Parshas Nitzavim ובחרת בחיים

(15) See, I set before you this day life and prosperity, death and adversity. (16) For I command you this day, to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, His laws, and His rules, that you may thrive and increase, and that the LORD your God may bless you in the land that you are about to enter and possess. (17) But if your heart turns away and you give no heed, and are lured into the worship and service of other gods, (18) I declare to you this day that you shall certainly perish; you shall not long endure on the soil that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. (19) I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—if you and your offspring would live— (20) by loving the LORD your God, heeding His commands, and holding fast to Him. For thereby you shall have life and shall long endure upon the soil that the LORD swore to your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give to them.

(15) את החיים ואת הטוב LIFE AND GOOD — the one is dependent upon the other: if you do good, behold, there is life for you, and if you do evil, behold, there is death for you. Scripture goes on to explain how this is:

(19) ובחרת בחיים THEREFORE CHOOSE THE LIFE — I show you these (“I set life and death before thee) in order that you may choose the portion of life. It is like a man who says to his son, “Choose for yourself a good portion of my real estate”, and sets him in the best portion saying to him, “Choose this!” And concerning this it states, (Psalms 16:5) “The Lord is the portion of my inheritance and my cup, אתה תומיך גורלי”, i.e. “You place my hand on the good lot, saying, ‘Choose this!'”

(26) כדמותנו, acting intelligently like the angels, though from free choice, not like the angels who act under Divine compulsion. In this respect, though the angels are celestial beings, they do not resemble man. In this respect man is a little more like G’d Himself than are the angels, though our habitat is in the “lower” regions of the universe. The principal difference between G’d’s total freedom of action and that of man’s is that G’d’s freedom of action is always put to a constructive use, whereas man frequently abuses his G’d given freedom to oppose the expressed will of His Creator. At any rate, not being hampered by the limitations imposed by having a body, the qualitative freedom of G’d is far superior to that of man, and this is why the Torah uses the comparative כדמותנו, to show that the comparison is limited.

(13) My Lord said: Because that people has approached [Me] with its mouth And honored Me with its lips, But has kept its heart far from Me, And its worship of Me has been A commandment of men, learned by rote—

(1) Free will is granted to all people: If one wanted to turn oneself to a good path and to be righteous he has free will, and if one wanted to turn oneself to an evil path and be wicked he has free will, as it is written in the Torah, Behold, the man is become like one of us, to know good and evil (Genesis 3:22), that is, this species of human is unique in the world and there is no other species like it in this matter, that it of its own initiative and will and thought knows Good and Evil and will do whatever it pleases, and there is no one to prevent its hand from doing Good or Evil, and since that is so Lest he send his hand (Gen. 3:22).

(2) Do not let this thing that the simpletons of the Nations of the World and most of the fools of Israel say cross your mind, that the Holy Blessed One decrees for a person to be righteous or wicked from the beginning of his creation. The matter is not so; rather, every person is capable of being righteous like Moses our Teacher or wicked like [King] Jeroboam, wise or foolish, compassionate or cruel, stingy or wasteful, and so on for all of the attributes.