Reb Meir, the second-century Talmudic sage, was seen as one of the greatest scholars of his day. Yet, unlike his friends, he chose to remain loyal to his teacher, Elisha ben Avuya, who became a heretic. Why?

There are three schools of thought. We are a victim of our past; we are the fathers of our futures. The unique position of Judaism extends man’s reach not only forwards, but even backward in time. We can retroactively redefine or recast our previous bad deeds into good ones, by peering through the “husk” of the negative and seeing it from the vantage point of the Divine. This was the secret of Reb Meir.