Since the majority of Israeli commanders are religious Jews, they are AWARE that good deeds and prayer are the ammunition of success.

If this were a story from ancient times, it would sound like this: A few Jews walked down to the front, braving a hail of spears and arrows, they arrived with a scratched shoulder and a sprained ankle, they shot a few arrows of their own and hundreds of Greek conscripts immediately expired. Pretty miraculous, huh?

But today we just chalk it up to luck, good safety procedures, well-built shelters, and other such rationalizations. If the menorah had burned 8 days on one measure of oil in OUR times, we’d have said well, it must have been that dry Temple air, or it was some type of genetically-enhanced super-oil that is 8 times more efficient than normal oil, or maybe it’s all a PR stunt by those sly Hasmoneans.

And that’s probably exactly what the Hellenists did say back then. The successful campaign against hordes of Greeks? Darn, those Hasmoneans are good, aren’t they? They fight like tigers! Greek losers can’t hold a spear to save their lives. We’ve been saying all along, drop this prayer thing. You need military training! Good weaponry! Solid communication! Reliable intel! That’s the ticket to victory.

We need to work on seeing the Guiding Hand in all events that transpire around us. G-d is making this a lot easier by performing open miracles in the Middle East. Today. Not 2000 years ago. But we are so used to hearing that the miracle of the human brain is a accident of nature, that the survival of Jews through the ages can be explained with societal factors, that so many miraculous wonders aren’t miraculous but perfectly normal — we can’t see the open miracles anymore — too many athiestic cataracts blurring our vision. At this rate, how will we know when Moshiach really is here? What’s he going to need to do to impress us? Raise the dead? Oh.