7?
Those questions are real, painful, and sacred. But G-d was certainly present in every place where a person rose against the darkness – where someone protected another human being, rescued a stranger, ran toward danger to save a fellow Jew, opened a home, carried the wounded, comforted the broken, or began rebuilding what evil had tried to destroy.
We do not always see the partnership flower to its fullness before our eyes.
A soldier may run into the line of fire and fall. A mother may risk everything to protect her children and not survive. In those moments, we do not see the open miracle we desperately want. The challenge remains, and then it passes to those left behind, who must somehow find the strength to rebuild.
Look at the Jewish people after the Holocaust. Look at Israel after October 7. That, too, is a miracle. The Hebrew word neis, miracle, is intimately connected with nisayon – a test, a challenge, a trial. A challenge becomes a neis when we rise above it.
Sometimes – like this week – we are given the extraordinary gift of seeing that transformation openly: the danger is real, human beings rise to meet it, and the outcome itself becomes visibly wondrous.
When that happens, we must recognize it for what it is.
We cannot say: Where was G-d when the outcome was tragic, and then, when the miracle finally bursts into the open, insist that G-d had nothing to do with it.
Thanking G-d does not diminish human heroism. On the contrary – it dignifies it!
We are thanking God for allowing human courage to bear fruit in a revealed manner. We are thanking Him for showing us, openly, what His partnership with us can produce!
To live with an awareness that leads to gratitude is to live with a consciousness of redemption.
After Entebbe, some objected to making a blessing of thanksgiving because the rescue had been carried out by secular Israeli soldiers who may not themselves have believed in G-d. The Rebbe rejected that thinking. What difference did their personal theology make? They had become the instruments through which an extraordinary salvation occurred. A miracle had happened. How could a Jew fail to thank G-d?
The Rebbe quoted our Sages who tell us something equally startling about King Chizkiyahu. He had the potential to become Moshiach and usher redemption into the world, but he lost that opportunity because, after the miracles he experienced, he did not offer the gratitude such a moment demanded.
He lacked, in that moment, a fully redemptive consciousness: the ability to see the miracle, recognize the partnership between Heaven and earth, and say thank You, Hashem!
My friends, this Simchas Torah we should dance our hearts out as perhaps we have never danced before! And we shout to the high heavens – Thank You! Thank You! Thank You, Hashem!
And then let that gratitude become a commitment.
Look what can happen when G-d, the Jewish people, and all good human beings everywhere join together against darkness. Look what we are capable of. Let us do more of it. Let us choose more courage, more goodness, more responsibility, more kindness.
And G-d, we ask You: show us more of it too.
Take our efforts and let us see their fruits. Turn every nisayon into a neis, to the point that the partnership between Heaven and earth blossoms openly before our eyes, until no longer will the goodness be concealed, no more will grace be born through tragedy, but rather we merit only open and revealed blessing, with the coming of Moshiach now.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach!
