Take a man that was living isolated on an island - with zero contact with the outside world - and bring him into the year 2024. Wouldn’t he consider a lot of the things we take granted for as “magic?”
While Arthur C. Clarke turned out to have been a new-age (early on) reprobate, he did pen a few truly notable insights. One of them, upon which I based part of the thesis in this midrash, was,
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
I contend he could have seen that by reading the early chapters of Exodus, and the 'magicians' of Pharaoh.
But the point here had to do with 'rituals' and procedures that seem us to be nothing but Biblical 'superstition,' or worse, and that thus have no value to today's enlightened,
modern, oh-so-advanced 'society.'
As an engineer, who spent an entire career working to design circuits that in many cases can't even be seen with the naked eye, and sometimes employ even-more-invisible RF
emanations that are even more invisible to our senses, it occurred to me that, without modern instruments (from network analyzers and oscilloscopes to DVMs) I couldn't even debug a failure in most of 'em, "post-apocalypse," without my tools.
And 5 GHz cellphone signals wouldn't have even been visible to a $50,000 scope that I used only a couple decades ago.
Yet YHVH once sent mankind a 'plague' or malady that was essentially a public humiliation. It
seems to have been intended to allow His people, at least, to "clean up the camp," and put the unclean (
tameh) out where they couldn't infest others. And what the Bible called "tzaraat" (again, NOT = "leprosy", or Hansen's Disease) hasn't been seen on the planet for many centuries. Why?
Can you even imagine a swamp full of lying, filthy scum politicians having the skin on their bodies flake off and being compelled (by Who?) to announce that they are "unclean, UNCLEAN!"? No? That speaks volumes.
We don't see that mechanism either.
What we see instead is an injection with invisible ingredients, allegedly to fight an equally invisible "virus" that causes people to be unclean in a way never seen before, but which often kills them. While they attempt to put OTHERS, who won't volunteer to be similarly unclean, 'outside the camp.'
But that's now pretty much the whole, fetid, world.
Could there be a message here?