The topic that I would like to discuss is the unique mission, the unique role that everybody in the world was created to do and that everybody in the world can play or what is the meaning of life?
I would like to open, not with everybody’s unique mission, but with a poem. I don’t know if it’s a children’s poem or exactly where it is from, but it is well known.
“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost. For want of a horse, the rider was lost. For want of a rider, the battle was lost. For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”
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This poem that has been put to song in Hebrew and in other languages. If you think about it, the idea of this poem is what is called “Chaos” in physics. It’s the Butterfly effect. One single little nail had such a great effect.
Historians seem to think that this poem might have been connected with Richard III, who was quoted in Shakespeare’s play. A horse, my kingdom for a horse! Historically it doesn’t seem that he really had a problem with the horseshoe on his horse, but that’s the way the poem is written.
What’s the idea of this poem? It’s an idea that we are familiar with and come across quite often. It can happen that a single little item, that looks very unimportant, has a great effect on what happens later on.
One nail was missing, and the situation built up and built up until an entire battle was lost. Actually, we come across the same idea in the book of Esther. In the book of Esther, Mordecai tells Esther that the government made an announcement that they want to destroy the Jews.
He tells Esther go see the king, to tell him that we have to save the Jews, and Esther has qualms about it. Esther says it’s dangerous; you’re not allowed to go into the king’s palace unless you’ve been invited. Nobody has invited me, she says, for the last 30 days.
And what does Mordecai say to her? Mordechai says, “Who knows? Maybe it’s exactly because of this that you were put into the palace as queen?” This is the specific opportunity, the specific thing that you are meant to do – to go and speak to the king and change the decree against the Jews.
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Indeed, she does so and ends up saving the entire Jewish nation. The idea is exactly the same idea. There was one specific thing that Esther was meant to do. She put her life in danger and went into the palace when she wasn’t invited.
It’s certainly something that is not a small feat. She had a specific mission, and that is what Mordechai told her. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. And when the nail was there in the right place, when Esther did what she was supposed to do, she was able to save an entire nation.
The truth is that I would like to talk about a similar idea that is not exactly the same. This is an idea that I have come across and that we see in many Jewish writings. In a way it’s the inverse of what I’ve been talking about so far.
“The real butterfly effect in your life”
I’ve been talking about the butterfly effect, that something very small can build up into a very large effect. But in Judaism, we come across an idea that as I say is an inverse of this, and expands it much further.
Let’s begin with a quote from Rabbi Kook. Abraham Isaac Kook was the first Chief Rabbi of Israel. He analyzes a prayer that we say on the holy day of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
We say, until I was created, I was not worth anything. But Rav Kook takes a look at this and says, it doesn’t mean until I was created, things weren’t worthwhile. It says, I was not meant to be created until the specific minute that I was created, and this s giving new dimension to my meaning of life!
There was no need for me until the moment that God created me. This is a very powerful thought. What it means is that every single person is created at the exact moment that the world needs him.
Every single person has a specific mission that he is here to accomplish. It can be a world-shattering mission like Moses, who took the children of Israel out of Egypt, like Esther who went into the king’s palace and saved her people, the Jews in the Persian kingdom.
It can also be a much smaller thing, like taking part in family life and doing good things on a personal level. But every single person has his own mission and his own task that he has to accomplish.
The same theme is repeated in other writings of Rabbi Kook. For example, he writes that everybody who studies the Bible, or everybody who studies wisdom and wise things, is realizing a potential that he has within him.
Every single person alive has a different potential. Everybody has something for which he was created. Something which he has to bring out from within himself. Rabbi Kook wrote about studying the Bible, about a person having a new way of understanding something in the Bible.
It’s interesting that we find exactly the same idea in other places in Judaism. The Sfat Emet, a Hasidic rabbi who lived about 150 years ago, discusses what people are meant to accomplish in life, and uses the same words.
He says that every single person has ideas when studying the Bible, and he can realize the potential of those ideas – only he can do that. He uses the same words as Rabbi Kook. They both use the term “to realize their potential.”
I’m sure this could be found in many, many places but I found the same idea in the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. Emmanuel Levinas was a French-Jewish philosopher who lived around the time of the Second World War.
He had quite an active life. He was the head of a school and did many things. But he was also a well known philosopher who wrote several books. Here’s a quote from what he said, translated from French.
In their uniqueness, every person is capable of wrestling meanings from the signs they see. Every time is inimitable. It is as though the multiplicity of persons is a condition for the fullness of the absolute truth.
Man will never say that there is such a thing as absolute truth; rather, it is made up of element after element. Many different elements are brought together by many different people. Each person, through his uniqueness, ensures that a unique aspect of the truth is revealed.
Certain aspects of the truth would never reveal themselves if certain people were missing from mankind. There is a totality, a total absolute truth, that the world should be discovering. The mission of the world, the object of the world is to reach total truth.
What is the meaning of life if not actions?!
We do this through the Bible. We do this through our actions. We do this by acting in the right way.
What Levinas says is that this total truth will not be discovered without everyone. We will never reach total truth until every single person who is created in the world makes it his business to accomplish his role within the world, to accomplish the thing that he was created for, his specific ‘meaning of life’
But all this leads up to a question. I have a mission.
What is my mission?
How I find what I’m supposed to do?
There’s a prominent rabbi here in Israel, Rabbi Aviner, who answers questions in weekly bulletins, in text messages, on the Internet. Here’s a question he was asked by someone. How can a person know exactly what his mission is here in this world? How can I know what I am supposed to do?
In his answer, Rabbi Aviner starts with the same quote from Rabbi Kook that I quoted before, that every single person is created at the moment when the world needs him, not before and not afterwards.
He says every person is different, in the makeup of the different things that he has done right and wrong. No single person is the same as any other person in terms of the things he or she has learned, the way he or she reacts to everything going on around them.
In that way, every person can fulfill this ideal of accomplishing his own unique mission just by being himself. If you don’t find a specific goal towards which you have to work, if you don’t find specific thing that you can accomplish, just be yourself.
Every person, every human being is the sum of everything that he has done until this moment. The next day, he will be adding another piece which is not the same piece as anything that he did the day before. Every single human being is a work in progress. We have to keep going and do what we think is best, and that makes us unique.
That’s one possible answer.
We can go a little further and say that our task in this world is not just to be satisfied by being ourselves. It may well be that we have to continuously look for more things to do and for better things to do.
Certainly people that we have met through Brit Olam, Noahide have decided that the way they started out their lives was not enough and they want to add more. They take on the 7 Noahide commandments, and some go even further.
People like that, who then publish and broadcast what they have done and tell other people about it, teach others so that they can join them. They’re doing more than just saying that the sum total of my life is the way I am supposed to be.
This may be the deeper connotation of what Rabbi Kook and the other Rabbis are talking about when they talk about the fact that everybody is born at his or her own specific time and with his or her own specific mission.
You have to keep looking to find the specific thing that you can do better than anybody else in helping create a better world for yourself and for everyone else.
A Noahide mission;
The question then arises: could a gentile’s unique mission be to be Noahide? This is a mission that would be not fulfilled if he converted to Judaism. There are people who specifically feel this way. They have said no, I feel that I have a mission to accomplish that I can only do if I remain a gentile, if I don’t become a Jew.
As a Jew, you’re distancing yourself from a lot of other people. You’re telling them I’ve gone further. But some people have specifically made a conscious decision that their mission in life is to stay in Noahide and not to become a Jew, and this decision can certainly be appreciated.
This is a lecture that have being giving by
Dr. Moshe Goldberg, Haifa, Israel.
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