What If It Wasn’t a Coincidence?

Jung, Esther and the meaning of coincidence

In Carl Gustav Jung’s consulting room, a young woman was describing a dream from the night before. Someone had given her a piece of jewelry shaped like a golden scarab, the beetle revered in ancient Egypt. She tried to explain everything through reason, and her therapy had not been moving for some time. Just then something tapped against the window. Jung opened it and caught the beetle trying to get in. It was one of the species in that region that most closely resembles a golden scarab. Jung handed it to her and said, here is your scarab. By his own account, her therapy began to move forward again after this encounter.

What moves me most in this story is what Jung did with the beetle. Instead of explaining the encounter and closing it, he placed the beetle in her hand like a gift. Perhaps the power of that moment lay less in what the beetle symbolized than in the room it gave to an encounter two people were living at the same time.

Jung called such moments synchronicity, two events with no causal link, one inside us and one outside, meeting in a meaningful way. He developed this idea in a long dialogue between psychology and physics. His essay was published alongside the work of the physicist Wolfgang Pauli in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. A psychiatrist and a physicist both thought these questions deserved serious attention.

Jewish tradition speaks of the same kind of encounter in another language, from within its own world. Hashgacha pratit, the individual providence of God. What Jung described is a psychological experience, while Jewish tradition speaks of a belief about the divine order of the world. They are not the same. Still, both approach the question of whether some encounters can be lived as more than ordinary coincidence. In a teaching attributed to the Baal Shem Tov, even the movement of a leaf in the wind can be understood as part of divine providence. So can a single blade of grass stirring deep in a forest.

The most beautiful story of this providence in the Tanakh is a book in which God’s name never appears. In the Megillah of Esther everything happens through what looks like chance. A man sitting at the king’s gate overhears a plot and saves the king’s life, and the deed is forgotten. On a night when he cannot sleep, the king asks for the royal chronicles to be read to him, and they open to that very page. The Midrash says that on that night it was not only Ahasuerus who could not sleep, but the King of the world. The Talmud ties Esther’s name to a verse in the Torah, anochi haster astir panai, I will surely hide My face. But hiddenness is not absence. As the tradition reads it, God’s name is missing from Esther, yet His hand is on every page. Beside the king who lay awake in his palace that night, another King was awake too, and a single page changed the fate of a whole people.

To know that what is hidden is real changes the eye that looks at it. Maimonides writes that providence is not the same for everyone but grows as a person’s mind and understanding develop. That is his teaching. What I add to it is my own faith. I read it not as a warning but as an invitation, and I believe the eye that sees is not producing an illusion. It is noticing something being offered to it. Seeing is a way of taking part in the encounter.

The Talmud gives a simple and lovely example of this participation. Sages would sometimes stop a child in the street and ask what verse he had learned that day. They received the verse that came from the child’s mouth as a word spoken to them in that moment. They did this not as fortune telling but as listening, without setting the world a condition, making room for it to speak.

The mind can of course try to explain such moments. But knowing how something happens does not erase what it means to the person it happens to. Describing the mechanics of a meeting does not make what happened in it smaller. One could probably find a medical reason for the king’s sleeplessness, and the story of Esther would still be the same story. That an encounter awakens deep meaning in me does not prove it was arranged especially for me. But not having such proof does not make what I lived worthless.

When something in my life touches me this way, I choose to take it seriously rather than explain it away. I ask what it reminds me of, what it is calling me toward, which door it has opened a little inside me. These questions do not shrink the sign. They keep it company. Writing the moment down in a few lines, noticing what widens in the body, gives it room. There is no need to wait for the meaning to resolve at once. Some encounters unfold over days, even years. As in Esther, the hand is often clearest when we look back.

That day Jung caught the beetle and placed it in the woman’s hand. She took it, and something changed. Perhaps our relationship with signs is something like this. We do not have to explain everything or turn every encounter into a conclusion. Sometimes all we can do is meet what comes our way with attention and keep the window open.

Sources

1. 1. 1. C. G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (1952), the scarab case. Published with W. Pauli in Naturerklärung und Psyche (1952), in English The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1955). Summary at https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/connecting-coincidence/201508/jung-s-scarab-psychotherapeutic-technique
      2. The Baal Shem Tov’s teaching on providence in the smallest movements of nature. https://www.chabad.org/therebbe/article_cdo/aid/80722/jewish/Overview.htm
      3. Esther 2:21–23 and 6:1–3, Mordechai’s deed and the king’s sleepless night. https://www.sefaria.org/Esther.6.1-3
      4. Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 15b, Rabbi Tanchum on “the sleep of the King of the world fled”. https://www.sefaria.org/Megillah.15b
      5. Babylonian Talmud, Chullin 139b, Esther and “anochi haster astir panai” (Deuteronomy 31:18). https://www.sefaria.org/Chullin.139b
      6. Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed III:18, providence and the development of the human mind. https://www.sefaria.org/Guide_for_the_Perplexed,_Part_3.18
      7. Babylonian Talmud, Chullin 95b (Rabbi Yochanan) and Gittin 68a (Rav Sheshet), asking a child for his verse. https://www.sefaria.org/Chullin.95b