Each year we are throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at the low income neighborhoods and schools, at the minimally employed in big cities and small. It also seems that every year we, as a nation, wonder why more funding is needed and situations don't improve.
“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”Joanne Kathleen Rowling
The following is a great perspective on "choices".
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"We are responsible for our choices, not G-d. He gave us the freedom of will to make choices; in fact, making those choices is what life is all about. When the Bible speaks of creating Man in G-d's image, Jewish commentators write that this image is the freedom to choose.
Just as He can choose without restriction, we have a partial ability to choose. We are influenced by nature and nurture — but not determined by them. We become greater or lesser — closer to G-d or more distant from him — through a constant process of making choices, small and large, every day of our lives. Blaming Him for our poor choices is an assault on Him, a turning of His gift to us into an excuse to mess up.
A concomitant of this gift is the existence of much evil that is of human manufacture. We would not have much freedom to choose if every time we were prepared to make a bad or evil choice, G-d would strike us down with a bolt of lightning.
To give us freedom, G-d often has to restrict Himself to being a Judge after the fact, rather than a Divine Intercessor. We can choose evil, and He does not interfere.
Somehow, restricting our free will would do even greater harm to our autonomy as human beings, i.e. our entire purpose in living our lives. Our choices, post facto, should never be confused with G-d's plan.
Hopefully, George Zimmerman's words to Sean Hannity represented nothing more than a slip at the moment. If he really believed that he could take refuge in G-d's plan, he committed a crime against humanity.
His own."
(Rabbi Yitzchok
Adlerstein is the Director of Interfaith Affairs for the Simon
Wiesenthal Center
in Los Angeles .)
Lord, we thank you for our freedoms and for the ability to reason. We love you for always staying at our side even when we don't use our ability to reason in a productive manner. Amen.
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