Making Miracles: A Partnership
Stein, Toby
MAKING MIRACLES: A PARTNERSHIP A personal interpretation of faith by an unorthodox Bat Mitzvah TOBY STEIN I We don't believe in miracles. Nearly all of us, we don't believe in miracles. And...
...It's short, but very hard: "Oh God, if there is a God, help me...
...Finally, with hardly anyone ever paying attention, let alone being impressed, and certainly not grateful, God . . . called in sick...
...The know-how stopped just short of that first step of his...
...It's as though God gave us wings—but neglected to give us flying lessons...
...And, knowing this, I feel sad...
...I don't say fifty-fifty...
...it wasn't enough for Him...
...Still, a craving for God seems to pervade practically every paper I wrote in college—I was always writing about divines or heretics or religious fanatics or atheists...
...I think that God always needed a little help from His friends...
...I think that maybe one of the reasons God made us in the first place was so that He wouldn't have to work alone...
...One evening, she couldn't go— and I went anyway...
...Whether we are willing, whether we are ready—that's something else again...
...being brave enough to admit that we need love and being willing to give it up front...
...Take that walk on the moon, the first one...
...So far, anyway...
...I had no family—on either end—and whereas synagogues thought only in terms of families, the Church had all these Fathers and Mothers and Sisters and Brothers, you see...
...How many there are...
...And which miracle do we believe in less even than the other...
...For Him...
...The first big one I see is that God started out rather modestly...
...Nineteen months later, I was baptized into the Catholic Church...
...And as—miraculously—interdependent...
...And that in the beginning there was God, Who lived in a darkness...
...Where my hunger for God came from is quite as mysterious as everything else about faith...
...Noah stopped God from uncreating us, nothing less...
...Let Him make them...
...If God made us, we owe our continued existence to Noah...
...He still had to take that first step onto the moon's surface...
...I am inclined to turn the question around...
...God, to me, is the always nearby, vivid, challenging, real option to the sometimes pale realities this world has to offer...
...At those times, the presence of God in my life makes me feel more real...
...miracles convert us...
...But He wasn't satisfied...
...I stopped doing it...
...And risk...
...I see it as a miracle...
...But kneeling each night, saying it, I felt sure that someone would take it into his head at that very moment to peep through the keyhole in my apartment door—and immediately send for the men in the white jackets...
...It is part of my spiritual history, and I don't believe in revisionism...
...Whether it took God six days or six billion years to make the world, it didn't take very long after that— whatever clock was ticking—for us, His last and most momentous creation—the one He wanted most to make—to disappoint Him...
...It said: God doesn't love you because you're good, He loves you because He's good...
...they are holy acts...
...And I find it quite okay, really, most of the time...
...That idea may seem obvious to some of you—or even trivial—but it had never entered my mind before, and to me it made all the difference...
...I stayed away from religion courses...
...And that we be willing to do a lot of legwork...
...What's "that way...
...As surely as I stand here, God has brought me to this place, this hour, this honor...
...That made me much more jittery than the neighborhood did...
...Instead of using these attributes to make miracles, we seem to use them more often to reject the very idea of miracles...
...And they educated me Jewishly, although not religiously...
...I must tell you that I view it as my real life's work to try as best I can to pay attention to Him...
...Of course we don't believe that...
...Because it was this grace, the decency God saw in Noah, that swayed God from the decision He had just made to wipe out what appeared to Him to be one great big mistake...
...It's all his...
...At the very least, a little help called faith...
...A division of responsibility...
...Small miracles like changing the mind of God...
...The miracle is: He always renews the option...
...But it took me eight more years before I was brave enough to join a synagogue...
...world and its creatures in six days...
...To be sure, the voice I heard was my own, and it spoke inside my head...
...Until now...
...Let there be light...
...Yes, I do see the relationship between God and man as personal...
...No abracadabra for us any more than for God...
...Again, a risky thing for God to do...
...But I have to admit to you that, to me, sometimes it is life that doesn't seem very real...
...but He can't do His without us, either...
...Today was why...
...God was paying attention to me that day...
...In an age when men have walked on the moon—we don't believe in miracles...
...He made man like Himself, with the capacity to think, with the capacity to feel not only his own pain but also another person's, with the capacity to imagine...
...God is like someone who lives alone and who makes plenty of outgoing calls— reaching out to people—but His phone dosen't ring, except for occasional take-out orders...
...Acting in His image...
...I find Judaism a hard religion for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I still have difficulty being a Jew alone...
...Experiencing my homecoming this past year has made me think about the business of prayer: ours and God's...
...As more than one miracle, in fact...
...I can almost hear Him crying out: "Hey, remember me...
...If we choose to live conscious of His presence, if we listen when we pray, we have some chance at least of making the world He prays for us to make...
...Hey, look, there's enough \york just getting through the week, right...
...That made me so unhappy that I never noticed how arrogant it was...
...He still wants our love...
...But in another sense I am here in what I believe to be an answer to God's prayer: that I come home...
...I have learned a lot this past year...
...I couldn't have done it without Him...
...I suggest that when we do it, when we do take flight, it is because we are at that moment copying God...
...I believe in God...
...being committed to creation— and always, always, being ready to admit that we cannot do anything all alone...
...but it goes back, I realize now, to my childhood, even though I was not conscious of wanting God in my life until my mid-twenties...
...That's magic...
...Yet I did want to believe: I said the prayer...
...I don't know if the way God made the world in any way resembles the Genesis story...
...In one sense, my being here is an answer to a longstanding prayer of mine...
...I believe that God knew that, knowing it, I would be free to know Him...
...It's not easy...
...So many miracles...
...Make us turn toward God...
...The class took place in a neighborhood that made her nervous, and I offered to keep her company...
...It seems to me to be quite simple: we are put on this earth to continue the miracle of creation...
...Still they did what a Jew is obliged above all to do: They lived as though there was a God...
...About how God works, and about how God and I work together...
...6:8...
...My theme today...
...The symbolism is enormously potent for me...
...Because He wanted man in His life...
...You know what I think...
...We know better than that...
...Not only did God make man, but He made him in His image...
...We can't do God's work in the world without Him...
...I saw the logic in it—and the sheer craziness...
...What I have been saying has nothing to do with theology...
...Given the advanced hardware, given the incredible know-how involved every step of the way, Armstrong still had to step out of the LM...
...And, it seems to me, that's our fault...
...He's still lonely...
...Like God, I'm alone most of the time...
...Why...
...When we don't work at making miracles, God is . . . laid off...
...My being here today, my being called to the Torah and reading the creation story from the scroll, my standing today before you as a Bat Mitzvah—is a miracle...
...Is it possible that we are unwilling to grant God's miracles in the Bible—easy for God, after all, to part a sea, or turn a stick into a snake and back again, or make a world—because if we grant those, then perhaps we will feel obliged to consider the miracles men make in the Bible...
...It is utterly self-centered of us to think that we alone want to be loved...
...God spends a lot of time in Coventry, wondering what He did to deserve the punishment...
...That is probably a mystery I should leave to greater minds than mine—but I'd like to take a stab at an answer...
...Ten years after I became a practicing Catholic, nine years after I was baptized, the man whom I had married during that time, and who was no mean theologian, said to me one day: "Do you know you've been practicing Judaism in the Church for ten years...
...I think this was why...
...To my mind, that is the one way God is like us: Just like us, He wants to be loved...
...And so, well into the Sixth Day, He risked making an even more complicated creation: He made man...
...Hard...
...Maybe home isn't always the most comfortable place to be, but it's where I belong...
...I always knew the thing God did best was love...
...But they were totally non-observant Jews and, to the best of my knowledge, non-believers...
...We are all God has...
...That this is where He wants me to be...
...He got bolder: He made more distinctions, more complicated creations...
...I see a number of miracles in the creation story in Genesis...
...And truly, that fascinates me...
...I want to make very clear that I think God exists whether or not we care that He does, whether or not we pay any attention to Him at all...
...In both senses...
...I was so afraid—foolishly, as it turned out—that I might have to become less of a Jew than I was...
...Or that one man's decency swayed God—caused the Ultimate Causer to relent, to give us another, finally irrevocable, shot at living in His image...
...For, in the end, what else are miracles but the flights of imagination and courage we do occasionally manage to take...
...I have been thinking rather a lot lately about miracles...
...Hard as it was for me to decide to be baptized, being a Catholic was far easier for me than being a practicing Jew would have been...
...But if in the old days God settled for faith, now He demands more from us before He makes a miracle...
...I think He got sick and tired of that arrangement...
...Why does it work this way...
...And there was light...
...And now, think: Which miracle in Bereshit is the greater: That the Lord God could make, the world in six days, however long those six days were...
...He doesn't live...
...In any good working partnership, the ratio varies according to the circumstances, according to what's needed just then...
...The miracles in the Bible, the miracles all around us...
...I think that these days God can't make miracles without us...
...I am talking from experience...
...So He did abracadabra again...
...But without us, He only exists...
...Many people ask if God cares what becomes of us or His world any more, if ever He did...
...What I do know is that God made the world...
...And I for one don't blame Him...
...Miracles aren't tricks...
...It's a miracle that God's still in the miracle business, but He is!'Any time a miracle needs making, and we notice, and we're willing to do our part, God does His...
...Yet I know more...
...My hope all my days...
...But how— without flying lessons...
...Therefore, it seems to me that mankind's step was not the bigger one—Armstrong's was...
...Abracadabra...
...Besides, it was a context in which many lived alone...
...I took that instructions course three times over, fighting what was happening to me all the way...
...A really beautiful turn of phrase, that...
...And it occurs to me that one reason might be that we don't see miracles—as miracles...
...I was told, and I accepted, that faith was a gift...
...We are what He has to work with...
...But always there's this division of labor...
...Who are miracle-blind...
...The kind of world we make—that's the only world God has to be Lord of...
...Can we find it within ourselves to care enough about God to make a world which will make Him glad He let Noah change His mind...
...This is the text of her Bat Mitzvah speech, given at Congregation B'nai Keshet (Montclair, New Jersey) in October 1981...
...Being a Catholic was for me a God-loving, God-learning experience...
...By the end of about ten weeks, I had to face the fact that I wouldn't have missed one of those classes for anything...
...I view the sophisticated hardware as a miraculous accomplishment, and the cumulative knowledge that went into NASA's planning as a kind of corporate miracle...
...Before the ceremony on the day of my baptism, I went to the altar rail and knelt and prayed that God would let me know someday why He wanted me to do this...
...To make a miracle requires that we be aware of the possibility, for starters, that we believe we have what it takes...
...We are able to make miracles...
...In any case, it was suggested to me by the priest who taught the class that if I wanted to, I could say what is called "The Agnostic's Prayer...
...I thought about that...
...I owe it to Him and to you to tell you a little about how it happened and why I see it as a miracle...
...But the best miracle I see belongs to Neil Armstrong...
...I do believe that I would not be reading from the Torah today had I not become a Catholic then...
...Now I know that the thing He does next-best is—wait...
...A miracle...
...He wants us—and needs us—today, every day, to make the world...
...And God saw that it was good...
...I'm here...
...I think He must be pretty disappointed...
...A miracle happens when faith makes someone willing to take the risk...
...And that might lead us to consider something even more precarious, not to say uncomfortable: making miracles ourselves...
...And not in the least surprising to me, I have discovered something He's much much better at than I am...
...I sat down, rather hard, in her office and, trembling with excitement, I said, "I have something to tell you...
...And how He always answers ours, but we seldom answer His...
...We have only to pay attention to the last sentence in the Torah portion: But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord (Gen...
...We never stop to think that one of God's days might be a physicist's million millenia...
...Not making music, that's where...
...When I was out of school a few years, a friend with whom I worked began to attend a class in Catholic instructions...
...Another reason we don't see the miracles around us, it seems to me, is that we think of a miracle as a spiritual magic trick...
...I never took a religion course...
...I for one do not think it a lowly station to be God's instrument...
...Being men as He is God: being open...
...In Judaism I have a home, my ancestral home...
...That God wanted man—needed man—and made him...
...In an age when there is a three-year-old in this world named Louise Brown—we don't believe in miracles...
...After all, where would Horowitz be without a piano...
...It requires that we pay attention, that we spot where a miracle might be needed...
...being committed to man...
...Miracles are God's shtick...
...I wasn't, among them, so different...
...But however long those six days were, still we don't believe it happened that way...
...For a long time, when He didn't get help, He made do: He did it alone...
...And this was in papers for history or English courses, not religion courses...
...With the capacity to make miracles...
...A loneliness...
...Magic cons us...
...Man, because he is in God's image, because he can create, is a double miracle: a miracle with the gift to make miracles...
...And we all know what a lousy life it is merely to exist...
...But it said something that had never occurred to me...
...Think of it...
...We don't want to get involved in anything as highfalutin as making miracles...
...It seems to me it's a lonely business altogether, being God...
...If my phone never rang, I'd be a pretty unhappy lady...
...Finally, convinced that God wanted me to be baptized, I decided to go through with it...
...In Bereshit, today's Torah portion, we read that God made the Toby Stein is the author of All the Time There Is and Getting Together...
...Our capacity to think, to feel another's pain, to imagine...
...My prayer is answered...
...He dropped a few hints over the years, but I never really did find out why...
...As we need Him, today, every day, to make us holy...
...Worse, I faced that I wanted to believe in God...
...That God can conjure up a world in one of His weeks or that He can be moved by the goodness of a single human being...
...There is no other way to say this: I think I know how God may feel...
...As he saw that what He had begun was "good," He developed faith in what He was doing...
...Still, I have no doubt that God decided it was time...
...Let's go back to the miracle within the miracle of man's creation: the uniqueness of man...
...To me, a miracle is any event in which faith plays a part...
...Right...
...Which is all I need to know...
...Silence...
...What I mean is this: God made the world, but we make the world...
...Sure he had faith in the hardware and the know-how, but also, in something beyond that...
...I realize—I really do—that to some people what I am saying isn't very real...
...And how many more there could be...
...That day, that February second, when I got back to my office, I immediately sought out the friend on whose behalf I'd started going to the instructions classes...
...In an age when Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem to seek peace—we don't believe in miracles...
...With the capacity to create...
...Simple, but not, of course, easy...
...Someone—somebody out there—say something...
...and I was sure that it would not be given me...
...But that doesn't mean I'd be happy if no one paid any attention to my existence...
...Eleven days after I started saying the prayer, I was walking along Ninety-Seventh Street, between Madison and Fifth, when I heard a voice...
...Ever since I was, at eighteen, left homeless, I have wanted a home—which has nothing to do with a house...
...Not back home, because I was never here before, but home the long way round...
...I imagine it's not much fun making miracles for people who have lost their sense of awe...
...Because this miracle of my being called to the Torah today, God and I have made together...
...I have been wondering why we don't make more...
...To share God's gift of creativity...
...He couldn't have done it without me...
...I was born to Jewish parents—very Jewish parents...
...It seems to me that when we and God make miracles together, it works pretty much the same way: Sometimes we do a little more, sometimes He does a little more...
...But then what partnership is fifty-fifty all the time...
...Besides, even He hasn't been so good at it lately, has He...
...How do I presume to say all this...
...But one man's goodness touched God, moved Him—changed God's mind...
...There is always a point where knowledge ends— an edge to what we know—beyond which there is darkness...
...Because it hasn't really worked out for Him...
...No, He hasn't...
...Downright no-buts-about-it cooperation...
...Which is, obviously, one way you get to believe in a personal God...
...Quite personally...
...You can't make a miracle by walking through the Yellow Pages...
Vol. 7 • March 1982 • No. 3
