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Q&A: I Will Raise Up for Them a Prophet from Among Their Brothers, Like You

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This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

I Will Raise Up for Them a Prophet from Among Their Brothers, Like You

Question

I’m a simple person, not especially bad and not especially good, with successes and failures, strengths and weaknesses, in every area of life.
On the other hand, more than once I knew with certainty things that would happen in the future,
things that statistically had no real probability at all—not even 1 in a million.
A kind of inner certainty that such-and-such would happen.
 
For example, that my wife would be a certain kind of person, living on certain streets in a certain city, that her parents would be such-and-such. It was a rare and almost impossible picture for several reasons (she is probably the only one in the country who fit those conditions, certainly when narrowed down to 1 out of a few dozen families living in that place that I “knew” she lived in…). And indeed, that was the first match suggested to me. I knew in advance that she was mine because she matched exactly the “things I knew.”
By the way, looking back over decades, she is the only person in the world—without any exaggeration at all—who could have matched the strange and rare combination of circumstances that I knew would be the case.
In general, psychology would deny this and tell me it’s déjà vu, and maybe offer all sorts of other explanations, but they are simply not factually correct.
And there were various other things too that I knew in advance.
This lasted for a period of several years, then disappeared, and maybe is now coming back.
I searched and found that Rabbi Aviner, in his book Between Light and Darkness, among fake rabbis and rebbes, writes that it is possible for ordinary people to merit prophecy.
What does the Rabbi think about that?
What am I supposed to do with it?
(I would ask Rabbi Aviner, whom I’m close to, but he’s kind of a Bibist and messianic-nationalist, and I’m suspicious of the judgment of someone who got swept up after the “those hooligans” cult.)

Answer

I don’t know.

Discussion on Answer

Franz (2024-10-29)

Rabbi, if what the questioner says is really true, isn’t this a difficulty for free choice? After all, his choices did not create reality; rather, the reality of his life and future was necessary.

Michi (2024-10-29)

I don’t get into discussions like these. In any case, it does not contradict free choice. At most, there are cases in which the outcome is dictated. Maimonides, in the letter, rejects the Talmudic passage about forty days before the formation of the fetus on the grounds that a person has choice regarding matters of commandment, and a match is a commandment.

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