Parshat Va’Era, “It’s Not the Miracles”: We are heavy into the “signs and wonders”
part of the Torah now, reading about the Ten Plagues sent against Egypt and
soon enough about the Red Sea parting and the Revelation at Mt. Sinai.
While a great deal is made of the Mt. Sinai moment, and certainly
for some of our Orthodox brothers and sisters heavy emphasis is laid on the
experience of all the Jews at Sinai, the real reason this moment is important
is not because of what happened or how, but the results – we received the
Torah.
None of the miracles we read about are meant to be “the proof”
for why someone should bother with Judaism. In fact, we see in our portion this week that
it is particularly pagan to believe only because the miracles are “cool.” The Egyptian magicians and wisemen are beat
by Moses and Aaron; the brothers can produce better miracles, and so the
Egyptians accept them as legitimate.
Our great sage, Maimonides wrote, “Israel did not believe in
Moses our teacher because of the signs he performed. When faith is predicated
on signs, a lurking doubt always remains that these signs may have been
performed with the aid of occult arts and witchcraft. All the signs Moses performed
in the wilderness, he did because they were necessary, not to authenticate his
status as a prophet . . . When we needed food, he brought down manna. When the
people were thirsty, he cleaved the rock… So too with all the other signs. What
then were our grounds for believing in him? The revelation at Sinai, in which
we saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears . . .” (Hilkhot Yesodei
haTorah 8:1)
Again, the emphasis on Sinai is
not because it was a miracle in and of itself, but because the resulting Torah
was a profound gift of moral, spiritual, and social genius – that was the proof. A proof that continues to unfold and improve
and reveal more about itself in every generation including our own. Truly we all do see it “with our own eyes”
and hear it “with our own ears.”
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