Choices

We are not Jews by choice. We are not circumcised by choice—they do it to us before we can be asked. Neither did anyone ask us if we would like to be obligated in all these mitzvahs—not since Mount Sinai. Even the one who joins us does so because something propels him from inside.

If we were Jews because our minds and hearts told us so, then our Judaism would take us only as far as our minds and hearts can know. But we are not. And so, our journey is on eagle’s wings and our destiny beyond the stars.
Rabbi Tzvi Freeman
Not by choice
Chabad.org

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will - to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. -Ephesians 1:3-6

Do we have a choice? I mean, about who we are...do we have a choice?

Logic would say "yes", at least up to a point. We don't have a choice about who our parents are, our hair or eye color, how tall we'll be, and a lot of other things. But we were given free will and the power of decision. We can choose where to live, what kind of work to do, who to marry, what to read, how to spend our free time. We can choose.

But if you're a Jew, you don't get to choose. As Rabbi Freeman states, except for those people who choose to convert to Judaism, you do not choose to be a Jew (more on this later). You are "born that way", to quote a popular song by Lady Gaga. Of course, a Jew can choose to comply to his or her obligations to the commandments and what sort of lifestyle to live. There are Jews who experience being Jews by virtue of their genetics, but who otherwise live a completely "goy" lifestyle. There are Jews who relate to being Jews in terms of a social identity, but who do not acknowledge the religious and spiritual reality of being a Jew. There are Jews who embrace all there is about being Jewish including the Torah and the Talmud, and who embrace God.

Even if you're a Jew who chooses to reject your Judaism, just like in Nazi Germany on Kristallnacht in 1938, when they come for you, it won't matter if you say you're a Jew or not. You are a Jew and they will take you away.

But what about Christians? No one is born a Christian. Even if you are born into a Christian family, it's not a foregone conclusion that you will become a Christian or, if as a child you accept Jesus as Lord and Savior, there's no guarantee your faith will endure into adulthood. Many kids raised in Christian homes lose their faith upon entering college and never regain it. You can choose to be a Christian and later you can quit. When they come for the Christians, you can deny your faith convincingly and with credibility, unlike the Jew.

There's a story about a teenage girl named Cassie Bernall who was murdered during the Columbine High School massacre on April 21, 1999. According to popular media reports, including news sources in Evangelical Christianity, Bernall was asked at gunpoint by one of the assailants if she was a Christian. She said "yes" and was immediately shot as a result. The church considers her a "martyr" for her faith and she has been much touted (or perhaps exploited) by organized Christianity as an example of a young person of faith who would even die for Jesus.

The facts of this event are somewhat in dispute and there are those who say the martyrdom of Cassie Bernall never happened, at least not in the way we've heard it reported. But fact or myth, the story of Cassie Bernall does highlight that Christians have a choice about acknowledging or denying Christ.

Don't we?

But if that's true that we have a choice, what did Paul mean when he said that "he (God) chose us in him before the creation of the world" and "he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ"? Paul is clearly addressing non-Jews who came to faith in the Jewish Messiah and who were adopted "to sonship" through the Messiah. Did we have a choice?

Free will says "yes", but Paul throws that choice into doubt.

Converting to Judaism for a non-Jew is a choice, isn't it? That choice is one of the reasons Judaism is hesitant to offer conversion as an option since converted Jews can more easily deny their "Judaism" when the going gets tough, just like Christians. Rabbi Freeman says, "Even the one who joins us does so because something propels him from inside...And so, our journey is on eagle’s wings and our destiny beyond the stars." This is applied even to Jewish converts...people who have been destined by God to be Jewish before the creation of the world, even though they weren't born that way.

I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. -Leviticus 26:42

The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus. You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. -Acts 12:13

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance. -2 Peter 3:9

In Judaism, the merit of the Patriarchs is applied to every Jew and it is in that merit that Jews are considered by God. Of course John the Baptizer did say that God could raise up sons of Abraham from stones (Matthew 3:9), indicating that the merit of the Fathers has limits. But God has remembered and God will continue to remember His covenant with the Jewish people and, as Paul states (in Romans 11:25-32), all of Israel will be saved.

But Peter says that God does not want anyone to perish. If Jews, not by their own choice, are members of the covenant, and Christians were chosen by God from before the creation of the world, where does choice figure in? I don't really know the answer, but there is this:

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. -Genesis 1:27

Choice or not, all human beings everywhere are special just because we were created in God's image. That doesn't mean arms and legs and such, but the part of us that, through no will of our own, seeks out something greater than ourselves. For some that means seeking science, for others some form of spirituality, and for those who try to block out that "image", it means immersing themselves in the things of the world including sex, drugs, alcohol, and whatever other pleasures they can find.

For those of us who try to answer "the call" and seek out that thing within us that wants to reconnect to its origin, we are taken places we don't want to go, we ask questions we don't want to ask, and we hear answers we don't want to hear. Yet we cannot stop seeking that missing part of ourselves, we cannot stop asking troublesome questions, and we cannot stop listening for disturbing answers.

The deepest longing, therefore, of the genuine Chasid is to become a "living Torah." The keeping of the Law is to him only a means to an end: union with God. For this reason he tries to keep the Law scrupulously, for "God's thoughts are embodied in it."
Paul Phillip Levertoff
Love and the Messianic Age

I suppose I'm cheating when I say that we do and don't have a choice. We don't have a choice about being created by God and we don't have a choice about who God created us to be, Jew or Gentile. We don't have a choice in that God seems to have created us with a built-in "homing signal" and, at some point our lives, He activates it and compels us to seek out that which we don't understand.

We do have a choice how we respond to that signal. Jews, though they can never stop being Jews, have a choice about how to respond to God. The rest of humanity, regardless of their religion including claiming no religion, have a choice about how to respond to God. Responding to God is challenging, even frightening. God calls us into worlds we don't always understand and probably wouldn't choose to enter, even if we did understand. We just know that, having answered God, we have only our faith to help us do what God has called us to do:

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” "Hineni" (Here I am), he replied. -Genesis 22:1

Dory: Come on, trust me on this one.
Marlin: Trust you?
Dory: Yes, trust. It's what friends do.
-from Finding Nemo (2003)

Trust. It's what Abraham did when God asked him to sacrifice his son, his only son, the son he loved, Isaac. Trust. It's what we have when God asks us to respond to Him. We don't have a choice in being the person God created us to be. We do have a choice in what we do with that person.

To quote a favorite expression of the Zohar: "The impulse from below (itharuta dil-tata) calls forth that from above." The earthly reality mysteriously reacts upon the heavenly, for everything, including human activity, has its "upper roots" in the realm of the Sefiroth.
Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism
by Gershom Scholem
quoting Zohar I, 164a and Zohar II, 34a

And so, our journey is on eagle’s wings and our destiny beyond the stars.

The road is long and often, we travel in the dark.