There was once a Cossack who saw a rabbi walking through the town square nearly every day at about the same time. One day he asked curiously: "Where are you going, rabbi?"

The rabbi answered: "I am not sure."

"You pass this way every day at this time. Surely you know where you're going."

When the rabbi insisted that he did not know, the Cossack became irritated, then suspicious, and finally took the rabbi to jail. Just as he was locking the cell, the rabbi faced him and said gently: "You see, I didn't know."

—Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe, 1993, p. 42.