Rabbi David Wolpe on prophecy and prediction, in “Future Tense:”
When the British Sun newspaper dismissed its staff, all of the staff received normal “we regret” letters. The letter to the astrologer began, “As you no doubt foresaw.”
Seeing the future is a coveted human enterprise: fortunetellers, pundits, preachers and prophets crowd human history. Each of us forecasts everything from the weather to international events. Most often our predictions turn out to be laughably wrong. Occasionally, partly by insight but mostly by inadvertence, we get something right.
But the prophets of Israel did not really tell the future — rather they saw into the present. Their stock in trade was less foresight than insight. The prophets knew that if certain behaviors continued, there would be certain results. History was in our hands, and their message was not that we were helpless against the great tides, but rather that God gave us the freedom to shape what would be.
Since human beings are free, all prophecy must be conditional. Change your ways, insist Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, and you will change your future. The stars, affirms the Talmud, do not control our future; it is as Shakespeare’s Caesar insists to Brutus — the fault is “not in our stars but in ourselves.”
Who is wise, asks Pirkei Avot? Haroah et hanolad, which can be translated as one who sees what he brings into being. In other words, watch the future as it is born of our deeds.
In his book “The Prophets,” Norman Podhoretz writes that the prophets “were not saints, as we understand that term” and that indeed “if the mark of a true prophet were the ability to foresee future events, hardly a one of the classical prophets would qualify.” One of the biblical figures who did successfully predict the future — Joseph — did so through the interpretation of dreams, but he is not regarded as a prophet.
Podhoretz describes the prophets as those who were able to understand and convey a previously unimaginable idea — that there is one God, that God chose a people through whom to send a message, and that the message, most succinctly summarized, is “choose life.” It is that choice, left to us, that determines our future.