From the heart of Jerusalem: Believing is seeing

I used to be troubled a lot by the question of why doesn’t G-d reveal Himself to us. If He wants our service, why doesn’t He demand faith through awe-inspiring demonstration and undeniable evidence?

The response I was given time and again was essentially that such a demonstration would make observance too easy. G-d intentionally withholds evidence of His power as a test to the struggling Jew, the purpose being that through confronting the test and taking the road of blind faith, the believer is ultimately fortified and his Judaism enriched.

But the obvious logical gap in this argument involves the Jew who struggles and falls into a world of G-dlessness. It makes little sense that a loving and compassionate G-d would toughen one Jew’s faith at the expense of another’s entire world of Judaism. A test may enhance Judaism for a narrow group but it drives the bulk of Jews away from the tradition altogether.

So the question remains: Why doesn’t G-d reveal Himself through supernatural occurrences? When discussing G-d, one must assume Him to be omnipotent; the concept of supernatural intervention is actually inconceivable. This is because from our modern perspective any “supernatural” event would cease to defy nature and instead redefine it. At the end of the day, if you define “nature” as that which exists and occurs, then any existence or occurrence only becomes incorporated into next year’s science textbook. It is impossible to introduce the supernatural into a world that exists only on the natural plane while preserving any form of separation between the two.

In 1927, Werner Heisenberg demonstrated that it is impossible to precisely identify an electron’s position and velocity simultaneously as it moves about the atom. Heisenberg proved (using scientific method) that man’s knowledge is doomed to incompletion. Consequently, seeing as man will never know the full scope of science, man will never be able to differentiate the mundane from the miraculous.