Once upon a time, a country fair was held. There was a contest to guess the correct weight of an ox. Eight hundred people took a shot. Not one got it right. But in the crowd was a guy named Francis Galton. He tried a little math experiment. He took all the guesses and averaged them: 1197 lbs. And then he checked the actual weight: 1198 lbs. The moral of the story: individually, people’s guesses were all over the place. Together, they were almost perfect. Or put another way, “Ain’t none of us smart as all of us.” As an aside, Galton was probably the smartest man in 19th century England. He coined the expressions “nature vs. nurture” and “eugenics” and also invented the first weather map (well, nobody’s perfect).
So what has all this to do with prayer? It may help us answer one of the single most vexing problems in all of Jewish theology—why do bad things happen to good people? The second paragraph of the Shema, “And if you really listen to the commandments…” asserts very strongly that if you are good, good stuff happens; but if you are bad, you get whacked.
Good luck with that. As we all know, it just ain’t so. Among other things, we’ve lost too many good, young people to be able to believe such a naïve theology.
But perhaps we are focusing on the wrong thing. Individual lives, like individual guesses, can be all over the place—and so can the consequences of those lives. A jerk can be a quazillionaire (examples too numerous to mention); an absolute angel can live in destitution (examples even more numerous—but we don’t know their names. They’re never on the cover of People magazine). But when viewed as a collective, the fate of the group follows G-d’s promised pattern almost exactly. Here’s a quick test. Think of the worst people of the 20th century. Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Walter O’Malley. You get the idea. Consider their fate, and the fate of the countries that sought to perpetuate their evil. Simply put, “the thousand year Reich” didn’t even make it to bar mitzvah age.