Thread by @rabbisacks

Here is a thread from my Covenant & Conversation essay on #Vayikra called "The Pursuit of Meaning". You can read it in full here: bit.ly/2HD0nxM & download the accompanying Family Edition here: bit.ly/2UABkiF. #ShabbatShalom

When we see a wrong to be righted, a sickness to be healed, a need to be met, and we feel it speaking to us, that is when we come as close as we can in a post-prophetic age to hearing Vayikra, God’s call.

And why does the word appear here, at the beginning of the third and central book of the Torah? Because the book of Vayikra is about sacrifices, and a vocation is about sacrifices.

We are willing to make sacrifices when we feel they are part of the task we are called on to do. From the perspective of eternity we may sometimes be overwhelmed by a sense of our own insignificance.

We are no more than a wave in the ocean, a grain of sand on the sea shore, a speck of dust on the surface of infinity. Yet we are here because God wanted us to be, because there is a task He wants us to perform. The search for meaning is the quest for this task.

Each of us is unique. Even genetically identical twins are different. There are things only we can do, we who are what we are, in this time, this place and these circumstances.

For each of us God has a task: work to perform, a kindness to show, a gift to give, love to share, loneliness to ease, pain to heal, or broken lives to help mend.

Discerning that task, hearing Vayikra, God’s call, is one of the great spiritual challenges for each of us. How do we know what it is?

Some years ago, in my book 'To Heal a Fractured World', I offered this as a guide, and it still seems to me to make sense: Where what we want to do meets what needs to be done, that is where God wants us to be.