Ellyse Borghi
I’d like to start with a question. Are we responsible for our sins?
I ask this because I’ve recently started working in criminal law. Most of the time the accused pleads guilty and then the job of their lawyer is to explain to the judge the mitigating circumstances that led up to the offending. We explain about broken homes, family violence, lack of education or stable employment, their drug and alcohol dependency and mental illness. We explain to the judge that a conspiracy of circumstances has led the client to make these mistakes, that my client is less culpable, less at fault and less responsible because of their circumstances. Perhaps indeed they are a victim of circumstance.
And perhaps we could say the same thing about ourselves. We say that if only you knew what my parents were like you would understand why I react this way. Or that I snapped at you because I was stressed. Or that I can’t give charity right now because I’m saving for something else. We tell ourselves that it’s our families, our stressed out lives and sometimes even our DNA that makes us do the wrong thing. We say that circumstances are to blame.
And on the one hand this is true. To bring it back to my clients, fate has dealt them a poor hand. They have had limited options and disadvantage can mean that the choices available restrict their ability to make good decisions. But on the other hand I am perhaps doing my client a disservice. In making these arguments, that it was circumstances that led my client to where they are now, I am disempowering them. In a way I am saying that they had no control over their choices.
Another way of seeing this is that they made those decisions. And just like they have the ability to choose bad and harmful actions so too they have the ability to choose to do the right thing. Perhaps then I could say to a judge that my client made those decisions and is taking full responsibility for their actions, no excuses. And that they are also taking responsibility to make better decisions in the future, that they are committed to choosing a different path.
Or in other words that they are doing teshuva.
This idea of free choice is fundamental to our humanity and is certainly a core tenant of Judaism and Teshuva.
The Alei Shur wrote “Let us examine ourselves. How often do we make use of our freedom (“power of choice”)? Personal disposition, education, habit, and interests maintain almost absolute rule over us from childhood to old age. It is even possible for a person to go through her entire life without ever making use of her freedom!... If we really examine ourselves, we’ll see that we use our freedom only on rare occasions. “Freedom is given”—and yet in practice, personal disposition, education, habit, and interests carry the day, whether in large, fateful decisions or in small, day-to-day ones. And where is freedom?... It is clear from this that freedom is not at all part of humanity’s daily spiritual bread. It is, rather, one of the noble virtues which one must labor to attain. It is not lesser than love, and fear, and cleaving to God, acquiring which clearly demands great effort. We can obtain freedom, and therefore we must strive for it.
Freedom of choice is our right but it is not a given. If we do not make conscious efforts to exercise our free will then it is only a right in theory but not in practice. Freedom is a project and it takes work. It can be terrifying to do away with our justifications and excuses and to accept full responsibility for our actions. But to do so, is empowering. And just as last year we might have made poor choices, this year we can resolve and wholly exercise our free will and choose something better. Just as my clients stand before a judge so too today we stand before the judge of judges, the king of kings and we take responsibility for our previous actions. We take responsibility to choose goodness.
I’d like to end with a short bracha
Yehi ratzon milfanecha adonai elochainu v’elochai avoteinu she t’varech otanu b’bechirat chofshit u’bkoach l’bchor et hanachon, et toratecha u’mitzvotecha, v’livchor et haemet kol yemei chayeinu.
May it be Your will, Adonai my God and God of my ancestors that you bless us with free will and with the strength to choose what is correct; your torah and your mitzvoth and to choose the truth all the days of our lives.
Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Knowledge 1:1-2 1.
Each and every person possesses many character traits….With regard to all the traits: a person has some from the beginning of his conception, in accordance with his bodily nature. Some are appropriate to a person's nature and will [therefore] be acquired more easily than other traits. Some traits he does not have from birth. He may have learned them from others, or turned to them on his own. This may have come as a result of his own thoughts, or because he heard that this was a proper trait for him, which he ought to attain. [Therefore,] he accustomed himself to it until it became a part of himself.
Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance, pp. 142-144.
The assumption that man is free, that he has been endowed with the spiritual courage to make choices and with the power to determine the fate of his religious and moral life—this assumption cannot rely on the idea of belief by itself; it also depends on knowledge, on a feeling of being wholly charged by the tension present in this God-given factor of free choice. Free will should implant in man a sense of responsibility... That is the meaning of Maimonides’ “to know”: a continuous awareness of maximal responsibility by man without even a moment’s inattentiveness!... It is a positive commandment to be conscious of the existence of free choice which makes man responsible for his actions... One is forbidden to take one’s mind off the principle of free choice, for it was not given to man only from without or by tradition; it is also something in the nature of self-discovery and must always remain part of the self—the knowledge that man can create worlds and destroy them.
Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, Alei Shur, vol. 1, pp. 155-156.
Let us examine ourselves. How often do we make use of our freedom (“power of choice”)? Personal disposition, education, habit, and interests maintain almost absolute rule over us from childhood to old age. It is even possible for a person to go through her entire life without ever making use of her freedom!... If we really examine ourselves, we’ll see that we use our freedom only on rare occasions. “Freedom is given”—and yet in practice, personal disposition, education, habit, and interests carry the day, whether in large, fateful decisions or in small, day-to-day ones. And where is freedom?... It is clear from this that freedom is not at all part of humanity’s daily spiritual bread. It is, rather, one of the noble virtues which one must labor to attain. It is not lesser than love, and fear, and cleaving to God, acquiring which clearly demands great effort. We can obtain freedom, and therefore we must acquire it.