For over a decade, every Simchas Torah, a small yeshiva in Petach Tikvah, Orot Shaul, would send its students to the colorful streets of Tel Aviv to bring joy and unity to the masses. One year, the Rosh Yeshiva, Rabbi Tamir Gronat, was troubled by a number of high-profile incidents that took place in Tel Aviv – street-fights between Orthodox and secular Israelis, and he felt that more had to be done. He printed shirts that said, “Harei ani mekabel alai le’ehov/ I accept upon myself to love,” and told his students that instead of their white Yom Tov shirts they should wear and hand out these shirts as they dance in the streets.
That year was 2023, and those shirts never saw the light of day. Instead, the majority of this Hesder Yeshiva geared up and went into battle. This would not be the only setback Rabbi Granot would face that year.
On October 13th at 4 AM, Rabbi Granot’s son, 24-year-old, Amitai called his fiancée from the Northern border of Israel. They had been engaged for two weeks and were not planning on getting married for a while. But war has a way of forcing people to prioritize what is truly important, and so Amitai decided he couldn’t wait any longer. “Roni,” he told his fiancée, “Next time the army lets me go home, even for a day, let’s get married. Small wedding, just our families. Roni, you are the only thing that’s important in my life.” By 11 AM that day, Amitai had been killed by Hezbollah.
At the funeral of his son, Rabbi Granot got up to speak. He had prepared remarks reflecting on the all-too-short life of his son. He had prepared remarks for his family, his beloved wife and children, who were reeling from the loss. But then he went off script. In Rabbi Granot’s broken heart, he realized there was someone else who was also in pain. “Roni,” he said to his son’s fiancée, “choose life.”
He was trying to give her permission to move on. But frankly, it was an absurd comment.
How does one choose life when G-d has stacked everything against you? How does one choose life when all of your careful planning has been undone? How does one choose life when life is the one thing that is so clearly out of our hands and entirely in the hands of G-d?
Of course, this absurd directive did not originate with Rabbi Granot. He was quoting a verse in the Torah, something Moshe Rabbeinu taught us on the last day of his life. “Uvacharta bachaim.” We, who believe that G-d controls the world, are faced with a paradox. If He is really in control, then where does that leave us? If G-d placed me in a dysfunctional home, if G-d created me with a physical or mental disease, if G-d put me in this horrific situation, that is His will. And yet, Moshe protests, without giving us any explanation as to how this actually works, we are told to choose our own destiny. “Uvacharta bachaim.” How?
Less than a month ago, Dr. Edith Eger passed away at the age of 98. She grew up in Slovakia, was an exceptionally talented ballet dancer with a promising career ahead of her, but the Holocaust shattered her dreams. She was taken to Auschwitz where Mengel y’s regularly made Edith dance for him. She somehow survived physically but the emotional toll was immense. At the age of 50, she went to college. She was trying to heal her own trauma but, in the process, her innate therapeutic skills emerged. She became Dr. Eger, a world-renowned expert in trauma, treating war veterans and others who endured the most horrific of circumstances. At the young age of 89, she published a book that I imagine many of you read called, The Choice. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.
Allow me to read a short passage from the book: “…(S)uffering is universal. But victimhood is optional. There is a difference between victimization and victimhood. We are all likely to be victimized in some way in the course of our lives. At some point we will suffer some kind of affliction or calamity or abuse, caused by circumstances or people or institutions over which we have little or no control. This is life. And this is victimization. It comes from outside. It’s the neighborhood bully, the boss who rages, the spouse who hits, the lover who cheats, the discriminatory law, the accident that lands you in the hospital.
In contrast, victimhood comes from the inside. No one can make you a victim but you. We become victims not because of what happens to us, but when we choose to hold on to our victimization. We develop a victim’s mind – a way of thinking and being that is rigid, blaming, pessimistic, stuck in the past, unforgiving, punitive, and without healthy limits or boundaries. We become our own jailors when we choose the confines of the victim’s mind.”
This was an elaboration on the philosophy of her mentor, Dr. Viktor Frankl, another Holocaust survivor who wrote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Both of them, these two Jews, Frankl and Eger, were helping us understand what Moshe was trying to teach us when he said, “uvacharta bachaim.” So much of life is beyond our control. But within those confines, as dark and limiting as they may seem, we have the ability to choose. We always have the ability to choose.
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On Shavuos, we celebrate the giving of the Torah. On the one hand, we chose to receive the Torah. G-d asked us, invited us, and we replied ‘Naaseh v’nishma,” we choose to accept our mission. And yet, the Talmud famously describes the moment before Hashem gave us the Torah: Kafah aleihem har k’gigis. G-d lifted the mountain of our heads and threatened us. Take it or die. You must accept the Torah.
Rabbi Dr. Norman Lamm explains: Every Jew is chosen; a Jewish baby boy, just eight days old, “feels the pain of cold steel cutting into his flesh,” we are marked for hatred and persecution no matter what we do, and we are given an overwhelming number of commandments. Some Jews try to escape their fate; they pander to antisemites by going to receptions in Gramacy Mansion or they try to hide their Jewishness. But wherever we go, G-d still holds that mountain over our head casting in inescapable shadow.
In Rabbi Lamm’s words: “But when the Jew, chosen by G-d, forcibly throughout history, turns to G-d and now, out of his own free will and with the total commitment of a free personality, chooses Him – his life is transformed, filled with the beauty of meaning and purpose. If a Jew is only chosen and not choosing, then Mt. Sinai crushes him. But if he turns about and decides to choose G-d, then Mt. Sinai becomes a lofty summons…”
“At a time of Yizkor,” we “remember parents and grandparents, and through them the link of every generation with the one that preceded it, all the way up the chain of time… If our link to the past is merely biological, simply a matter of heredity,” of culture, of Jewish food, of Jewish friends, “then we are merely chosen Jews.” It’s a fate that has been chosen for us. And that’s not a life. To live is to choose, to live is to recognize our limitations, what has been given to us, and in that space, climb higher and higher. We need to be Jews who proactively chose to live a life of Torah and spirituality.
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On August 15, 2025, Roni, Amitai Granot’s bereaved fiancée, got married. She asked Rabbi Granot, her almost-father-in-law to officiate. He refused but she insisted. Under the chuppah, Rabbi Granot used the opportunity to speak of his son and his dashed dreams. He then sang, “Zeh hayom asah Hashem, this is the day that G-d made, Nagilah v’nis’m’cha bo, let us rejoice.”
He later told a friend that the cup of wine he held during the ceremony was literally filled with tears; tears of a fate he did not choose, mixed with the wine of a choice to live.
Roni chose life. Rabbi Granot chose life. We can choose life as well.
Every year on Shavuos, we can look up and see a daunting mountain, a life forced upon us filled with restrictions and hate. Every year on Shavuos, we are given the opportunity to say, Naaseh v’nishma once more. How am I choosing to be Jewish? In what way am I elevating my Jewishness beyond what was forced upon me, beyond what I inherited from my parents? Is my prayer more meaningful or am I just copying whatever I saw in my home? Am I studying my Jewish heritage or am I content with Jewish culture? Is my relationship with G-d one of hiding under the mountain, or am I trying to climb it, and reach Him?
“Uvacharta bachaim.” It doesn’t always feel like it, but we always have a choice.