We have arrived at the eve of Yom Kippur. We have chanted Kol Nidre, acknowledging our desire to transform ourselves in the new year, yet admitting the unlikelihood we will achieve all that we vow to God and ourselves. If Reb Nachman’s teaching that “all was created for the sake of the choice and the chooser” * speaks truth, then this sacred day will sorely test our willingness to choose rightly.
The renowned theologian Chris Rock underscores Reb Nachman’s words: “You know, some people say life is short, and that you could get hit by a bus at any moment, and that you have to live each day like it’s your last. Baloney [OK, he didn’t actually say ‘baloney’]. Life is long. You’re probably not gonna get hit by a bus. And you’re gonna have to live with the choices you make for the next fifty years.”
There’s the rub: at every moment, we make personal or group choices that birth outcomes we must deal with for a lifetime – perhaps beyond. Sometimes, we are taken aback by the consequences of what seems like a perfectly reasonable choice, given what we know:
A wealthy clergy-person (denomination irrelevant), who has been faithful to God his whole life, is visited by an angel. “God sent me to let you know you’re going to die in two days. But, don’t worry, you will be welcomed into heaven.”
The preacher says, “that’s great – but listen, I know God has this rule that we can’t take anything with us. Do you think God would bend it for me? I’d really like to take something with me.” The angel agrees to ask. The next night, he returns with a message: “God told me to tell you that you may bring one suitcase, with whatever you want inside of it.”
The preacher is excited by the possibilities, yet can’t decide what to pack. He considers filling the suitcase with cash, but he’s not sure what kind of currency is accepted in heaven. Instead, he converts all his cash into gold, which he imagines must be of – literally – universal value.
Next day, he dies peacefully and finds himself at the entrance to heaven, suitcase by his side. The welcoming angel stops him: “Sorry, but you can’t bring any worldly possessions with you.” The preacher replies, “An angel assured me that God said it was OK.” “Oh, well, if it’s OK with God, bring it on in. Just out of curiosity, what’s in the bag?” Smiling broadly, the preacher opens the suitcase, showing off all the bars of gold. Puzzled, the welcoming angel gives the new arrival a funny look: “That’s what you brought? Pavement?”
Sometimes, we look to religious teaching to help make our choices clearer, yet find ourselves disappointed when the tradition responds with complexity, insisting we accept responsibility and free will, pushing us back toward the school of Reb Nachman and Reverend Chris: “all was created for the sake of the choice and the chooser.”
Our adult B’not Mitzvah class recently discussed a passage from Sifra, an early legal commentary on Leviticus, which posed a variant of “the lifeboat question.” R. ben Patura expounded the Torah verse “that thy brother may live with thee (25:36)” with this example: Two men were traveling through the desert and only one had a water flask. The water would suffice to keep only one man alive until reaching the next water hole. If the owner of the flask kept the water for himself, he would reach the spring; if he shared, both he and his companion would die.
According to R. ben Petura, “the verse, ‘that thy brother may live with thee,’ means that the water should be shared, even though both men die.” But R. Akiva said – focusing more on the word “live” than the word “brother” – ‘that thy brother may live with thee’ means that your life takes precedence. The water should be used to save a life. On this question of self-preservation versus survival, ben Petura offers what we might call a romantic, “Romeo and Juliet” answer: if we can’t live together, we’ll die together. Akiva, whose decisions generally prevail, gives a rational yet harsh-seeming response: choose life. If we cannot choose life for all, then choose life for those whose lives can be chosen. A guideline based on sturdy religious principle, for sure, yet leaving us with wrenching choice. (Study handout, source unknown.)
At the heart of Judaism’s insistence on personal and communal responsibility, on the primacy of free will, is the notion that we are born to the work of choosing, created with inclinations to do good and to do evil, capable of learning to master what tempts us. In this regard, R. Lawrence Kushner offers a useful distinction between “bad” and “evil.”
“‘Bad,’” he writes, “means ‘unfortunate,’ ‘painful,’ and even ‘horrible,’ but it does not mean that someone is necessarily responsible for what happened. A freak accident for which no one is to blame, for instance, is ‘bad,’ but it is not ‘evil.’ [Often, though, we use ‘bad’ to mean] ‘unethical,’ ‘wicked,’ and ‘evil.’ We cry out that things should have been otherwise and that someone is to blame. And if the one who is to blame acted intentionally, then the ‘bad’ is also ‘evil,’ [leaving us to consider] that the question, ‘why is there evil in the world?’ means ‘why are human beings evil?’” (God Was in this Place, pp. 61-2.)
Just as we might find R. Akiva’s guidance more challenging than empowering, so may we find R. Kushner’s insight disturbing. Who wants to accept such a burden of choice and responsibility? Happily – and I underscore happily – we are not expected to excise our potential for evil, as our human wholeness requires us to wrestle with our yetzer harah. Remember, we are commanded to love the Eternal with all our heart, all our soul, and with all our material, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual components – with all our human “stuff.”
One strand in our tradition even identifies the evil inclination with essential human passions: “Were it not for the yetzer harah, a person would not build a house or get married; would neither beget children, nor ply a trade or pursue a profession.” (Gen. R. 9:9.) The great scholar R. Eliezer Berkovits adds: “The evil inclination is here recognized as a necessary ingredient of life itself, the Jewish concept of the élan vital, the individual’s desire to live and survive. It is the affirmation of one’s personal existence and the drive for self-fulfillment. It is not evil in itself, but only the potential cause of evil. The vital forces of individual existence which maintain a person in the world are the same which may carry a person against the world.” (“When Man Fails God,” A.E. Millgram (ed.), Great Jewish Ideas, p.187.)
Yet again, we return to the primacy of free will and its corollary responsibility. Two recent films have instructed us in how to train our dragons; Judaism offers us copious guidance on how to train and direct our inclinations for good and evil, how to fulfill our roles as creative partners of the Holy One. First of all, we are not expected to do this work alone, but rather, with a loving partner. Reb Zalman (zt”l) points to Leviticus 16:30 as the verse that invites us to do the work of Yom Kippur in partnership with God: “For through the agency of this day, I will atone for you – before YHVH you will be purified from all your sins.” He notes that “there are teachings in Kabbalah that point to God investing Him/Herself into the time of the 26 hours of Yom Kippur to effect the atonement for us. How 26 hours? Because we add an hour before and an hour after. Why 26? It is the numerical value of the divine name, YHVH. It is love begetting a response of love, 13 + 13 = 26, 13 being the numerical value of love, ahavah.” (“A Teaching for Yom Kippur 5773.”)
Second, we are heirs to an extraordinary array of spiritual practices that help us refine and uplift our behaviors, practices that help us discern when we’re at risk of our “less good” yetzer, our more selfish inclination, taking the upper hand. Reb Yitzhak Buxbaum likes to tell the story of a pious Jew, who on his deathbed, promised his friend that he would return to tell him how he had been judged in the World of Truth. After some time, he appears and reports that in examining his deeds, no fault was discovered with a single exception: once, when he had sat on a court, a plaintiff slipped a coin in his pocket, which he pretended not to notice. Because of this sin, heaven decreed the punishment of Gehinnom – a transitional place of soul-examination and learning.
When he arrived in Gehinnom, he was given a little hammer and told to knock down a gigantic building. Daunting, perhaps, but he thought to himself: “why did I pray my whole life, why did I seek to fulfill mitzvot? Isn’t it because I sought to do God’s will? If this, too, is God’s will, then I accept the obligation to do it – just as I accepted the obligation to train myself to align to God’s will when I was alive – even if it takes a very long time.” As he then tells his friend, “I swung the little hammer and hit the building once, and it collapsed in an instant, and I was welcomed into heaven, because I had accepted the decree as the same divine will that had guided me throughout my life.” (MiSod Siach Hasidim, p. 277, Daily Maggid #111, “The Judgment.”)
Judaism’s great mystical optimist, Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook (zt’l) ceaselessly encourages us to understand our constant struggles as holy and necessary aspects of the universe’s evolution: “The perception that dawns on a person to see the world, not as finished, but as in the process of continual becoming, ascending, developing – this changes us from being ‘under the sun’ to being ‘above the sun,’ [viewing reality] from the place where everything takes on new form. The joy of heaven and earth abide in us as on the day they were created. In this luminous perspective, one looks at all the worlds, at the general and human development, at the destiny of each creature, at all the events at all times.” (Orot Hakodesh 2:517.)
He continues: “A foundation of the Torah is that the human being is created in the Divine Image. The essence of this is found through the absolute freedom that humans have. . . . Without the foundation of absolute human freedom, there would be no place for Torah to exist.” (Pinkasei HaRayah, 2:16) Thus, our routine struggles to accept our role as God’s partners in shaping creation and to discern how to align our wills with the underlying divine will represent evolutionary pathways to a fulfilled aspiration: shalom, a universal Shabbat of wholeness, wholesomeness, and boundless joy. An aspiration we share with our divine partner.
Judaism is rich with “sacred technology” for cultivating our partnership with God. As Martin Buber famously describes our interconnection with the One: “no matter where I take hold of a shred of [the divine Unity], I hold the whole of it. And since the teachings and all the commandments are radiations of God’s being, a person who lovingly does one commandment utterly and to the core, and in this one commandment takes hold of a shred of the unity of God, holds the whole of it in hand, and has fulfilled all.” (Ten Rungs, 1962) All was created for the sake of the choice and the chooser, so choose something: a morning and evening Sh’ma, a blessing before food, light Shabbat candles, study a few words of Torah, offer forgiveness ungrudgingly, be still and know that God is God.
“For through the agency of this day, I will atone for you – before YHVH you will be purified from all your sins.” Through divine love were we created; through reciprocal love are we cleared of wrongdoing. Created in the divine image, we share the divine capacities for choice and for accepting responsibility: remember, Isaiah teaches, “oseh shalom u’voreh et harah,” God takes responsibility for making peace and creating [what we experience as] bad (45:7). We are also created in the image of the One [who] offers good to all and who shows compassion to all divine works (Ps. 145:5). In Rav Kook’s ecstatic vision of a humanity rising to Union with the Holy One:
It is the good that I desire,
Its glorious expanses entrance me.
Its lips, its roses, I kiss,
Its beautiful vision exalts me.
Absolute good, without limitation,
Without end, constriction or boundary,
That is not separate from anything alive,
That with its love, fixes everything broken.
Good for me, good for all,
Good without badness or tightness,
Good full of pleasure for all,
Full of tranquility without anxiety.
Good forever, good right now,
Good for every people and nation,
Who seek the good and not the bad,
And the light and the delight, ‘as the One is there” (Gen. 21:7).
May our desire to partner with God to attain the highest rung of cosmic evolution be a catalyst for manifesting our best choices according to all of our capacities; may all of our inclinations, no matter where they arise, be for good. Amen, g’mar tov.
* Everything you see in the world - everything that exists - is there for the sake of free will, in order to test people. The entire world and all that it contains were created to give man free will. (Sichot Haran #300; Chayey Moharan #519)
The renowned theologian Chris Rock underscores Reb Nachman’s words: “You know, some people say life is short, and that you could get hit by a bus at any moment, and that you have to live each day like it’s your last. Baloney [OK, he didn’t actually say ‘baloney’]. Life is long. You’re probably not gonna get hit by a bus. And you’re gonna have to live with the choices you make for the next fifty years.”
There’s the rub: at every moment, we make personal or group choices that birth outcomes we must deal with for a lifetime – perhaps beyond. Sometimes, we are taken aback by the consequences of what seems like a perfectly reasonable choice, given what we know:
A wealthy clergy-person (denomination irrelevant), who has been faithful to God his whole life, is visited by an angel. “God sent me to let you know you’re going to die in two days. But, don’t worry, you will be welcomed into heaven.”
The preacher says, “that’s great – but listen, I know God has this rule that we can’t take anything with us. Do you think God would bend it for me? I’d really like to take something with me.” The angel agrees to ask. The next night, he returns with a message: “God told me to tell you that you may bring one suitcase, with whatever you want inside of it.”
The preacher is excited by the possibilities, yet can’t decide what to pack. He considers filling the suitcase with cash, but he’s not sure what kind of currency is accepted in heaven. Instead, he converts all his cash into gold, which he imagines must be of – literally – universal value.
Next day, he dies peacefully and finds himself at the entrance to heaven, suitcase by his side. The welcoming angel stops him: “Sorry, but you can’t bring any worldly possessions with you.” The preacher replies, “An angel assured me that God said it was OK.” “Oh, well, if it’s OK with God, bring it on in. Just out of curiosity, what’s in the bag?” Smiling broadly, the preacher opens the suitcase, showing off all the bars of gold. Puzzled, the welcoming angel gives the new arrival a funny look: “That’s what you brought? Pavement?”
Sometimes, we look to religious teaching to help make our choices clearer, yet find ourselves disappointed when the tradition responds with complexity, insisting we accept responsibility and free will, pushing us back toward the school of Reb Nachman and Reverend Chris: “all was created for the sake of the choice and the chooser.”
Our adult B’not Mitzvah class recently discussed a passage from Sifra, an early legal commentary on Leviticus, which posed a variant of “the lifeboat question.” R. ben Patura expounded the Torah verse “that thy brother may live with thee (25:36)” with this example: Two men were traveling through the desert and only one had a water flask. The water would suffice to keep only one man alive until reaching the next water hole. If the owner of the flask kept the water for himself, he would reach the spring; if he shared, both he and his companion would die.
According to R. ben Petura, “the verse, ‘that thy brother may live with thee,’ means that the water should be shared, even though both men die.” But R. Akiva said – focusing more on the word “live” than the word “brother” – ‘that thy brother may live with thee’ means that your life takes precedence. The water should be used to save a life. On this question of self-preservation versus survival, ben Petura offers what we might call a romantic, “Romeo and Juliet” answer: if we can’t live together, we’ll die together. Akiva, whose decisions generally prevail, gives a rational yet harsh-seeming response: choose life. If we cannot choose life for all, then choose life for those whose lives can be chosen. A guideline based on sturdy religious principle, for sure, yet leaving us with wrenching choice. (Study handout, source unknown.)
At the heart of Judaism’s insistence on personal and communal responsibility, on the primacy of free will, is the notion that we are born to the work of choosing, created with inclinations to do good and to do evil, capable of learning to master what tempts us. In this regard, R. Lawrence Kushner offers a useful distinction between “bad” and “evil.”
“‘Bad,’” he writes, “means ‘unfortunate,’ ‘painful,’ and even ‘horrible,’ but it does not mean that someone is necessarily responsible for what happened. A freak accident for which no one is to blame, for instance, is ‘bad,’ but it is not ‘evil.’ [Often, though, we use ‘bad’ to mean] ‘unethical,’ ‘wicked,’ and ‘evil.’ We cry out that things should have been otherwise and that someone is to blame. And if the one who is to blame acted intentionally, then the ‘bad’ is also ‘evil,’ [leaving us to consider] that the question, ‘why is there evil in the world?’ means ‘why are human beings evil?’” (God Was in this Place, pp. 61-2.)
Just as we might find R. Akiva’s guidance more challenging than empowering, so may we find R. Kushner’s insight disturbing. Who wants to accept such a burden of choice and responsibility? Happily – and I underscore happily – we are not expected to excise our potential for evil, as our human wholeness requires us to wrestle with our yetzer harah. Remember, we are commanded to love the Eternal with all our heart, all our soul, and with all our material, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual components – with all our human “stuff.”
One strand in our tradition even identifies the evil inclination with essential human passions: “Were it not for the yetzer harah, a person would not build a house or get married; would neither beget children, nor ply a trade or pursue a profession.” (Gen. R. 9:9.) The great scholar R. Eliezer Berkovits adds: “The evil inclination is here recognized as a necessary ingredient of life itself, the Jewish concept of the élan vital, the individual’s desire to live and survive. It is the affirmation of one’s personal existence and the drive for self-fulfillment. It is not evil in itself, but only the potential cause of evil. The vital forces of individual existence which maintain a person in the world are the same which may carry a person against the world.” (“When Man Fails God,” A.E. Millgram (ed.), Great Jewish Ideas, p.187.)
Yet again, we return to the primacy of free will and its corollary responsibility. Two recent films have instructed us in how to train our dragons; Judaism offers us copious guidance on how to train and direct our inclinations for good and evil, how to fulfill our roles as creative partners of the Holy One. First of all, we are not expected to do this work alone, but rather, with a loving partner. Reb Zalman (zt”l) points to Leviticus 16:30 as the verse that invites us to do the work of Yom Kippur in partnership with God: “For through the agency of this day, I will atone for you – before YHVH you will be purified from all your sins.” He notes that “there are teachings in Kabbalah that point to God investing Him/Herself into the time of the 26 hours of Yom Kippur to effect the atonement for us. How 26 hours? Because we add an hour before and an hour after. Why 26? It is the numerical value of the divine name, YHVH. It is love begetting a response of love, 13 + 13 = 26, 13 being the numerical value of love, ahavah.” (“A Teaching for Yom Kippur 5773.”)
Second, we are heirs to an extraordinary array of spiritual practices that help us refine and uplift our behaviors, practices that help us discern when we’re at risk of our “less good” yetzer, our more selfish inclination, taking the upper hand. Reb Yitzhak Buxbaum likes to tell the story of a pious Jew, who on his deathbed, promised his friend that he would return to tell him how he had been judged in the World of Truth. After some time, he appears and reports that in examining his deeds, no fault was discovered with a single exception: once, when he had sat on a court, a plaintiff slipped a coin in his pocket, which he pretended not to notice. Because of this sin, heaven decreed the punishment of Gehinnom – a transitional place of soul-examination and learning.
When he arrived in Gehinnom, he was given a little hammer and told to knock down a gigantic building. Daunting, perhaps, but he thought to himself: “why did I pray my whole life, why did I seek to fulfill mitzvot? Isn’t it because I sought to do God’s will? If this, too, is God’s will, then I accept the obligation to do it – just as I accepted the obligation to train myself to align to God’s will when I was alive – even if it takes a very long time.” As he then tells his friend, “I swung the little hammer and hit the building once, and it collapsed in an instant, and I was welcomed into heaven, because I had accepted the decree as the same divine will that had guided me throughout my life.” (MiSod Siach Hasidim, p. 277, Daily Maggid #111, “The Judgment.”)
Judaism’s great mystical optimist, Rav Avraham Yitzhak Kook (zt’l) ceaselessly encourages us to understand our constant struggles as holy and necessary aspects of the universe’s evolution: “The perception that dawns on a person to see the world, not as finished, but as in the process of continual becoming, ascending, developing – this changes us from being ‘under the sun’ to being ‘above the sun,’ [viewing reality] from the place where everything takes on new form. The joy of heaven and earth abide in us as on the day they were created. In this luminous perspective, one looks at all the worlds, at the general and human development, at the destiny of each creature, at all the events at all times.” (Orot Hakodesh 2:517.)
He continues: “A foundation of the Torah is that the human being is created in the Divine Image. The essence of this is found through the absolute freedom that humans have. . . . Without the foundation of absolute human freedom, there would be no place for Torah to exist.” (Pinkasei HaRayah, 2:16) Thus, our routine struggles to accept our role as God’s partners in shaping creation and to discern how to align our wills with the underlying divine will represent evolutionary pathways to a fulfilled aspiration: shalom, a universal Shabbat of wholeness, wholesomeness, and boundless joy. An aspiration we share with our divine partner.
Judaism is rich with “sacred technology” for cultivating our partnership with God. As Martin Buber famously describes our interconnection with the One: “no matter where I take hold of a shred of [the divine Unity], I hold the whole of it. And since the teachings and all the commandments are radiations of God’s being, a person who lovingly does one commandment utterly and to the core, and in this one commandment takes hold of a shred of the unity of God, holds the whole of it in hand, and has fulfilled all.” (Ten Rungs, 1962) All was created for the sake of the choice and the chooser, so choose something: a morning and evening Sh’ma, a blessing before food, light Shabbat candles, study a few words of Torah, offer forgiveness ungrudgingly, be still and know that God is God.
“For through the agency of this day, I will atone for you – before YHVH you will be purified from all your sins.” Through divine love were we created; through reciprocal love are we cleared of wrongdoing. Created in the divine image, we share the divine capacities for choice and for accepting responsibility: remember, Isaiah teaches, “oseh shalom u’voreh et harah,” God takes responsibility for making peace and creating [what we experience as] bad (45:7). We are also created in the image of the One [who] offers good to all and who shows compassion to all divine works (Ps. 145:5). In Rav Kook’s ecstatic vision of a humanity rising to Union with the Holy One:
It is the good that I desire,
Its glorious expanses entrance me.
Its lips, its roses, I kiss,
Its beautiful vision exalts me.
Absolute good, without limitation,
Without end, constriction or boundary,
That is not separate from anything alive,
That with its love, fixes everything broken.
Good for me, good for all,
Good without badness or tightness,
Good full of pleasure for all,
Full of tranquility without anxiety.
Good forever, good right now,
Good for every people and nation,
Who seek the good and not the bad,
And the light and the delight, ‘as the One is there” (Gen. 21:7).
May our desire to partner with God to attain the highest rung of cosmic evolution be a catalyst for manifesting our best choices according to all of our capacities; may all of our inclinations, no matter where they arise, be for good. Amen, g’mar tov.
* Everything you see in the world - everything that exists - is there for the sake of free will, in order to test people. The entire world and all that it contains were created to give man free will. (Sichot Haran #300; Chayey Moharan #519)
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