On Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed… Who shall live and who shall die… Who shall be at peace and who shall be tormented… but teshuvah, repentance; tefilah, prayer; and tzedakah, acts of righteous compassion, will annul et ro’ah ha-gezera, the severity of the decree.What is the meaning of these few lines, some of the most familiar in the High Holy Day liturgy, specifically three questions that emerge from them:
In other words, I'd like to explore with you the ideas of fate and free will, and how they interact, especially in the imagery evoked in the prayer I cited above.
First, a traditional Chinese parable:
Long ago in a remote village in China, there lived a man whose only possession was his horse. One day the horse ran away. “Ah, terrible fortune!” lamented the poor man. But a few days later, his horse returned, with a beautiful wild mare by its side. “Ah,” said the man. “Good fortune!” But when the man's only son tried to break in the new horse, it threw him, and he broke his leg. “Ah,” said the man. “Terrible fortune!” Shortly after this, a military recruiter came through the village, drafting every able-bodied man into the emperor's army. Since the man's son had a broken leg, he was not considered fit to serve. “Ah,” said the man. “Great fortune!”
Or to quote a great sage from the same tradition, Siddhartha Gautama Buddha: “Fortune changes like the swish of a horse's tail.”
So, here we are: another year has passed. Some of us have experienced good fortune, perhaps even great fortune during the past year; others of us have experienced bad, perhaps even terrible fortune. Our homes, our communities, our nation, our world have been diminished by the loss of precious lives; and they have also been enriched by the addition of new ones. Our people-fellow Americans, fellow Jews, Israelis, Westerners, fellow human beings-are still at war, fighting old battles and starting new ones. Humanity still remains vulnerable to plague, famine, sword, and natural disaster-in the year that has just passed: a tsunami and devastating hurricanes. The voices of the biblical prophets, of Lamentations and Ecclesiastes, of Job still reverberate in our ears with the ring of incontrovertible truth. So, how do we cope with this unending cycle of loss and sorrow?
Do we take refuge in denial, clinging to the illusion that everything will turn out all right, that it's all for the best? But we know that's not the case. We know that young people will die before their time; that some of the righteous will suffer, some of the wicked, prosper; that villains will get away with murder; that life keeps turning out to be-as our children persist in reminding us “not fair.” So do we then become cynics, agreeing with Kohelet that “vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” What can one person do to change the world? What can one person do to change her own fate? For, as Kohelet reminds us: “The race is not won by the swift, nor the battle by the valiant; nor is bread won by the wise, nor wealth by those with understanding, nor favor by the learned-but time and chance happens to them all” (Ecclesiastes. 9:11). Isn't this a formula for depression? Or for callousness? Or for hedonism? Why should we bother to care about anything if everything and everyone are destined for the grave?
Wise and spiritually gifted people have been pondering these same questions for millennia-and have suggested a variety of answers. And yet here we are again, still asking those questions, still finding previous answers inadequate. Here we are again at another new year, the time for returning to basics, for acknowledging ultimate realities'-Who shall live, and who shall die; who shall live out a full lifetime and who shall die too soon, who shall be at peace and who shall be tormented'; here we are again at a time for new beginnings, for turning to a fresh page in the Book of Life. Have we become no wiser after another year of living? Are we back to square one? Is the world, are our own lives still as bewildering as they were last Rosh Hashanah? Are we doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over just as the seasons repeat themselves with each revolution around the sun?
Perhaps we have been focusing on the wrong questions as we have struggled to make sense of these theological challenges. Maybe the question is not “Why is there suffering in the world?” but rather, “In the light of such suffering, what am I called upon to do?” Not “How can I stand this grief that afflicts me?” but rather “In the light of such grief, what good remains?” Not “Why do I have to lose so much?” but rather “In the light of such loss, what blessings can I celebrate?”
What if we simply acknowledged that human life is defined by loss, that the moment of our birth is the beginning of our dying, that life moves inexorably in the direction of entropy, disintegration, disorder? What if we did not take our own experience and knowledge as the measure of the world or the measure of God? What if instead we accepted that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in [our] philosophy? What if we understood that our assignment in life is not to demand meaning of God but to “find” and “make” meaning in God's world?
Rabbi Akiva, one of the great sages of our tradition, taught in Pirke Avot, The Ethics of Our Fathers that “Everything is pre-ordained, yet free will is given” (Pirke Avot 3:15). What exactly does that mean? How can we have choices to make if everything's already been decided for us? What exactly did Akiva mean in this apparently paradoxical statement? What did he mean by everything? Did he really mean everything?
An ancient midrash:
“When a baby is conceived, Laylah, the Angel of Night, brings the fertilized egg before God who decides its fate: whether it will be a boy or a girl, rich or poor, strong or weak, beautiful or ugly, fat or thin, wise or foolish. Only one decision does God leave in the hands of the unborn soul: whether it will be righteous or wicked. Between morning and night on that same day, another angel reveals to the unborn soul its future life: where it will live and where it will die and where it will be buried. And then at the end of nine months, the angel announces to the soul that it is time to be born, but the soul protests. The angel silences it: 'So God has decreed. Against your will you were formed, and against your will you will be born. And against your will you will one day die. Such is your fate.' Just before the baby is born, the angel taps it right under its nose, leaving a small cleft there. Then the angel extinguishes the light shining above the baby's head and it forgets everything it has learned during the previous nine months. And then the baby emerges into the world, crying and afraid. Each soul spends the rest of its time on earth recovering what it once knew.” (Ellen Frankel, The Classic Tales, 17-18).In this midrash, we find Akiva's “everything” and also a suggestion of what he meant by “free will.” The midrash tells us that everything is pre-ordained for the unborn soul except whether it will be righteous or wicked. This is solely the province of human choice. Similarly, the talmudic sage, Rabbi Hanina, taught: “Everything is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven” (Berakhot 33b). Is this the same “everything” and its exception as Rabbi Akiba and the midrash refer to in their texts? What exactly is meant by yirat shamayim, the fear of heaven? In Hebrew the wordier refer to the kind of fear we feel before taking a difficult exam or performing a dangerous task or when we face a mugger or a bully. It's also not the fear of pain or even of death. No, yirah, usually translated as “awe,” refers to how we feel in the presence of something indisputably greater than ourselves-like the Grand Canyon, the Milky Way, a chess grandmaster, the birthing of new life. It is a blend of reverence, dread, and wonder. And if we experience such yirah the presence of natural wonders, how much more so when we face the One who created them? However, such awe in the presence of divine power, divine justice, divine compassion is only meaningful if it happens through an act of our free will -- for if it were pre-ordained, it would be similar to the submissiveness shown by slaves or captives, who have no choice but to quake before their masters. When we willingly demonstrate our fear of heaven -- by acting righteously, by performing acts of repentance, prayer, and tzedakah, for example -- we truly honor God. In so doing, we temper the severity of the divine decree, whatever it turns out to be for us. By acknowledging our limits, we paradoxically enlarge our freedom.
Dr. Ellen Frankel is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of the Jewish Publication Society. She is the author of many books including, The Classic Tales.