The book, The Perfect Mile, by Neil Bascomb tells the story of Roger Bannister, three athletes who committed themselves to breaking the four-minute mile. Bascomb writes:
All three runners endured thousands of hours of training to shape their bodies and minds. They ran more miles in a year than many of us walk in a lifetime. They spent a large part of their youth struggling for breath. They trained week after week to the point of collapse, all to shave off a second, maybe two, during a mile race—the time it takes to snap one's fingers and register the sound. They understood that life was somehow different for them. If they weren't training or racing or gathering the will required for these efforts, they were trying not to think about training or racing at all.
Each of them describes the attempt to push oneself beyond the ordinary, to make changes in their lifestyles in order to better themselves and in doing so they felt that they had achieved something unique and extraordinarily satisfying.
What does it mean to be human? How are human beings different than all other living things? When asked this question, I think that many of us would answer, “Free will.” It’s the fact that Human beings have the ability to exercise choice. We do not make important life decisions based on instinct, we have the ability to use critical thinking, to weigh evidence, and gather data before making a decision. But let me ask you something? How many times have you done something that you knew you shouldn’t do, but you just couldn’t help it? Or how many times have you failed to do something that you really should have done? Where is our free will in these situations?
Furthermore, research has shown that both hereditary and environmental factors will not just influence a person’s likelihood to act in a certain way, but they can actually predict how an individual will act in a given situation. What about choice?This week’s Parsha has an important lesson with regard to free will. At the end of Parshat Nitzavim 30:19, we have the words: “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse, choose life!” …ובחרת בחיים!
When we think about it, why do we need to be told to choose life and blessing? The choice seems pretty obvious, there doesn’t seem like much of a choice at all. Who in their right mind would choose death over life or curse over blessing. We shouldn’t need to be told to choose life. Nevertheless, the torah tells us to choose life. I believe the Torah tells us this for a reason. Because when it comes to expressing our free will, it needs to be an active and conscious process. Where we come from, our personal history and experiences no doubt have an impact on how we will react in any given situation, but it cannot dictate the way that we will act. Our actions need not be predetermined. We all have the ability to change!
As we go into Rosh Hashanah, we should realize that this is exactly what teshuva is really about. It’s about being able to make changes in our lives. The word teshuva literally means to return. Return involves a certain degree of change. When we make difficult changes, we are acting with free will. We are choosing how to live, and this time of year our choice, just like it says in the Parsha, is to choose life. So much of what we pray for on Rosh Hashanah is life. We ask God to inscribe us in the book of life; we add the word חיים [life] to blessings in the amidah between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. When we prepare ourselves for the High Holidays, the Teshuva we are doing is an introspection on what do we want out of our lives in the coming year and how are we going to achieve that. We’re not just praying for a higher quantity of life, we are prayer for a higher quality of life!
Choosing life, while it might be obvious, is not always easy. Choosing life means becoming aware of the things that we know that we really want to implement in our lives but don’t. Choosing life means taking a step back from our routine and reevaluating.
In the recent issue of the Reform Judaism magazine there was an article called, “my frum week.” The article is about a young woman who is a student at Yale university who decided she was going to try being as frum as she could. She was going to try living like an Orthodox Jew for a week. Every day she got up early for minyan, went to minyan in the afternoon for mincha and Ma’ariv, made blessings before and after she ate, she dressed differently, basically she felt like for that week her whole life had changed. Making the change gave her insight into her own life and Judaism based on her experience of these mitzvoth she hadn’t previously experienced. I’d like to share with you one of her observations in her own words:
The new level of observance I experienced during frum week also gave me a different way of connecting to God. Previously I believed that some undercurrent of Divinity was in the world around me; to experience it I simply needed to enter the world with open eyes and wait for God’s presence to appear to me. During frum week, each action I took was a forced pause of mindfulness of the Divine, an awareness that my every deed was meant to advance me toward God, regardless of how I was feeling at that moment.
One of the most important aspects of being an observant Jew is the way in which everything we do has the potential to be a movement towards God. But this experience doesn’t just happen. It has to be something that we choose, we need to exert our free will to make changes in our lives that can sometimes seem inconvenient to use before we get used to that change. But the point of it all is that it connects us to our maker.
Rosh Hashanah is the time of year when we remind ourselves that we are human, we are not just automatons; we are capable of making changes. To some extent we are products of our environments and surroundings, but we always have a choice on how we are going to exist in that space.
This week is when we really begin the High Holidays. Tonight we are going to start saying selichot, and we will say them every day until Rosh Hashanah begins. Because the work that we hope to accomplish on Rosh Hashanah has to start beforehand, meaningful change does not come in an instant. Let’s make this week our frum week. Whatever it is that you do, figure out a plan on how you will do something additional this week. Take the time to consider how this mitzvah will help with the overall mitzvah of teshuvah. Perhaps it is to say blessings before and/or after you eat coming, maybe it’s to pray more at home or even to come to shul for minyan this week. Go visit an elderly friend, give food to the homeless, or make a hospital visit. Let us all choose to do something extra this week as an expression of our free will and our desire to choose life.
