Why the First Day of Hanukkah Is a Miracle

There are at least a thousand things in the Torah that people don’t think of as “real.” The splitting of the Red Sea. A talking donkey. Manna falling from the firmament. Angels who look and act like human beings. A ladder to heaven. Babies born to elderly couples. An entire universe created in six days, with a weary God resting on the seventh.

I know what reality is, they say. It’s me sitting here, typing out words on my computer, looking out the window where I can see our lawn, now as verdant as an Irish meadow. Last week it was nothing but brown, dead grass. Then came a massive rainfall, almost five straight days, and the grass seeds that our gardener spread across the yard suddenly took hold. Everything sprang into life. Three straight days of sunshine helped too. All of that is normal, undeniably so. Nothing like the stuff in the Torah.

Could it be that our perception of grass as “real” comes from the way repetition has inured us to its sheer prevalence, creating a dulling of my imagination?

What if we had never seen grass growing before? What if there had only been pebbles? Would we be shocked at seeing this magical green carpet we call grass? I think I would. I think we all would.

What if one morning the sky went from jet-black to a blaze of gold just that single time, would our casual appraisal of the sun rising turn to radical amazement?

How about the sun? A ball of fire that rises only in the east, hangs above us each day to brighten and warm the world, and sets only in the west. What if this had happened only once? If one morning the sky went from jet-black to a blaze of gold just that single time, would our casual appraisal turn to radical amazement?

It would also bring with it a great sense of fear, of excitement, and, with its intense beauty, untold pleasure.

Reclaiming Astonishment

Is the sun real? Is our sentience real? Is grass truly nothing to be excited about? Would we dismiss their supposed normalcy, their unquestioned reality, so easily if we were seeing and feeling them for the first time?

How about the idea that a fully formed human being exits a human body after a predictable nine months in the womb? How do we so easily compartmentalize the birth and life of human beings into the category of known, understood, normal—and then, off we go? How did birth, of all things, end up in nearly the same mental file as “traffic” and “Sunday morning bagels”?

Have we lost something essential in having seen these things so many times that we have failed to see the obvious? Have we trained ourselves out of wonder?

Maybe the real problem isn’t that the Torah is full of unreal stories and the lawn is full of real grass. Maybe it’s that once something repeats often enough, we exile it from the realm of the miraculous and demote it to “just the way things are.” Grass, having appeared once, would shatter our minds. The sky, lit once, would blow our minds. The first birth would draw us to our knees. But seen a thousand times, or even a half dozen, they become scenery.

Hanukkah and the Miracle of the Ordinary

There aren’t eight days of Hanukkah because the miracle lasted eight days—it only lasted seven. Once oil burns, that first day is already taken for granted. We expect flame when we light something. But the rabbis insisted that the very first day was miraculous too. Not the extension of the oil, not the spectacle, but the ordinary itself—fire responding to wick, sustaining light, obeying laws that are themselves miraculous. The miracle begins even before it stretches into the unexpected; it begins the moment flame appears at all.

The natural world itself is the miracle, albeit one we are used to.

In that light, the Torah begins to look a little different. Maybe it is not trying to provide a journalist’s account of physics-defying events. Maybe it is attempting to describe the world as it actually is: inexplicable at its core. The larger point isn’t so much about miracles. It’s understanding that the natural world itself is the miracle.

Science, physics, mathematics, artificial intelligence, as useful and astonishing as they are, have not come close to explaining the nature of reality, the fundamentals of consciousness, or the state of being. They have given us powerful names and models, precise measurements, and dazzling predictions. They have shown us how certain processes unfold. But they have not told us, with any finality, what existence is, why it matters, or what it asks of us.

If we see grass only as a product of biology and chemistry—things which give us hints about its properties, its growth, its reproductive abilities—we may have missed something profound: a sense of wonder about the world. We may not be able to escape from a purely rote apprehension of the vast forms and phenomena of the universe, and in our own inner-universe: the mind. By narrowing the frame to what can be measured, we risk cutting ourselves off from what can only be marveled at. By insisting that “real” means “fully explained,” we shrink reality to fit the size of our explanations.

AI and the Triumph of the Predictable

We are building machines whose entire purpose is to make everything far more accessible, and therefore, more commonplace.

And just as we are forgetting how to be astonished, we are building machines whose entire purpose is to make everything far more accessible, and therefore, more commonplace. Artificial intelligence systems that can predict what we will say, what we will buy, what we will fear, what and who we will trust—before we are even conscious of deciding. They scan our words, our patterns, our hesitations. They answer our questions. They finish our sentences.

In one sense, they are miracles of a kind. In another sense, they are the final triumph of mystery-reducing repetition. If grass is “just biology,” the sun is “just astrophysics,” and a human life is “just chemistry plus time,” then AI becomes “just computation.” The world grows more manageable and less enigmatic at the same time. Everything can be modeled, forecast, optimized—and nothing is quite allowed to be holy.

Striving for Truth

The Torah has a word for truth—emet—that I’ve begun to hear differently. It isn’t a narrow fact-check, a little green badge announcing “accurate.” It suggests something more like the reliability of an entire story, from beginning to end: aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, to mem, the middle, to taf, the last letter. Emet is not simply, “Did this happen?” It is, “What kind of world are we living in? Can it be trusted? Is there a deep coherence beneath all this seeming chaos?” And if so, might we go so far as to think of God as that coherence?

Our sciences and our machines will go on naming things. They will get better and better at telling us how. Emet, truth, asks why. Why this grass? Why this sun? Why this child, this life, this love, this death? Why this brief, flickering consciousness that is uniquely mine —and not yours? Having been born, what then, is our role?

Imagine, for a moment, that we succeed at some of the things our age keeps promising. We cure many of the dread diseases. We feed far more people. We house them. We keep them safer than any generation before. Our machines help us coordinate all of this. The bluntest edges of existence are softened.

If, in such a world, we still walk past the grass without seeing it, still watch the sunrise without feeling anything, still treat our daily affairs as items on a calendar, then all our explanations and successes will indeed have accomplished a great deal. They will ease suffering, feed the hungry, cure illness, and shelter those who need shelter. But they will not, by themselves, bring us any closer to a more profound sense of life, a feeling of meaning and purpose that makes living worthwhile. Without that, even our greatest achievements may ring hollow. We will have information without emet.

We are standing at a threshold. The changes coming toward us—through medicine, through technology, through AI—are far beyond what even just a few years ago we could have imagined. They are not decades away; in historical terms, they are moments away. We may soon live in a world that is, paradoxically and by many measures, more controlled, more predictable, more “ordinary” than any that came before it.

The question is what we will bring with us across that threshold: a further numbing of our sense of mystery, a reflex to call the Torah fiction and the lawn reality and leave it at that—or a willingness to see that everything we have ever called ordinary is, in fact, extraordinary.

Curing disease, ending hunger, providing shelter and safety, building astonishing machines—these may be the prelude. Emet is something else. It has to do with the quality of our insight, with whether we allow ourselves to recognize that grass and Red Seas and newborns and algorithms all hang on a thread we did not create. If we can recover even a homeopathic dose of that awareness, then perhaps the world we are hurtling toward will not only function better, it might also feel as if we had reclaimed some of the mystery and beauty that surrounded us when we were young.

And in that mystery, in that beauty, lies everything.