Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Everything is a Miracle

 Rambam (Introduction to Iyov) We believe in absolute Divine Providence—as expressed in the concept that "the eyes of the Lord range throughout the whole earth"—as well as in miraculous providence; that is to say, the phenomena described in the Torah involving miracles. For, upon reflection, there is no distinction between the statement that a certain righteous person will live out his days or that one who eats *terumah* will die, and the splitting of the Red Sea or the manna falling for forty years. Verses such as "I will remove sickness from your midst" and "I will send a plague among you" stand on the same footing as the Plague of the Firstborn, the plague, the drowning of the Egyptians in the sea, and all other miracles; for if we were to say... Consider the plague that struck your midst—akin to the Plague of the Firstborn—alongside the drowning of the Egyptians in the sea and all the other miracles. For if we attribute all sustenance to the natural order, neither man nor beast would die based on merit or transgression; yet, once we believe that God cut a life short before its natural time, we acknowledge that the hand of God performed a miracle and altered nature—just as He parted the sea before His congregation and drowned our enemies within it. The only difference between the two cases is that one is hidden while the other is manifest. Even if one stubbornly insists that the person who ate *Terumah*—in the instance you cited regarding a supernatural death—did not die through a suspension of natural law, but rather that God simply orchestrated events so he would consume foods that induce illness, or perish in battle in the usual course of events or altered his mazel, the fact remains: his destiny was altered due to his sin or improved because of merit and it wasn’t due to the natural course of Nature. If God alters the nature of a person's food—causing him to consume harmful items he would not have eaten had he not sinned—then it is certainly plausible for the nature of wholesome food to be transformed into something harmful to him. Phenomena such as "I will give you your rains in their season" and "The Lord will open for you His good treasury"—as well as the reverse, "the heavens over your head shall be bronze"—are all instances of miraculous changes to the natural order and the celestial influences governing the heavens and the earth.

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