God of the Disappearing Gaps

Why Orthodox Storytelling Needs a New Strategy

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Der Yiddisher

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David Ben-Gurion famously said, “any Jew who doesn’t believe in miracles isn’t a realist.”

The Orthodox Jewish world took the line and ran with it. Miracles have long become a staple in our homes, speeches, and viral WhatsApp statuses: a Sefer Torah pulled unscathed from the inferno. A community spared in a terror attack because they kept Shabbat. A man who avoided being crushed in the Twin Towers because he was the tenth at a Shacharit minyan.¹

These stories travel fast. They’re gripping, emotionally satisfying², and affirm what we desperately want to believe: that Torah observance is rewarded not just spiritually, but visibly, immediately, and dramatically³. That God will turn the world upside down to “show up” for the faithful.

But what happens when He doesn’t?

What happens when a madman guns through a full Beit Midrash? When a Bnei Brak resident is killed by an Iranian missile? When the most devout were gassed in the Holocaust? That’s when this framework starts to tremble and the explanations grow creative: Maybe they had a hidden sin. Maybe their death was a kaparah for the generation. Maybe we just don’t understand.

That last one begins to get warmer.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: keeping the Torah doesn’t guarantee a preferential or pain-free life. If anything, as Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik argues, true religious commitment brings the opposite: loneliness, struggle, and the burden of being summoned⁴. And if your belief hinges on extraordinary interventions, if you require witnessing miracles to sustain your relationship, you’ve already shrunk God to something barely divine.

This critique isn’t new⁵. Baruch Spinoza argued that if God needs to intervene to tweak nature’s course, then He built a flawed universe to begin with⁶. David Hume went further: no testimony, he said, could override the weight of consistent natural law⁷. And in their way, they were right. If the universe is truly God’s creation, why would breaking its rules be the clearest sign of His presence? Isn’t that backwards?

The problem isn’t miracle stories. It’s that they’ve become our only working theology of divine involvement. We’ve made God a “god of the gaps⁸,” a being invoked only where explanation fails.

And so we raise generations who cannot find God in breath, in photosynthesis, nor in Halakha. We teach wonder only through shock, never through reverence.

That’s not just childish. It flirts with heresy.

Because it implies God exists only where reason breaks down. That as science advances, faith must retreat. That each natural explanation pushes God further out of reach.

But Torah’s vision is older and deeper. Kol haneshama tehallel Kah⁹-“every soul,” or perhaps more literally, every breath, praises God. Not just the blackout. Not just the burning bush.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel¹⁰ called this radical amazement, the spiritual discipline of greeting the ordinary with the reverence usually reserved for the extraordinary¹¹. A sunrise. A child’s heartbeat. For Heschel, the miraculous was not the violation of nature’s laws, but the revelation that those laws are already saturated with meaning.

When the world is already holy, faith has no quarrel with science. It can draft science into the service of midrash and become an expanding commentary on divine intelligence.¹²

This isn’t just an idea, it’s built into how we live. Modeh Ani is the first thing we say when we wake up. Asher Yatzar thanks God for a working body. We say a hundred blessings a day, stopping to appreciate what we eat, what we see, and what we experience. Kiddush makes a drink into something sacred. Birkat Hamazon turns a meal into a moment of thanks. Halakha trains us to notice what we’d otherwise miss.

The payoff? You no longer need a ‘suspension’ of nature to feel close to God.¹³

Will we stop sharing miracle stories? Probably not. But the moral I tack on now is different: sometimes the shelf holds, sometimes it doesn’t. God is present in both. A faith that can bless a pulse-ox reading with the same reverence as the Exodus is a faith resilient enough for the ever-shrinking margins of mystery.

So tomorrow morning, before you scroll for the next viral nes, do something more subversive. Open your eyes. Breathe. Welcome to the biggest miracle you’ll encounter all day: the one you’re already living inside.

1. These get crazier, like the report that a Hamas militant claimed a “scary old man” stopped them from entering Netivot; when shown a picture of Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira (Baba Sali), he reportedly said, “He looked just like that.”

2. See concepts such as “collective effervescence” or “just-world hypothesis” for frameworks that help explain the psychological and communal function of such stories.

3. There is an argument in the Talmud whether or not mitzvot get rewarded in this world at all:

“Rabbi Ya’akov, who says: There is no reward for performance of a mitzva in this world. As it is taught in a baraita that Rabbi Yaakov says: There is not a single mitzva written in the Torah whose reward is stated alongside it, which is not dependent on the resurrection of the dead…” - Kiddushin 39b

Additionally, Rabbi Avrohom Yeshaya Karelitz (Chazon Ish) challenges the simplistic (or eisegetic) reading of the Talmud that “those engaged in a mitzva-related mission do not come to harm” (Yoma 11a; Kiddushin 39b; Chullin 142a). He writes that this view of faith is incorrect. Rather, trust means recognizing that there are no coincidences in the world, and that whatever occurs under the sun is a function of divine decree. - HaEmunah VeHaBitachon, ch. 2

4. Rabbi Joseph Ber Soloveitchik, Halachik Man (1983). He states further that the expectation that religious life should be simple or miraculously safeguarded is an idea “embedded in the most ancient strata of Christianity”. Sourced by

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5. A famous piece from Maimonides underscores this. “The Israelites did not believe in Moshe because of the miracles he performed… Rather, they believed in him only after the revelation at Sinai.” - Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah 8:1

6. Benedictus de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (1670)

7. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)

8. This is a broad religious fallacy that God explains whatever science can't explain

9. Psalms, Chapter 150

10. Descendant of both Dov Ber of Mezeritch (Maggid of Mezritch), and Levi Isaac of Berdichev (the Berdichever), as reflected here and throughout his writings.

11. Abraham Joshua Heschel, God In Search of Man (1956)

12. This is the basis of The Great Partnership (2011) by Rabbi Jonathon Sacks

13. Considering the exponential rise of AI and accelerating advances in neuroscience, biology, and cosmology, those gaps are closing fast. The mysteries we once called miraculous are becoming models and algorithms. If your faith depends on mystery, what happens when there’s nothing left to explain?