Dual Deeds and Free Agents

Question: How does one understand the eating from the Tree of Knowledge? Was this ‘transgressive’ act part of the Divine plan for Creation or did this act take us off course and break with the plan? If it was part of the plan all along, then how could it be considered ‘transgressive?’ Is there a plan B if plan A fails to launch? Who bears ultimate responsibility?

–Kiki H.

Response: Thanks for your question. So much hinges on this pivotal episode of ‘tree tales’ that we need to first pull away and capture the bigger picture with a wide angle lens before closing in for a macro shot of the face of this highly problematic eating test/contest. For now, let’s sequester both judges and judgment while we reconsider the background conditions for agency in general–that is: for being a free agent encumbered with the weight of responsibility. These conditions play into our own calculated actions, as well as our speculation about the desires, motives and plans of the Creator. They also go a long way to explaining the history of history, as we hope to show.

In Chassidic thought we find a crucial distinction between will (ratzon) and the subject who possesses will (ba’al ha’ratzon). When I specify that ‘I want pizza, I want water, I want fun, I want sleep’ I am indicating the object of my will. The ‘wanting’ is directed to some thing or condition and pulls me out of myself towards the intended object. This only involves the ‘what’ of want. The question of ‘who’ (as in ‘who’ is doing the wanting) is entirely different. In order to be an ‘independent operator’ I have to own my desires rather than have them own me. For instance, an addict who desires an object of addiction has forfeited control and surrendered his or her will to a large degree. Freedom to want something must remain tied to the freedom to not want it, otherwise the wanting is compelled in some fashion.

Were this not the case, beyond my status as a free agent, my subjecthood would be imperiled in that I am I to the degree that I am free. My will is all that ‘I’ have, all that makes me me. My thoughts, feelings, words and deeds may resemble those of another person (superficially) with the exception that my will flows forth and trickles down through all of these manifestations of self, giving them my individual watermark. The powers of the soul are self-styled to the degree that my subjective stamp surfaces and confirms that I was the being that invested my volition within them.

Rashi confirms this distillation of ‘soul and self’ to ‘will’ in his gloss on Genesis 23:8 where Avraham/Abraham states “If it is your will (nafshechem) that I bury my dead from my presence….” whereby ‘your soul(s)’ (nafshechem) is translated as ‘your will.’ Soul or self or psyche or subject, all anchor the concept of an owner of desire or a possessor of will. This does not mean that the will is addressed or billed to me as the keeper of it. Nor does it signify that I came to be the cause of that will–that it originated within me, like a desire that I came up with and which can be traced back to me.

Rather, degrees of freedom are bundled with degrees of control: self-control, self mastery or self-sovereignty. My autonomy as one who wills must be from that which I will. The sovereign subject cannot be under duress even from the excitement to fulfill one’s own desire. While it is easy to feel that my wanting has gotten the best of me or that I am condemned to follow my inclinations because I am held captive to them, there is a higher executive authority operating (a higher or more essential self perhaps) that can always rescue me from being hostage to my own desires.  As terrorizing as my will might be at times of its greatest irrational intensity, I can always summon a still deeper strength to deprogram my inner voice that says ‘I simply must.’ Want has seized me. I am no longer the possessor but the possessed. Clearly this reversal signals all sorts of opportunities for psychosis.

But then something snaps and the hypnotic spell evaporates and I regain my sense of mastery. I can continue to want but I now recognize that I could also want otherwise. My will is now reconfirmed as subject to me and the muscle of my subjectivity and not the reverse. The health of the situation can be ascertained by asking myself if I could uproot one will and replace it with another or if I could act in opposition to what I want. My free will permits me to exercise or not exercise that will. I could eat pizza or exercise self-restraint and not eat it. Scrape away all of the excuses and it all comes down to me as the one who wills.

Given the super-symmetry between the Divine and the human detailed in Kabbalah, all of the above analysis may be reinscribed within the meta-narrative of Creation whereby the supreme actor or authority is the Creator Himself. Much of the content of the Torah (specifically the commandments) informs us of the Divine will. One instance of that Divine will that is recorded in the episode of the Tree of Knowledge was the prohibition of eating from the tree. The fact that God has this desire (for Adam and Chava/Eve to not eat) is an example of directed will. But the Divine agent who is the master of this will, who issues this decree, is not compelled by it in any way. God does not ‘have to’ tell us not to eat. He could want otherwise.

The implication is that Divine will is the model for our free will. We might even put forth that the human capacity for free will is the presence of the Divine within the human. Both the Divine and the human can ‘own’ a desire for something but not be owned by it. This affords us (and the Divine) with the possibility of going against the grain of what is wanted. Not that He or we have to be contrarians to what we want most of the time (or all of the time) but that the pure potential to do so certifies that the will emanated from a free agent.

The root of historical events unfolding in seeming opposition to Divine mandates in the Torah directly connects with this ‘permitted’ opposition of will by the host of that will, as we will continue to elaborate in Part Two.

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