ANSWER:
Certainly it does, and certainly it doesn't; now pay attention. When you'll take your son that you'll have someday, and you'll force him to sit down in the evening and do his Chumash homework, you are forcing him to do something against his free will, but you are bestowing upon him a gift. That gift although it deprives him of free will, is certainly worth what he's getting. However, because you are teaching him Torah now and he is learning the ideals of the ways of righteousness, you're giving him more free will. Because later in life he's not going to listen to the temptations of the street that would lead him off the path of success in life, that would lead him chas v'shalom to disaster.
He will utilize his free will to choose what's good for him, what's wholesome and what's beneficial. And therefore in a sense the Torah certainly deprives us of free will, too. The Torah says do this and that, it's not asking us to decide what we want to do, but because we listen to the Torah we gain an independence of mind, we are no longer enslaved to low desires and wicked passions. Therefore the rest of our lives we were able to choose virtue and success and happiness.
So the Torah is cheirus, it's a freedom from all the forms of degradation to which the world is subjected and enslaved, because they didn't have a Torah to set them free. Oh they'll say, you people of the Torah you are enslaved to the Torah, so we'll say we are happy to be enslaved to the rules of good sense.
If you are enslaved by the traffic rules, you cannot cross at a red light, then you're happy. It's a good thing that all the drivers are enslaved by fear of the police, and they stop at red lights. Otherwise if everybody would drive through red lights there would be collisions every day on every street corner, and the morgues would pileup. It's because we are enslaved to good rules that our lives are saved.
And as a result, once you learn to control yourself in front of a red light, when you come home and your wife says something that causes you to see red, you're able to contain yourself, you learn self-control! You don't do just whatever you want to do, you understand that if you plunge through the red light it's a disaster.
So just as you stand waiting for the light to change, you wait for your wife to quiet down and a few minutes later she's a different person. That's how women are; for a moment she says something, a few minutes later she's a different person. And it's the same with everybody else too. If you learn how to control yourself by means of the Torah, then all of life is much more successful and happy.
Good Shabbos To All
This is transcribed from questions that were posed to Harav Miller by the audience at the Thursday night lectures. To listen to the audio of this Q & A please dial: 201-676-3210
Important Numbers
