Crafting Your Identity and The Art of Choice (Torah and Free Will)

Finish this sentence if you will. You are what you Da da da. You are what you eat is a famous line. Maybe you are what you love or you are what you think. Some brilliant scholars have even posited that you is what you is. Maybe that works here. But when we think about it for a second, what are we? How do you define a person? Their atzmias, their eye? This is a pressing question because we got to know who we are. That's the very, very beginning of everything. Rabiruqam, in one of his epic, ma'amaram, explains to us the best answer. He proves it unequivocally, very distinctively, and makes his answer undoubtedly the best one. Or he argues that you can't say that a person is defined by his body, because hopefully we're not defined by where the body ends up, which is to be maggot infested inside of the ground. God forbid, that isn't us. Obviously, we're more Maybe. We are our souls, our Nishama, from up high. We also definitely believe in the idea of Gil-Gulim and the trans-migration of souls and how the souls come back around to fulfill their task in life. So what are we? Maybe we are our fate, our destiny. What are we? Fate and destiny can't be because what's already been decreed how tall we'll be and how wealthy we'll be. Rabiruqam tells us a brilliant insight that every single person, he is nothing more than his choice, his behira. Ha'adam hu ha'behira ach levad. That's it. Because a person, he doesn't get to even choose his surroundings. You didn't pick really where you got to live. You're pushing to places based on where is the best, parnasa Hashem guiding you to follow the cloud inside of the desert to accomplish different missions. You didn't really get to pick many of your natios, what you're pulled towards, what your drives are, what your ambitions are, how lazy you are, that's all been pre-wired. The only thing that we have control over in our lives is what we choose, our behira, and that's it. So at that moment that you choose to sleep in, I choose to sleep in we become a shtik mahos, a chevcha, one big mister sleeping. That's who you are, but that's the choice that you've made. And when you choose to get up early and run to da'v, putting five AM to da'van vasikin, you're mister vasikin, because a human is really only what he chooses at that moment. So life is in your hands and we have the definition of life. Really all brings us to that clear answer that you are what you choose.