Choose
Wisely
Rosh
Hashanah Morning 5778
September
21/22, 2017
Rabbi
Alan Cook
Sinai
Temple, Champaign, Illinois
Rabbi Shifra
Penzias tells the story of her great aunt, Sussie, who lived through the
horrors of Nazi Germany. One afternoon,
Sussie was riding a bus home from work in Munich when SS officers boarded and
began demanding to see the passengers’ papers.
For some, this was an annoyance.
For the Jewish passengers, it was terrifying; Jews were being told to
leave the bus and get in a truck parked around the corner.
Sussie began to
tremble, as tears streamed down her face.
The man seated next to her politely asked what was wrong.
“I don’t have the
papers you have,” Sussie explained. “I
am a Jew. They are going to take me.”
The man exploded
with disgust. He began to berate
Sussie. “You stupid idiot!” he
screamed. “I can’t stand being near
you!”
A soldier nearby
asked what was wrong. “She’s what’s
wrong!” the man yelled, pointing at Sussie.
“My wife has forgotten her papers again.
She always does this and I am just fed up!”
The soldiers
laughed and moved on. Sussie never even
knew the name of the man who rescued her in this manner. She never saw him again.[1]
I tell you this
story not to highlight the Nazis’ sadism and misogyny; most people in this
country understand that Nazis are evil.
Rather, the incident serves to illustrate the complexities of human
existence on this earth. Did the
stranger on the bus exercise free will in jeopardizing his own well-being to
stand up for Sussie? Or was he placed
into that situation by some Divine intervention, specifically to ensure
Sussie’s safety? Had God already plotted
out the narrative arc of Sussie’s life, and was it God who determined that she
would emerge unscathed from the ordeal on the bus? Sussie’s experience evinces echoes of a
longstanding theological conundrum: does God intervene in the world, charting
the course of every individual? Or do we
indeed have a choice as to how our lives will unfold?
We find similar
questions when we consider many of the narratives in the Torah. Did Eve and Adam truly have free choice about
whether to eat the forbidden fruit (Genesis almost certainly would have been
much shorter if they had not)? Did
Joseph’s brothers exercise free will when they sold him into slavery, or was
this a necessary instance facilitated by God to move the family to Egypt and
set up the Exodus? Could Moses and Aaron
truly have chosen not to hit the rock in order to provide the kvetching Israelites with water in the
wilderness? And could Abraham actually
have said, “No!” upon hearing the awful and awesome call to sacrifice his
beloved son Isaac?[2]
Rabbi Susan
Silverman notes that the Torah recounts two major interactions that Abraham has
with God. She writes, “Abraham once
argued with God and once obeyed, and the obeying was the failed test.”[3] Why, we might ask, does Abraham intervene on
behalf of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, most of whose citizens were
completely unknown to him, and yet fail to challenge the Almighty in regard to
the command of the Akeda? If we understand the Torah text to be exploring
similar questions, then some possibilities emerge that may explain—even if they
don’t excuse—Abraham’s behavior.
It is possible that
God, at least as described in Biblical events, has not fully ceded free will to
humanity. If this is the case, then
Abraham had no choice but to proceed according to the command he had
received. The events needed to unfold
according to God’s design because of the way that the interaction between God,
Abraham, and Isaac fit into the master plan of the universe.
Read in this way,
we might interpret Abraham’s actions less as a foolhardy rush to do God’s will
and more as a trepidatious path that Abraham feels powerless to deviate
from. When, for instance, Abraham
assures his son, “Elohim yir’a’eh lo et
ha-she, b’ni—God will provide the ram, my son,”[4] we see this less of a
statement of confidence in divine providence, and more of a tentative reply:
“At least, I assume that’s what will happen…”
Abraham would seem to have some notion that these events are out of his
control; Isaac, too, recognizes that his life is quite literally in God’s
hands.
This notion of
pre-ordained events may soothe and satisfy some who are uncomfortable with the Akeda narrative. It would appear to absolve Abraham of some
guilt for his failure to intervene when his son’s life seems to be at
risk. Yet, in solving that conundrum, the
concept of predetermination opens an even bigger can of worms.
If we were to
accept that God is pulling the strings on all human actions, guiding even the
most minute details of our daily life and our interactions with others, then we
would have to accept that God is the source of both Good and Evil in this
world. This notion, known as theodicy,
has troubled theologians—at least monotheistic ones—as far back as the origin
of the Abrahamic faiths. If there is
only one God, and if we accept that God’s default mood is to be benevolent to
all, and if God knows all and determines the course of every life, then we all
should know only goodness. In order for
us to allow for the fact that bad things do happen to good people, we either
have to reject the notion that God has power over all world events, or we have
to reject the notion that our fates are predetermined. This would mean that we have free will. We have a choice.
So this leads us
to the conclusion that Abraham has consciously chosen to get involved in this
scheme, fully cognizant of the fact that doing so will place Isaac in
jeopardy. We might conjecture that Abraham, at this
juncture of his life, feels unwilling or unable to out his own
self-interest—the preservation of Isaac—above what he has heard as the command
of the Divine. But whatever his
motivation, it is his choice to awaken early in the morning and to carry out
the preparations for this terrifying plan.
Having weighed the potential consequences of inaction, he has chosen to
forge ahead. Through this lens, the statement, “God will
provide the ram, my son,” feels less like a reassurance to Isaac, and more an
exasperated, “I know what I’m doing—don’t mess with me, kid.”
The “Choose Your
Own Adventure” books that had their heyday in the mid-1980s provided readers
with an abundance of choice in determining how the narrative would unfold. At the bottom of every few pages, options are
presented: if you want to go down the stairs, turn to this page; if you want to
climb out the window, turn to this page.
But life’s options are not always so clear-cut. At times, we may not even understand all the
choices placed before us.
The Western world
has taught us to value choice. But we
don’t always have the tools at our disposal to make the most informed
decision. And so we may second-guess
ourselves, because we fear the repercussions of choosing incorrectly. Author and psychologist Barry Schwartz
explored this difficulty in a 2005 TED talk based on his book The Paradox of Choice.[5] Schwartz notes:
“Choice has… negative effects on people. One effect,
paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis, rather than
liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very
difficult to choose at all…A study was done of investments in voluntary
retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records
from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual-fund company of about a million
employees and about 2,000 different workplaces. What she found is
that for every ten mutual funds the employer offered, the rate of participation
went down two percent. If you offer 50 funds, 10 percent fewer employees participate
than if you only offer five. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose
from, it's so hard to decide which fund to choose, that you'll just put it
off until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
of course tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this
mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they
retire because they don't have enough money put away, it also means that
making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching
money from the employer. By not participating, they are passing up as much
as five thousand dollars a year from the employer, who would happily
match their contribution.”[6]
If people
experience paralysis when faced with a plethora of choices regarding retirement
investment, it should not surprise us that Abraham could face paralysis when
forced to grapple with the choices placed before him at the outset of the Akeda narrative. This is literally a life-or-death decision!
Another factor that Schwartz addresses regarding the human
psyche and choice is that it’s always “easy to imagine you could have made a
different choice that would have been better.” Schwartz states, “this imagined
alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret
subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you
made, even if it was a good decision.”[7]
Schwartz’s work
implies that if indeed Abraham had free choice about whether to participate in
the Akeda, the gravity of the choice
overwhelmed him, preventing him from acting in a rational manner. It also suggests that once Abraham made the
decision to heed God’s call, he found himself continually second-guessing his
actions.
Perhaps this
resonates with us on some level, because we have been in situations such as the
ones Schwartz describes. Yet still, many
of us hold Abraham to a higher standard—this is not about selecting a
retirement plan, or being overwhelmed by the selection of beverages at the soda
fountain, or wishing you’d worn a short-sleeved shirt instead of long
sleeves. A person’s life was left
hanging in the balance as Abraham mulled over his choices. If, indeed, Abraham made a decision to
proceed with the sacrifice of his child—and if he did so without any influence
from God or other outside forces, I think most of us would consider that to be
a flawed exercising of free will.
So if the notion
of pre-ordination is theologically unnerving, and the idea of completely free
choice also is morally troublesome—or even paralyzing, where does that leave
us? Perhaps we need to challenge
ourselves to envision a world in which God has plotted out an ideal for the
course of human history. Yet at the same
time, we overlay onto this master scheme the realization that humans have been
endowed with free will, and that the way we conduct ourselves has the power to
alter the world—for good or for ill.
Rabbi Akiva taught, “All is foreseen and yet free will is
given.”[8] This seemingly paradoxical construct
represents a valiant rabbinic attempt to answer the essential theological
question with which we have been grappling.
Do humans have free will to conduct our lives as we see fit, or has God
preordained our actions? For Akiva and
his classic rabbinic counterparts, the answer to the dilemma seems to be,
“yes.”
The Kabbalists teach that God created the world to be perfect,
with a clear plan for how the events of the universe would unfold. But at some point early in the process of
creation, the perfection and order of the universe was disrupted. Since then, it has been humanity’s
responsibility to engage in acts of tikkun
olam—literally, the repair of the world.
When we operate within the guidelines of morality that our tradition has
set forth for us, we help to bring God’s plan closer to realization. At such times, the framework of God’s vision
for the world becomes visible.
There will be those who exercise the free will they have been
granted and choose to remain aloof and indifferent to the world around
them. Worse, there will be those who
allow their moral compasses to veer wildly off course, flouting the vision that
God has for them and for the world. This
is the price we are assessed in exchange for our free will. But when such evil individuals make
themselves known, it is up to each of us to intervene, and to make sure that
goodness prevails. Perhaps responding
with such moral indignation or intervention represents the divinely-ordained
purpose for which we were brought into this world.
Beyond our struggle to make sense of
today’s Torah portion, there are modern practical implications to the effort to
hold predetermination and free will in balance with one another. For one thing: the human experience does not
unfold within a vacuum. Just as Isaac
and the ram (and God) were each major players in the Akeda story, so too we go
through our lives interacting with many other people who are engaged in this
struggle between destiny and choice. How
our spouse, or business client, or teacher, or the driver in front of us at the
traffic light chooses to respond in a given moment sends imperceptible ripples
through the fabric of the universe and may alter the schematic that God has
designed for that particular encounter, or the way we choose to respond to
it.
There are many reasons why I am a
rabbi and not a theoretical physicist.
But there are ways in which that science converges with the theology
that I am laying out today: chaos theory and the so-called butterfly effect
suggest that minor, seemingly inconsequential alterations in the anticipated
order of the universe can impact major events half a world away. Not to oversimplify, but perhaps the flapping
of a butterfly’s wings can impact a weather pattern in Japan. Or the jumping of a grasshopper in Africa
could lead to the Cubs winning the World Series. In a similar manner, our choices when we are
faced with ethical quandaries might change the grand order of the
universe. For instance, if a builder or contractor
chooses less expensive construction materials, the project he is working on
could collapse, injuring those inside.
But if his company uses the highest quality materials, they might not
receive the bid—putting his employee’s well-being at risk. Daily we are faced with such choices, and the
way we choose says a great deal about our view
of the world, and our role within it.
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes, reflecting on the story of Sussie
and the stranger on the bus:
“You do not exercise your freedom by doing what you want…[W]hen
you accept the task that destiny seems to have set befor you, you become
free. Perhaps the only exercise of real
freedom comes from doing what you were meant to do all along.”[9]
In the stressful moments surrounding the Akeda, Abraham may not have understood that the challenge of God’s
call—the test, if you will—hung in the precarious balance that Rabbi Akiva
described, and that Rabbi Kushner elucidates.
Abraham may not have realized how his story, Isaac’s story, and God’s
story all were intertwined in the master story of the universe and thus he may
not have seen a way to exercise his free will in such a situation. He may not have known that his true purpose
was to refrain from the sacrifice, to show the limits of blind obedience to a
higher power. But the fact that, in the
heat of the moment, Abraham is blind to these nuances is perhaps what humanizes
the story and makes it “real.” This is why, thousands of years later, we
continue to analyze and question his actions.
But what was completely obfuscated for Abraham perhaps begins to
come into focus for us: that, as humans, we are uniquely endowed with the
ability to change the story of the world, to respond to God’s vision of the arc
of human history with our own ideas and ideals.
We pray that we may be gifted with the sense to use this opportunity
wisely and responsibly. May we have the
insight to make the choices that will help each of us to enjoy 5778 as a year
of sweetness, health, happiness, and blessing.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thank you for your comment. Please note that I reserve the right to remove inappropriate or offensive comments. Hopefully, your remarks do not fall into either of these categories.