Melton class, miracles

[cellio]

Last night was class #10 (of 30 for the year), and evaluation night. They wanted the forms back that night, so I had to write comments quickly. I hope I was sufficiently diplomatic about the first course.

The second class last night involved a discussion of miracles. The rabbi started by asking us to list things we considered miracles, and we got some interesting personal stories that way. I, in typical fashion, said that it depends on how you define "miracle" -- which, I wasn't surprised to learn, was the point of the exercise. :-) (Collect input first, then look for trends, then bring sources to bear.) It was a good discussion.

One idea I want to capture before I lose it: we might think of the burning bush as a miracle about the bush (that it burned without being consumed). How long do you have to stare at a burning bush to realize it's not being consumed? Maybe the real miracle was that Moshe stopped to look and study it. (This tied into an idea I raised in the earlier discussion, not original to me, that God is always present, like a radio signal, but you have to be tuned to the right frequency for that to do any good.)

Comments

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

There's a kabbalistic notion that the focus of Creation isn't so much manifestation per se as the imposition of order, that is, the manifestation specifically of physical laws. We can look at the first thing created -- light -- as an ordering of primordial chaos by the imposition of divine Law. So that leads to a definition of
"miracle" as "violation of physical law". That, I think, is a little broader than the popular idea, which seems to require some sort of specific benefit that we can believe was a deliberate gift from God. (Well, okay, everything is, but you know what I mean. See why I'm not a Talmudic scholar?) It takes a rabbinical mind, I think, to look at an unconsumed burning bush in the desert that way. Yes, we can evaluate the bush in terms of the gift to which it led Moses, but it itself...well, it isn't like the parting of the Red Sea, which was clearly done at that moment to save Israel from Pharaoh's pursuit.

I'm probably not expressing myself well here, but I'd be interested in how a real scholar (like, um, you) defines "miracle".