The largest cruise ship in the world today is Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas. It stretches an incredible 365 meters long and can carry up to 7,600 passengers. Despite its size, it rarely spends more than a few days at sea before docking for passengers to disembark and to restock supplies.
The Icon of the Seas is more than twice the length of Noach’s Ark, and both taller and wider. Yet the Ark contained at least two of every animal and bird species in the world—thousands of creatures, from elephants and hippopotamuses to lions, tigers, and bears (oh my!). It also had to hold enough food to sustain all those animals, plus Noach and his family, for over a year. How could all of that possibly fit inside the Ark?
The answer is simple: it was a miracle.
The Ark was approximately 200 meters long and less than 35 meters wide—far too small to contain everything it needed to. So if Hashem was going to perform a miracle anyway to save Noach, his family, and all the animals, why bother building the Ark at all? Hashem could have saved them in any number of miraculous ways—or at least instructed Noach to build a smaller boat. Why make Noach go through all that effort to build a massive structure that, in the end, couldn’t fit everyone?
Rabbi Yechezkel Levenstein explains that when Hashem performs miracles, He minimizes them as much as possible, using the natural world as His vehicle. This allows people to maintain their bechirah, their free will—to be able to say, “Maybe it wasn’t a miracle after all.” In the case of the Ark, although it was clearly miraculous that everything fit inside, the size of the Ark still allowed for some level of plausibility. A person could tell himself, “Well, it was a pretty big boat.”
This idea applies to our daily lives as well. We see the world functioning in a consistent way and think it’s simply “nature.” Plant a seed, and a tree grows. Sow wheat, and you can make bread. We tend to think of miracles as things like the manna that fell from heaven for the Jewish people in the desert. But in truth, the fact that a seed can produce a living plant is no less miraculous than the manna.
The challenge is to recognize that what we call “nature” is really just Hashem’s miracles in disguise.
When we learn to see the miraculous within the natural, our appreciation of Hashem deepens, and our gratitude grows. Because truly—that is a miracle too.
Good Shabbos,
Rabbi Shaps and the JET Team
