Look Up and Count the Stars

The Torah says: “He took him outside and said, ‘Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ And He said to him, ‘So shall your children be.’” Who Deserves a Miracle? There is a question everyone asks himself, even if he never puts it into words: Who deserves a miracle? Is it for the great ones, the righteous, the special people who have earned it? Is it for those who have already finished the job and already proved they are worthy? Most people wait. They wait for the impossible to become possible. They wait for the road to become clear all the way to the end. They wait until they feel strong enough. When that doesn’t happen, they put things aside and give up. And really, how could they not? By definition, the impossible cannot become possible. But here lies a basic mistake in how we understand a miracle. The Miracle Waits for You to Move A miracle does not wait for certainty. It waits for movement. A miracle does not necessarily belong to the great and the worthy. It belongs to whoever is ready to take the first step. He takes it even when the end is nowhere in sight. He takes it even when simple math says there is no chance. To understand this, we need to open the verse in the Torah’s story of Abraham and look carefully at exactly what it says. “Count the Stars” Hashem takes Abram, later named Abraham, outside. He tells him: “Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then He says: “So shall your children be.” Rashi, the classic Bible commentator, explains the words “if you are able to count them” to mean: you will not be able. The task is impossible from the start. This raises a simple and deep question. Why did Hashem tell Abraham to count, if He knew Abraham could never finish? What is the point of an instruction that can never be carried out? But that is exactly the point. The instruction was not to finish counting. The instruction was to begin. Hashem did not ask Abraham for success. He asked him for movement. “Count, please” means: start counting. And Hashem’s answer did not wait until the counting was done. It came right away: “So shall your children be.” It was a blessing without limit, given in return for one small act of beginning. This is what the Zohar, the classic book of Jewish mysticism, calls an awakening from below that brings an awakening from above. The small human act, the willingness to point at the first star, is the key that opens the flow of blessing from above. Your Job Is Only to Begin Few things freeze a Jew like the big calculation. A young married man sits down and wants to study. He sees the whole Talmud in front of him: so many volumes, so many pages, so many years. He wants to pray, and he sees how much focus and feeling he is missing. He wants to support his family with dignity, and he sees the bills for the coming months. When you look at that whole calculation at once, it freezes you. But the Torah does not demand that you finish. It demands that you begin. The Talmud tells of Nachshon son of Aminadav. The Jewish people stood at the edge of the deep waters of the Red Sea, and he jumped in. He did not know the sea would split. He did not wait for certainty. He made one movement of faith, and that act is what split the sea. We see the same thing in the miracle of the prophet Elisha and the jar of oil. The blessing kept flowing and filling, as long as there were empty jars to receive it. The moment the jars ran out, the oil stopped. The limit was not in the blessing from above. The limit was in how many jars the person had prepared below. Hashem said to the Jewish people: “Open for Me an opening as small as the eye of a needle, and I will open for you an opening as wide as a great hall.” A tiny opening, the size of a needle’s eye, one movement from a person, and Hashem opens gates of blessing in return. This is a law. It is not luck, and it is not a one-time miracle. It is a law of how heaven and earth relate. A person makes a vessel, and the blessing fills it. As Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, teaches: what we do makes a home for Hashem in this lower world, and this is the whole reason a person is in the world.