I overheard two 8th graders at lunch a few days ago. One was agonizing over an elective; running through schedules, what her friends were taking, what “looked better” on paper. The other just asked, “But which one do you actually want?” A pause. “…the art one.” No pro/con list had settled it. Someone had simply asked, plainly, without trying to convince her of anything, and for a moment, something passed between them that neither logic nor persuasion could have produced.
That’s stayed with me since, and perhaps this week’s parsha is wrestling with the very same question: what actually moves a person to choose?
The parsha ends with a strange redundancy. Just a few verses earlier, the Torah has already spelled out, in detail, that goodness brings life and its opposite brings ruin. The consequences are laid out plainly, almost like a warning label. And then, almost as an afterthought, comes a second instruction that seems to say the same thing all over again: “U’Vacharta Ba’Chaim” (choose life). If the choice was already clear, if the Torah had already shown exactly which path leads where, why command it again?
Rashi, in his commentary on this verse, pauses here too; he clearly feels the same redundancy needs explaining, and he doesn’t let it pass with a simple restatement.
Instead, Rashi senses something we all know in our bones: knowing the right path and actually choosing it are two different acts entirely. Information alone doesn’t move a person. Something else has to happen, not another fact added to what we already know, but a kind of contact. Hashem doesn’t hand us an answer from a distance and leave us to act on it alone; He meets us at the very place where the choosing actually happens.
We tend to imagine choice as a crossroads – two paths laid out, weighed and measured, until reason tips the scale. But there’s another kind, one that doesn’t argue us into a decision so much as it happens between two presences, the way real understanding always does. Not persuasion. Not even recognition, exactly. Something closer to being ‘met’.
Viktor Frankl, writing out of the ashes of Auschwitz, put it starkly: man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, he must recognize that life is asking him. Life doesn’t hand us meaning like an answer key from far away. It addresses us, directly, and waits for a response. The only question is whether we’re present enough to hear it.
That’s what this whole season is about. We don’t build a new self from scratch on Rosh Hashanah, working it out alone in a room. We step forward to be met, by Hashem, by the people who show up for us the way that student did in the hallway, by the moment itself, if we let it actually reach us.
U’Vacharta Ba’Chaim – Choose life – not as a calculation, and not even as something we take, but as something we let ourselves meet.
May we be written and sealed for a year of life, sweetness, and goodness that is clear and revealed.
Wishing our whole Posnack family a Ktiva V’Chatima Tova,
Rabbi Shlomo Cohen
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