Who am I?

The Essential Question of Being Human

“Humanoid on Trial,” co-created by me with Meta AI and Canva AI.

As long as humans have been around, there have been humans who have denied that they have free will.

There are those who have done this from the intellectual, secular perspective of physics, chemistry, neuroscience and evolutionary theory, like Robert Sapolsky and Sam Harris (here’s their recent conversation on the subject).

Then, there are others who religiously believe that they are doomed/destined on theological grounds (e.g. Calvinists and a few other Christian sects, as well as some streams of Hinduism).

Lastly, there are those who simply argue with the brute force of their instincts and primal desires that they simply can’t help themselves from doing whatever it is they feel like doing.

For all of these people, the human experience of deciding what to do in a moral dilemma is nothing more than an illusion.

To them, we have no more agency than robots or animals.

…Or do we?

“Cross-examination of a Bear,” co-created by me with Meta AI and Canva AI.

To be clear, this discussion is not just a matter of philosophical cocktail conversation. Confusion about our ability to make real choices in life can have catastrophic consequences.

According to this perspective, every criminal’s actions can be readily justified, and every terrorist has necessarily been pushed to the brink by his society.

If we “drink the koolaid” of not having free will, the only coherent attitude to take towards our cravings and comforts is to obey them.

Why would we put any effort into fighting them if it makes no difference?

For this reason, close to a thousand years ago, Maimonides, in his Laws of Personal Transformation (Teshuva), addressed this outlook head on:

A person should not entertain the belief held by [many Gentiles and Jews] that, at the time of a person’s creation, God decreed whether he will be righteous or wicked. This is untrue. Every person is fit to be righteous as Moses, our teacher, or wicked, as Jeroboam. [Similarly,] he may be wise or foolish, merciful or cruel, miserly or generous, or [acquire] any other character traits. There is no one who compels him, sentences him, or leads him towards either of these two paths. Rather, he, on his own initiative and decision, tends to the path he chooses.

In the last XL, we started to articulate that free will in Jewish literature does not mean the freedom to do anything. Of course, our choices are very much a function of our nature and nurture. The kinds of choices we have to make will no doubt change dependent on our genetic predispositions, health and social influences.

But there are always choices to be made.

Free will is better thought of as our ability to choose between acting from our Higher Self or from our Lower Self at every relevant juncture on any given day.

In this XL, we will come to understand this choice more deeply and more clearly.

One of the salient features of the episode of the Garden of Eden is that Adam and Eve were naked. One would think that the Torah would be too prude to mention this fact, but it actually does so very openly:

The two of them were naked, Adam and his wife, and were not ashamed.

The Torah goes on to chronicle that the first thing that happened to them after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil, which they were told not to eat from, is that they became aware that they were naked, felt ashamed, and covered themselves up:

Both of their eyes were opened and they perceived that they were naked, so they sewed together fig leaves and made loincloths for themselves.

We tend to be unfazed by these details in the story precisely because they are so familiar to us, but if you think about them, they are bizarre:

• If God didn’t want us to be naked, why didn’t make clothes for us right away?

• If it’s bad to be naked in public, and good to be ashamed of it, why is becoming aware of this important moral truth the primary consequence of doing a sin? Isn’t it more intuitive to think that sin will make you take OFF your clothes than put them on?

The following is the explanation of Rabbi Eliyahu Dessler (1892-1953), based on a notion articulated by Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin (1749-1821). It is a commentary on the best-known story on Planet Earth, but it also cuts to the core of human psychology — our sense of identity.¹

According to the Torah, what makes human beings different from animals is that animals only have a consciousness which emerges from their physical matter:

…וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹקים תּוֹצֵא הָאָרֶץ נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה

God said, “Let the earth bring forth every kind of living conscious creature…”

As opposed to humans who have an additional higher consciousness that is infused into us from on High (we often refer to this higher consciousness as our “conscience”):

וַיִּיצֶר ה׳ אֱלֹקים אֶת־הָאָדָם עָפָר מִן־הָאֲדָמָה וַיִּפַּח בְּאַפָּיו נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים וַיְהִי הָאָדָם לְנֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה׃

Hashem God formed the Human from the particles of the earth, blowing into his nostrils the soul of life, and the Human became a living conscious creature.

To me, this explains why animals have far less mental illness than human beings. Animals do whatever they feel like. They don’t suffer internal conflict between what they feel like, and what they know that they should be doing. They are of one mind.

Humans, however, often suffer from mixed feelings and inner conflict. It is common to really want to do something but not be able to get ourselves to feel like doing it. While our Higher Self wants to be selfless, our Lower Self feels like worrying only about comfort and self-preservation.

At any given moment, our minds are tempests of thoughts and unconscious feelings, and buried beneath all of them, the pesky voice of our conscience telling us what we should and shouldn’t do.

Again, as we’ve said a few times, it could very well be that many of the “decisions” we’re making throughout our day are not true free-will-decisions. Some neuroscientists claim to have disproved the existence of free will by demonstrating that the neurochemical cascade of cause-and-effect is already underway even before we “decide” what to do. Perhaps on all of these more technical decisions they are right.

But the Torah’s claim of free will does not revolve around the decisions about what stocks or socks we buy. It’s about the decisions that determine our identity.

When God created the first human beings, He set their consciousness into motion with the sense of self — the “I” being squarely in the Higher Self, the Best-Version-of-Yourself — what is known in Torah language as the Neshama-נשמה or Divine Soul-נפש אלקית. This explains the change in the relationship to our bodies after eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Imagine putting on VR glasses that place you in the body of an avatar. Your avatar is not you. It is the “body” you were given to move around in the virtual world in which you were placed. This is what it felt like initially to be Adam and Eve. They weren’t embarrassed that their avatars weren’t wearing clothing because they did not see themselves as their bodies. Their bodies were simply vehicles that transported their consciousness around the world.

If this sounds odd to you. It is. Because we (post-eating from the Tree of Knowledge) identify with our bodies much more than our conscience. When you and I get hungry we don’t say, “my body is hungry.” We say, “I am hungry.” For us, our bodies are who we are. Our “I” is firmly implanted in our bodies. And our conscience is the “other.”

Think about when you’re in bed sleeping and your alarm goes off. How do you perceive the voice of your conscience telling you to wake up? Is that you speaking, or a distant, third party voice? If you’re like most people, it’s a distant, faint voice telling you that you should probably wake up and not face the consequences of flaking out on your whole day. At which point you respond, “Leave me alone. I’m exhausted.”

This is the transition that happened when Adam and Eve chose to eat from the Tree that God told them not to eat from. By choosing to eat from it, they not only ended up eating from it, but more significantly, they shifted their sense of self from their Higher Self to their Lower Self — from their souls to their bodies. The decision defined who they were. They were de facto no longer the best-version-of-themselves.

By shifting their sense of self into their bodies, they now felt exposed and ashamed to be perceived as “just a body,” and immediately felt the need to cover up.

This is why nudist colonies have never fully taken off. The sense of shame of being exposed is very real and runs very deep. In this way, clothing reminds us that we’re more than our bodies. What you see is not what you get. We’re so much more.

And most significantly, we need to realize that while our relationship to our bodies changed with eating from that tree, it remains as true that every moral decision we make can shift our identity in that respect. By doing the right thing, I am identifying with the self in me that wants to do the right thing over the easy thing.

When we lose ourselves, we can ask ourselves the same question God asked Adam: “Where are you?”

Where are we indeed?

1. Here’s Rav Dessler’s original essay, translated to English.