“As A Man Carries His Son”

In Devarim, this week’s parsha, it says:

“in the wilderness, as you have seen…Hashem, your G-d, carried you the way a man carries his son,

Yet in this matter, you do not trust Hashem, your G-d,

Who has been going ahead of you on the road to seek for you a place to encamp; with the fire at night to show you the way for you to go on, and with the cloud by day. (Koren Translation)”

It’s tempting to feel annoyed at the people and say, “after all the miracles they witnessed in Egypt and in the desert, how could they doubt Hashem?”

By our standards, it may seem incredible that the people would question the Divine mandate after the miraculous Well of Miriam, the pillar of cloud, and the fire followed them through the desert.

But today, we have miracles too. We have free mobile apps that contain essentially the entire Torah, and hebrewbooks.org which has even more Torah. We no longer practice bloodletting, because we realized it’s not helpful. We have low infant mortality compared to our ancestors. We understand things about the universe that they could never comprehend.

Hashem loves us just as much as He loved Moshe Rabbeinu and the people of his time. But the character and appearance of the miracles are different. It takes imagination to recognize that the miracles are still all around us, in different forms. Learning and mitzvot are the greatest miracles.

In the words of Rav Moshe Wolfson ztz”l, the greatest joy we can have is prayer. To be able to communicate directly—what greater honor could a person have?