20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs

Destiny and Fate

Destiny and Fate Albert H. Friedlander D estiny and fate are best understood as existential selfexpressions of a particular religious tradition and a particular people. In Judaism, they are the internal structure of a people bound by revelation and by its own capacities and needs tq become "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Ex. 19:6). Such an internal structure leads Israel to the obligation of concrete action to which no limits are set beforehand, but which manifests both limitations and cfivine grace in the action itself. Martin Buber has proposed that "man has been appointed to this world as an originator of events, as a real partner in the real dialogue with God."1 It is human destiny that is the issue here, the insistence upon a religious life that is totally concrete and irreducible. This is how Judaism understands creation: it is God"s plan in which the human being enters upon a path of freedom. In that kingdom of freedom, destiny is realized. A I:Iasidic master once gave a paradOXical interpretation of the first word in Genesis: "'In the beginning'-that means: for the sake of the beginning did God create heaven and earth. For the sake of man beginning, that there might be one who would and should begin the direction towards God.'''2 138 DESTINY AND FATE The created world imposes its laws upon humanity, a set fate that must be accepted. Awareness of uncaring nature and its forces often led the rabbis to deterministic statements: "Ben Azzai taught: by your destined names will men call you and in your appointed place will they place you and give you what is intended for you. No man can take what is prepared for his fellow man and no kingdom can touch its neighbor even by a hair's breadth" (BT Yoma 38b-39a). Against this, Akiva taught: "Everything is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given" (M. Avot 3:15); and we find: "Everything is in the hand of heaven, except the fear of heaven" (BT Ber. 33b; BT Meg. 25a; BT Nid. 16b). There is consequently a dialectical interrelation between destiny and fate: on the one hand, there is a free movement toward God engendered within the individual, a destiny of dialogue in which a single person or a people reaches toward partnership with God in the kingdom of freedom; on the other hand, the world of nature, with its immutable laws, restricts this forward movement within the person or the people achieving their destiny. Fate intervenes, but cannot destroy those who live in freedom-a single moment can bring eternal freedom. It is Israel's destiny to move toward God as a people, struggling against the imposition of a pattern beyond its control. One must accept the fate imposed by nature, containing all of the particularities of a human being tied to his physical surroundings, of a flawed Jacob-people limping along darkened mountain paths. But Jacob is also Israel. Freedom of action, a share in the divine task of creation, brings the Jews toward a destiny in which isolation and despair are way stations where vision and integrity rise above the flawed fate that has been given. Israel moves toward others, and such encounters shatter its isolation. It is part of human fate that individuals become part of a collective, attached to a community that may remove major choices from their volition. This process can be a numbing, souldestroying experience-a robotlike fate imposed by a society in which individual capacities are numbed, destroyed, or turned away from the task of creation. The function of the Jew is to fight against that darkness, to transcend his natural dimensions and to discover the "supernatural Jew,,3 who returns to that destiny where freedom is still possible. The parameters of destiny are time and space. We take too much upon ourselves when we consider ourselves as ruling these dimensions, when our conceptual use of cosmological time freezes all time into a structure in which we move at will through past and future. Even when we stand in the anthropological time of actual, conscious human will that cannot know the future, that can only explore the past as an aspect of cosmological timeeven then we cannot move beyond the space we occupy. The past is past, DESTINY AND FATE 139 and the future is dependent upon decisions that have not yet...