J
acob was on his deathbed. He
summoned his children. He
wanted to bless them before he
died. But the text begins with a strange
semi-repetition:
“Gather around so I can
tell you what will happen
to you in days to come.
Assemble and listen, sons
of Jacob; listen to your
father Israel.” (Gen. 49:1-2)
This seems to be saying
the same thing twice, with
one difference. In the
first sentence, there is a
reference to “what will happen to you
in the days to come” (literally, “at the
end of days”). This is missing from the
second sentence.
Rashi, following the Talmud, says
that “Jacob wished to reveal what would
happen in the future, but the Divine
presence was removed from him.” He
tried to foresee the future but found he
could not.
This is no minor detail. It is
a fundamental feature of Jewish
spirituality. We believe that we cannot
predict the future when it comes to
human beings. We make the future by
our choices. The script has not yet been
written. The future is radically open.
This was a major difference between
ancient Israel and ancient Greece. The
Greeks believed in fate, moira, even
blind fate, ananke. When the Delphic
oracle told Laius that he would have
a son who would kill him, he took
every precaution to make sure it did
not happen. When the child was
born, Laius nailed him by his feet to
a rock and left him to die. A passing
shepherd found and saved him, and
he was eventually raised by the king
and queen of Corinth. Because his feet
were permanently misshapen, he came
to be known as Oedipus (the “swollen-
footed”).
The rest of the story is well known.
Everything the oracle foresaw
happened, and every act designed to
avoid it actually helped bring it about.
Once the oracle has been spoken and
fate has been sealed, all attempts to
avoid it are in vain. This cluster of ideas
lies at the heart of one of the great
Greek contributions to civilization:
tragedy.
Astonishingly, given the many
centuries of Jewish suffering, biblical
Hebrew has no word for tragedy. The
word ason means “a mishap, a disaster,
a calamity” but not tragedy in the
classic sense. A tragedy is a drama
with a sad outcome involving a hero
destined to experience downfall or
destruction through a character flaw or
a conflict with an overpowering force,
such as fate. Judaism has no word for
this, because we do not believe in fate
as something blind, inevitable and
inexorable. We are free. We can choose.
As Isaac Bashevis Singer wittily said:
“We must be free: We have no choice!”
Rarely is this more powerfully
asserted than in the Unetaneh tokef
prayer we say on Rosh Hashanah and
Yom Kippur. Even after we have said
that “On Rosh Hashanah it is written
and on Yom Kippur it is sealed … who
will live and who will die,” we still go
on to say, “But teshuvah, prayer and
charity avert the evil of the decree.” There
is no sentence against which we cannot
appeal, no verdict we cannot mitigate
by showing that we have repented and
changed.
There is a classic example of this in
Tanakh.
“In those days Hezekiah became
Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks
SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH
On Not
Predicting
the Future
36 | DECEMBER 16 • 2021