Waiting for a Miracle

Why does everyone get so excited about miracles?

Because when we see a miracle, we see G-d.

We live our lives in the dark. We're told to believe, but it's all blind faith. G-d is hidden from us but we're expected to demonstrate (or pretend) that we see Him with every move we make.

So life can be hard. We ask, What are we here for? Is there really a G-d? Have I been duped? It's like working and working and working at a job and never getting paid. We can exist on "I will get paid someday," but it wears thin after a while. We wonder if there's really someone behind the door of the boss's big corner office.

And then it happens. We see Him. We get so excited because seeing G-d is the ultimate for us. Seeing the manifestation of His infinity (the Ohr Ein Sof) gives us a shot of adrenaline. It's true after all! I'm not just making it up! I see Him! There is something to all this! Our souls soar. We are overwhelmed in this greatness. Everything drops away and there's just our soul standing with the infinite greatness of G-d.

Now revealed miracles of this magnitude don't happen every day. In fact, a revelation on the level of Ohr Ein Sof happened just two times in our entire history. Once at the Splitting of the Sea, and then at the Giving of the Torah. And look how these revelations have affected us. It's 3315 years later and we're still talking about it! We cling to this experience with everything we've got. It's food for a starving body and soul. It's payday for the working man.

But 3,300 years is a long time to wait. So what do we do in the meantime?

We try to experience the Ohr Ein Sof in other things. Like seeing the miracles in the stories of Purim and Chanukah. There's just one catch. We have to work at it. It's G-d's infinity making a miracle, but it still requires our faith. "It could have happened anyway," we say.

Then there are miracles we call "chance" and "coincidence." You miss a bus and the course of your life is forever changed; you call a wrong number and find a long lost friend - miracles so seamless that even the person they happen to doesn’t fully comprehend what really occurred.

And then there’s the constancy of nature. Isn't it unbelievable that since the creation of the world, a day is exactly 24 hours and a solar year is always 365.2… days? Wouldn't you think that the wake of a meteor shower or dust particles in space would create a drag on our celestial bodies and delay their orbit/rotation by, say, a second or two? Why is that a miracle? Because according to the nature of the world, everything is created with a limited amount of G-dly energy. Everything wears out eventually. A person begins to deteriorate the moment he is born. Animals die. Trees dry up. But the constancy of nature defies that law. A real trompe l'oeil! It looks like nature but there's a twist. It's like rubbing steel wool against a stone for twenty years and the stone doesn't change. It's steel wool (nature) and it's a stone (nature) but something doesn't follow. The law of friction disappeared. Bet you didn't even notice!

But is witnessing that kind of miracle like the Splitting of the Sea? No. It requires applying our intellect and meditating on it. Okay, I see that it's miraculous, but I have to work hard to comprehend it. And even then, the concept is above my head. What fun is that? It's not like seeing Elijah the Prophet or manna falling out the sky or some other "wow." It doesn't overwhelm me. It doesn't fill me. I think about it and then it's gone.

So we continue to live in the hope of another revelation. We want to see it but we don't. Even if we try to see it, we have to make do with understanding it. And so we live our lives craving something we mostly can't have or something that we have for a split second and then it's gone.

In the Future Redemption we will experience Ohr Ein Sof all the time. We will see it, feel it, taste it, breathe it. It won't matter if the Ohr Ein Sof splits the sea, spins the earth on its axis, makes a parking space for you on a busy street, or has you open a book to a page that just happens to address and give advice for an urgent issue in your life, we will see Ohr Ein Sof everywhere. We won't have to meditate on it, we won't have to believe it, we won't have to convince ourselves. The veil will be lifted and we will be vessels to receive it.

Remember when we saw Ohr Ein Sof at Mount Sinai and our souls left our bodies because it was too much for us? Well, it won’t happen this time. Not only will we see it, but we will withstand it, understand it, and become one with it.

G-d's miraculous infinity is here, was here, and has always been here. We've just had blinders on. There's one way to see it now. How, you ask? We just have to open our eyes.

Based on a maamar (Chassidic discourse) by the Lubavitcher Rebbe titled KiYimei Tzeitzecha 5712