Recognizing the Daily Miracles of Life

This article originally appeared in The Jewish Journal of Greater Boston and was reprinted in Jewish Boston.

Obi-Wan Kenobi was my first spiritual guide.  From the moment I saw Star Wars with my parents as a three-year-old, I was captivated by his connection to the Force and by his calm wisdom.  As the movies progressed (and as I grew older) I took one of Obi-Wan’s teachings to heart: “Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.”  Many years later, I remembered those words as I learned about another spiritual guide, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.

In one of the classic stories of Heschel’s unique style, he once showed up to offer an evening lecture.  Standing before the audience, he announced, “My friends, a miracle occurred on my way here!”  He allowed excitement to build among the gathering before announcing, “The sun just set!”

Heschel understood the power of perspective: “our own point of view,” as Obi-Wan phrased it, can make the difference between the mundane and the miraculous.  A sunset is a simple, every-day event, yet we can also take it as an invitation to pause and reflect on the glory of Creation and the One who crafted such beauty.

“As civilization advances,” Heschel wrote in God in Search of Man, “the sense of wonder declines.  Such decline is an alarming symptom of our state of mind… The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living.”  Cultivating a “point of view” that marvels at our experiences helps us to perceive the miraculous in our lives, which leads to new spiritual resilience and delight. 

Chanukah, our beautiful festival of miracles, reminds us to appreciate the wonders in our world and in ourselves.  We see a hint of this in the etymology of the word itself: “miracle” is derived from the Latin miraculum, which has the sense of astonishment and marveling.  Similarly, the Hebrew word nes, “miracle”,can also mean a “flag” or a “signal” – something that commands our attention.

One of the miracles of the Chanukah story, I teach our Hebrew school students, is that God made a single flask of oil last for eight days.  From “a certain point of view,” this isn’t much of a marvel.  However, from a perspective of wonder, this is an event of overwhelming significance, demanding our attention and kindling our imagination.

“But why do we make such a big deal about something so small?” a student once asked me.  I invited him to join me in considering which natural laws would need to be bent or broken for such an event to occur.  At the end, we had quite a list, ranging from topology to thermodynamics: this seemingly small instance required lot of exceptions to our expectations of physics.  Although my student wasn’t fully convinced that this particular miracle couldn’t have been improved upon (“It would have been better if God had created a column of fire, like in Exodus!”), it was clear to us that the more we paid attention, the more miraculous this small episode became.

No matter where each of us might place ourselves on the spectrum of skepticism, Jewish tradition invites us into an experience of wonder at Chanukah.  We are offered the reminder, to paraphrase another teaching from Obi-Wan, that something marvelous surrounds us, permeates us and binds the universe together. 

Heschel believed that “the beginning of our happiness” requires us to allow a sense of wonder to flourish in our hearts.  This Chanukah offers us the opportunity to reclaim “a point of view” that helps us to perceive the wondrous miracles in our lives and in our world. 

It is all too easy for us to shut ourselves away from the awareness of the miracles that abound, in the words of our prayer for peace, “in every time and every moment.”  Beginning in this Chanukah season, we can choose another path, one that will lead us to refreshment and new resilience.  Let’s reclaim the will to wonder and to marvel.  Let’s rejoice as light begins to return to the world from a time of darkness.  Let’s find delight and uplift in the reminder that great miracles happened – and happen – everywhere we allow ourselves to recognize them.

Inspired by our festival of light and miracles, may we merit to hold to a “certain point of view” that embraces wonder.  Guided by this insight, may we rest secure in the knowledge that the Living Force, the One in whose image we are all made, will be with us…always.