[Avodah] Man's Purpose in Life

[Professor L. Levine]

The following is from the fourth letter of RSRH's 19 Letters


Our purpose in life, therefore, is not the acquisition of
possessions; we should not measure our achievement in life by
the volume of outer or inner treasures that we accumulate. Our
life's mission is concerned with what we become, what we
make of ourselves, and what we give, not what we get. We
should measure our attainments by the extent to which we
fulfill God's Will with the help of our outer and inner
acquisitions, utilizing every single one, small or large, for truly
human deeds of Divine service. Our endeavors to acquire inner
and outer possessions have value only because they provide us
with the means to perform such deeds.

>From the slightest mental faculty, and the nerve ganglia
which serve it, to the strength of your hand, with which you
are able to bring about changes in Creation and to which the
entire realm of nature and every being within your reach are
subject-all your capabilities are but tools lent to you, which
one day will appear before the throne of God as witnesses for
or against you, testifying whether you neglected them or used
them well, whether you wrought blessing with them or curse.
Accordingly, there is an outer, universally applicable criterion
by which to judge man's deeds: whether or not they correspond
to the Will of God. And there is an inner criterion by which to
judge a man's greatness, which differs from case to case: not
the sum total of his achievements and the amount of resources
with which he has been endowed, but whether he has used
them to the best of his ability to do God's Will.


YL
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