Abraham and Sarah weren’t supposed to have children.

The Torah stresses it again and again. The first thing we learn about Avram’s wife is that “Sarai was barren; she had no child” [Genesis 11:30]. Years later she tells Avram that “Hashem has stopped me from giving birth” [16:2]. When Hashem promises a son, Avraham himself wonders, “Shall a child be born to a man of a hundred years? And shall Sarah, who is ninety, give birth?” [17:17]. Next week’s reading tells us that both of them were elderly, and that Sarah no longer had a woman’s monthly cycle [18:11]. The Torah closes every door, on his side and hers.

Rashi tells us, from the Talmud (Shabbos 156a), that Avram had seen in the stars that he would never have a son. So Hashem “took him outside” [15:5] and told him to look up at the heavens. Hashem was telling him to step outside the stars entirely: Avram might not have a son, but Avraham would. As the Talmud puts it, “Ein mazal l’Yisrael,” Israel is not bound by nature. On the contrary: the Torah tells us that the Jewish nation, the children of Avraham, exist above nature.

Hashem also wanted the miracle to be undeniable. When Yitzchak was born, the cynics of the day said Avraham and Sarah must have found an abandoned or orphaned child and were claiming him as their own. So at the feast for Yitzchak, the minister’s wives brought their infants, and Sarah nursed them (Bava Metzia 87a; Rashi on 21:7).

The Jewish People, then, are not simply a miracle. We are a public miracle, shown openly before the entire world.

That has stayed true ever since. Empires that should have outlived us are gone. Nations that tried to erase us are despised for having tried. By every law of history, a small people scattered across the globe should have disappeared long ago. Instead we are still here, still learning the same Torah, and still telling our children the story of Avraham and Sarah.

The lesson is not only for the world, but for us. A people born above nature shouldn’t measure its future by the odds. When the “stars” say it can’t be done, our history says otherwise. We are Avraham’s children, and Hashem has been taking us outside since the very beginning.