Vayeira’s haftara involves a woman desperate for money. Her deceased husband had amassed debt saving hundreds of lives, and now her sons are under threat of enslavement unless she can pay her creditor. She seeks out the prophet Elisha for help and he says to her, 

“What can I do for you? – Tell me, what do you have in the house?” She answered, “Your maidservant has nothing in the house except for a jug of oil.”

He said, “Go borrow vessels for yourself from outside – from all your neighbors – empty vessels; do not be sparing [get as many as you can]. Then go in and shut the doors behind you and behind your children; pour into all these vessels and remove each full one. [Meaning: don’t move from empty jug to empty jug, but bring each empty jug to you. God will make the original jug like a spring, and a spring does not move about.] ” (2 Kings 4:2-4)

Sure enough, the jug that only had so little oil filled every empty vessel they could find. She’s able to sell the oil and repay the debt. But why did Elisha start this whole interaction with, “What do you have in your house?” If God was going to do a miracle for her, why didn’t He have her find buried treasure in her yard? Why couldn’t diamonds have magically appeared on her dinner table? Why does the miracle seem to need to come from something she already has? 

Miracles are a funny thing. Yes, Hashem can do open miracles as if they were magic. But He prefers not to run the world that way. If Hashem fixed all our problems, we’d never learn to make the changes our lives and our world require. That is only accomplished via our efforts and our sacrifices. Now, Hashem is helping us every step of the way; making miracles happen behind the curtain, so to speak. But He wants it to appear that it is happening via the natural order. Even for big miracles there always needs to be some element of doubt, some possible rational explanation, so as not to rob us of freewill. So Elisha specifically tells the woman to close the door to her home. 

In addition to miracles needing to be hidden, Hashem really avoids miracles that are “something from nothing” (in Hebrew yeish m’ayin). When Hashem created the world, that was yeish m’ayin. But since then the universe runs on the scientific principle of no matter or energy can ever be created or destroyed, only converted. So miracles are simply conversions or formations; “something from something” (yeish m’yeish).

There’s an interesting custom when it comes to grace after meals (bentching.) During the after meal blessings, you’re supposed to make sure to leave some bread on the table, opposed to clearing all the food away. During the bentching, there are prayers for livelihood, sustenance, health, etc. Some believe these blessings need a place to go to be actualized. That way the food presently there can be a vessel to bring in more blessing. But if there’s nothing there?  Well, any number times zero is going to be zero. So for the woman and her jug of oil, it is easier for the miracle to come to her using what she already has. 

This is an important notion to consider. When it comes to failures and frustrations, for many of us there is an impulse to wipe the slate clean, abandon what you’ve worked for, and go do something else. How many times have we heard, “If so-and-so candidate wins the election, I’m leaving the country?” How many times have we thought about quitting our job and finding something new? I can’t tell you how many scripts I’ve stopped writing because it became too hard to finish and instead started on a new idea, only for it to go the same way.

The word bracha comes from the Hebrew root bet, reish, chaf. The numerical values in gematria are bet – 2, chaf – 20, reish – 200. So the root adds up to 222. It’s as if, with each letter, blessing doesn’t just double, it multiplies by 10. The nature of blessing is that it grows, but it has to start from something. Certainly, there are times when you need to change direction or walk away from an endeavor. The blessing can run out. But if we’re walking away simply because we’re frustrated or don’t want to do the hard work to overcome an obstacle, well what’s to stop us from hitting the same obstacles on the next opportunity? Instead, we should look at what we have and focus on finding the blessing we can build upon. 

Rebbi Nachman of Breslov wrote, “If you believe it is possible to destroy, then you can believe it is possible to fix.” Or in the words of Neil Degrasse Tyson, regarding terraforming a new planet because Earth has been too damaged by human influence, “It seems to me, if we can turn Mars from what it is today into Earth, then we can turn Earth back into Earth.”

This post was inspired by The Toras Chaim Podcast: Vayeira – Back to Life.