"Anyone who doesn't believe in miracles is not a realist"

David Ben-Gurion’s statement, “Anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles is not a realist,” challenges conventional notions surrounding reality and skepticism. Traditionally, realism is associated with practicality, clear-eyed acceptance of facts, and a dismissal of fantastical or improbable events. Miracles, on the other hand, are often seen as supernatural or exceedingly rare occurrences, outside the ordinary course of nature and logic. Ben-Gurion inverts this paradigm, suggesting that in order to truly understand reality, especially in certain historical or existential contexts, one must acknowledge the possibility, and perhaps even the necessity, of miracles.

The context in which Ben-Gurion spoke is essential. As a key founder and first prime minister of the State of Israel, he experienced firsthand the extraordinary realization of a two-thousand-year-old aspiration: the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland. This had seemed an impossibility, a miracle, in historical terms. Yet a combination of determination, global circumstances, human agency, and fortuitous turns enabled that once-unthinkable dream to become truth. Ben-Gurion’s realism did not deny the improbable; rather, it absorbed the lessons of lived experience: sometimes the improbable becomes real, sometimes the extraordinary interrupts the ordinary.

Furthermore, the statement highlights the limitations of a narrow rationalism. It suggests that life, history, and the human journey are filled with events that defy tidy explanation or strict probability. Progress, survival, and transformation often rely on aligning hope with action, even when logic suggests otherwise. The “miracles” referenced do not have to be supernatural; they can be the unpredictable convergence of efforts, opportunities, and timing that shape history.

By equating belief in miracles with realism, Ben-Gurion advocates for an open-minded stance: the world is far more surprising and filled with possibility than cynicism or mechanistic reasoning allows. True realism is not about limiting belief to what is merely probable, but embracing the extraordinary forces at play in human affairs.