Bechira Points: beh-chee-rah: Choice Points
Barukh Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haOlam, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav vitzivanu la’asok bidivrei Torah.
I. Maimonides, (1135-1204), Laws of Teshuva, Chapter 59
1. Free will is granted to all people. If one desires to turn themselves to the path of good and be righteous, the choice is theirs. Should they desire to turn to the path of evil and be wicked, the choice is theirs…
2. A person should not entertain the thesis held by the fools …that, at the time of a man’s creation, God decrees whether he will be righteous or wicked. This is untrue. Each person is fit to be righteous like Moses, our teacher, or wicked, like Jeroboam.
[Similarly,] she may be wise or foolish, merciful or cruel, miserly or generous, or [acquire] any other character traits. There is no one who compels her, sentences her, or leads her towards either of these two paths. Rather, she, on her own initiative and decision, tends to the path she chooses.
II. Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe (1914-2005), Alei Shur, Vol. 1, p. 156
The great [Jewish] philosophers established bechira (free will) as the cornerstone for the whole Torah.... But from this resulted a common misperception among the masses; that all people actively choose their every act and every decision. This is a grievous error.
III. Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler (d. 1953), Strive for Truth
A. Everyone has free choice –at the point where truth meets falsehood. In other words Behira takes place at that point where the truth as the person sees it confronts the illusion produced in him by the power of falsehood (desire). But the majority of a person’s actions are undertaken without any clash between truth and falsehood taking place. Many of a person’ actions may happen to coincide with what is objectively right because he has been brought up that way and it does not occur to him to do otherwise, and many bad and false decisions may be taken simply because the person does not realize that they are bad. In such cases no valid Behira, or choice, has been made…
B. When two armies are locked in battle, the place where the struggle takes place is called the front line. This line is drawn at the place where the two forces meet. On either side, there is territory that belongs to that side and is thus not the location of battle. The front line moves and changes, but battle, generally speaking, occurs only where the two sides meet. Our moral choices can be thought of in a similar way. There are decisions that we have made in our lives so many times that they are no longer decisions. It is obvious to us that we will respond in particular ways to particular events. Those choices are within our territory. There are also choices we have never had to make and likely will never have to make. They are beyond the realm of our experience. They are firmly out of our territory. The place where these territories meet is the place of choice – bechirah. On the spectrum of what we know to be ethical and what we know to be unethical, we make choices only at the bechirah point. This is the point where our values come into conflict and thus the choices are not obvious.
It must be realized that this behira-point does not remain static in any given individual. With each good behira successfully carried out, the person rises higher in spiritual level: that is, things that were previously in the line of battle are now in the area controlled by the yetzer tov (good, clear thinking)...giving in to the yezter ha’rah (impulse for immediate gratification) pushes back the frontier of the good, and an act which previously cost one a struggle with one’s conscience will now be done without behira at all.
IV. Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 156a (400-600 CE)
“One who is born under Mars will be a blood shedder. Rabbi Ashi said, [he may be] a surgeon, a thief, a butcher or a Mohel (perform circumcisions).”
V. Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Ancestors, 3:19a
Everything is foreseen, yet free will is given.
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