First, none of us is a prophet. None of us ever can know with certainty why things happen, why G-d allows them to happen, why He sometimes intercedes in the natural course of events while, on other occasions, He “hides His face” (Deut. 31:17-18; 32:20) and refrains from altering the natural course.

Most wars, for example, follow a somewhat predictable course, but He once made the sun stand still in Givon, extending a Friday afternoon, so that Joshua and the Israelites could finish their battle before Shabbat. Joshua 10:12-14

Once, with miles of Sancherev’s (Sennacherib’s) soldiers camped outside Jerusalem for the night, planning to invade and massacre King Chizkiahu’s (Hezekiah) people the following day, that night all 185,000 of his men died in a mysterious and inexplicable plague. II Kings 18:17-19:37

Many of us have grown up on Biblical miracles such as the Ten Plagues, the splitting of the Sea of Reeds (alt. translation “Red Sea”), food falling from Heaven daily for nearly 40 years, and more.

We don’t know why things happen or don’t, but we know G-d is at the helm, and He has His reasons. The sun is 93 million miles from earth. If it had been a bit closer, the planet and its inhabitants would have been incinerated; if a bit farther, all would freeze. If the oxygen component of the atmosphere were a bit more rich, a strike of a match would explode the planet; if a bit less, we all would die of asphyxiation. With stronger gravitational pull, we would be unable to move; with less, our bones would break constantly. It takes greater faith to believe atheistically than to recognize Almig-ty G-d, our Creator.

There is Divine purpose, and sometimes events become comprehensible only decades or centuries later. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella exiled all Jews from Spain in August 1492. That remains one of the worst catastrophes in Jewish history. All seemed lost for Sephardic Jewry.

As it happens, on that same time, the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, sponsored by the same Isabella and Ferdinand, set sail for India. His journey, all confused, instead landed him in a New World that would become the most extraordinary haven that Jewish people ever would experience outside Israel. Coincidence? We Jews see the hand of G-d in it.

The hand of G-d?  During the Civil War, Union armies expected a rapid victory. Northern citizens even brought folding chairs and picnic baskets to watch the first important conflagration, that of First Manassas/Bull Run. They came for a picnic. By the time the Confederates had turned the tide, those picnickers were fleeing for their lives.

The South put up a heck of a fight for five years. What they lacked in population numbers and supplies, they made up for with great generals. Perhaps their greatest after Robert E. Lee was Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.

One night, after yet another Confederate victory, this one at Chancellorsville, Jackson arrived back at the camp late at night after scouting his enemy. A young fidgety sentry on guard duty asked him the password, and Jackson did not know it. The kid got antsy and shot Jackson, whose left arm had to be amputated as infection threatened.

Nevertheless, Stonewall Jackson died from pneumonia generated by that wound infection a few days later. (I not only have visited his burial site but also traveled, searching half a day, to the separate site where his left arm is buried.)

If he had not been shot so pointlessly, might the subsequent war, particularly the Battle of Gettysburg, have turned out differently? If so, then today we might be two separate, weaker countries. Was it the hand of G-d that ensured that America would remain united as one enormously rich and populous country so that it would be the only world power capable  — a century later — to take down Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and Arab terror? The hand of G-d?

Indeed, it is believed by some historians that Abraham Lincoln was elected president by a fluke. Get this: In the old days, there were no presidential state primaries, so parties went into their conventions with various contending candidates, and delegates would cast votes at the convention, amid promises and horse-trading.

Such votes often ran several rounds until someone among several contenders finally secured a majority of delegates. For example, it took 17 days and 103 (one hundred and three!) rounds of balloting until Congressman John W. Davis finally beat out New York Governor Al Smith, a Catholic who opposed Prohibition, and Ku Klux Klan-endorsed William G. McAdoo for the 1924 Democrat presidential nomination. (It proved to be, uh, “McAdoo about nothing”: Republican Calvin Coolidge won in November.)

Well, going into balloting at the 1860 Republican convention, William Seward was the odds-on favorite to win on the first round of balloting, the first night of the convention. Yet, somehow, the people running the convention had not ordered enough paper ballots, so they rushed an order for more and needed to postpone the first round of voting to the next day.

That entire night, delegates advocating for the various contenders worked like crazy to turn minds. Just enough flipped from Seward while awaiting the paper ballots into the next morning so that he just missed. Lincoln won a few rounds later, and the rest is history. Was G-d turning history to raise Lincoln to lead during the forthcoming Civil War?

Did G-d intervene in the course of America’s history by having Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet hit its mark? If so, why? Or by having John Hinckley, Jr. barely miss his goal?  Why? Or the dirtbag who shot President Trump? When Israel was declared independent, how did they beat seven weapon-stocked invading and trained Arab Muslim armies, when the Jewish state’s defenders were barely trained Holocaust survivors, severely undersupplied, with Harry Truman imposing a complete embargo on sending weapons to Israel?

Later, in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War, it would be Richard Nixon — of all people — who was G-d’s messenger on earth to rescue Israel by rushing weapons that saved the day. And books have been written about the miracles of the 1967 Six-Day War.

We do not know G-d’s ways because His thoughts are not our thoughts, and His ways are not our ways. Isaiah 55:8. It may be that 9/11 happened as part of a Divine intervention — or, maybe, simply because fools in Washington were welcoming haters from “our friends, the Saudis” to be trained in America to fly commercial aircraft, while no one bothered them for failing to attend the class on how to land a plane.

Likewise, the Butler, Pennsylvania outrage may simply have been because of Secret Service incompetence in the upper-echelon DEI level. Warnings and sightings of the shooter went on for an hour. He was seen on the roof for twenty minutes. That roof should not even have been vacant. Even a rabbi and attorney who never has worked in law enforcement knows from TV and movies that assassins go for nearby rooftops with unobstructed lines of vision.

And still, although we do not know His purposes with certainty, we know with certainty that we presently are witnessing not only an historical epoch but also miracle times: The Democrats’ gang rape of the legal system miraculously all falling apart everywhere at once just as conventions and elections approach.

The miracle of Biden self-destructing before tens of millions, in a live event the leftist media could not cover up. The miracle that, although Biden had won the coin toss, he gave Trump the right to the last word and closing argument.

The miracle that Biden’s people required that Trump’s mike be cut off every time Biden would speak, thus enabling (i) Trump to appear gentlemanly, and (ii) Biden to deliver uninterrupted two-minute soliloquies of fumbling and doddering. The miracle of the Butler incident, missing by just a whisker because Trump was turning to point to a chart.

Was this G-d’s way to elevate Donald Trump, to say, “You still have a history-impacting role ahead to save America in its Eleventh Hour and also to save the world by reimposing crushing sanctions on Iran before they go nuclear”?

Is it G-d’s three-dimensional chess also aimed at Putin and at Xi and at North Korea, for this man to be G-d’s messenger to save Taiwan or Ukraine or Israel as Biden cannot?

Or was G-d destroying and humiliating Biden for 40 years of public lying and shaming others? To punish him for cutting off aid to Israel and allowing $250 billion to an almost bankrupt Iran? For proclaiming Easter Sunday as Transgender Day? Or is G-d’s purpose to elevate Kamala to the presidency — G-d forbid — because there is no other way, short of miracles, that she conceivably could be in the discussion?

Or is it to punish Americans for the immorality of abortions on demand, even late-term abortions; transgender shower stalls and elementary school bathrooms, and transgender sports competitions, sex-change surgeries, and so much immorality. Or is it all G-d’s plan to elevate J.D. Vance for the next 12 years to help save America from the Obama-Biden catastrophe? No way to know — now. It will be revealed with the passage of time.

Know that we now are living in a moment of miracles. And know that it devolves on us not to proclaim whether G-d is on our side, but instead to strive always to be on G-d’s side.