Free Will

While we have all been created for and with a purpose/mission, we were also created with free will.  We have the freedom to make choices, good or bad.  We instinctively know what is for the good, yet that is not what we always execute.  Adam and Eve knew not to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge* and yet they were seduced into doing so.  They had it all, then threw it away and left us the legacy of repairing the damage their choice created.  The world we all wish for is in our hands.  It may not happen on our schedule, but by all of us making the right and good choices, we will get there.  We can do good because it’s the right thing and we can do right because it’s the good thing.  The freedom we were given should be celebrated by exercising it for the good. We should be grateful for it and not leave it to someone else to do our part.

“We have to believe in free will.  We’ve got no choice”. – Isaac Bashevis Singer

“Perhaps the greatest madness of all is to see life only as it is and not as it ought to be.” – Cervantes

Dr. Viktor Frankl in his book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, vividly describes how inmates of Auschwitz living in unimaginable conditions and with everything stripped from them still had the freedom to do good.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstances, to choose one’s own way”. – Dr. Viktor Frankl from “Man’s Search for Meaning”

*Conventional wisdom says the fruit was an apple.  Yet in the Torah it does not say what kind of fruit it was.  All we know is that it was organic and locally grown (laugh)