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 

