Do We Still Believe in Miracles? Rabbis, Refuseniks and the Politics of Wonder

 

It starts with a sore elbow and a polite handshake.

Nudelman’s bursitis has been getting worse for months. The cortisone shots hurt, the relief is temporary, and even turning over in bed has become an exercise in gritted teeth. He complains about it to his rabbi because that is what people do when they run out of things to tell their doctor. Rabbi Newman listens, winces in sympathy, and pats him lightly on the shoulder as they part in the foyer. Nothing special. No shofar blasts, no chant, just a friendly touch at the end of a conversation.

Later that evening, watching television, Nudelman realizes the burning is gone. The ache that had colonized his days has disappeared so cleanly it feels as if it belonged to someone else. He stands up, flexes his arm, knocks over a vase in his excitement, and does the modern thing a man does when something inexplicable happens. He picks up the phone.

“It is you,” he insists when the rabbi answers, already half apologizing for sounding superstitious. “You know me. I am not gullible.”

Newman reacts the way his training has taught him to react. He talks about delayed reactions and cortisone, about how the body sometimes heals itself. He points out that Nudelman had already stopped treatment. He suggests coincidence, timing, anything but the possibility that his hand on a congregant’s shoulder might be the decisive factor.

The world of Lost and Found is not a revival tent and Rabbi Newman is not a televangelist. He is a Conservative rabbi in Bolton, Pennsylvania, a small town that prides itself on being educated, realistic and more or less immune to spectacular claims. Miracles are the last thing anyone expects from the synagogue on the hill.

Which is precisely why the story spreads.

Cultures of Disbelief

The setting matters. Sheldon Greene does not put his miracle rumors into an ecstatic or mystical milieu. He stages them in places where disbelief is almost a badge of maturity.

In Bolton, the hospital and its doctors treat illness as a technical problem. A disease is something to be imaged, sampled, medicated and charted. When patients start leaving beds early after visits from the rabbi, administrators do not rejoice. They worry about statistical anomalies and budget projections. There is even talk that if Newman keeps “curing” people, the hospital might have a case for accusing him of practicing medicine without a license.

The congregation is no more eager to be associated with wonders. When national news outlets seize on the phrase “wonder working rabbi from Bolton,” the board is mortified. They do not want their carefully run Conservative congregation to become a punchline in Pittsburgh. They want to be known for adult education and a respectable new sanctuary, not for supernatural elbow repairs.

In The Lev Effect, the environment is equally prosaic. Tikva School, with its attached retirement home, sits in a failing steel town. Salaries are low and often late. The building needs more work than the budget can handle. The board spends its time worrying about fundraising, immigration law and how to keep a Jewish school alive in a shrinking community. No one is praying for a messiah to appear. They are praying for a donor.

Into that setting walks Lev, a Soviet refusenik and Jewish scholar who has been precluded from an academic career in Russia because he is Jewish and because he wants to leave. For years he has worked as a school “superintendent” in the Soviet sense, a highly educated man pushed into a quasi-custodial role and persecuted for his desire to emigrate. Tikva hires him to lead the school. He arrives not as a janitor, but as director, charged with holding together a fragile institution that blends children and elders under one roof.

Both communities start from the same baseline: a culture of disbelief. They are not hostile to faith, but they are wary of spectacle. Which makes them a good testing ground for what happens when experiences begin to accumulate that will not stay politely in the “ordinary” column.

The Rabbi Who Does Not Want to Be a Healer

In Lost and Found, Nudelman’s bursitis is not an isolated case. Other stories follow. A patient feels a burning in the chest when the rabbi touches him and later discovers that a shadow on a scan has vanished. Someone whose prognosis was grim starts to improve. The hospital census drops, then surges again as rumors attract the sick from farther away, hoping for a blessing at the bedside.

The congregational reaction is fractured and revealing.

Some people are delighted. They compare Newman to a golden wine goblet. The image is telling. It suggests that the rabbi is a beautiful vessel, but it also raises the question of what is inside, and whether anyone is paying attention to it. Others grumble that he is so busy visiting the sick that he no longer has time for sermons, classes or committee work. A miracle worker who neglects budgets and bar mitzvah preparation is, for them, a mixed blessing.

The board is preoccupied with respectability. National coverage makes them anxious about being thought naive. They imagine colleagues in larger cities shaking their heads over this provincial congregation that has allowed itself to be turned into a curiosity. Miracles, even if real, do not fit their sense of what a modern Jewish community should be known for.

Through all of this, Newman himself remains the most skeptical voice in the room. He insists on natural explanations. When those become harder to defend, he does not relax into a supernatural one. He becomes more frightened than proud. If something is happening through his hands, he does not trust himself to interpret it.

Greene leans into the irony. The person most inclined to take God seriously is the one least willing to attribute unusual events to divine intervention. The congregation, meanwhile, wants the benefits of having a “miracle rabbi” without having to think of themselves as the kind of people who believe in miracles.

Lev: A Director Under Suspicion

Where Lost and Found explores accidental healings, The Lev Effect explores a more diffuse phenomenon.

Lev arrives in Bolton carrying the double weight of Soviet persecution and Jewish hope. In Russia he has been supervised, watched, denied an academic post and punished for asking to leave. In Bolton he is suddenly given authority, asked to direct an institution that nobody else has quite known what to do with.

He approaches Tikva School with a mix of rigor and joy. Morning assemblies combine prayer, song, movement and flag-raising, reflecting his conviction that education is a whole-body, whole-community affair. Staff meetings are long and argumentative, but he listens carefully before making decisions. He encourages the students to face outward, not only inward, bringing in Sami, a Palestinian boy, as a student and staging events where Israeli and Palestinian symbols share a stage.

Crises keep brushing past him. Funding disappears and then reappears. Immigration authorities take an interest in certain residents and then look away. The institution teeters on the edge of failure and then finds new footing. A pattern begins to form in the minds of those who want to see one. Readers and reviewers have come to call it “the Lev effect.”

Some residents and staff quietly begin to think of Lev in theological terms. Is he a messianic figure? Is he, in some more Christian imaginations, a version of Jesus returning in a Jewish setting. The novel has been described by reviewers as a “farcical comedy and theological provocation,” and the passion story overtones are not accidental.

Lev does nothing to encourage those speculations, but he does not entirely escape them. He jokes, deflects, goes on directing the school, but other people’s narratives accrete around him. Once again, Greene is less interested in proving or disproving the miraculous than in the way a community under pressure projects its needs onto a person who seems to bring with him an unusual concentration of fortune and disturbance.

That pattern continues after Lev dies. His death does not end the arguments around him. It rearranges them.

Once he is gone, someone steals his body from the funeral home. The community gathers expecting a familiar ritual and instead finds that one of the old residents has been laid in the coffin where Lev was meant to be. The mistake is absurd and moving at the same time. Elders, students, staff, neighbors, people from the street who have treated Tikva as a place of shelter, and even members of nearby churches and the mosque all sit in the same hall and listen to stories about a man who has unsettled them in different ways. For that hour, the factions that worried about budgets, miracles and Palestinian flags are pulled into a single act of mourning. A choir gives the service a sound closer to celebration than to a quiet burial.

Greene shapes the sequence as a tilted retelling of the Passion. The absent body, the crowd, the mix of grief, confusion and projection are all present, only this time in a small-town social hall instead of a cathedral. The messiah language that follows comes less from Lev than from what the outside world does with the story. Outside the building, cameras and microphones turn this local service into a story of their own. A few striking images and phrases travel quickly through news reports and gossip. Some viewers decide that Lev was a kind of messiah for a tired town. Others treat the whole business as an oddity. The homeless who gather around the edges of the ceremony seem to understand something quieter. They claim him simply as someone who noticed them and made space for them in a school that might otherwise have ignored them. The public story of wonders and sainthood sits on the surface. Underneath it, Greene keeps his focus on the way one person’s stubborn presence can change how a community sees itself.

Institutions Under Strain

In both novels, the institutions themselves are characters. They have budgets, reputations and fragile self-images.

Bolton’s synagogue board worries about how the congregation appears in larger Jewish circles. They want to be seen as serious, responsible and modest, not as a place where people line up for faith healing. They also have mundane concerns. If the rabbi is spending his days at the hospital, who is preparing sermons, supervising the Hebrew school or courting donors for the new building campaign.

Tikva’s board has different but related anxieties. The school is chronically underfunded. Salaries are deferred. Teachers are asked to accept sacrifice as part of their religious commitment. The retirement home residents are vulnerable, and any hint of scandal could frighten off both families and funders. Lev’s political choices, his willingness to bring controversial guests and symbols into the school, and the whiff of the miraculous around him all feel like risks that a fragile institution cannot afford.

Greene likes to put wonder and strain in the same frame. Miracles, or things that look like miracles, do not show up in his fiction when everyone is comfortable. They arrive in communities that are already stretched, where every new development is another pressure test.

That is no accident. Institutional crisis reveals what people really believe about God, merit and responsibility. It shows whether boards value safety over honesty, whether leaders can tolerate ambiguity, and whether members treat stories of the extraordinary as opportunities for generosity or as threats to be managed.

It is not hard to see the continuity between this and Greene’s own observation that both law and writing come from the same impulse: the desire to act as a change agent in the face of injustice or inertia. Synagogues and schools, in these books, are also change agents, whether they like it or not.

At the same time, neither book is simply a thought experiment about the miraculous. Lost and Found is also a portrait of postwar Jewish life in small-town America, full of humor, money worries, congregational politics, arguments about Israel and immigration, and the ordinary frictions of family and community. The Lev Effect follows immigration, aging, and intergenerational responsibility alongside its theological provocations, asking what happens when a fragile institution becomes the screen for people’s fears and hopes about leadership itself.

Faith as a “Spiritual Walker”

Across these Bolton novels, one of Mendel’s most revealing lines comes when he describes faith as “a kind of spiritual walker for the psychologically disabled.” It is a wry line, self-deprecating and affectionate at the same time.

A walker is not a trophy. It is a support for someone who is unsteady. It is practical, slightly comic and absolutely serious. You lean on it when you need it. You do not boast about it.

That is how religious language often operates in these novels. Congregants in Bolton compare their rabbi to a golden goblet, then worry that perhaps the wine he carries is not the sort they expected. People crack jokes even as they line up for blessings. Mendel himself observes, with sour humor, that people love emergencies as long as they happen to someone else.

Miracles, in this world, are not proofs of doctrine. They are occasions for ordinary reactions: jealousy, fatigue, generosity, resentment, exhaustion. A healing might mean that an overworked nurse gets to go home on time, or that a fundraiser’s pitch acquires a new angle. The supposedly “spiritual” events are thoroughly entangled with the practical.

Greene’s treatment of faith is consistent with this. He does not glorify belief as a superior mode of knowing. He presents it as a support that some people need and others do not, a way of walking through an unstable world without falling, but also without claiming to understand every crack in the pavement.

What Counts as a Miracle Now

Most readers Greene is writing for live in a world saturated with medical technology, statistics and therapy. We are taught to look for delayed drug effects, misdiagnoses, placebo responses and confirmation bias. Rabbi Newman’s instinctive reach for natural explanations is recognizably ours.

Yet people continue to report experiences that feel, to them, like interventions. A chance meeting that alters the course of a life. A diagnosis that inexplicably disappears. A sequence of events so unlikely that “coincidence” feels like a thin word. Many of these stories are told only in private. They are too easily mocked, especially in communities that define themselves by their distance from superstition.

Greene’s novels do not tell readers what to make of such stories. They do something harder. They model a way of living with them.

First, they take them seriously as part of the characters’ lives. Nudelman’s elbow matters because pain shapes his days. A seeming healing is not a plot decoration. It changes how he moves, works and relates to others. Lev’s presence at Tikva matters because the school’s survival is genuinely at stake. If fortune tilts a little when he walks into a room, nobody there can afford to ignore it.

Second, the books refuse to turn these events into spectacle or proof. There is no moment when a narrator steps in to say “this was a true miracle” or “this was only coincidence.” Characters argue, joke, and misinterpret one another. The question of what “really happened” remains open.

That posture is itself a kind of intellectual honesty. It acknowledges that the world includes experiences we do not fully understand, without demanding that we choose between credulity and contempt.

Living with Mystery Without Losing Our Minds

By the end of Lost and Found and The Lev Effect, there is no final verdict on whether the healings or the “Lev effect” count as miracles. What lingers instead are images: a man flexing an elbow that no longer hurts, a rabbi trying to disappear into his ordinary duties, a Soviet scholar walking school corridors in Bolton while students and elders quietly argue about who he might be, a funeral where the wrong body lies in the coffin and the right story finds its shape in the people gathered around it.

In Sheldon Greene’s work, belief and skepticism are not enemies. The most skeptical characters often care deeply about God and ethics. The most credulous are sometimes looking for shortcuts that true faith cannot give them. Both belong in the same room.

Modern communities will probably never agree on what “really happened” when a rabbi’s touch heals or a director’s arrival seems to bend the odds in a failing school. They can, however, decide how to treat the people around those stories. They can choose mockery, fear, manipulation, or something more generous: curiosity, restraint, a willingness to help without insisting on a single explanation.

The fiction suggests that the real test is not whether we can explain every mystery. It is whether we can stay honest, decent and openhearted while we live with them.

Find more of Sheldon Greene’s reflections on law, faith and community on his 

Substack: https://sheldongreenee.substack.com/

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