Finding your Purpose: Rabbi Jonathan Sachs

[box] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, one of the world’s greatest Jewish scholars and contemporary thinkers, offers insights into Finding Purpose. A global religious leader, philosopher, author and moral voice for our time, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks has been Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth of England since September 1991, only the sixth incumbent since the role was formalised in 1845. [/box]

If you want to find your purpose in life. Think about following sentence,  Where what you want to do, meets what needs too be done. That is where G-d wants us to be. So many of us have passions and if you don’t have a passion, take time out to discover it. Dream a lot, fantasize a lot, think what really would be a life you would really live. Keep your dreams. Joseph dreamt dreams.

A jewish leaders is one who dreams dreams and that’s what he wants to do. In the meanwhile there is a world out there and that world has needs for something’s not others, at some times and not others and somehow or other you have to connect to that world, and that is why I say your purpose in life comes when those two things meet. What you want to do and what needs to be done. For each of us it’s different, but it’s when they come together you will know your purpose in life.

If you get it wrong one or two times, don’t worry about it, none of us gets it right right first time. I did not want to be a Rabbi at the beginning of my career. I had an aspiration be an economist. I had an aspiration to be a lawyer. I had a dream of being an academic.  I didn’t think of becoming a Rabbi until really quite late.  I was very conscious that we were short of Rabbis that’s what needed to be done. I never saw that that’s what I wanted to do until one or two great Rabbi’s, the Labavitcher rabbi being the most important one,  lit that little spark, that flame in me. All of a sudden what I wanted to do, became what needed to be done. So I became a rabbi.  I didn’t get it right the fourth time until quite late in life.

Don’t worry if you get it wrong. Maybe it’s not one thing throughout the whole of life. People I really admire are people who really live to the full one role and maybe discover hey, there is something new that needs to be done. Maybe I need to shift  direction. You were always know when it’s right, because you want to do it and it needs to be done.