The Nature of Free Will

Part 2: Choosing and Not Choosing

As I sit down to plan my Shabbos menu, I run through a mental list of my usual options… honey chicken? Poppers? Meatballs…?

In the morning, I’m getting dressed. The red shirt or the blue one?

I’m in high school, deciding which seminary is best for me. How can I know — and how can I choose?

While these may sound like “decisions,” are they what we call choices — in the sense of bechira? Are these expressions of my free will?

In Part One of this series, we explained why Hashem endowed us with the opportunity, ability, and obligation to exercise our free will. Now, let’s explore what it is we are (or are not) choosing.

The Rambam¹ explains the nature of “free will,” the freedom to make choices, as follows:

Permission is given to every individual to direct oneself to follow a good path and become righteous or follow a bad path and become evil². This is what is written in the Torah, ‘And now man is like one of us, knowing good and evil.’ This means that a human being is unique in creation in that he personally understands good and evil and can choose to do either, and there is no one to prevent him from doing so.

Bechira means we are making decisions that involve moral choices: right versus wrong, permitted versus best. So, the choice of the red shirt or the blue one may not fit into the bechira category — unless, of course, it involves a question of morality (one shirt is more modest and dignified than the other, or one of them is stolen). What I am making for Shabbat probably isn’t a moral decision. And where I go to seminary, well that would depend on what makes me lean towards one place or another.

Aside from non-morally consequential choices, there are many other areas that are not under the rubric of our choices. The Gemara³ tells us, “Everything is in the hands of Heaven except for Fear of G-d.” And Rashi⁴ explains: “Everything that occurs to a person is from G-d… But whether a person is righteous or evil is not from Heaven. This is entrusted to the individual, and there are two paths before him, and he needs to choose the fear of Heaven.”

Seems a bit unfair, no? We can’t choose our circumstances or even the outcomes of our choices — and yet this is referred to as our “freedom to choose”? The Rambam⁵ clarifies the notion of free will: “There is not one to force him, nor is there a decree upon him, nor someone to pull him to one of these paths. Rather, the person himself, using his mind, chooses the desired path.” In other words — free will is not that we have the ability to choose everything, but rather that when we decide whether or not to do what is best, the choice is ours alone.

Rav Chaim Friedlander elaborates on this point — by nature we tend to blame our lack of spiritual performance on the externals: If only I were more rich, then I could spend more time doing mitzvot, if only I lived in the right place then I could buy more modest clothing, if only my friends would stop gossiping, then I would.

Says Rav Chaim⁶:

This is a very dangerous situation since one loses the impetus to change oneself….This is only a delusion …This is the way of the yetzer [hara] to relax an individual into thinking that his situation is not dependent on himself, and he is personally incapable of changing the situation. However, the true solution is for the person to recognize that ‘The situation depends only upon me [taking action],’ and then all the excuses will be proven false, and in front of G-d, one cannot make such claims.

The essence of free will, says Rav Dessler, takes place at the meeting point between what we know clearly and that of which we are entirely ignorant. The gray area, where we know, but it’s a stretch to do or not to do. We are somewhat aware, but not convinced. We have a tug of war with the yetzer tov and yetzer hara. Clarity is obscured, and we can be led astray – but that is a choice, not an automatic result.

Granted, life circumstances may set us on a particular course. This is exactly what Rav Dessler tells us in his famous “Kuntrus Habechira” (Essay on Choice)⁷. We are born into a world, a family, a community, where there are things we were never exposed to and Torah ideas we have yet to learn. We are also given a set of rules and values from birth that make other aspects of our life a given, for better or worse. Make no mistake – that is not what we are judged for. The essence of free will, says Rav Dessler, takes place at the meeting point between what we know clearly and that of which we are entirely ignorant. The gray area, where we know, but it’s a stretch to do or not to do. We are somewhat aware, but not convinced. We have a tug of war with the yetzer tov and yetzer hara. Clarity is obscured, and we can be led astray – but that is a choice, not an automatic result.

On this battlefield we aim to conquer more and more territory, to place more arenas of life under the direct influence of the yetzer tov, and ingrain it so deeply into our behavior that it is as if we are no longer choosing. Each time we choose for the good, the area of struggle becomes that much more clear to us, that much more true. 

We can never discount the impact of one small choice. Just as the dieter tries to tell himself that one more or less cookie makes no difference – but objectively we know that the decision does not exist in a vacuum. Each choice changes who we are, and what we will choose next. 

My students recently did a program in their seminary where they chose a quote to portray artistically in the school halls. It states: “We ask God to change our situation, not knowing that He put us in the situation to change us.” This is, quite succinctly, the purpose of our existence. We do not sit back and wait for Hashem to change what is around us – rather we make this situation meaningful and worthwhile, by using it to affect my own morality, hopefully for the good.

¹ Laws of Repentance 5:1

² Genesis 3:22

³ Berachos 33b

⁴ ibid

⁵ Laws of Repentance 5:2

⁶ Sifsei Chayim Volume I, p. 9

⁷ Michtav M’Eliyahu, Vol. I