Feb 1st, 00:00

Those who know me very well will tell you that I will always choose a TV sitcom for unwinding instead of a picking up a book. And visiting a museum is ok though I can learn a lot more history of the town from speaking with the
waiter. But I do have a philosophical side. And this month I have chosen to ponder what we cannot predict.
Every night when I watch the weather report and see video of freezing rain and snow storms back East, I am so thankful to live in Southern California. But curiously, though we don’t have the changing of the seasons, and from day to day the
forecast does not differ that much, we still tend to depend on the most unpredictable of soothsayers, future tellers and forecast gurus which are phrases that describe our nightly television weatherman. The nightly weatherman isn’t the only one who likes to predict. Here are some of my favorites: “Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible,” said Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society in 1895. “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home,” said Ken Olson, president and founder of Digital Equipment, a maker of mainframes, in 1977. “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” said an official at the US patent office in 1899. And Charles Darwin wrote in the foreword to The Origin of Species, “I see no good reasons why the views given in this volume should shock the religious sensibilities of anyone.”
As has been pointed out by others despite the many political
experts, research institutes, think tanks, government and university departments, no one foresaw the bloodless end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. And the
historian Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Islam, was once asked to predict the outcome of a certain American foreign policy intervention. He gave an excellent reply. “I am a historian, so I only make predictions about the past. What is more, I am a retired historian, so even my past is passé.”
We know so much these days. We look up and see a universe of a hundred billion galaxies each of a hundred billion stars. We look down and see a human body containing a hundred trillion cells, each with a double copy of the human genome, and 3.1 billion letters long enough if transcribed to fill a library of 5,000 books.
However, there is still one thing we don’t know. We don’t know
it and perhaps will never know what tomorrow will bring. This idea that tomorrow is an uncertain future with nothing yet written about it, is a particular kind of worldview. It suggests we human beings are free. We choose, we make mistakes, we learn. People constantly surprise us. The failure at school becomes the winner of a Nobel Prize. The leader, who disappointed, suddenly shows courage and wisdom in a crisis. The driven businessman has an intimation of mortality and decides to devote the rest of his life to helping the poor.
This is something science has not yet explained and perhaps never will. There are scientists who believe freedom is an illusion. For religion, for Jewish culture, this is what makes us human and it is not an illusion at all. We are free because we can be the subjects of our own stories – we can respond to events in our lives, not just physically but in how we perceive what happens to us and around us.
The Bible teaches this lesson early on in the book of Exodus in the three words God tells Moses at the burning bush when Moses asks God what is God’s name. God replies, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh. These words are often translated as, “I am what I am.”
What they really mean, though, is “I will be who and how I choose to be.” There is something about the human being that will always elude research and study: our future. Our future is unpredictable because we create it.
So may I suggest an exercise – do one totally unpredictable act of kindness or respond in a way someone never would have expected. Choose compassion instead of anger. Choose patience instead of frustration. Rise above a petty grudge (or a valid one) to choose forgiveness. Take a class you never would have considered. And read a book on a subject you thought was beyond your reach. In the next twenty-four hours be unpredictable for the better and show someone that the world is a little better than they thought it was going to be. Try it and see.