It is often
assumed that the free will versus determinism debate hinges on whether a man is
a puppet who, dangling from the puppeteer’s string, has no real choice in what
he does. Those who take this extreme view often press the point that God
controls absolutely everything: if a person exercises choice in performing any
act, it is only because the circumstances leading to that choice and the means
of resolving it are both predetermined by God. Free choice is therefore an
illusion. We are however bound to believe that we exercise free will, since it
is this that gives any sort of personal meaning to our lives.
Others take
the view that God’s control over human thoughts and actions is more nuanced in
that, while setting the parameters within which we act out our daily existence,
He has the freedom to choose the extent to which we exercise a genuine freedom
of choice.
I can give
an example, by way of analogy. Many years ago, two of my grandsons were
fighting one another. Initially a play fight, the game became a little too
rough and I decided to intervene. I lifted the lighter boy off the ground and
held him firmly so that he could neither kick nor punch his cousin, though he
made strenuous attempts to do so.
At one
level my intervention curtailed the physical motion of the wriggling child. He
could neither escape my grasp nor approach his foe. This was clearly a
constraint upon his freedom to choose where to move. On another level, however,
I contemplated the full range of options that remained available to him:
- Continue to
resist my grip (in which case I would simply strengthen it as necessary);
- Stop
squirming and relax (in which case I would have put him down, at a safe
distance from his protagonist);
- Say he was
sorry (in which case I would have put him down near his erstwhile rival, having
first extracted an undertaking from the latter that hostilities would cease);
- Scream (in
which case I would have ignored him till he stopped screaming);
- Call for his mother to intervene (which is what he actually did).
I like to
think that this scenario reflected in human terms the sort of thing that Rabbi
Akiva had in mind in this mishnah. Do you agree?
