Yesterday we spoke about traveling into the self; today, Abraham is told to step outside:
And He took him outside, and He said, “Please look heavenward and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He said to him, “So will be your seed.” (Genesis 15:5)
When G‑d brings Abraham out to count the stars, Rashi teaches that “Took outside” means more than physical relocation. It means: “Go out of your astrology.” [1] Abraham had seen the stars and concluded he was destined to be childless. G‑d’s response: You are not subject to the constellations. The Talmud crystallizes this revolution in four words: Ein mazal l’Yisrael—“There is no star for Israel.” [2]
The message is not that patterns don’t exist. Stars are real; their courses are predictable. The message is that you are not trapped in the pattern. What looks like destiny is often just the story you’ve been telling yourself—or the story told about you by others, circumstances, trauma, genetics, upbringing, or the cold calculus of probability. Abraham is taught that the Jewish people transcend statistical fate. Free will isn’t the absence of constraints; it’s the capacity to step outside the model that would otherwise determine you.
“Leave the script that predicts you, so you can choose the story that reveals you.”
In technical terms, this is “Bayesian model selection” or “active inference at the meta-level”—the brain doesn’t just update beliefs within a framework; it sometimes updates which framework to use. That leap—from one explanatory structure to another—is uncomfortable. The old model feels true because it has been reliably predictive. Stepping outside it, feels like stepping into chaos.
Predictive-processing brains run on priors. Growth often demands revising the model itself, not just its parameters—upping model order, re-weighting precision, embracing “surprise” to learn.[3] Sometimes, a paradigm shift is required.
But that is exactly what “go outside” means: expand the hypothesis space. Don’t just adjust your predictions within the constellation; question whether the constellation itself is the right map. Abraham’s stars said “barren.” G‑d said: “Count again. You are using the wrong coordinate system.”
Takeaway: Today, do one concrete act that contradicts the old paradigm. Not a grand gesture—just one choice that falls outside the predicted script. Then notice: the universe did not collapse. New possibilities appeared. You just counted new stars.
That’s Lekh Lekha. Go to yourself by first going outside the self you thought was fixed. The real you is not written in the stars. It is written in the choices you make when you stop believing they are already written.
[1] Rashi to Gen. 15:5; Nedarim 32a; Gen. Rabbah 44:10.
[2] Shabbat 156a, meaning that Israel is not bound by the constellations and astrological signs.
[3] Friston, K. (2010). “The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11, 127–138; Clark, A. (2013). “Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 36, 181–204.
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