Sh'lihut
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The question is the same for us all no matter our station in life: prince or pauper, rich or poor. To have no answer to the question of purpose is to be rendered rudderless, as a driven leaf tormented aimlessly and endlessly. To have an answer, to have a sense of mission in this world is to have found meaning in the short time allotted to us. It is the balm that soothes the crushing weight of human mortality. As Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” (Cited in David Brooks, The Road to Character, p. 23)
I do believe that each and every one of us has a purpose, a function, a mission here on this earth that only we, uniquely, can fulfill. Earlier this week, my neighbor and colleague Rabbi Haskel Lookstein drew my attention to a beautiful article by the late Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik called “Shlihut,” a concept that can best be translated as the act of being an emissary (Yemei Zikaron). As human beings created in the image of the divine, we carry an awesome responsibility to be God’s emissaries, to instantiate the divine will here on earth. The mission is not necessarily explicit, we are not called on by God as were Abraham and Moses. Rather it is the very fact of our being that is our implicit calling. No different than Joseph, who came to understand the particular role that he was called on to play, so too each one of us. It is a posture both audacious and humbling – a “summoned life” driven by the belief that each one of us has a vocation, a life driven not by the question of what I want out of this world, but what this world wants or expects out of me. (Brooks, The Road to Character, p. 21) In language that mirrors Pascal and carries of whiff of the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, Soloveitchik writes, “The fact that a person is born in a specific time and era and place and not in another era and other circumstance can only be understood by accepting the concept that every person is an emissary.” (p. 11) Nevertheless explains Soloveitchik, not everyone will fulfill her or his mission. None of us is ever informed as to what our mission is, and granted the gift of free will, the choice of whether we do or don’t fulfill it is ultimately our own to make. To be human, however, is to live with the knowledge that every life does bear the potentiality of purpose and that a life well lived is lived in pursuit of discovering that purpose and, more importantly, seeking to fulfill it.
When it comes to shlihut, identifying and fulfilling the particular mission of our existence, there are no hard and fast rules. Some people run towards it, some resist. Joseph embraced his mission as it became apparent to him. Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of hearing from Wendy Kopp, a woman who nearly twenty-five years ago thought up the idea of Teach for America as her senior thesis in college. Tens of thousands of teachers, students and school systems have been forever changed by that single and sustained shlihut. Others, like Moses, like Esther, like Jonah take some convincing along the way; they only accept their life work grudgingly or with great apprehension. There is not necessarily a correlation between the success of any person’s shlihut and his or her initial willingness to accept that shlihut.
Some people find their shlihut early, some people find it late. Rabbi Akiva, the greatest scholar of his day, was an illiterate shepherd until he was forty. Theodore Herzl’s frenzy of Zionist activity, leadership that would alter the face of Jewish history forever, all happened in the final ten years of his life. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in his late forties, Ray Kroc built up McDonalds in his fifties and Abraham and Sarah were ninety-nine and ninety respectively when they got around to having children. I often remind myself that one of my heroes, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, didn’t write his major work until he was in his mid-fifties. One never knows when one will find one’s shlihut.
Furthermore, continues Soloveitchik, not only might one’s mission not be what one thinks it is, it might also not be just one. Over the course of his or her lifetime, every person has multiple missions to fulfill. A mission can be momentary – an unanticipated intervention in another’s life, whereby one acquires the world to come in a single instant – or it can be ongoing, like parenting a child. Perhaps most importantly, Soloveitchik writes, there can be no hierarchy to shlihut. It is expressly forbidden to rank one person’s shlihut as higher than another, even if one of the people is a powerful ruler or a great Torah scholar. There is no person without his or her hour, as Pirkei Avot teaches, there is no thing that does not have its place. For if we are all created equally in the infinite dignity of God, then every person’s task is unique and thus deserving of respect. As Martin Luther King famously wrote:
If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michelangelo painted, or a Beethoven composed music or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
No question, shlihut is an elusive, slippery concept that raises as many questions as it resolves. Nevertheless, what we can not do, what we dare not do, is abdicate our obligation and opportunity to find our purpose in this world, going to the grave with our song unsung, failing to contribute that one thing that only we can and that this world is waiting on us and counting on us to do.
The final and perhaps most important thing to say about shlihut is that it is an outlook on life that never ceases. Nobody ever sees the mission of his or her life fulfilled, and no person will ever know the full extent of his or her influence. Even Joseph, who believed his purpose to be one thing, understood that it would not be for generations that the full impact of his existence would be realized. So too each one of us must live attentive to the possibilities of every moment, aware that the ripple effect of every moment extends well beyond the horizon of our vision. We must, like God, muster the courage “to be that which we will be,” asserting our faith in our humanity and our God with the self affirmation that we are indispensible to God’s creation. As Heschel wrote, “In the eyes of the world I am average. But in my own heart, I am of great moment. The challenge I face is how to actualize, how to concretize, the quiet eminence of my being.” (Who is Man, p. 35) Today and every day, may we all live up to this challenge, actualizing the fullness of our being and living lives that will stand as enduring testimony to what it means to live a purposeful existence.