Some books keep us awake at night others put us to sleep. Perhaps the best in the soporific category is the non-best-seller entitled A Million Random Digits with 100000 Normal Deviates a book that has been published by the RAND Corporation for over 50 years. As its title implies it contains hundreds of pages of random digits. (The customer reviews on Amazon are worth reading.) Why would anyone buy much less produce such a book?
Random numbers are of major importance in many fields of science. For example when clinicians test a new drug they conduct a controlled experiment in which some people are given the drug and others receive a fake form of the medicine known as a “placebo.” The results for the two groups are then compared. For the experiment to be valid each participant must be assigned to either the active or placebo group randomly. Experimenters use lists of random numbers to assure that there is no bias in doing this.
Now is it so hard to come up with a list of random numbers? Can’t anyone with a pencil and a sheet of paper do it? Actually they cannot. Studies have shown that humans have subconscious biases that produce patterns when they attempt this task. For example people might produce more odd numbers than even ones or they may refrain from repeating digits even though repeated digits will frequently occur in truly random sequences.
Since scientific research is dominated by computer usage these days there are programs called “random number generators” that provide the sequences of digits or decimal numbers that are needed. When we look more closely into this software however we see that the numbers are not truly random; the outputs are more properly called “pseudo-random ” meaning that the numbers the programs produce pass many statistical tests of randomness but are generated by complex sequences of calculations that produce the exact same sequence of numbers each time they are started from scratch. Thus a user obtains a sequence of numbers that are completely unpredictable to him but exactly predictable to someone who knows how the software works.
We have all experienced events in our life that seem random but lead to outcomes that are significant to us. The way a person meets his zivug a business deal that just “falls into place ” a missed airline flight — to a believing Jew these are instances of yad Hashem yet a secular person might call them “just coincidences.” Indeed some outcomes are very welcome but others can be quite negative. Isn’t everything just random?
The Ramchal (Rav Moshe Chaim Luzzato) writing in Derech Hashem tackles the question of theodicy or “why the righteous suffer and the wicked prosper.” He explains that Hashem considers many factors in determining the experiences of a person’s life. Some tzaddikim suffer in this world so that their reward in the next is increased while resha’im may receive any rewards that are due them here so as to be excluded from the greater rewards of Olam Haba. Some may suffer so that others can receive rewards for helping them. Some hardships and rewards serve as tests of an individual some as growth opportunities. Some experience hardships to prepare the way for experiences of later generations; some are given pleasant lives to bring joy to righteous people who love them.
There are myriad factors and the complexity of understanding why things happen in this world is beyond the ability of any human being; only Hashem can balance factor against factor and come to a just decision. We have seen that the outputs of so-called random number generators are not truly random but are determined by such complicated calculations that the user cannot understand or predict what number will be produced. To him they appear random — so too with Hashem’s actions in the world. Random they are not but beyond our comprehension they are. Some choose to see such events as random and meaningless. Might there be a better way to perceive them from a Torah viewpoint? —