A story to start this week. A few years ago, my brother and sister-in-law invited Bernice and myself to spend shabbat with them at their flat in Rehavia, in central Jerusalem. On the Friday evening, Martin and I went to his regular synagogue when they are in Jerusalem – Hanasi.

This synagogue holds a service in the main synagogue upstairs and a smaller service in the study hall downstairs, which Martin and I both prefer. However, this particular shabbat marked a birthday or anniversary of Rabbi Berel Wein, the well-respected rabbi of the synagogue, and therefore the downstairs service was cancelled and everyone joined the main service upstairs in his honour.

There I noticed that one of the men saying kaddish (the memorial prayer recited for a deceased parent or other close relative) was a friend who still lived in the same area of Jerusalem that we used to live in. After the service I went over to say hello.

He was also spending shabbat as someone’s guest. He introduced us to his host, and I introduced Martin, and the four of us, for five minutes, shared the same route back from synagogue. In that time, Martin and I between us managed to find three connections with my friend’s host, one of which was that he was a judge in England who sat in the same court as a cousin of Bernice’s then sat in.  

Not much of a story, really, and yet….I have many times, since this incident, thought about how many separate, indeed disparate, factors had to be aligned to make this unexciting event happen.

When Martin and Adèle chose to buy a home in Israel, Jerusalem was, probably, the only serious place they considered, but they could have ended up in any one of a number of areas in the city.

Even having settled in Rehavia, they could have chosen any one of a number of synagogues to pray in.

On a normal shabbat, we would have attended the service downstairs, while my friend was upstairs.

If this friend had not lost a parent less than 11 months before, he would not have been saying kaddish.

If it had not happened, some years earlier, that he and I both lost a parent during the same period, and spent several months saying kaddish together, I would probably not have recognized his voice.

Had I not recognised his voice, I might well not have noticed him at all in the crowded synagogue.

Our two hosts might not have chosen the same week to invite us for shabbat. I would then not have met his host.

If this host did not happen to live in the same direction from the synagogue as we were going, we would not have chatted for five minutes.

There are many London courts at which he could have presided, other than the very one where Bernice’s cousin also sat.

I only knew where Bernice’s cousin presided because Bernice’s mother lived very close to the court, and she and her niece had a warm relationship. As a result, on her weekly session at the court, Bernice’s cousin would usually spend time with Bernice’s mum, a fact which I knew because we always updated with the cousin’s news..

I make that ten facts aligning to produce the result that we discovered this connection. If any one of these links had been missing, the connection would have remained undiscovered.

So, what do I make of this story, and why do I feel that there is a point in sharing it with you?

Let me say first that I do not believe there is a great significance to the connection, nor that this alignment was the conscious working of a prime mover, or the cosmos, or kismet, or karma, or fate. I do believe that it was a coincidence, even though I am aware that, as an orthodox Jew, I am treading a narrow path saying that.

Consequently, I suspect that this kind of alignment has the potential of happening all the time. In the last couple of decades I have experienced at least two other similar chance discoveries. (Don’t worry – I’m not going to inflict them on you; I may presume on your forbearance, but I’m not going to push my luck to that extent.)

This leads me to a kind of conclusion. I wonder whether we spend our lives accidentally and randomly doing what Pre-Cog (kind of clairvoyant but not quite the same) Agatha gets Tom Cruise’s character to do intentionally in this memorable scene from Minority Report.

In other words, when we bend down to tie a shoelace, we miss the current cycle of the pedestrian crossing lights and therefore arrive late at the restaurant and just miss seeing….who? And so on and so forth. The forests of our lives are strewn with the dried-up pods of seeds that never germinated, because we were looking the other way.

Even when we act deliberately, we really have no way of knowing what the outcome of that decision will be. Our lives are constructed from the decisions we make at thousands upon thousands of successive splits in the road, each of which leads us down a particular route.

The problem (or perhaps the magic) of this lies in the fact that, whenever we reach a decision point, there is no way that we can make a truly informed decision about how to decide. Doubtless many of you have already been thinking of Robert Frost since before the beginning of this paragraph. For the benefit of those who slept through American Poetry 101, Frost put it much better than I ever could.

The one turning-point that we always speak about at home, and that Bernice is convinced of, is the following. I spent most of my last two years in secondary school being very active in a Zionist youth movement, and to some extent (that’s coded language for almost totally) neglected my studies. (I feel my children have reached the age where I can say this, and my grandson hasn’t yet reached the age where I can’t.)

As my A-level final exams grew closer, I failed to work seriously, and, at a certain point, more or less gave up making an effort. (I did, however, complete some fine jigsaws and played a lot of excellent bridge.) This is largely because my study habits and self-discipline were very poor.

Had I studied for those exams, I might well have won a place at a good university (two good universities thought so), and the likelihood is that Bernice and I would not have married, and I would not have known her wonderful parents, and Esther and Micha’el would not have been born, and Tslil and Ma’ayan would not have come into our lives, and Tao would not have been born, and…and…and my head hurts.

And apparently, it’s never too early to enjoy the chance encounters that life sends your way!