Recently I used the expression “by chance “ in a conversation with someone, only to be corrected that nothing ever happens by chance.
After all, chance suggests randomness and without plan. Can life and all that happens during our life be relegated to chance?
Hardly.
Yet we live our lives as if some things are by chance. Random.
In the week’s Parsha, Balaam, the rabid anti-Semitic prophet is hired to curse the Jewish nation. It’s a dramatic story that can make most movies seem boring. Multiple times — despite acknowledging that only that which Gd will allow him to curse will he be able to curse— he attempts to curse. He suggests that perhaps with much effort he’ll “chance” upon the moment that he’ll be allowed to curse the Jews.
Not a very good plan, I’m afraid. Nothing is by chance after all and he pays a heavy price for his foolish plan. He ends up blessing the very subjects he was out to curse and he does so with the most glorious blessings. He stood “no chance” and he well knew it and subsequently blew it!
Yet whilst nothing is by chance — Gd has created the world giving us “a chance“. It seems that used correctly, the word “chance” is tremendously empowering.
Each of us, every day, every moment for that matter, are given a chance to live ethical, moral and meaningful lives — to make this world a better place as prescribed in the Torah and gifted us via the Mitzvoth.
We are all given “a-chance” and that’s not “by-chance”. It’s the design of life. It’s the Divine design of this universe where so often we get pulled into thinking that things are by chance when in truth the only chance that there is — is the chance that each of us have to transform the world, visibly, into Gd’s garden.
If by chance you’ve read this piece to the end of— please accept my warmest wishes for a Shabbat Shalom!
Rabbi Yehuda & Dina Kantor
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