Avot297

2:
When we read the Torah we cannot help but be struck by the fact that many a time and oft God seems to interfere in the normal workings of nature, the God causes something so unusual to occur that we call this occurrence a miracle. The American Heritage Dictionary defines a miracle thus:

3:
The idea that God interrupts the ordinary workings of nature was very problematic for the sages. The sages saw the glory of God manifested in the unchanging laws of nature. For them, God created the world; God determined the laws and regulations by which the world functions and if these laws are interrupted in some arbitrary manner it would seem to diminish God's greatness and God's omnipotence. And yet, the sages had to recognize that the Torah is full of miracles. Some of them are momentous and destiny-changing; some of them appear to the philosophic mind to be bordering on the ridiculous – if they do not pass that borderline.

4:
So the sages had to make the miraculous element in the Torah be of such a nature that its occurrence would not jeopardize God's status in their religious philosophy as the ultimate arbiter of the laws of the physical universe. We might perhaps say that there were only two events that the sages recognized as miracles in the commonly accepted meaning of the word: events that appear inexplicable by the laws of nature and must be held to be an arbitrary act of God. The first is the passage of the Israelites through the Red Sea [Exodus 14:21-29]; the second is, of course, the theophany at Sinai [Exodus 19-20]. Compared with those momentous events what is the sage to do with donkeys that talk and argue with their rider [Numbers 22:21-34]? Our present mishnah represents an attempt by the sages to solve this dilemma.

5:
Whether or not the sages accepted the creation story as told in the first chapter of the Torah as historical fact or philosophical midrash is immaterial; for in all their relationship to the 'Account of the Creation' they accept the biblical format, use it and build on it. Thus the universe was created by God in six days. A corollary of this dictum is the fact that the world as we know it today did not come into existence until the very last seconds of the 'Friday' of creation, just before the onset of the very first Shabbat. (For Shabbat represents the end of the creative process and the beginning of the regular functioning of the world of nature.)

6:
In our present mishnah the sages see all those troublesome quirks of nature which we call miracles as being 'built in' to the fabric of creation at the very last minute. We may, perhaps, liken God's creative work to a computer programme: once the programme is complete it should function with complete regularity according to all the eventualities that the programmer has foreseen. Thus, what appear to us to be anomalies in nature were, for the sages, eventualities whose need was foreseen by the Creator, built in to the fabric of the universe "on Erev Shabbat at twilight" – at the very last moment of creation before all creation came to an end

To be continued.

At the request of many I have begin to publish some of the Divrei Torah (sermons) that I gave in the Torat Hayyim Congregation in Herzliyya over the past two decades, until I recently retired from that rabbinate. The Divrei Torah are, of course, in Hebrew only. At the moment there is in the archive a Dvar Torah
for Rosh ha-Shanah; a Dvar Torah for Yom Kippur should be added in the next couple of days. Here is the link to the Dvar Torah Archive (in Hebrew).