Introduction
In his book Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, Nassim Taleb argues that the human brain abhors randomness. We are hard-wired to see patterns everywhere, to make sense of our surroundings and the events unfolding around us. Sometimes this pattern-seeking serves us well, but other times we fool ourselves into seeing order where there is none. We simply cannot tolerate the void of meaning that randomness implies.[1]
1. Quantum Randomness
Perhaps this helps explain why quantum physics—random at its core—remains so difficult to accept. It is not merely hard to understand; it is hard to believe. At the foundation of our reality lies indeterminacy: outcomes that no amount of measurement, refinement, or intellectual force can fully turn into certainties. Even Einstein, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, could not make peace with this. “G‑d does not play dice!” he famously protested. To which Niels Bohr replied, “Stop telling G‑d what to do.”[2]
I do not know whether G‑d plays dice. But I know He instructed us to do exactly that.
2. Playing Dice on Yom Kippur
On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, we read about two goats and the casting of lots—the central ceremony of the Avodah, the Service performed by the Kohen Gadol (High Priest) in the Beit HaMikdash (Holy Temple) in Jerusalem. In the Torah, the day is called Yom HaKippurim, a phrase that can be read, quite literally, as “the Day of the Lots.”
Consider the paradox this presents. The Baal Shem Tov taught that everything in this world is a manifestation of hashgachah pratit—Divine Providence extending to the smallest detail. Not the rise and fall of empires alone, not only the destinies of nations, but the microscopic: a straw blown by a gust of wind is divinely decreed.[3] This worldview seems to leave no room whatsoever for randomness. And yet, on the holiest day of the year, the heart of the service is a lottery.
Why would a tradition that insists there is no “mere chance” place a ritual of “chance” at the center of its most awe-filled day?
3. Where Providence Hides
The resolution begins with a simple insight: to the human eye, Providence is most easily concealed when events can be explained without it.
Two great “screens” stand between us and the manifestation of the divine hand: the objective regularity of nature and the subjective force of human choice.
Nature is an extraordinary concealment. Its laws are so reliable that we can build bridges, launch satellites, and predict eclipses. Drop a stone, and gravity dictates its path. Heat water, and thermodynamics governs its boiling. These regularities are not the enemy of Providence; they are its garment. However, precisely because they are consistent, they crowd our perception. When everything can be explained by physics, we stop noticing the One who authored physics.
Free will operates similarly, though from the inside. When I choose, when I decide, when I insist that my preferences are sovereign, I fill the space where G‑d might be revealed. As the Kotzker Rebbe famously said when asked, “Where is G‑d?”: “He is wherever you let Him in.”[4] The more tightly I grip the steering wheel of life, the less I notice the Hand that laid the road for me.
Here is where the lottery becomes a spiritual technology. A lottery neutralizes nature and will at the same time, not by abolishing them, but by arranging them so that they no longer produce an intelligible human explanation.
From the standpoint of physics, a die roll is governed by deterministic equations of motion. But those equations are exquisitely sensitive to initial conditions: the exact angle of release, the microscopic texture of the surface, the currents of air, the elasticity of the table, the tiny asymmetries of the die itself. In principle, the roll is “lawful”; in practice, it is effectively unpredictable—what we call in physics “deterministic chaos.” We have not suspended the laws of nature, but we have arranged conditions such that the laws do not yield a forecast we can own. A coin toss or a roll of a fair die neutralizes the predictive power of physical laws without suspending them.
From the standpoint of psychology, a lottery is even more radical. It is bitul or self-withdrawal. The Kohen Gadol does not choose which goat is “for the L-rd” and which is “for Azazel.” He removes his will from the decision entirely. In that vacancy, something else can enter.
“And Aaron shall place lots upon the two he-goats: one lot ‘For the L-rd,’ and the other lot ‘For Azazel.’” (Leviticus 16:8)
The lots are not a concession to uncertainty; they are a deliberate cultivation of it. They create a space that neither nature nor human preference can plausibly claim. And in that space, Providence can be revealed—not necessarily as a thunderclap miracle, but as meaning that shines precisely where meaning seems absent.
4. Goral: The will above reason
In Jewish thought, a lot (goral) is more than a randomizer. It is a way of reaching a decision that bypasses the usual machinery of reasons.
When I choose by reason, I can explain myself. I can point to advantages, probabilities, or preferences. But a choice by lot is, by design, beyond explanation. It comes from nowhere that the mind can map. That is why the goral has always carried a faint scent of the sacred.
The Land of Israel was divided by lot. Saul was selected by lot. Jonah’s shipmates cast lots. Achan was exposed by lot. Israel did not use the goral because it lacked intelligence; it used the goral precisely when intelligence was not the proper tool.
Chassidic and kabbalistic teachings take this a step further. They speak of the goral as rooted in a level “higher than intellect”—a dimension of will (sefirah of Keter, which precedes in the sefirotic tree the intellectual sefirah of Ḥokhmah[5]) that precedes reason. Reason is comparative; it weighs. Will is absolute; it decides. In human beings, we experience this directly: sometimes we choose because of reasons, and sometimes we choose because we want. In the divine, “because I will it” is not caprice, but sovereignty itself.
A goral, then, is not “meaningless chance.” It is a hint of a higher kind of meaning—one that does not arrive via our arguments. It is the meaning that descends from above our categories.
5. Hidden Miracles and the Ramban’s Wager
Here we touch a classic Jewish idea: Providence is often a “miracle” precisely because it is hidden. In his commentary (Exodus 13:16), Nachmanides (Ramban) asserts:
“No man can share in the Torah of our teacher Moses unless he believes that all our affairs, whether they concern masses or individuals, are miraculously controlled, and that nothing can be attributed to nature or the order of the world.”
To accept this is a kind of wager: one commits oneself to a worldview in which nothing happens purely by natural necessity; every event carries the imprint of divine agency if one is to be true to Torah.
The Nachmanides also argues that the open miracles of the Exodus are meant to train us to see the hidden miracles that occur constantly. The point of a visible miracle is not to keep suspending nature forever, but to teach us to read nature itself as a concealment of the Divine will.
If so, the lot becomes the perfect laboratory for hidden miracles. It is “nature” in motion—a lawful physical process, yet it stubbornly refuses to become a narrative we can control. The world is doing what it always does, and yet the result feels like it came from “elsewhere.” The lot is where nature becomes transparent.
6. Amalek: the Ideology of Happenstance
There is an enemy in the Torah whose theology is, essentially, randomness.
When the Torah describes Amalek’s attack, it uses the phrase asher karcha baderech. Rashi notes that karcha can be read as the language of mikreh (“happenstance”), a “sudden happening.”[6] Amalek’s strategy is not only military; it is metaphysical: to persuade Israel that events are just accidents, and therefore meaningless.
This is why Amalek is so corrosive. If everything is “chance,” then there is no story, no covenant, no calling—only statistics. Amalek does not need to refute Providence; it only needs to reduce reality to coincidence.
Against this, Judaism does something unexpected: it does not deny the experience of randomness. It redeems it. It turns mikreh into a doorway rather than an argument against meaning. “Yes,” the Torah seems to say, “from your perspective it may look like a roll of the dice. But you do not know who is holding the dice.”
7. Purim: salvation through coincidence
The Zohar makes a remarkable statement: Yom HaKippurim can be read as “a day like Purim.”[7] On the surface, the comparison is shocking. Yom Kippur is fasting, awe, white garments, and trembling. Purim is feasting, wine, masks, noise, and laughter. Yet the Zohar insists: Yom Kippur is only like Purim, as though Purim touches an even deeper point. Why? Because Purim is the festival of hidden Providence.
The Book of Esther never mentions the Name of G‑d. It reads like secular court intrigue: politics, jealousy, beauty contests, palace gossip, bureaucratic records. The story is stitched together from what appear to be coincidences—little accidents that just happen to line up. And precisely because the Megillah hides the Divine Name, it trains the eye to see the divine hand.
This is the paradox of Purim: the more concealed G‑d is, the more unmistakably He is there.
Haman casts lots (purim) to choose a date for genocide, convinced that history is a dice table, and he is the gambler. The lots fall, and Haman relaxes into fatalism, imagining that randomness has granted him inevitability.
But the same lots become the mechanism of his downfall. The date he chose, “by chance,” allows time for reversal. The royal insomnia at the “wrong” moment turns the bureaucratic record into a weapon. A sequence of events that could be narrated as mere happenstance becomes, in retrospect, an architecture.
Purim teaches that Providence often arrives disguised as randomness. Yom Kippur teaches that we can actively create space for that revelation.
8. Four Biblical Vignettes of the Sacred Lot
The Torah and the Prophets use lots in moments of moral and spiritual tension—precisely when the stakes are too high for manipulation.
Jonah: In a storm at sea, the sailors cast lots to identify the source of the calamity. The lot falls on Jonah. A skeptic might shrug: mere chance. Yet the narrative forces the opposite conclusion. The “random” lot becomes the instrument through which truth surfaces.
Saul: Although Saul was anointed privately by Samuel, he was later revealed publicly at Mizpah through a goral (lot) that ‘took’ the tribe of Benjamin, and finally, Saul son of Kish.[8] This selection method excludes bargaining. It denies human control and therefore discloses a different kind of authority.
Achan: After Jericho, Israel suffers an unexpected defeat at Ai. The culprit is identified through a process of successive lots among tribes, clans, and households. The point is not statistical; it is spiritual. The hidden sin is brought into the open through a mechanism that no single person can steer.[9]
The Land: The inheritance is apportioned by lot, again with the clear intention that the gift cannot be bought, negotiated, or seized. Even the geography of Israel is stamped with the message: possession is not control; it is Providence.[10]
9. Randomness as an ethical discipline
There is also an ethical dimension to the lot that we often miss.
A lottery is humility in action. It admits: I do not know enough to choose. It also admits: I am not entitled to choose.
In a world saturated with optimization—best strategies, best practices, best outcomes—we can start believing that every result is earned. The winner deserves. The loser failed. The rich are smart. The poor are lazy. Taleb’s great critique is that this is often a lie we tell after the fact, a story stitched over chance.
Modern science quietly agrees. When researchers randomize patients into treatment and control groups, they are not endorsing meaninglessness. They are acknowledging bias and trying to remove the human hand from the outcome. Randomization is used precisely because it is fair, because it prevents manipulation, and because it reveals truths that our preferences would otherwise conceal.
The lot on Yom Kippur does something spiritually analogous. It removes manipulation. It refuses to let ego masquerade as holiness. And then — in the empty space left behind—it makes room for a higher will.
10. Quantum Indeterminacy and the Open Slot in Nature
Now return to the modern mind, haunted by quantum randomness.
Quantum mechanics tells us that at a fundamental level, nature does not always provide a single determined outcome. Instead, it provides a distribution—real possibilities with real probabilities. The theory is astonishingly precise in predicting those probabilities, and yet it refuses to say which particular outcome will occur in a given instance.
One can interpret this in many ways. But from within a theistic weltanschauung, quantum indeterminacy offers a striking metaphor: a place where the laws themselves leave an open slot.
Providence, in this view, does not need to smash nature from the outside. It can work from within the space the laws already allow—selecting among permitted outcomes without violating the equations that govern the probabilities.
This is not a scientific claim and not a proof. It is a theological framing: a way of understanding how Divine action might be compatible with a lawful world. Randomness, precisely because it is lawful yet underdetermined, becomes a subtle conduit for Providence. I have elsewhere called this “randomness as the portal for divine Providence.”[11]
11. Chance as Encrypted Meaning
We can say the same thing without physics. Randomness is often just a meaning we cannot decode.
A cryptographic ciphertext is designed to look like noise. To the unaided eye, it is indistinguishable from randomness. And yet it may contain a message of exquisite precision. The difference between noise and meaning is not the data itself, but whether you possess the key.
So it is with Providence. The same event can appear to one person as a meaningless accident and to another as a clear sign. One person sees only ciphertext—noise. Another possesses the key and reads the message.
The Baal Shem Tov’s claim that every detail is Providence is not a call to superstition. It is a call to attentiveness. The key is to become humble enough to admit that the world may be speaking in a language deeper than our statistics.
12. Conclusion: The redemption of randomness
The scientific mind often treats randomness as the border where meaning ends. The religious mind is tempted to treat randomness as the place where meaning begins.
The Torah’s path is more demanding. It asks us to accept randomness as a genuine feature of our experience, sometimes even a feature of nature itself. But it also asks us to recognize that the very experience of randomness can become a portal: a space where neither nature nor ego fully explains, and where a deeper kind of meaning can enter.
That is why, twice each year—on Purim and on Yom HaKippurim—we read about lots and celebrate that sacred opening in the fabric of causality where Providence shines through.
Einstein insisted that G‑d does not play dice. Perhaps he was right—but not in the way he meant. The dice are not evidence of divine absence. They are the instrument through which divine presence speaks in a language our deterministic minds cannot claim to control.
Some people are fooled by randomness. But when we learn to step back, withdraw our grasping, and let the world speak from beyond our reasons, we may find ourselves not fooled by randomness, but saved by it.
[1] Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (New York: Random House, 2005), 56–77.
[2] Letter from Albert Einstein to Max Born, December 4, 1926, in The Born-Einstein Letters, trans. Irene Born (New York: Walker and Company, 1971), 91.
[3] This teaching is preserved in Keter Shem Tov and Toldot Yaakov Yosef by Jacob Josef of Polonee and elaborated by Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn in Sefer HaMaamarim 5696 (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1990), 120. The story of the Baal Shem Tov pointing to a falling leaf appears in numerous Hasidic sources; see also Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, Led By G‑d’s Hand (Brooklyn: Sichos in English, 2008).
[4] This saying is widely attributed to Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787–1859). The exchange with the young Reb Leible Eiger is recorded in various Hasidic collections. See Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 2:277.
[5] On the primacy of Keter (Will) over Ḥokhmah (Wisdom), see Zohar I:31b, which establishes that Ḥokhmah is called “reishit” (beginning) precisely because Keter remains hidden above it; cf. Zohar II:121a and III:290a on the verse “v’haḤokhmah me’ayin timatze“—”Wisdom emerges from nothingness” (Job 28:12), where “ayin” (nothingness) refers to Keter. Rabbi Isaac Luria elaborates in Etz Ḥayyim (Sha’ar 23:5, 8) that Keter represents “Ratzon Ha’elyon” (the Supreme Will)—not a will directed toward any particular object, but the primordial Willingness that precedes all intellectual faculties. See also Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, Tanya, Sha’ar HaYiḥud VehaEmunah, ch. 9, on will as the “soul” of intellect.
[6] Rashi on Deuteronomy 25:18, s.v. asher karcha.
[7] Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 21, 57b: “Purim itkri al shem Yom HaKippurim” (Purim is called after the name of Yom HaKippurim). See also Zohar III:100b for related discussion of the holiday’s mystical significance.
[8] I Samuel 10:20–21.
[9] Joshua 7.
[10] Numbers 26:55-56, Joshua 14:2.
[11] Alexander Poltorak, “Randomness as a Mechanism for Divine Providence” (paper presented at the 7th Miami International Conference on Torah and Science, Miami, FL, December 12–15, 2007).
