As we approach the New Year (Rosh Hashanah) and the end of the Torah, we study Deuteronomy 29:9–31:30, the double sections of Nitzavim and Vayelech. Conventional Jews complete the entire Five Books of Moses every year, and restart from the beginning the same day we finish.
The events we read this week take place on the last day of Moses’ life. These are the beginning of his parting words of wisdom to the entire Jewish people, and through the Bible to all of humanity.
First, Moses reminds us of the dangers of idolatry, and the responsibility of the community to correct people who sin publicly. Moses explains that after the curses we discussed in last week’s reading, God will return the hearts of the Jewish nation to Him, and return the Jews to the promised land.
Moses explains that men have a choice to make between good and evil, life and death, blessings or curses; and should choose life. Moses then writes the entire Torah down and gives it to the priests to place into the Holy Ark of the Covenant and explained that the Torah (Bible) is an eternal witness between God and the Jews.
Wisdom of the masses
“You stand today, all of you, before the Lord your God: your leaders, your tribes, your elders, your officers, and every Israelite man; your young ones, your wives, the stranger in your gate; from your wood-hewer to your water-drawer.” 29:9
The Bible is for everyone: men, women, and children. Every human can connect to God in their own way, at their own level. This seems obvious but is actually a major Jewish innovation. We explained that in Egypt Pharaoh was incredulous at Moses’ request to bring the women and children along for a festival (Exodus 10:9-10):
Pharaoh called himself the god of the Nile and was willing to allow some freedom of religion for the Jewish slaves. Obviously he valued religion. However, Pharaoh’s concept of religious observance was that it was only for grown men. To him, religion was a serious and dignified matter, the domain of adult males only. The Jewish concept is that while men and women have different obligations in divine service, the faith is for everyone, and all Jews need to be present for a meaningful holiday.
While other ancient faiths were burning children alive and keeping women as temple prostitutes, Jews were getting women and children to realize the importance of their own individual connections with God. Idolaters saw women and children as objects, that the powerful should use or abuse as they saw fit. They felt the only real faith was for grown men. Jews understand them as subjects with their own avenues for Divine service that are not always the same as those of men.
Jews innovated that faith is for everyone, though women and children may have different religious obligations. Men have an extra burden of not only working on their own mission and inner life, but helping members of the family to see their ability to connect to the infinite.
You don’t have to be a religious man to realize that there is useful wisdom in the Bible and that it has had a massive influence on mankind. Jews also innovated near universal literacy. We are the “People of the Book” and taught our sons and daughter to read long before the printing press made books and literacy accessible to regular people in mainstream culture.
Moses addressed his last words of wisdom to men, women, foreign converts, even to the “wood cutters” and “water drawers” who were actually non Jewish tribes who had come to join and learn from the Jewish people. Our wisdom is for everyone, and the messages of self improvement and continual striving for a better life are for all of mankind.
Don’t be fooled by the current bias against the past; the popular modern view is that the ancients were backwards, chauvinistic, and ignorant. That view itself is ignorant of history.
Our ancestors saw the world for what it really is, and developed a deep understanding of human nature and relationships. They formed cohesive societies through strong leadership, where men and women functioned to complement one another and built healthy families. While their practices were not always up to modern standards, they were doing the best they could, and in some ways they got it right more than we do.
The underlying message Moses gives you is that whoever you are, you are important enough to learn wisdom, reflect on your accomplishments, and improve you life. Don’t assume studying the Bible or ancient sources is just for academics, clergy and historians.
In present day life we often falter because we don’t learn and apply what was common sense 100 or 1000 years ago. In addition, many people don’t want you learning the old books because they contain rational ideas that would jeopardize their power to control your mind and your life.
The Bible reminds us of the radical truth that men and women are not the same but are complementary. This contradicts the current notion of blank slate equality. This means that all people are the same inside, and any differences are caused by external influences.
To promote the idea of the blank slate, the media and popular culture will tell you the genders are totally equal, that attraction you feel for a beautiful woman is merely due to social conditioning, and that every belief is equally valid so nothing is morally superior to anything else.
These are blatant lies, an opiate to control the masses. They are designed to prevent you from thinking for yourself and developing yourself. There is a real subversive power in learning about the history and reality of mankind through the Bible. The wisdom our ancestors possessed and created is the inheritance they have passed down to the future, to us. Take ahold of it, learn and use it.
Outer change prompts inner change
Moses, after discussing the epic curses and tragedies that will befall the Jews for straying after idols, states:
And a later generation, your descendants, who will rise after you, along with the foreigner who comes from a distant land, will say, upon seeing the plagues of that land and the diseases with which the Lord struck it: Sulfur and salt have burned up its entire land! It cannot be sown, nor can it grow anything, not any grass will sprout upon it. It is like the overturning of Sodom, Gamorah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overturned in His fury and in His rage.
And all the nations will say, Why did the Lord do so to this land? What is the reason for this great rage of fury? Then they will say, It is because they abandoned the covenant of the Lord, God of their fathers, which He joined with them when He took them out of the land of Egypt. For they went and served other deities, prostrating themselves to them deities which they had not known, and which He had not apportioned to them. And the Lord’s fury raged against that land, bringing upon it the entire curse written in this book (29:21-6)
Mark Twain visited the Holy Land in 1867, his journal from this trip became the basis for his first major book “The Innocents Abroad”. He details that the land was barren and desolate, in the Jezreel:
“There is not a solitary village throughout its whole extent – not for 30 miles in either direction. There are two or three small clusters of Bedouin tents, but not a single permanent habitation. One may ride 10 miles, hereabouts, and not see 10 human beings… Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince… Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? … Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies.”
Other visitors from Europe in the late 19th century reported Israel was a wasteland with few inhabitants living in poverty and rampant disease amongst swamps and deserts.
Not too long after Twain and others bore witness to the lasting effects of Divine wrath, the Zionist pioneers began to set up the first new Jewish farms, towns and hospitals in Israel in over 1000 years. There were already religious Jews living in Jerusalem and Tzefat, the Zionists started new cities where there was nothing. Where there were deserts and swamps they planted groves and fields. This was the first step in making modern Israel.
Even though the early Zionists were largely secular and sometimes even anti-religious, their physical work and sacrifice created the infrastructure needed for a flourishing society. Rabbi Teichtal’s amazing work Eim HaBanim Semeicha explains why this had to happen the way it did and how this was God’s hand in action.
In short, sometimes a purely physical effort without deeper contemplation is the necessary first step to accomplishing a radical intellectual or spiritual change.
There is an important practical lesson for modern men. Changing your external behaviors causes internal effects on you. Acting happy or at ease can make you actually happy or at ease. Your physical actions change your mental and emotional life. The obvious example is to lift weights, which improves your strength and physique, but also your mood and mental prowess.
When you start what matters is just putting in the physical effort, you don’t need complex plans or methods. Don’t overthink it, until you feel a need to seek training from more experienced men. Just move your body. You will notice gains and so will the women around you. Adding simple physical activity or changing your surroundings can be the start of an upgrade to all areas of your life.
Choose life
Behold, I have set before you today life and good, and death and evil, inasmuch as I command you this day to love the Lord, your God, to walk in His ways, and to observe His commandments, His statutes, and His ordinances, so that you will live and increase, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land to which you are coming to take possession of it.
But if your heart deviates and you do not listen, and you will be drawn astray, and you will prostrate yourself to other deities and serve them, I declare to you this day, that you will surely perish, and that you will not live long days on the land, to which you are crossing the Jordan, to come and take possession thereof.
This day, I call upon the heaven and the earth as witnesses [that I have warned] you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, so that you and your offspring will live; (30:15-19).
The Bible reminds us that we have free will. This is a critical part of humanity. God created us with the capacity to make our own choices, even to choose to ignore God. This is the dividing line between men and animals: men are also driven by our instincts and emotions but can choose to rise above them. We can, with training and practice, put reason before emotion and instinct and make our decisions based on intellect.
Free will also separates man from angels: as elevated as they are they are stuck at their level. Since they see the reality of God they cannot choose anything but pure obedience (yes even Satan is a faithful servant). Only mankind was created with the gift and challenge of free will. We can open our eyes to our possibilities or shut them tight and seek comfort and pleasure in life.
Free will is always contextual.
Your “free” choices are not only your own, but the product of your society, media, culture, upbringing, friends, books you read… Abraham understood this. One of the most amazing things Abraham ever did was to pray for the evildoers in Sodom and Gomorrah [actually there were five cities there, those were the biggest]. Despite their evil he prayed for them (Genesis 18:16-33). Look closely, exactly what did Abraham pray?
He asks God to spare the cities if there is a certain quorum of righteous people there. He first asks for 50, ten per city, as ten men is considered in Jewish law as a significant group for spiritual matters. Then he asks to delay their judgment if there are even less righteous men among them. But he never asks that the cities be spared even without any righteous men among them.
Abraham understand that people used to making certain decisions don’t just change by themselves; they need an outside exemplar to demonstrate a better direction. Having a minimal number of righteous people to set a good example would provide this positive influence. Abraham knew that the men of Sodom and Gomorrah would not change on their own. Abraham does not ask God to help the men steeped in wickedness to see the light and now choose good on their own; that is practically impossible.
The lesson is you can’t pray (or assume) that someone will change their values or the way they make decisions. Yes, there may be outliers, but in general it just won’t happen. Free will is not exercised in a vacuum. You have to pray for or make a change in their whole environment, that will rebuild their decision making process from the foundation up.
This is why even in modern society it is very important to know the way a woman grew up, what influenced her, and how she gets along with her parents. We learned about Jacob’s wives, and how he spent years weaning them away from the influence of their original culture and family of origin. Don’t assume you have the fortitude that our father Jacob had.
We have written about our free will decisions being in the context of our culture and upbringing:
Even though we have free will and make our own choices, we are in large part the product of our environment and culture. When we see people regularly engaging in activities we are influenced by this and start to think those activities are normal and acceptable. If the ancient Jews had seen idols and men engaged in idolatry, eventually they would have accepted this and been lured to follow.
Indeed, this tragedy eventually happened since our ancestors were not totally successful in eliminating idols from the promised land. To the ancients, idolatry was not stupid and superstitious, they had entire cultures and belief structures built around idols and pagan rituals. We don’t appreciate how easy it was in the past to get sucked into such a cult, even though the magical thinking employed by idolaters continues into our own time.
This fact clues us in that our choices are not entirely our own, but we make choices in the context of our environment. One of my own rabbis told us that he was a religious soul, and if he had been born in Haiti he would have become a fervent believer in the power of voodoo. He told us this to remind us that our society of origin plays a huge role in our assumptions.
Who chooses death?
Moses tells the Jews they have a choice between life and good, or death and evil. Then he says they should choose life. That should be obvious, who chooses death?
The issue is this: we are all to some or a large extent the product of our cultural context, and some cultures value death. These are not only those societies that encourage violence, terrorism, and conquest. Our own modern country places an inordinate value on comfort, relaxation, and vacation. Of course relaxation can be used to recharge your energies, but often it is simply an escape from the painful work of striving for growth.
Trying to accomplish requires energy and accepting a risk of failure and broken dreams. Easier to eat, drink, sleep, binge watch shows and movies, play games and zone out. Easier and more comfortable to waste time. A lot of profits in the modern world are made on men wasting time and seeking comfort. And time, gentlemen, is what your life is made of.
In addition, the “village” ie the media, corporations, educational establishment, etc., promotes certain values that are naturally inimical to your own. They push their values on you claiming that you will find more comfort and meaning if you agree to their world view. Convincing you zone out and indulge in the entertainment they are selling is profitable. But real accomplishment isn’t comfortable, it is hard and dangerous.
The opposite of pain is not pleasure; pain is the price you invest to get real pleasure. The true opposite of pleasure is comfort and stagnation. However, men investing in themselves and upgrading their lives does not enhance profits and control. It is better for “the village” to keep men living in the dream world of comfort rather than the dangerous world of pain and real pleasure.
This is one reason why over the past 19 years, since September 11, 2001, there had been quite a lot of propagandizing and dissension over the proper role of the USA in the world. If the American people should involve themselves in foreign wars, at least for the valid reason of self protection and deterrence, young men and women must to be willing to face pain and risk their own lives to make a change on the world.
This determination undermines the profitable goal of getting young people to fixate on leisure, luxury, and consumption. Many elements of the global village would prefer that you don’t choose to live your own life on your own terms. When your culture and context is pushing you away from making difficult choices, you need an extra impetus to choose life and start finding your own path and improving yourself.
Where is your free will?
I highly recommend Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler’s treatment of free will in his philosophical masterpiece “Letter from Eliyahu”. As we mentioned, if your culture has certain assumptions about how life works, that reduces your scope of choices, unless you can reject the influence your society has over your decision making. That is no small task.
Your own decisions also impact your future decisions. A man who always stops for coffee and a donut on the way to work probably made an active decision to do that a few times, and eventually got into the habit. After a while, he is on auto pilot. Eventually, he can’t imagine not getting his daily donut. It’s now outside the bounds of his free will decision making, until there is an outside shock to the system.
The Bible demonstrates this concept through Pharaoh king of Egypt, who kept deciding to keep the Jews enslaved in the face of greater and greater plagues. After continued stubbornness from Pharaoh, God gives his heart, his free will, strength to allow him to stay the course (Exodus 9:12; 10:20, 27). This was not interference with his free will, but the natural consequence of making the same choices over and over. Our choices reshape the bounds of what we can choose.
Many of the things we do every day are not even free will decisions, we just do them out of habit or based on our assumptions. Many activities we simply would never countenance, those are outside our scope of free will. The traditional Jew eating pork is one example, he doesn’t even crave it. Acceptable activities we do regularly become automatic, they are also outside our free will. The traditional Jew lighting candles for Shabbat.
Your actual free will is only a thin, shifting battle line. As you make decisions, the battle lines move back and forth. You may conquer more territory, shifting more areas of your life to safely behind lines of control. As you mature and grow in wisdom, you begin to realize that the assumptions your culture pushes on you are not for your own benefit. You gain the insight and strength to push the battle lines in more areas.
Again, the basic problem is this is hard work, and it is easier to be comfortable than to experience the pain of realizing your basic assumptions about life were false and need to change. A wise man will consider what ideas are his own and what are external, and map for himself where the battle of his own free will be can best be fought.
What is free will?
In Jewish philosophy, we skate the thin ice between free will and determinism. In the conventional Jewish view it is not simply one or the other: we have free will but it is constrained. Our choices are limited by the reality the God is eternal and omniscient and knows exactly what we will choose to do. We are also limited because we are all born into a certain biological, social, and cultural reality that shapes our choices and desires.
An omniscient God is not incompatible with free will, Rambam (Maimonides) explains this in Laws of Repentance, chapter five. Our free will is so great that according to the Ohr haChaim haKadosh, men can choose to murder someone before his time and God will allow this happen based on their decision (this is why Reuben saved Joseph from his brothers’ plot to murder him by having them throw him into a pit full of poisonous snakes and scorpions, see Ohr haChaim on Genesis 37:21). Other Rabbis dispute this idea (see Shaar haBitachon in Hovot haLevavot).
Without revealing too much, God allows us free will, even though we are allowed to make the wrong choices and hurt ourselves and others.
We need free will to realize that we are truly accomplishing something positive through our choices; this fuels our spiritual growth. God places each of us in a specific context which does limit our scope of action. Men are social animals and respond to outside pressure. The restraints on your choice are purposeful, so you behave in a civilized manner and also so you can make an effort and overcome them to accomplish your personal mission.
I wrote about this issue regarding Jacob’s legacy:
…even when God promises, you still need to do your part. Jewish thought has a concept of predestination but also a competing concept of free will. Our sages teach that even before you are born there is a field, a house, a woman (at least one) fated for you. But that this “fate” or “mazal” can change through prayer and actions. This tension is hard to understand at first, we live with this spiritual reality and we get used to it. A practical example my rabbi gave us: A man can have a judgment in Heaven that he will live a healthy life to age 100, but if that man jumps off the roof he is still dead.
All humans, tread a fine line of fate and free will. We make our plans and put in our efforts, and we have to make reasonable efforts, but there are forces and energies out of our control and even beyond our imagination. You don’t have be a religious man to know this. The universe is out of your control.
Naturally, God is omniscient and not time bound, He knows what will happen, what you will chose. However, our choices still matter, which is why Moses tells us to “choose life”. [Some explain this through parallel universes, noting an ancient Medrash stating God created hundreds of thousands of worlds before creating the one we inhabit].
There is a hint to this dual approach to free will. Abraham described man (himself) as being of just “dust and ashes (Gen 18:27). Our ancient sages in the Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:5) teaches that each and every person is obligated to say: The world was created for me...” Are we mere dust and ashes or are is mankind the ultimate pinnacle of creation? Yes and yes!
Of course we are dust and ash compared to God, and we will all return to the dust. Meanwhile, we must remember that we are important. We are created just a little lower than the angels – but with free will. We are able to choose our road through life, and this is a real meaningful choice. The Hebrew for “for me” is “B’shvili“, shvil means path, shvili means my path, B’shvili means in my path.
Therefore, the Mishnah means that you must tell yourself that the entire world was created just for the path you choose to take in life. The direction the world takes is determined by the path you choose now. The whole world is here to serve you as you choose your mission and work on your life, you are the main character in your own drama.
It gets even deeper: Your personal choices impact the direction and future of the entire universe. We explained the word used b’shvili means in my path. The word nivra “created” is a passive verb meaning “was created”, but the same exact word is also the active verb in first person plural meaning “we will create”. We as in you and God. The hidden message from our ancestors is that you must bring yourself to understand that the path you choose in life makes you a partner with God in creation. As a result of your chosen actions, God and you effectively recreate the entire world.
We made a similar point in Trumah:
Rambam (aka Maimonides, in Teshuvah 5:1) explains that in all of creation only mankind resembles God in that we were made with free will. Because we have free will (a limited free will), our decisions and actions matter. Ancient Jewish mysticism teaches that every man, on the soul level, is woven into the fabric of creation in such a way as to be interdependent with all of creation.
If a man chooses to elevate himself, for example by giving charity, he changes himself into a more charitable person, and also changes the balance of the entire universe to be a more charitable place. He is molding the entire universe by his decisions and actions. Every decision, every single act matters and ripples throughout the world.
We were chosen to be the partner with God in creation (a junior partner). This is one of the secrets in Genesis 1:26 “let us make man“. Angels do not create, they do not develop or change; God is not really talking to angels. In one sense, God is using the ‘royal plural’. In another sense, God is talking to man, to us. To you! Telling you: “Let us make man!” Join God in the work of making yourself into a man.
Stop right here and reflect: You are an entire world. There is no one exactly like you in existence. There never was before and there never will be again.
You have unique talents and hold tremendous potential: You are a world unto yourself, and you can create worlds, or destroy them. You have been given a mission to make yourself into whatever you choose to be and you are infused with the power to accomplish anything. Your choices matter.
My rabbi taught us an amazing thing. He said take every man seriously. This man in front of you could cure cancer. He could start a nuclear war (this was back when that was the worst fear). Most of all, take yourself seriously.
This is one of the missing elements from modern life. Many of us fail to “choose life” as in to live to the hilt and use all our talents, because we simply do not realize how important we are in the grand scheme. When other men are sidelined by pursuing comfort and empty fantasies, you must keep asking yourself “what am I living for?” and then go about the hard work of actually living for it.
There is a hint to this concept in the names of this double reading Nitzavim means “standing”, in the plural, while Vayelech means “and he went”. Many men are merely standing still, not exercising their ability to choose. Only a few individuals are moving, growing, and living. Be one of those few, put in the work, and build yourself into a a man capable of making real choices.
Red Pill Rabbi 