KING SOLOMON’S SERVANT came breathlessly into the court, “Please! Let me borrow your fastest horse!” he said to the King. “I must be in a town ten miles south of here by nightfall!”
“Why?” asked King Solomon.
“Because,” said his shuddering servant, “I just met Death in the garden! Death looked me in the face! I know for certain I’m to be taken and I don’t want to be around when Death comes to claim me!”
“Very well,” said King Solomon. “My fastest horse has hoofs like wings. TAKE HIM.” Then Solomon walked into the garden. He saw Death sitting there with a perplexed look on its face. “What’s wrong?” asked King Solomon.
Death replied, “Tonight I’m supposed to claim the life of your servant whom I just now saw in your garden. But I’m supposed to claim him in a town ten miles south of here! Unless he had a horse with hooves like wings, I don’t see how he could get there by nightfall . . .”
Obviously this calls to mind the old yiddish line about how we make plans and God laughs. As if our plans really determine anything. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner would point to this story as another example of how there are hidden things at work always. We act upon the reality that we perceive, but each action sets off ripples that we only sometimes get to understand later.
So, we go about our lives and act as if our actions have meaning, while it’s clear that we don’t really know what those meanings necessarily are. We only find out later. Maybe. What this means is that every decision we make is, by it’s very nature, an act of faith. Not faith in God per se, or in the Bible or in ritual law, but simple, basic faith that everything is interconnected, whether we see how or not -- that everything has meaning, whether we understand it or not, and that, as my teacher Rabbi Kushner might say, that all of this free will is ultimately being used in the service of what’s meant to be anyway.
