This story exemplifies the verse, “Many are the thoughts found in the heart of man, but it is God’s advice that will prevail.”
We could explain that it is the person who thinks and plans something and then ultimately God nullifies the person’s thoughts and works against those plans.
On a deeper level, however, Rebbe Bunim of Peshischa explained that the thoughts of man remain intact, but nonetheless, it is God’s plan that will be realized by the deeds of man. In our story as well, Avner calls for the Ramban to come before him in the middle of Yom Kippur so he can taunt him. And his plan is realized. Nevertheless, it is specifically through his own machinations that Avner returns to God, reconnects, and is known as Rabbi Avner.
This is an example of how foreknowledge and choice work. We cannot say that Avner did not choose his own path. He transgressed of his own will and consciousness, completely on purpose. Perhaps what originally angered Avner was that the Ramban had said that everything is already written in Ha’azinu. Everything that is going to happen throughout the generations has already been written in the Torah. Avner could not tolerate this. “I will prove that I will do whatever I want, and as much as I want,” he tells himself. And when he actually does go completely overboard, he mockingly asks the Ramban “Is my story—the story that completely contradicts the Torah—also in Ha’azinu?”
In other words, can the Torah include the story of the person who contradicts and rejects the Torah?
And the Ramban answers him that it is! No matter how far you have gone astray, you are written there, in the most horrifying verse that there is. The verse that described God’s thought: “I said in My anger I will make them as if they do not exist, I will eliminate their memory from humanity.” This secret was revealed to Avner specifically because he chose to descend to the lowly place that he reached. It was from there that he understood that the even the most distant and lowest place he had reached is still within the realm of God’s foreknowledge.
Does this mean that it is too late for Avner and that he cannot return to God? After all, he is alluded to in the darkest of verses, a verse that says that nothing will remain of him. No! There is always teshuvah, but it is as difficult at the teshuvah performed by Rebbe Elazar Ben Dordaya, whose soul departed his body amidst sobbing. In the same manner, Rabbi Avner chooses to become naught and to fulfill the verse that says that his memory will be eliminated from humanity by his own doings, from a place of repentance. Rabbi Avner did not commit suicide, God forbid. He simply set sail for the unknown, to nothingness, where he disappeared. Rabbi Avner’s rectification is within the nothingness.
