digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Treat the events in your life as possible calls from God (mikra) rather than mere coincidence (mikreh), and ask what God is asking of you through them. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues that this one-letter difference changes how a person responds to both bad and good events. He illustrates it with a grounded flight that led to an unplanned film project in New York.
Key Points
- The Hebrew words mikreh (mere chance) and mikra (God is calling to us) sound almost identical; mikra is spelled with an alef while mikreh is spelled with a heh.
- The Torah's middle book, Vayikra, is spelled with a small alef in the Sefer Torah, which Sacks reads as a reminder of how small the difference is between seeing life as coincidence and seeing it as God's call.
- Asking "what is God asking of us through this happening?" is presented as a daily discipline that Sacks has practiced more over the years.
- Interpreting a painful event as having a purpose in the future, rather than being a random blow, is described as a way to survive catastrophe without losing faith or hope.
- His example: a planned flight to London was cancelled because of volcanic ash from Iceland, and while in New York he met Mark Pearlman, who proposed making a film together, which he took as a call to use that moment.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions: Each time something happens to you or your community, ask yourself, "What is God asking of us through this happening?" Make this a regular daily practice rather than a one-off reaction.
- Concrete instructions: When something bad happens, consciously frame it as having a reason that lies in the future and as a means to do something, instead of letting it derail you into depression.
- The Torah's word for "God calling," mikra, is written with an alef, while mikreh ("chance") is written with a heh; the Sefer Torah shows the alef in Vayikra in small script.
- Sacks presents the flight disruption as a personal example, and the film was being made during the same morning he was supposed to fly.
- He cites Joseph Heller's phrase, "a trash bag of random coincidences blown open in the wind," as the view of history he rejects.
Bottom Line
Sacks's point is less about any specific event than about a choice of interpretation: seeing events as possibly purposeful gives a person direction and resilience, even when the events themselves are painful or disruptive.
