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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/40633/full/40633/miracles-can-happen-on-chanukah-and-every-day-of-the-year/ <br /><br /> <b>Miracles can happen on Chanukah — and every day of the year</b> <br /> Wednesday, November 25, 2009 | by dan pine <br /><br /><p>Over the eight crazy nights of Chanukah, Jewish kids everywhere repeat the phrase preserved in the dreidel’s four-sided acronym: A great miracle happened there. For me, the great Chanukah miracle happened here in California, one December afternoon in 1961.</p> <p><img alt="dan pine" class="left" height="200" src="http://jweekly.com/images/uploads/column_pics/column/dan pine.jpg" title="dan pine" width="126" />I was 6, a precocious motor-mouth of a boy. Sitting beside my father as he clacked away at his typewriter, I busied myself cutting out a Star of David for the holiday, working  with a heavy pair of scissors.</p> <p>At one point the scissors jammed in the thick cardboard. The smart thing would have been to ask my dad for help. Instead, I did the dumb thing, trying to force them through with all my 6-year-old might.</p> <p>In an instant, the scissors busted through and up, ripping into my left eye.</p> <p>I remember a flowing sheen of red and my father leaping out of his chair. I remember running — or was I carried? — into the bathroom down the hall. My mother pounded her fists on her head, my Yiddishe grandma gripped her walker and screamed.</p> <p>Because I was in no pain, I downplayed the injury, trying to reassure my parents, freaked out seeing their baby covered in blood. As my father gunned our old Rambler station wagon to the doctor’s office, I remember picking up a newspaper and reading it out loud. “I’m OK, Daddy,’ I said. “See? I can read.”</p> <p>My memories of the subsequent days and weeks are hazy. I had surgery, had both eyes sewn shut and heavily bandaged. Virtually blind, I stayed home from school for what seemed like ages, learning to get around the house by feeling my way along the walls.</p> <p>I got used to the dark.</p> <p>And then, in time, the bandages came off and my eyes — and my vision — were fine. One hundred percent fine.</p> <p>My miracle? The scissors never touched the eyeball. Instead the blade went up the inside part of the lid. I missed my eye by an eyelash. Literally.</p> <p>Of course, I use the word “miracle” advisedly. I don’t really believe in miracles, if by the term one means God with an outstretched arm intervenes in physical events on Earth.</p> <p>When Pope John Paul II was shot in Rome back in 1981, some claimed it a miracle that the bullet missed his heart, that God steered the bullet an inch to the left, saving the pontiff’s life.</p> <p>One person responded by asking why then didn’t God simply move the bullet two feet to the left?</p> <p>It’s a good question, and it made me laugh when I read it. But I don’t want to indulge in cynicism. Better to adjust my sense of what constitutes the miraculous. Let’s define it as a good result that beats overwhelming odds.</p> <p>Given the chaos of physics, the scissors should have poked my eye out.</p> <p>I don’t want to go all Hallmark card here, and I’m certainly no paragon of gratitude, but once in a while I find myself appreciating the minor miracles of daily life.</p> <p>At 54, my body still works well. No replaced parts, no engine overhauls yet needed. Don’t laugh, but sometimes I marvel that my toes can actually wiggle on mental command. Try it. It’s amazing.</p> <p>Though my parents are deceased, virtually every other person I have ever cherished in my life is still alive and well and reasonably happy.</p> <p>And that’s just me. What about the billions of acts of human kindness that take place every day, even in the face of chronic cruelty and disinterest?</p> <p>How about the greatest human miracle of all: We are beings, made of atoms forged in the fires of dying stars, aware that we are starstuff. I can’t begin to calculate the odds against that.</p> <p>While we’re at it, let’s not forget the miracle of a tiny band of Jewish warriors who, vastly outnumbered, defeated one of the great armies of the day. Of course I mean the Maccabees in 160 BCE. Or perhaps the Israel Defense Forces in 1967.</p> <p>These are the kinds of things I try to remember to remember during Chanukah and every day, as I feel my way along the walls.</p> <p><strong><br />Dan Pine </strong>can be reached at <a href="mailto:dan@jweekly.com">dan@jweekly.com</a>.</p>

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