Q&A: Free Choice
Free Choice
Question
Hello Rabbi!
I wanted to share a thought I have with the Rabbi regarding free choice.
My feeling is that we don’t really have any “free choice” at all. I feel that every person has a path mapped out for him in advance. For example, my younger son has been saying since age 4 that he wants to be a rabbi. We never educated him toward that, and to this day he is very spiritual and aspires to advance in that area. In contrast, my second son has fewer spiritual tendencies and thinks in other directions. The feeling is that they were born with different DNA. The feeling is that there is some cosmic entity / God who decides what the root of each person’s soul will be. I even feel that the transgressions I commit are uncontrollable or involuntary. I read that according to Maimonides, free choice about whether to be righteous or wicked is mainly an educational statement, but not necessarily something actually possible. In short, we can clearly see that people are born with a certain character and certain tendencies, and they do not really have that much free choice. The thought that they can do anything is an illusion and not really true. I would be glad to hear the Rabbi’s opinion on this matter.
Answer
I am not familiar with any such statement by Maimonides, and in my estimation there is no such statement.
As for the issue itself, it is clear that our tendencies do not depend only on our choices, but once we have given tendencies, we do have the ability to maneuver within them—for example, to decide whether we go along with them or not. You can see a description of this picture in two articles here on the site (and at much greater length in my book The Science of Freedom):
Maimonides does not speak about free choice in the strong sense.
He writes: “If he wishes to incline himself to the good path and be righteous, the permission is in his hand.”
And it has to be this way, because a sinner is a person who, although he knows what is good and what is bad, chooses evil—not freely, but in an essential and intrinsic way. That is, the person himself is a sinner, not his opinion and not his knowledge.
The whole idea of free choice destroys the true meaning of a person who is genuinely wicked. It turns it into some kind of changing whims.
After the Torah was given, you cannot say that you do not know what is good and what is bad.