.png)
Dr. Barry Schwartz, a psychologist, delivered a Ted Talk on what he called the “explosion of choices” we now have: In his local supermarket there are seemingly endless varieties of cookies, soups, cereals and toothpastes. When it comes to health care, patients are offered “options” from which they could choose. Technology allows us to work every minute from anywhere, so when we’re not “at work” it’s our choice whether we should be.
As Jews living in America we are also afforded many choices, but it wasn’t always that way. In the Middle Ages, Jews in Christian Europe were excluded from most professions and by the 13th-century money lending was almost the only legal means for a Jew to earn a living. Forced to live behind ghetto walls, Jews were subject to pogroms. This life of “no-choices” prevailed until the Emancipation in the late 18th century when for the first time Jews were finally allowed to live amongst their gentile neighbors, permitted to enter the guilds and crafts from which they had been excluded. They started having choices …