Miracles are embarrassing. At least that’s what Maimonides believed. A perfect God would create the world correctly the first time without needing to go back and intervene. With this starting point, we understand how Maimonides, Rambam, minimizes the miraculous or supernatural in his understanding of Judaism. Angelic visions are interpreted as dreams. Talmudic tales of wonder-working rabbis should not be taken literally whenever they contradict the laws of nature. One can imagine Maimonides’ God grumbling about having to change the laws of nature – which I, God, wrote – just to save some humans from calamity. But Maimonides’ God, the Unmoved Mover, doesn’t grumble.
But Hazal, the rabbis of the Talmud do not seem to have shared Maimonides’ philosophical commitments and they too were concerned by miracles – they did not minimize the miracles of Scripture but they taught us to avoid miracles in our own life. Rabbi Yanai, in Massechet Shabbat (32a) teaches that one must avoid dangerous situations rather than implicitly rely on a miracle. Maybe you will not merit a miracle. And, if you do merit Divine protection from danger, it will come at the expense of your merits. The proof for this dynamic, the Talmud explains, is Yaakov’s words in Parashat Vayishlach.
קָטֹ֜נְתִּי מִכֹּ֤ל הַחֲסָדִים֙ וּמִכׇּל־הָ֣אֱמֶ֔ת אֲשֶׁ֥ר עָשִׂ֖יתָ אֶת־עַבְדֶּ֑ךָ
I have been diminished by all of the kindnesses and truth which You (God) have done for Your servant.
After kiddush, we have a multigenerational beit-midrash scheduled. Parents and grandparents and children are invited back to shul for learning one-on-one or in small family groups. This verse – especially the word קָטֹ֜נְתִּי is going to be our subject and so in order to avoid spoilers I am not going to share what Ramban and Seforno have to say about that verse.
But Rashi adopts the interpretation of Rabbi Yanai that קָטֹ֜נְתִּי means “I have been diminished.” Yaakov is frightened and concerned about how much Divine favor is really available to him in his moment of distress because he has already been the recipient of so much kindness from God and he cannot imagine that he is owed any more.
According to this view of the world, every good thing that comes our way, every favorable turn of events in our advantage, every blessing we encounter that falls on our heads and not to someone else, should make us feel diminished and less confident that any additional favors will come our way.
This is not the only way to understand the world, this is not the only way to experience the world, and each of us has grown up in a world molded by a very different perspective.
In his 1905 classic, “The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” Max Weber identifies a specific feature of Calvinist religious thought with the emergence of Capitalism in Northern Europe. Calvin taught an austere formulation of Protestant thought in which nothing we do in life could ever be sufficient to earn salvation which was entirely a predetermined product of divine grace. Since salvation cannot be earned, a life of virtuous industry and material success could be a sign that someone was predetermined for salvation. This is the most we can hope for, but is sufficient to nurture spiritual reassurance.
Calvinism did not create Capitalism, but, according to Weber, the virtues or mindset that Calvinism fostered helped create the modern world.
The Northern European Protestants who invented Capitalism had a religious orientation that included a religious duty to work hard, saw a moral value in punctuality, precision, and reliability, understood that spending on luxuries was sinful, and so profits were reinvested. Industrious productivity and worldly success was the most socially accepted sign that an individual had been predetermined for salvation.
Even by the early 20th century, the religious fervor of Calvinism and its offshoots had faded and Capitalism as an economic system developed its own self-sustaining and self-reinforcing dynamic.
Weber was concerned about secular Capitalist society once it had shed the religious virtues which had nurtured it. We, in the modern Capitalist west, had become, Weber concluded in 1905, “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart.”
But the spirit of Capitalism endured for a century after Max Weber’s warning and, with the exception of immigrants from behind the Iron Curtain, all of us in this room were born into, or attained adulthood in, a prosperous world whose stability was anchored in a post-war liberal world order and where Jewish freedom and flourishing was an integral part of Americanness.
I don’t have to detail for you the ways in which the world has been transformed from the one in which we grew up. Populists, of the left and right, have drawn our attention to those left behind by the modern economy and who were failed by mainstream politics. Jewishness is no longer experienced as being obviously part and parcel of Americanness. The collapse of the pro-Israel consensus and the concurrent rise of nativism places much of the American Jewish community in a stranglehold which our modern history has not prepared us to tolerate or even understand.
We are not just facing external pressures. We are confronting Max Weber’s problem from within: prosperity without purpose, freedom without responsibility, institutions without the moral seriousness needed to sustain them.
In Calvinism, worldly success cannot earn salvation, but it can function as a source of existential reassurance—a sign that one’s inner life reflects God’s grace. Yaakov experiences the same prosperity not as reassurance but as danger.
Yaakov stands alone, in prayer, as he prepares to face his brother. His success and large prosperous family does not give him confidence, but fuels his humility. Katonti. I am humbled by all the good that I have received, and, in that way, I can confront my fears and reconcile with my erstwhile enemy.
This is a Katonti moment for Jews wherever we live. We had assumed that our success, and the stability that surrounded us, were self-perpetuating, the result of cashing a blank-check from the universe. Weber warned about prosperity eroding the moral seriousness necessary to sustain peace and freedom. Yaakov understood that too. Success and tranquility should generate humility, not self-confidence.
Yaakov teaches us that humility is not a posture of fear but a posture of responsibility. Katonti does not mean shrinking from the world in perpetual apology for existing; it means recognizing that blessings are never entitlements and are not signs of eternal Divine grace. Blessings obligate us to gratitude, to renewed moral seriousness, and to responsibility for our community and for our world. We cannot restore the world of our youth, or the world as it existed two, or five, or ten years ago, and we cannot wish away the forces that are buffeting Jewish life, nor can we complain about them or whine about them and reasonably hope those forces disappear. But we can meet this moment as Yaakov did: not with complacency from his past success, nor with despair from present uncertainty, not with nostalgia but with the humility that transforms anxiety into purpose.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 