The sages taught that God has a task that occupies Him constantly — matchmaking. The Talmud records that a Roman matron once challenged a rabbi: "Your God created the world in six days. What has He been doing since then?"
"Making matches," the rabbi replied. "Pairing husbands with wives, wives with husbands." The matron scoffed. "That is His great occupation? Even I can do that. I have a thousand male slaves and a thousand female slaves, and I can pair them all in a single night."
She went home and did exactly that — lined them up and paired them off by fiat. By morning, her household was in chaos. One slave had a broken head, another a gouged eye, a third a fractured rib. Every pair was miserable. They came to her in a great clamor, each begging to be separated from the mate she had assigned.
The matron summoned the rabbi again. "Your God's Torah is true," she conceded. "It is beautiful and praiseworthy. Everything you said was correct." The rabbi nodded. "God pairs couples," he said, "and He also builds ladders — raising this one up and bringing that one down, enriching this one and impoverishing that one, all so that the right two people meet at the right moment."
What appears to human eyes as random fortune — wealth, poverty, travel, catastrophe — is, the rabbis taught, the hidden machinery of divine matchmaking. Every rise and fall is a step toward a meeting that was decreed before birth.