Shabbat Nitsavim Va'Yelekh
Written by Rabbi Professor Marc Saperstein Tuesday, 11 September 2007
The idea that human beings are free to choose between moral alternatives and are therefore responsible and accountable for our actions has been something of a heresy in the intellectual history of the West.
We find in the literary masterpieces of our classical heritage, vividly portrayed in the most famous Greek tragedies, a vision of human beings struggling futilely against forces they cannot control, caught in the web of necessity and unable to escape.
When Shakespeare’s Cassius says, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves that we are underlings,” thus implying that the stars are not responsible for our actions, he is expressing an attitude considered to be the essence of villainy.
The dominant religion of western civilization often reinforced this vision of morally impotent man, with some of its leading theologians teaching that it had been arbitrarily determined before the Creation of the world who was to be saved and who to be damned for eternity.
Twentieth-century literature abounds with characters who appear to assume that they have no choice in directing their lives, who drift aimlessly and purposely like jetsam on the sea, wherever the current may carry them. Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviourist psychology share the assumption that human freedom to choose is an unscientific illusion.
The central teachings of Judaism, encapsulated in a climactic verse of parashat Nitsavim, present a radically different vision of the human being. Our tradition recognizes no blind fate that renders us helpless before it, no compulsion, either external or internal, to threaten our freedom of choice. Instead it posits the freedom that alone gives meaning to the moral life, a doctrine of moral alternatives: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse.” What follows is not an absolute command, which human beings are unable to disobey, but a suggestion that we too often ignore, a hope that we too often thwart. “Choose life—that you and your offspring may live” (Deut. 30:19). It is as if God were saying, I can show you the alternatives, I can advise you, even plead with you to obey My laws and be moral human beings, but I cannot make the choice for you. That is something each of you must do alone.”
Maimonides emphasized the centrality of freedom to the Bible and the entire structure of Jewish thought in his “Laws of Repentance” at the end of the first book of his Code of Jewish Law. “If God determined whether a person were to be righteous or wicked, or if there were something inherent in human beings that inexorably drew us to one among many ways, as foolish astrologers have conceived in their own fancy, why then did the prophets bid us, ‘Do this and do not do that! Mend your ways and leave off transgressing!’ Why would they say this if, from the moment of our creation, everything about us were determined, or if our inner drives forced us to something from which we could not withdraw? What reason would there then be for the entire Torah?” Thus according to Maimonides, without this foundation stone of free choice, the entire edifice of Judaism begins to topple.
This is the Jewish understanding of human nature: we are free agents, held morally accountable for our choice, but always able to choose again for the better. It is a beautiful, poetic, uplifting vision, a vision that leads not to dismay or despair but to hope, not to aimlessness and futility but to purpose, not to abject cynicism but to the stirring affirmation that despite our weaknesses and imperfections and failings and sins, we can indeed lead a life that is worthy in God’s sight. “Choose life, that you and your offspring may life.” There could be no more fitting prelude to the Days of Awe.
