We Are Responsible For Our Own Actions

We are admonished not to punish the fathers for the sins of the sons and not to punish the sons for the sins of the father. This is a fundamental principal in the Torah. God gave us free will but free will means that we are responsible for our actions.

Good morning. This is a powerful Torah idea: moral responsibility is individual, even though sin has social consequences.

What stands out is the distinction between punishment and responsibility. The Torah rejects inherited guilt: a child does not bear the punishment for a parent’s wrongdoing, nor does a parent bear punishment for a child’s crime. Yet that does not mean that the community or family is irrelevant. We are shaped by our environments, and a society can create conditions in which wrongdoing becomes thinkable, acceptable, or easy to conceal.

The concept of free will is therefore central. A human being is not merely an animal responding to instinct, nor a slave responding to a master’s command. A person possesses agency—the capacity to choose differently, to recognize wrongdoing, and ultimately to change.

That makes the Torah’s system remarkably nuanced. When someone commits a grave crime, society may have to punish the individual severely. But it must also ask: What kind of society produced the circumstances in which this person believed he could do this? What did the family, community, and culture teach him to regard as normal? Those questions are for moral examination and education, not for transferring guilt to innocent people.

And perhaps that is one of the Torah’s most important messages as we enter the period of establishing a society and governing a nation: we are responsible for our choices, and we are also responsible for the society in which those choices are made. We cannot blame an innocent child for the sins of a parent. But neither can we pretend that our families and communities have no influence on the choices people make.

The individual has agency—and because he has agency, he also has the possibility of teshuvah, change, and becoming better. That is both a profound statement about human freedom and a profound statement about human dignity.