Maimonides opens his laws of repentance by declaring free will the pillar of the Torah: every person may become righteous or wicked, and nothing compels the choice. Against astrological and theological determinism he insists the deed is genuinely ours, for otherwise reward, punishment, command, and repentance are empty. He then meets the hardest objection, that God's foreknowledge seems to fix the future, with the claim that God's knowledge is unlike ours and beyond our grasp, so it determines nothing. Two centuries later Hasdai Crescas argued the opposite: the will is causally determined, and the Torah's justice can be saved another way. The map holds the dispute.
The normative Jewish position is Maimonides': free will is a pillar of the Torah, and God's foreknowledge, being unlike human knowledge, determines nothing. Hasdai Crescas dissented, accepting a causal determinism and grounding reward and punishment in the nature of acts rather than in an uncaused will. The mainstream held with Maimonides; the dispute remains one of the sharpest in medieval Jewish thought. No reading is adjudicated here.
free will is real and a pillar of the Torah -- the deed is genuinely ours
Free will is granted to every person and is a pillar of the Torah and the commandments. A human being genuinely originates his choices; nothing in his nature, the stars, or the divine decree compels him to be righteous or wicked. If the deed were not truly the agent's own, the commandments, reward and punishment, and the whole call to repentance would be unjust and meaningless. The freedom of the will is not a concession but a foundation, on which the moral and legal life of the Torah is built.
Maimonides' declaration of free will as a pillar of the Torah is verbatim in the public-domain Hilkhot Teshuva ch. 5 (Sefaria). (SUGYA-ENGINE.md §11)
Free will is granted to every man. ... This is a fundamental principle and a pillar of the Torah and the commandment.
God's foreknowledge does not determine the will -- His knowledge is unlike ours, beyond grasp
The objection that God's foreknowledge fixes the future, and so cancels freedom, rests on a false analogy. God's knowledge is not external and added to Him as ours is to us; He and His knowledge are one, and just as we cannot comprehend His essence, we cannot comprehend His knowledge. We know with certainty both that He knows all and that the will is free, but how He knows the free future without determining it is beyond the human mind. The compatibility is affirmed; its mechanism is consigned to the divine incomprehensibility.
The foreknowledge resolution (God's knowledge is unlike ours and incomprehensible, so determines nothing) is in Hilkhot Teshuva ch. 5 (public-domain). (§11)
Free will is granted to every man. ... This is a fundamental principle and a pillar of the Torah and the commandment.
the will is causally determined; the Torah's justice is saved another way
The will is not uncaused; every choice is determined by its causes, and a truly uncaused will would be unintelligible. Crescas accepts a causal determinism and saves the Torah's justice differently: reward and punishment attach to the act and the disposition it expresses, not to an impossible uncaused choice, and they function as natural consequences and as formative causes rather than as desert for a freedom no one has. Divine foreknowledge poses no special problem, for the future is determinate. Maimonides' libertarian freedom, on this view, is neither coherent nor necessary.
lens Crescas' determinism is set out in Or Hashem against the Maimonidean-Aristotelian mainstream; characterized here, not quoted.
Crescas' causal determinism (Or Hashem) against Maimonidean free will is a documented position in the history of Jewish philosophy. (§11)
Free will is granted to every man. ... This is a fundamental principle and a pillar of the Torah and the commandment.
Is the will genuinely free and self-originating, as the pillar of the Torah requires (Maimonides), or causally determined, with the Torah's justice secured not by an uncaused choice but by the natural and formative working of reward and punishment (Crescas)? The Jewish form of the fork between human freedom and the divine decree, fought between two of its greatest philosophers.
Staged in: Moses Maimonides
Does Maimonides' appeal to the incomprehensibility of God's knowledge resolve the foreknowledge problem, or only forbid us from stating it -- and is that, as Crescas suspected, a refusal rather than an answer?
Contribute to the open questions →Provenance 3 engine-verified (sourced by the refinement engine, adversarially verified) . Every source is verified once and reused across the graph; each engine-verified node carries its audit basis above.
Every position rests on a real source; export the bibliography below. A citable Zenodo DOI per passage is on the roadmap.
@misc{maimonides-teshuva,
author = {Moses Maimonides},
title = {Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Teshuva, ch. 5 (on free will); Eight Chapters},
url = {https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Repentance.5},
note = {public-domain; via Hekhal Sugya}
}3 positions and 1 contention. Maimonides' Hilkhot Teshuva public-domain and verbatim-verified (Sefaria). Engine-verified, not yet editor-signed. The free-will-vs-determinism contention instantiates the free-will-and-the-decree chakira on the Jewish side, completing the triad alongside the Islamic qadar and Christian grace disputes.