Now that we know that trying to outsmart G-d will only backfire, and that the only way to truly change a gezera is to change ourselves and come close to G-d, the question is, what can we do to protect ourselves?
We will quote some stories from the Gemarah (Masechet Shabbat (קנו,א to teach us to have no fear:
The Gemarah says Rav Yochanan tells the following story:
Shmuel, a rabbi in the times of the Gemarah, said אין מזל לישראל
The Jewish People are above Mazal
Shmuel had a friend, אבלט Avlet, a stargazer.
One day they were sitting by a lake looking at the stars. Avlet pointed to a man walking into the forest, and predicted that the man would get bitten by a snake and die. Shmuel replied that if the man was Jewish he might make it.
Sure enough, later on that day they saw that very man walking out of the woods. Avlet the stargazer was shocked. He couldn’t believe it! He had never been wrong. He interrogated the man and searched his bag, where he found a piece of wood cut in half along with a snake cut in half as well. It seemed that he was right, that the man was supposed to die. Now it was Shmuel’s turn to interrogate the man. He asked what the man had done that day. The man replied that he and the other woodchoppers always shared in the preparation and expense of lunch. One man brought the bread, one the meat, one the tomatoes etc.
But one man was very poor and couldn’t contribute anything that day. Rather than embarrass him, the woodchopper decided to be the collector that day. He collected all of the contributions and then, not wanting to steal from the other woodchoppers, he decided to forgo his own lunch and give his portion to the poor man so that he could have lunch, and not be embarrassed.
Shmuel heard the story and said that’s what it means that צדקה תציל ממות Sedaka saves a person from death - and not just a strange death but death itself.
The Gemarah then tells another story. Rabbi Akiva had a daughter about whom he was told by the stargazers that she’d die the day after her wedding. He kept the news to himself, but on the day of her wedding he was petrified. On the morning after her wedding, he went to check on her and found her alive and well. He asked her how she was and she told him that the night before, in the dark, she had pinned her tiara to the wall. In the morning she saw that a snake had been pinned to the wall under her tiara! The rabbi asked her what she had done the day before. She mentioned that there had been a poor person at the wedding and that she gave the pauper her own portion of food.
Again, Rabbi Akiva said,
צדקה תציל ממות
Sedaka saves from death.
Based on these stories, the Alshich asks two powerful questions:
1-Why not warn the person in advance if you hear they are destined to die?
2- In each case, the person was asked what merit they earned that day. Why on that day? Would a merit from the day before not work?
He answers that we learn two things:
1- Sometimes there is gezera is for a specific day and they needed to do something that day to be saved.
And how would they know what to do?
2- G-d would send opportunities on that day, opportunities to merit salvation. Therefore, in both situations, they got what they needed be saved.
Rabbi Pesach Krohn tells a story, one of my favorites. A man lived in Lakewood. His wife was in the Catskills at a bungalow colony for the summer. One Thursday night on his drive from Lakewood to the mountains, the man stopped at a restaurant on the way. A poor vagrant, a Holocaust survivor, who had once been a great scholar, but had unfortunately lost his mind due to the atrocities, was there in the restaurant. Despite the fact that the survivor was less than pleasant smelling, and not in his right mind, the man sat down next to him and asked him what he’d like to eat. The survivor requested baked apples and a cup of tea, which the man ordered for him. It was a rainy, dark night, and later, as the man made his drive up the dark mountain roads toward the bungalow colony, his car skid and flipped over into an embankment. The car was upside down. The man crawled out, lucky to be alive. Someone spotted him, brought him into his home, and covered him. He was cold and wet. The woman of the house then offered to give him something to eat, to warm him, something she had just made for her husband-and she brought him baked apples and a cup of tea! He took it as a sign that G-d had sent him an opportunity on that bad day, to do something to save his life.
That’s the way to change the decrees. Don’t worry about the details. Just create zechuyot.