Sermons & Stories

When I was growing up, I loved Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series. It imagines the fall of an enormous galactic empire that was based on the fall of the Roman empire. Central to Asimov’s storytelling was the idea of psychohistory – a “science” that if you had a large enough sample of human beings, one could predict the future with a high degree of probability… large trends – not individual actors. While the language and depiction of women is dated, it’s still a great series.

The desire to know the future has been with us for a long time and it’s amazing to think about where we are today. “Futurist” is a profession. There is a group at USC’s Viterbi Information Sciences Institute working on a project called SAGE – Synergistic Anticipation of Geopolitical Events. It relies on people – not experts – interacting with artificial intelligence to make predictions about future events and I guess they’ve had some level of success. And there are scientists building a “digital twin Earth,” a highly accurate digital simulation of our planet to hopefully provide reliable predictions about extreme weather and climate change.

https://scienceblog.com/514351/its-not-magic-its-science-predicting-the-future/

https://www.euronews.com/living/2021/02/26/scientists-are-building-a-digital-twin-of-earth-to-predict-the-future-of-climate-change

It still sounds like different versions of Asimov’s science fiction to me. But then again, Ancient Judaism had it’s own way of predicting the future. In this week’s Torah portion, Tetzaveh, we read about how the Urim and Thummim, which in some way helped to tell the future, should be placed into the breastplate worn by the High Priest. It almost seems like a casual reference – like everyone should know what an Urim and Thummim were.

When the Torah was written, everyone probably did know what they were. By the time the rabbis rolled around hundreds of years later, they are asking questions about the proper way to consult the Urim and Thummim, why they are called Urim and Thummim, and even what they are and how they work (Talmud Yoma 73a-b). They stopped working after the destruction of the First Temple (Talmud Sotah 48b) or during the time of Samuel and David (Jerusalem Talmud Sotah 24b). Either way, we’ve been without their oracular powers for a long time now.

It’s not that people haven’t stopped looking. I’m sure there are more than a few people that might want to know next week’s lottery numbers or who will win next year’s Superbowl or other things we could bet on – think Back to the Future…. But when it came to the Urim and Thummim – such inquiries were off limits. Unlike Greek mythology or science fiction movies starring Michael J. Fox, these oracles in Judaism were not about one person’s quest. They were about what would benefit the people as a whole.

The idea of the Urim and Thummim, the idea of psychohistory, and the idea of futurists and SAGE and twin Earths – it all speaks to our inherent curiosity about what’s going to happen next. We certainly could have used more sophisticated future predicting prior to winter storm Uri. We would love to find out with greater certainty when we’ll have the COVID pandemic under control. And of course we want to know if things will turn out ok – for us, for our families, for our world.

The desire to know will always be there. And we’ll always bump up against the reality that our best, most scientific predictions will always speak to probabilities at best. And what does that mean? It means that it’s important to remember that even after a year where it feels like we don’t have much control of anything, our future is our own. There are no shortcuts. We must live each day to find out where the next one will lead us. God willing our actions today will lead us to the future we hope to see.

Shabbat Shalom!