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envisaged by the Torah is that in it every 
individual mattered. Justice was to be 
paramount. The rich could not buy 
special treatment and the poor were not 
left destitute. When it came to communal 
celebrations, everyone — especially the 
orphan, the widow, the stranger — was to 
be included.
Everyone had at least some share in 
the harvest of grain and fruit. Employers 
were to treat employees with fairness 
and sensitivity. Even though there were 
still slaves, one day in seven they would 
enjoy the same freedom as their owners. 
This meant that everyone had a stake in 
society. Therefore, they would defend it 
with their lives. The Israelites were not 
an army conscripted by a ruler for the 
purpose of his own self-aggrandizement. 
That is why they were capable of 
defeating armies and nations many times 
their size.
Above all, they were to have a sense 
of destiny and destination. That is the 
meaning of the keyword that runs like a 
refrain through the curses: keri, a word 
that appears seven times in our parshah 
and nowhere else in Tanach. “If you walk 
with Me with keri … then I will walk 
with you with keri.”
There are many interpretations of 
this word. Targum Onkelos reads it as 
“hard-heartedly,” Saadia as “rebelliously,” 
Rashi as “treating as a casual concern.” 
Others understood it as “harshly” or 
“with hostility.” Maimonides, however 
(partially echoed by Rashi, Rashbam, Ibn 
Ezra, Chizkuni and others), understands 
it as related to the word mikreh, meaning 
“chance.” Hence the meaning of the 
passage according to Maimonides is: “If 
you believe that what happens to you 
is simply a matter of chance, then, says 
God, I will leave you to chance.”

CHOOSING PURPOSE
On this reading, the book of Vayikra 
ends as it began, with the fateful choice 
between mikra (with an aleph) and mikreh 
(with a heh): between seeing life as a 
call, a summons, a vocation, a destiny, 
and seeing it an accident, a random 

happening with no ultimate meaning 
whatsoever.
So it is in the life of nations and 
individuals. If you see what happens 
to you as mere chance, your fate will 
be governed by mere chance. That is 
what the Sages meant when they said, 
“Wherever [the Torah] says, ‘
And it came 
to pass’
, it is always a prelude to tragedy.” 
If you simply let things come to pass, 
you will find yourself exposed to the 
vagaries of fortune and the whims of 
others. But if you believe you are here 
for a purpose, your life will take on 
the directedness of that purpose. Your 
energies will be focused. A sense of 
mission will give you strength. You will 
do remarkable things.
That was the special insight Jews 
brought to the world. They did not 
believe — as people did in ancient times 
and as atheists do today — that the 
universe is governed by mere chance. Was 
it mere chance that a random fluctuation 
in the quantum field produced the 
Big Bang that brought the universe 
into being? Or that the universe just 
happened to be regulated by precisely 
the six mathematical constants necessary 
for it to give rise to stars and planets 
and the chemical elements essential 
for the emergence of life? Was it mere 
chance that life did in fact emerge from 
inanimate matter? Or that among the 
hundred million life forms that have 
existed on Earth, just one, Homo sapiens, 
was capable of asking the question “Why?”
There is nothing self-contradictory 
about such a view. It is compatible with 
all the science we now know, perhaps 
with all the science we will ever know. 
That is the universe as keri. Many people 
think this way. They always did. On this 
view, there is no “Why,” not for nations, 
and not for individuals. Life just happens. 
We are here by accident.
Jews believed otherwise. No one said 
it better than the Catholic historian Paul 
Johnson:
“No people has ever insisted more 
firmly than the Jews that history has 
a purpose and humanity a destiny. At 

a very early stage in their collective 
existence, they believed they had detected 
a Divine scheme for the human race, of 
which their own society was to be a pilot. 
They worked out their role in immense 
detail. They clung to it with heroic 
persistence in the face of savage suffering. 
“Many of them believe it still. Others 
transmuted it into Promethean endeavors 
to raise our condition by purely human 
means. The Jewish vision became the 
prototype for many similar grand designs 
for humanity, both Divine and man-
made. The Jews therefore stand right at 
the center of the perennial attempt to give 
human life the dignity of a purpose.”
The people who change the world are 
those who believe that life has a purpose, 
a direction, a destiny. They know where 
they want to go and what they want 
to achieve. In the case of Judaism, that 
purpose is clear: to show what it is to 
create a small clearing in the desert of 
humanity where freedom and order 
coexist, where justice prevails, the weak 
are cared for and those in need are given 
help, where we have the humility to 
attribute our successes to God and our 
failures to ourselves, where we cherish 
life as the gift of God and do all we can 
to make it holy. In other words: precisely 
the opposite of the violence and brutality 
that is today being perpetrated by some 
religious extremists in the name of God.
To achieve this, though, we have to 
have a sense of collective purpose. That 
is the choice that Moses, speaking in the 
name of God, set before the Israelites. 
Mikra or mikreh? Does life just happen? 
Or is it a call from God to create 
moments of moral and spiritual beauty 
that redeem our humanity from the 
ruthless pursuit of power? 
“To give human life the dignity of a 
purpose.” That is what Jews are called on 
to show the world. 

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks served as the 

chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of 

the Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings have 

been made available to all at rabbisacks.org. This 

essay was written in 2015.