Partnership in miracles

My son and I attended a bar mitzvah this weekend. We went to one last year that I wrote about here. I’m glad to say I was actually invited this time. We had a great time!

I wanted to share something the rabbi said in his address to the congregation during the ceremony. The Torah reading was the single most important event in the Hebrew Testament: leaving Egypt and the parting of the Red Sea (actually, I was reminded, the Sea of Reeds). The rabbi shared a story from a midrash in the Talmud.

Apparently there’s a tradition that a particular newly-freed Hebrew, in anticipation of the sea’s parting, began to wade into the water. He got up to his ankles and said, I know the sea’s going to part! He got up to his knees and said, I know the sea’s going to part! He got all the way up to his nose, and still kept wading. And it was at that moment Moses raised his staff and the sea began to part.

In praising this man’s faith, the rabbi at the bar mitzvah said, “A miracle is a partnership.” He made the point that we participate in the miracles in our lives, we aren’t just spiritual bystanders.

I love this idea. And I think it applies to all spiritual growth. Do we just sit passively waiting for divine Love to bless us? Or do we run out to meet it, headlong, with faith? What is required of us in order for the blessings to come? Are we willing to immerse ourselves, even up to our noses?

What miracle do we want to partner on today?

From Science and Health:

The miracle introduces no disorder, but unfolds the primal order, establishing the Science of God's unchangeable law.

--p. 135

The miracle of grace is no miracle to Love.

--p. 494

The great miracle, to human sense, is divine Love, and the grand necessity of existence is to gain the true idea of what constitutes the kingdom of heaven in man.

--p. 560

MIRACLE. That which is divinely natural, but must be learned humanly; a phenomenon of Science.

--p. 591

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