Miracles happen when we opt for hope over despair - The Jewish Chronicle

There’s no good word for it yet, the little nicks and cuts of antisemitism that turn up in the course of an ordinary morning. Not the lurid swastikas of history, but the subtler sort; the stranger who insists they once knew a Jew at school, as if it’s an alibi they’ve kept for emergencies or the colleague who decides you need their ten-minute lecture on the Middle East before you’ve had your coffee. “Micro-aggression” is too sterile, too American campus. I prefer schmaltz-cuts; small, sticky, and impossible to scrub off.

I get the unmistakable stuff every day. The blatant kind, the rants about Jews running the world, the money jibes, the cartoons with hooked noses straight out of the 1930s. But that’s faceless, shouty. You scroll, you delete, you block. Last week was different. It wasn’t the baying mob of twitter. It was quiet. Polite, even. A situation that, on the surface, looked perfectly ordinary. And that’s what made it worse. You start sense-checking yourself…was it me? Did I imagine it? Except I knew I hadn’t. And that’s what winded me, like being elbowed in the ribs while everyone else carried on chatting about the canapés.

I won’t spell it out here. No doubt it will surface on a podcast one day. For now it’s enough to say it stung, the sharp shock of discovering the armour you thought you had doesn’t quite cover you after all.

And then, because the universe has a sense of humour (and a Jewish one at that), I already had an invitation in the diary. Levi Schapiro of the JCC in Stamford Hill had asked me weeks earlier to come and meet some of the community. The date landed in the shadow of it. I was exhausted, half-looking for an excuse to stay home. But you don’t cancel on Levi. Jewish guilt won’t let you. Besides, cancelling would mean living with the image of five Charedi men sitting in a small office with a bottle of Scotch, wondering where I was. And if there’s one thing worse than antisemitism, it’s letting perfectly good bridge rolls go stale.

Upstairs in that office, I was with a man I already knew a little, the grandson of someone my own grandfather had saved during the Shoah. There was a connection between us, across decades and continents, thrown into sharp relief by the scene: him in his black hat, me in my Nike trainers, the two of us facing each other over Scotch and egg mayonnaise.

I’d been invited to meet some of the people behind Bonei Olam, a charity that provides fertility treatment for couples who otherwise couldn’t afford it, offering medical support and funding where there would otherwise be none. Around the table in Stamford Hill, the men spoke about what it means to bring a child into the world against the odds. One of them said, almost in passing, “We invest in the 1 per cent chance.” What they were really inferring was that the community invests in miracles. Families, they explained, can sponsor a treatment cycle (sometimes anonymously, sometimes not) and the results are measurably better when that support is shared.

It dawned on me then, not with thunderbolts but with something quieter; miracles aren’t about lightning bolts or seas parting. They’re about taking the smallest chance, the one everyone else has written off, and saying: we’ll still back it.

This isn’t just Jewish of course. It’s the most human instinct of all; to put your faith in the tiniest chance. Every parent at a hospital bedside, every campaigner who plants a tree they may never sit under, every couple who dares to love again after heartbreak, they’re all doing the same thing. Betting on the improbable. Investing in hope.

And Jews, of course, have our own contemporary miracles. Children born in communities where the odds seemed impossible. A synagogue rebuilt after attack, its doors opening again the next Shabbat. Hebrew still being spoken after two millennia of exile. Whole generations of us still here arguing over who gets the good seat at shul, quarrelling over who makes the best chicken soup, and endlessly debating whether Fiddler on the Roof is profound or just kitsch. Every one of those, in its own way, a miracle.

And it’s funny, once you start looking, you see miracles everywhere. In the fact that two grandsons of history can share Scotch in Stamford Hill. In the way an unexpected invitation in the diary can arrive just when you’re low. In the stubborn belief that the tiniest chance is still worth our investment.

So yes, mornings sometimes come with their paper-cuts of prejudice. But afternoons can remind you that life turns on tiny notes, one chance in a hundred, one unexpected kindness, one stubborn refusal to give up. And it’s those notes, those 1 per cent chances, those moments of improbable grace, that we’re called to invest in.

Which is why I’ve come to believe that miracles aren’t rare at all. They’re stubbornly, gloriously everywhere. Not waiting for The Almighty to hand them down, but appearing whenever people choose to back hope over despair, even – perhaps especially – when the odds are against it.

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Rob Rinder