Free Will vs. Fate

Rabbi Ellen Lewis, "Changing Your Past: Reflection on Forgiveness" in Mishkan Hanefesh, xxiv, xxvi.

You can change your past. That is the emotional premise of forgiveness. No, you cannot change what happened. You can change only your emotional relationship to what happened. And it might very well be the hardest thing you ever try to do....

We have choices: we can grieve the loss rather than punish ourselves for something that we cannot do... We can grieve the loss of our old self. We can move on and make progress in our life by engaging in the process of grief, which leads to an experience of freedom and gives us a new perspective on life. That new view may even open our heart to finding forgiveness in unexpected places... Just as we can change our past, so we can write a new story going forward.

Albert Friedlander, “Destiny and Fate,” 138

It is a part of human fate that individuals become part of a collective, attached to a community that may remove major choices from their volition. This process can be a numbing, soul-destroying experience -- a robotlike fate imposed by a society in which individual capacities are numbed, destroyed, or turned away from the task of creation. The function of the Jew is to fight against the darkness, to transcend his natural dimensions and to discover the “supernatural Jew” who returns to that destiny where freedom is still possible.

Abraham Joshua Heschel, God in Search of Man

The essence of man’s freedom is in his ability to surpass himself. To a certain extent man is enslaved by his environment, society, and character, but man can think, will, and take decisions beyond these limitations. If men are treated as “processes” freedom is destroyed. Man is free at rare moments; freedom is an “event.” Everyone has the potentiality for freedom, but only rarely achieves it.