Choose Life

What separates man from beast? Well, there are many things that separate man from beast, but one of them is the ability to make choices. We call that bechirah.

An animal is governed by its nature and instincts. When it is hungry, it seeks food. When it is tired, it seeks rest. When it senses danger, it seeks safety. A person, however, can experience an impulse and choose not to act upon it. He can be angry and decide to remain silent. He can be tired and nevertheless get up to daven. He can be tempted to sin and choose to walk away. He can be hurt by another person and decide that he will not allow the hurt to determine how he treats others. The ability to stop, consider, and choose a different course is one of the defining qualities of a human being.

Rabbeinu Yonah writes in Shaarei Teshuvah (3:17) that the loftiest spiritual values we are to strive to attain were imparted to us through mitzvos. He cites as an example the mitzvah in this week’s parsha of choosing good over bad. Every person is given the opportunity to choose what type of life he wants to lead and what he wants to do with his life. The Torah commands us, “Uvocharta bachaim — And you shall choose life.”

The Torah does not merely tell us that we possess the capacity to choose. It instructs us to use that capacity properly. The Torah tells us that when we stand at the crossroads and are confronted with alternatives, we must recognize that the choice is ours and that our choices have consequences. A good life does not simply happen. It is built through decisions, some large and consequential and many so small that we barely notice them at the time.

We tend to think of the important choices in life as the major decisions that require careful thought and planning: whom we will marry, where we will live, where we will send our children, and which path we will take in life. These decisions are certainly important, but there is another category of choices that quietly shapes us every day: how we speak to our spouse when we are tired, how we respond when someone has offended us, whether we use our time productively or allow it to slip away, whether we complain about what we lack or appreciate what we have, and whether we respond to a difficult situation with emunah or with frustration. These choices become the building blocks of our character.

A person becomes who he is through the choices he makes. Each time he chooses patience over anger, he strengthens his capacity for patience. Each time he chooses Torah over distraction, he becomes more attached to Torah. Each time he restrains himself from saying something hurtful, he develops greater control over his speech. Conversely, when a person repeatedly gives in to an impulse or temptation, he is also making a choice, and each time a person gives in to his yeitzer hora, it becomes that much more difficult to do the right thing the next time he has to make a choice.

There is tremendous power in the concept of bechirah. We are not merely choosing what to do in a particular moment. In a very real sense, we are choosing what kind of person we will become.

I met a delightful Yerushalmi Jew who told me about his Hungarian grandfather, a Jew from Toshnad who met the same fate as the overwhelming majority of Hungarian Jewry. He was taken to the concentration camps with his wife and children, and only he survived.

Years later, the grandson asked him, “Of all the awful experiences of the war, which was the worst?”

The grandfather’s answer was unexpected. He said that, for him, the worst moment came after the war had ended, when he had been freed from the camps.

He emerged alone, barely alive, with the people he had loved most in the world gone. Seeking some measure of solace, he made his way back to his hometown of Toshnad, hoping to see the home in which he had once lived with his family. But the Jews of the town were all gone, and a non-Jewish family had assumed ownership of his house.

He walked up to the door, simply wanting to take one final look at the place he had once called home. He had left that house without saying goodbye, never imagining that he would one day return to it alone.

Then he noticed that the family nameplate was still firmly fastened to the door.

Seeing his family’s name on the door gave him the courage to knock. The occupant was kind enough to allow him inside. He entered and looked around at the walls that had absorbed the laughter and songs of his murdered family. Everything seemed just as he remembered it. The dining room table, around which his family had gathered for festive meals and sung zemiros on countless Shabbosos and Yomim Tovim, was still there. Even the leichter on which his wife had lit the candles for so many years remained in its familiar place.

He stood there, overwhelmed by memories, when suddenly the man who had taken possession of the house told him that his time was up.

“Okay, Jew,” he commanded. “Your time is up. Get out.”

The grandfather walked out of the house and stood on the street. Decades later, he told his grandson that he had never felt so degraded and distraught in his entire life. All the pain and heartache he had endured seemed to converge in that one moment. He had survived the war, but now he was standing outside the home that had once belonged to him, looking at a life that no longer existed.

And then, standing there at the gutter, he realized something.

He had a choice.

He could allow the anguish to pull him down and give it all up or he could summon whatever strength remained within him and rise above what had happened to him.

He chose to rise.

He made his way to Yerushalayim, remarried, built a new home, and was blessed with a new family. In time, that family grew to include children and 150 grandchildren.

Think about the magnitude of that choice. He could not change what had happened. He could not bring back his wife and children. He could not restore the Jewish community of Toshnad or reclaim the years that had been stolen from him. None of those things were within his power. But there was one thing he could determine, and that was whether the tragedy would be the end of his story or whether he would pick himself up and start again.

He followed the posuk of “uvocharta bachaim” and chose life.

That decision gave him the strength to move forward. It enabled him to rebuild his life, to establish another Jewish home, and to create a future that would eventually include generations of descendants. The tragedy remained part of his story, but it did not become the entirety of his story.

That is the power of bechirah.

Thankfully, we are not generally confronted with choices remotely resembling the one that lonely survivor had to make. Our challenges are usually much smaller and our decisions far less dramatic. Yet, the principle is the same. We may not always be able to choose what happens to us, but we can choose what we will do with what happens to us.

A person may be disappointed, but he can choose whether to become embittered or to strengthen his emunah. He may experience failure, but he can choose whether to view it as proof that he cannot succeed or as an opportunity to learn and try again. He may encounter a difficult period in his life, but he can choose whether to spend his days asking, “Why me?” or to ask, “What does Hashem want from me now?”

This does not mean that pain is not real or that difficult experiences should be dismissed with simplistic answers. The Toshnad survivor knew pain in a way that few of us can comprehend, yet he refused to surrender his future to his suffering.

The Rambam makes this point especially clear in Hilchos Teshuvah (5), where, in the midst of his discussion of teshuvah, he stops to establish one of the fundamental principles of bechirah: Every person has the ability to choose whether to follow the good path and become a tzaddik or to follow the bad path and become a rosha. Man is unique in creation in possessing this ability to act according to his own will and to determine whether he will be good or bad. Nothing is predetermined. Each person has the ability to decide what he wants to become and how he wants to live his life. As the Rambam writes, a person can be as righteous as Moshe Rabbeinu or as wicked as Yerovom.

This is the choice that Moshe Rabbeinu placed before Klal Yisroel in Parshas Re’eh (Devorim 11:26-28): “Re’eh, see, I am placing before you today two paths, two ways in which you can live your life, es habrocha, the path of blessing, asher tishmeun, if you listen to and observe the Torah, and es haklolah, the path of curse, if you choose not to follow the Torah.”

And this is the choice Moshe presents to the Jewish people in this week’s parsha as well. He told the Jewish people (Devorim 30:15-19), “Re’eh nosati lifonecha es hachaim v’es hatov, v’es hamoves, v’es hora... Hachaim vehamoves nosati lifonecha habrocha v’haklolah uvocharta bachaim lema’an tichye atah v’zarecha, See, I have set before you life and good, and death and evil. I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. And you shall choose life so that you and your children shall live.”

The choice is placed before us. Which path we take is up to us.

The nisayon of bechirah is constantly before us. It is not reserved for the rare dramatic moment when a person is forced to make a life-altering decision. It is present in the ordinary moments of every day: Do we follow the yeitzer tov or do we allow the yeitzer hora to convince us and guide us?

The lonely survivor standing outside his former home in Toshnad could not have known what his choice would eventually produce. He could not have envisioned a new home in Yerushalayim, a new family, children, grandchildren, and 150 descendants. He could only choose what to do with the next moment.

He chose life.

And that is the choice Hashem places before each of us as well.

Uvocharta bachaim. Hashem tells us that we should always choose the option that grants us life.

This past Sunday, the 17^th of Elul, the Rajchenbach family dedicated the new Kollel Zichron Eliyohu building in Chicago, marking yet another milestone in the remarkable growth of the Torah community in that Midwestern bastion of Yiddishkeit. It was a day of celebration, a day on which the fruits of decades of mesirus nefesh and dedication to Torah were made visible in bricks, mortar, and a beautiful new building.

But there was another facet to that dedication that surely would have been on the mind of the patriarch of the Rajchenbach family, the beloved Reb Yankel, had he merited to be there.

The 17^th of Elul is a date that carries a very different memory for the Jewish people. Eighty-seven years ago, in September 1939, Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany, and the inferno that would engulf European Jewry had begun. Within days, the Second World War had spread across Europe, and the destruction of Polish Jewry and, ultimately, the great communities of Eastern Europe was underway. The Jews of Poland, who had built some of the greatest Torah communities the world had ever known, were decimated. Families were torn apart, communities were erased, and an entire world was destroyed. Millions were murdered, many in the concentration camps and ghettos, while those who survived often emerged with little more than their lives. Their homes were gone, their possessions were gone, their families and friends were gone, and the world they had known had disappeared.

Some survivors were so broken that they lost their faith or their connection to Yiddishkeit. Others simply lost the will to live. But there were also those who made a different choice. They chose to live. They chose to cling to Hakadosh Boruch Hu. They chose to rebuild Jewish homes, to raise children, and to recreate, as best they could, the world that had been destroyed.

One of those people was Yitzchok Rajchenbach of Lodz, Poland.

A simple Yid, he lost his wife and children in the war, yet he made the choice to begin again. He married a woman who had lost her husband during the war, and together they settled in Lodz. There they had a son whom they named Yaakov Eliezer.

Eventually, the antisemitism and difficult conditions in postwar Poland became too much and they made another choice: to leave. They eventually settled in Omaha, Nebraska.

Their son Yankel was then eleven years old. He had been sent to public school, but when he became bar mitzvah, his father turned to his only son and told him, in his Poilishe Yiddish, “Du kenst ir nisht bleiben ah Yid. Mir darfen dich shiken in yeshiva. You won’t remain a Yid if you stay here. We have to send you to yeshiva.”

Yitzchok Rajchenbach made his choice. He took his young son to the bus station and put him on a bus for the thirty-four-hour journey to New York City, where the boy would enter yeshiva.

A refugee who had already lost almost everything was making another sacrifice because he understood that what mattered most was that his son have a life of chaim.

That boy grew up to become one of the spiritual fathers of the Chicago Torah community. The city that today boasts a magnificent new Kollel Zichron Eliyohu building owes a portion of its Torah landscape to the choice made by a Polish refugee who understood that if his son was to remain a Yid, he needed to give him a Torah education.

Hitler sought to destroy the Jewish future. Yitzchok Rajchenbach chose to rebuild it.

And so there is something deeply moving about the fact that on the 17^th of Elul, a date forever associated with the beginning of the destruction of the Jewish world of Poland, a new Torah building was being dedicated in Chicago by children and grandchildren of Lodzer Yidden who were mekayeim the posuk of uvocharta bachaim lema’an tichye atah v’zarecha.

Interestingly, my grandfather, Rav Eliezer Levin, the late rov of Detroit, made a similar choice. He told me that when he arrived in Detroit in 1939 to serve as a rov, there were already thirty-three other rabbonim in the city, and some of them were not pleased about the arrival of another rov. “Who needs another rov here?” they wondered, particularly another greener, a newcomer who had recently arrived from Lithuania.

Years later, Rav Levin told me, “Uber fun zei alleh iz gornit gebliben. But there is nothing left of all those rabbonim.”

He was not criticizing them. He was making a point about a difficult decision that he made.

“Those rabbonim did not have the strength to send their sons away to yeshiva,” he explained. “They kept their sons at home. But I sent my only son to yeshiva.”

It was an extraordinarily difficult choice. Rav Levin was a refugee, trying to establish a life and a rabbinic career in a new country. He had only one son, and sending him away was hard. We certainly cannot judge those who made a different calculation under circumstances that were extraordinarily difficult.

But Rav Levin made his choice.

He followed the posuk of “uvocharta bachaim lema’an tichye atah v’zarecha,” and chose life for his son.

And that son was Rav Avrohom Chaim Levin.

Rav Avrohom Chaim went on to found the Telzer Yeshiva in Chicago, which became a pillar of Torah in the city. The yeshiva helped establish the Torah infrastructure and leadership that built the Chicago Torah community and made possible the establishment and expansion of Kollel Zichron Eliyohu.

And so the chain continues.

We often think that our choices affect only ourselves. We make a decision and imagine that its consequences end with us. But that is rarely true. A parent’s choices affect his children. A mechanech’s choices affect his talmidim. A community’s choices affect the generations that follow. One person’s decision to sacrifice for Torah can become the foundation upon which thousands of others eventually build.

Choices lead to life, not only for the person making the choice, but for his children, his grandchildren, his community, and, ultimately, for the entire world that benefits from another generation of Torah.

Hopefully, we will never be confronted with a choice as monumental as the one that stood before that lonely survivor on the streets of Toshnad. Most parents will never face the decision that confronted Yitzchok Rajchenbach when he placed his young son on a bus and sent him thousands of miles away to yeshiva. We will, thankfully, not have to rebuild our lives from the ashes of the Holocaust, nor will we have to make decisions under circumstances in which the future of our Yiddishkeit seems to hang in the balance.

But we should not conclude that bechirah is less relevant to us. Our lives are filled with choices, but they are simpler. In every instance, in every choice, the Torah tells us, “Uvocharta bachaim.” Choose life. Choose the right path, the path of goodness.

A person wakes up in the morning and is faced with a choice about how he will begin his day. He can approach it with gratitude or with complaints, with zerizus or with sluggishness. During the day, he will encounter people who test his patience and situations that do not proceed as he would like. He will have opportunities to speak and opportunities to remain silent, opportunities to be helpful and opportunities to walk away, opportunities to use his time well and opportunities to allow it to disappear. He will encounter temptations that nobody else sees and nisyonos that perhaps nobody will ever know about. Each time, he is being asked, in one form or another, to choose.

And because these choices are so ordinary, we sometimes fail to appreciate their significance. But greatness is built when a person chooses what is right over what is convenient, what is meaningful over what is immediately pleasurable, and what will bring him closer to Hashem over what merely feels good for the moment.

The decision to spend another few minutes learning instead of reaching for the phone may not seem like a historic event. Choosing not to answer an insult may not make the newspapers. Not allowing our taavos to control us, choosing to help a poor Yid from Eretz Yisroel or from around the corner — all these things mean choosing life.

Hashem does not want us to drift through life. He wants us to recognize that we have been given the ability to direct ourselves. We are not simply products of our circumstances, our personalities, or our inclinations. We possess the ability to choose what we will do with them.

There is a path called chaim, and we possess the ability to choose that path.

The world around us constantly encourages us to make choices based on what is easiest, fastest, and most enjoyable. The Torah asks us to consider something deeper: What is true? What is right? What does Hashem want from me? What kind of person will this decision make me? Is this the path of brocha or the path of klolah? Will this action bring me closer to being like Moshe or like Yerovom?

The most encouraging aspect of bechirah is that we are never trapped by yesterday’s choices. As long as we are alive, we can choose again. That is the gift of teshuvah.

Hakadosh Boruch Hu, in His compassion, has provided us with teshuvah, giving us the opportunity to reverse course and begin again. We are not condemned to remain where our previous choices have brought us. We can undo our mistakes and return to where we belong.

On Rosh Hashanah, we are judged according to the choices we made throughout the past. Yet, out of His deep and enduring love for us, Hashem gives us the opportunity to change that judgment.

“Lo nifleis hee mimcha velo rechokah hee” (Devorim 30:11). In this week’s parsha, the Torah tells us that teshuvah is within everyone’s reach. When we recognize that we have made bad choices and wish to rectify them, Hashem reaches out to us. He invites us to come closer and helps us repair what has been damaged.

Whether we earn the good life we all seek is ultimately up to us. It requires us to recognize the truth contained in the words of the pesukim, in the teachings of Chazal, in the words of the Rambam, and in the mussar seforim we should be reviewing during these days leading up to the Yomim Noraim.

The more we align our lives with the path He has laid out for us, the more we merit the brachos and goodness for which we yearn.

Let us all use the gift of bechirah wisely and, in the instances when we haven’t, merit to do teshuvah, so that together with all of Klal Yisroel, we will be inscribed and sealed for a kesivah vachasimah tovah, a year of brocha, yeshuah, refuah, parnossah, nachas, and the coming of Moshiach Tzidkeinu bekarov.