I think that most of us take it for granted that we have free will, without ever thinking about what free will really means. There are so many factors that influence our thinking and decision making that its hard to identify where, exactly, we exercise our total free will. We are influenced by our families, friends, upbringing, schooling, work, society, culture, commercials, celebrities, etc. When you consider all of the factors that influence us, it seems pretty clear that to make a true act of free will would require a great deal of exertion on our part. Without proper introspection in order to identify the factors that influencing the way we act and make decisions, then we just float through life without truly acting out of free will.
In this week's Parsha, God tells Avraham that he needs to remove himself from all the things that influence him, for his own sake. The verse says, "Go for yourself, from your land, from your birthplace, from your father's house..." If we dissect the parts of this verse we will learn an important lesson about free will. God didn't have to spell out all the places from where Avraham was supposed to leave, the verse could have just said, "go to where I'm going to show you." By adding those superfluous words, it is indicating to us that there is a lesson to be learned. The three places mentioned, your land, your birthplace, your father's house, are all places with a great deal of influence upon a person's identity. People often identify with their country, their community, and their father/parent's home. Having these identities are not inherently bad, but it's sometimes difficult to identify where the person ends and where the identity based on that external factor begins.
God is telling Avraham, that sometimes, in order to have a spiritual awakening we have to remove ourselves from the influence of external factors. That is the nature of the words in the verse saying, "go for yourself." The statement for yourself is also unnecessary. But when we consider all the seemingly unnecessary parts of the verse, the idea emerges that acting in one's own best interest with true free will sometimes requires a reconstruction of our own identity separate from external influences. Once we know where we stand on certain issues at our core, we can begin to think with our own free will, then we can go back and consider the potential impact our decisions will have for good or bad on our family, communities and larger society.
The beginning of the Parsha deals with a lesson to Avraham about removing oneself from external influences in order to make decisions based on our own free will. If that were the end of the story, then we would be forced to conclude that the ideal way of life, would be to live in a cave away from all of society's influences and only think about ourselves. But thankfully that is not the end of the story. Avraham is the model of consideration for others and the champion of social justice in the ancient world. He does go back to his family and homeland in order to find a spouse for his son. The lesson is that in order to fully engage in the world as an individual acting on our own free will, it is necessary that we identify who we are and what we believe in, and then re-insert that image back in to society.
Shabbat Shalom!
