Unstuck

For years I’ve wondered whether I’d ever get to use the phrase deus ex machina on these pages, but thanks to the brief, riveting saga of the massive Ever Given cargo ship stuck for days in the Suez Canal, that time has finally come.

Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary explains deus ex machina (pronounced “dayess ex makina”) this way: “A person or thing that appears or is introduced suddenly and unexpectedly and provides a contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty.” When one of the world’s longest ships spends six days utterly, helplessly marooned, wedged between opposite banks of the Suez Canal as 350 freighters sit waiting to pass through, that qualifies as an apparently insoluble difficulty. And when, despite all the fevered, round-the-clock efforts to spring the ship, it is a fortuitously timed full moon that causes the tides to spring higher than usual, shaking the ship free of the Egyptian mud — well, that’s quite the unexpectedly contrived solution.

Not to mention that the solution came from the heavens, literally. The “deus” in the phrase, after all, means G-d.

Of course, the ultimate illustration of the concept is the long-awaited arrival of Mashiach Tzidkenu, may it happen speedily in our days. That will suddenly and unexpectedly provide a solution — the final one — to the seemingly insoluble twin difficulties of the Jewish People’s long exile and the descent of mankind into an abyss of depravity. What the world witnessed on the first day of Pesach this year was but a small harbinger of that (although at 1,312 feet, 2 inches — sometimes every inch counts — which is a full 200 feet longer than the longest American aircraft carrier, it’s hard to consider anything connected to the Ever Given as “small”).