A Grammar Mistake Mistaken for Metaphysics

You are given life. You are not given purpose.

This is a hard pill for many of us to swallow. We struggle to digest it.

Purpose, at best, is something people assemble after the fact. For some, it is personal and idiosyncratic—a loose mixture of desires, experiences, temperament, and luck. For others, purpose is said to preexist: assigned rather than discovered.

In this latter view, purpose comes from God, embedded in some vaguely defined “Divine Plan.” Any purpose not derived from it is considered inferior or mistaken. Failure to accept this purpose is framed as a moral defect; acceptance, as virtue. Everything that happens—joy, suffering, success, catastrophe—is declared “meant.”

A divine purpose must be absolute. If it comes from the creator, deviation is impossible. Such a purpose is important enough to justify killing and dying, which is why it also requires an afterlife. Without eternal compensation, the arithmetic fails.

I enjoy talking to religious people. I have several ultra-orthodox tenants, and every Friday a group of Lubavitch boys comes to my office to bring me closer to my faith. Our conversations usually end the same way, with the question that matters most:

“You really believe this is all there is—and then we die?” They mean it rhetorically.

I always feel strange answering yes. It sounds incomplete, almost arbitrary.

But I have no other honest answer.

The purpose of life is to live. This is not inspirational; it is tautological. Life does not require justification beyond itself.

We often describe life as a journey—birth, progression, death. But a journey implies a destination. That implication may be nothing more than a habit of thought: a grammar mistake mistaken for metaphysics.

Life may not be linear at all. It may be self-contained. The organism that is born and the organism that dies are not moving toward a goal; they are undergoing a process—growth, maturity, decline. No different in principle from plants, insects, or any other living system.

Life engenders process, not purpose. Minds invent purposes.

Hence the familiar substitutes: an afterlife for the righteous, spiritual missions, the Kingdom of God, tikkun olam—the repair of an imperfect world designed by a perfect creator. Or their secular equivalents: wealth, status, credentials, legacy, family. All serve the same function. They place life at a distance, something to be earned or completed, rather than something already happening.

But the only purpose that does not collapse under scrutiny is the one that does not need to be pursued. It is not ahead of you. It is not earned. It is already occurring. It is part of your very nature: the fullness of being alive.

Life persists even in cracks in pavement. It does not wait for meaning, permission, or explanation. Psychological constructions—expectation, obligation, narratives of purpose—often interfere more than they help.

Reduce the distance between mind and body. Reduce the demand that life justify itself. As the barrier drops, so does anxiety about purpose.

What remains is not meaning in the grand sense, but something simpler and harder to refute: being alive, fully, and without judgment.

Take dancing lessons

Sometimes we need to go back to the beginning.

Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

God’s story, according to the Western biblical tradition, begins with creation. There is no prologue—no scene of God cavorting in a heavenly realm with other gods, no sense of what the Creator might have been doing before deciding to make the world, or even why He decided the world needed to be created at all.

Was God lonely? Why doesn’t the text say, “In the beginning God was lonely, and so He created some company”? Or bored? Why not, “In the beginning God was bored, and since crossword puzzles required words—which had yet to be created—He decided to take on a different project to occupy His time: making a world”?

It can’t be that God needed to create the world. That would imply that creation and God exist on the same level of necessity, which theology insists cannot be. The only explanation that makes sense is that God made a decision—one whose reason we simply do not know.

In the Hebrew tradition, human beings are described as 'partners' in creation. Our purpose is to help God “repair” the world—tikkun olam. But we must be junior partners, since by definition we cannot be equal to God. That already presents a problem. And it gets worse.

Because we don’t know why God created the world, we don’t know “God’s Plan” for it either. Yet we are repeatedly told there is a plan—otherwise, why bother creating anything at all?

It’s like being asked to help build a shelter without ever seeing the blueprints. We don’t know what the shelter is meant to look like, what purpose it serves, or why the architect decided to build it in the first place. And the architect isn’t taking questions.

Conveniently, not knowing God’s Plan has given people endless excuses for the tragedies and injustices of the world. Suffering becomes part of God working in “mysterious ways.” We’re told we aren’t supposed to understand the plan, because if we did, we would be equivalent to the Creator—which we cannot be. The arguments quickly collapse into a tangle of circularity.

It would have been far simpler if scripture had said: "In the beginning God got tired of the heavenly décor and decided to add another wing, populated with animals and humans, whom He could summon to relieve His boredom." At least then we might reasonably conclude that the purpose of creation was to entertain God—a view some have argued, only half-jokingly.

But perhaps creation begins with creating because it isn’t His story at all. It’s ours.

When we interpret the creation story as God’s story, with humans as secondary bit players, life itself becomes secondary to serving God. And that framing—serving a divine plan we cannot see or question—has been used to justify some of the most heinous and inhumane acts in human history. Human life becomes expendable in service of something abstract and unknowable.

If the story of creation is not about a plan, then it may be about exactly what it describes. Creation is its own purpose. We are not meant to serve a mysterious divine blueprint; we are meant to serve creation itself—to find our place in it, to honor and respect it, and to be fully present in our own lives.

And now, the pivot to the non-biblical, technologically advanced present.

People today worry about the growing power of AI—the omniscient entity they fear will one day enslave us.

But there is a moment—if you’re lucky—when you realize that what your smartphone is doing is more than manipulating your choices or nudging your decisions. It’s trying to disempower you. It’s trying to strip you of your agency.

Once you see that, you understand that it isn’t enough to “escape” technology by turning it off, as if it were Rikers Island and freedom were just a matter of walking away. That’s not how it works.

You have to be active. You have to learn to play the guitar. Or the piano. Learn to crochet. Build furniture. Practice Tai Chi.

You have to re-empower yourself by creating. Learning and practicing skills—one, two, three—is how agency is reclaimed. That’s how you begin to break free. Because the technology has you in your head. That’s where it lives, and it follows you wherever you go. To resist it, you have to re-enter the world—much like God did when He created it.

You have to use your hands. Or your feet. Or both.

Alan Watts famously compared living to dancing. Like dance, he said, the purpose of life is not to reach a particular destination or end point, but to engage fully in the process itself. Life is musical, playful, and immediate—not a grim, goal-oriented march toward some final achievement. 

It turns out that modern technologies are designed to exploit our goal orientation to turn us into addicts seeking the next fix.  

But creation is not something that happened once. It's happening all the time, if only we can attend to it.

The only way to be present in biblical Creation is to be creative in the mundane everyday sense. So take dancing lessons.

A Life of Self-Rediscovery

The midrash tells of an angel who accompanies the soul in the womb. This angel teaches the unborn child the entire Torah and all the wisdom of the world, only to tap the baby’s lip just before birth, causing it to forget everything.

It’s usually read as a charming explanation for the philtrum—the indentation beneath the nose—but the story intends much more. It speaks to the profound sense of alienation most of us feel from our own innate self. According to the myth, we once possessed a perfect, intuitive knowledge of who we are. Birth is the moment we lose it. The rest of life becomes a long, halting effort to remember.

Birth, in this reading, is a kind of exile. And the trauma of childbirth—leaving the warm, floating cocoon of the mother’s body, being squeezed through the narrow canal, expelled into cold light, poked, prodded, assessed as your lungs strain for their first breaths—is not incidental to the myth. It is its first proof.

Even the recent return to home births, meant to soften the harsh sterility of the hospital environment, can only go so far. But birth is only the first trauma of life.

The next arrive almost immediately, when your nascent sense of self collides with your absolute dependence on the people who keep you alive. As you grow stronger and more cognitively aware, those two impulses—independence and dependence—begin to grind against each other. You develop innate tastes and traits, early intuitions of who you are and how the world touches you. And at the same time, family expectations, household values and rules, and the norms and conventions of your immediate world begin pressing inward.

This is traumatic—not as a singular emotional shock, but as a continuous shaping force that leaves marks. As surely as the body carries scars from repeated blows, the psyche carries scars from repeated collisions with the expectations of others.

The process intensifies once we enter school. It is worth remembering that the modern classroom—rows of desks, the teacher at the front, bells, grading—was designed during the Industrial Revolution. The goal then was explicit: to mass-produce standardized workers with maximum economic efficiency. The system was not designed to cultivate the individual needs of children but to ensure conformity, predictability, and output. Even though educators have spent generations smoothing the rough edges, the basic structure remains.

Under these pressures—family, school, peers—we develop personas, masks in the original sense, to help us function within the rules of the game. But the more skilled we become at wearing masks, the more the question presses: what becomes of the authentic self we began with? The one closest to our emotional essence? The one the midrash says we once knew perfectly?

For some, the discontinuity is manageable. For many, it becomes a lifelong struggle that we tend to label as emotional dysfunction. I think it is more accurately a spiritual struggle—a yearning for reconnection with one's innate nature, the self that was lost at birth.

Viewed through this lens, the angel’s touch is not simply the cause of forgetting but the beginning of alienation. And the re-learning of Torah throughout life becomes a metaphor for personal rediscovery. To learn is to remember who we were.

If we take this seriously, then education should not be a mechanism for further alienation. It should be its antidote—a process that encourages self-rediscovery rather than conformity. Learning would not be defined solely by the acquisition of skills, although those matter. It would be defined by the deepening of one’s connection to one’s own nature: one’s innate feelings, predispositions, curiosities, and gifts.

In that sense, the highest purpose of education is not to prepare us for the world, but to help us find our spiritual path to our authentic place in it - not the place assigned to us by others, but the place remembered from before we were born.

The Blessing of Being Leaderless

There are many things that distinguish Judaism from other religious traditions, but the one that stands out to me these days is how profoundly leaderless we are.

Of course we have leaders in the ordinary sense—people elected or appointed to fill necessary roles. But I mean leadership in the grander, spiritual sense. Jews have no representative of the Divine on earth, no equivalent of a Pope. We have no model of divinely-sanctioned human behavior—no Jesus, no Muhammad, no Buddha. And that's been our blessing.

Our biblical leaders—Abraham, Moses, David—were remarkable, inspired figures, but they were also deeply flawed and recognized as such. Their stories are as much about failure as fulfillment. They made serious mistakes even while carrying out their divine assignments, sometimes precisely because of those assignments. Almost none of them wanted the job in the first place.

This has given Jews a healthy skepticism of leadership and a realistic view of human nature. It may also be one of the qualities that has irritated others about us for centuries. Paired with our spiritual self-regard as a “chosen people,” our refusal to bow down—even to ultimate authority—has not always endeared us to the nations.

It’s hard being a leaderless people.

Some modern Jewish movements have tried to soften the disadvantages of this leaderlessness by creating their own leaders. Hasidism is the clearest example. Founded by the Baal Shem Tov in the 18th century, Hasidism responded to the political upheavals, intellectual elitism, and assimilation pressures in Eastern Europe.

The irony is that the Baal Shem Tov himself seems to have had no interest in becoming a leader. His teachings emphasize the holiness of ordinary life and the spiritual capacity of every individual. He believed that divine understanding was accessible not only through sacred texts but through the simple act of living with a full, open heart. If anything, he preached the opposite of perfection: humility, commonness, the sacred everyday.

And yet stories proliferated—of miracles, healing, mysticism. Over time, the pedestal formed. In several Hasidic groups, the elevation of rabbis to quasi-messianic figures took on a life of its own. Lubavitch, for instance, met the challenges of modernity by embracing a vigorous, outward-facing messianism centered on Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneerson.

Historically, we find messianism in Judaism ascendant in times of political crisis and spiritual upheaval. The original form of messianism in Judaism evolved into Christianity at the time of the Roman conquest of Judea and the destruction of the Second Temple. There were other moments of messianic fervor such as the so-called false messiah Sabbatai Tzvi who developed a personal following in response to the Khmelnytsky Massacres, which reportedly killed tens of thousands of Jews, and devastated the Jewish world. 

When messianism is on the rise, you know we're in deep trouble. 

The core message of Judaism, though, is that no one is coming to save us. Responsibility rests with each of us individually, and all of us collectively. If Judaism has a hero, it isn’t a king or a prophet; it’s the people themselves, the ragged, imperfect multitude that stood at Sinai and has been wrestling with what it all means ever since.

Whenever we place our faith in a single leader—even a charismatic or comforting one—it signals desperation and a retreat from personal responsibility. And whenever a leader tries to convince us that someone else is to blame for our problems, we should remember this: Living life is a profoundly lonely and mysterious individual experience, but we’re all in the same boat. So at the very least, we have each other.

"Not a Deal"

"Not a Deal" 

That's what the Lubavitch kid who comes to my office every Friday to try to convince me to put on tefillin said. 

He's been trying to get me to put on tefillin for weeks. His original pitch was that I should do a mitzvah to help the soldiers win the war in Israel. I said, really? How is my putting on tefillin gonna help win the war in Israel. He said, every mitzvah helps. I said, if you believe that, then you must believe that God cares about me doing a mitzvah and that He can intervene in what's going on. Then you must also believe that on some level God allowed October 7th to happen in the first place. And somehow there's a connection for God between doing mitvahs or not doing mitzvahs and allowing terrible things to happen. The kid agreed. I said, well I don't believe that me putting on tefillin is going to help win the war. Because if I believed that, I'd have to also believe that God is cruel enough to let young, innocent people die and be taken hostage, because we didn't do enough mitzvahs. If there's a God, I can't believe He'd be that petty. So I don't want to insult His intelligence by putting on tefillin and thinking he'd respond by making Israel win the war.

But that was a few weeks ago. This is a new week.           

"Not a deal." 

"What's not a deal," I asked.

"100 criminals and murderers released for one Israeli hostage, that's not a deal."

"Really," I said. "What's a better deal."

"One for one."

"So you think that one murderer has the same value as one innocent victim?" I asked. "I don't. I would trade 1000 criminals for 1 hostage. Because to me that's the value. 1000 to 1. Do you know what gives life value?"

He waited for my answer.

"Can't be faith in God. I mean, the terrorists have plenty of that, or so they claim. It's the law that gives life value. When a person follows the law, it means they are taking responsibility for others. The terrorists are lawless. That's why they will even kill their own women and children. To them, there are no laws, or rather they are the law, and so human life has no value. But surely you understand this. It's what Judaism is all about. Learning and following the laws of Torah. But it also applies to citizens following the laws of a country. The laws make us responsible for one another. Gaza is lawless, so human life has zero value. The hostages are citizens of Israel. They have so much value that the government and all the citizens of Israel are willing to do anything to get them back, even if it means sacrificing their own sons and daughters in battle. With responsibility comes value." 

"But what if the terrorists being released kill more people. It happened before."

"Yes, it's possible." I said. "But it's not inevitable. We let our guard down before. Our leaders failed. If we don't hold the leaders we chose accountable for the mistakes they made, then we are more responsible for letting it happen again."

"Making a deal, shows what you value," I told the kid. "They value their murderers and criminals. We value our fathers, mothers, daughters and sons."  

"Kol Yisrael arevim zeh la-zeh," he said.

Lesson learned.

The Hopelessly Hopeful Jew

Why did you think it was so easy to exterminate your people? You're weakness. I saw it. Everyday I saw it. Everyone of them thinking only of how to avoid being flogged or kicked or killed. Everyone thinking only of themselves. Why do you think it only took four soldiers to lead a thousand people to the gas chambers? Because not one out of thousands had the courage to resist. Not one would sacrifice himself! Not even when we took they're children away! So I knew then, that you people had no right to live! You had no right…

As it is the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, it's been a week to think about the Holocaust. The lines above come from a 2011 film called The Debt which I saw on the weekend. Not a great film but the lines have stayed with me for days. They are spoken by a former sadistic Nazi doctor called "The Surgeon of Birkenau," a character clearly modeled after Mengele. He says this to one of his captors, member of a team of Mossad agents who traveled to East Germany in the early 1960s on a mission to bring him back to Israel to stand trial, obviously based on the successful abduction of Adolph Eichmann. The most riveting part of the film begins when the plan to whisk the ex-Nazi out of Germany fails and the Mossad agents are forced to hold him. The longer it takes to formulate a new plan to get him out of Europe the more the Nazi surgeon can toy with their minds and hearts, essentially exploiting perceived weaknesses. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't take it far enough, but I found the psychological manipulation and subtle control he begins to exert on the highly-trained agents extremely compelling. The lines quoted above spoke to me in particular because I've always wondered how it was possible that, aside from the odd episode of heroism and rebellion that we've all heard about like the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, millions of Jews seemed to sleepwalk to their inevitable demise. We've heard explanations for this. About the disbelief, particularly among German and Austrian Jews, that the country and culture to which they felt so loyal, could betray them. We know that the Nazis perpetrated mass-deception, telling the Jews that they were going to be put to work, hence the words inscribed in black wrought iron "Arbeit Macht Frei" on the entrance gate of the camps. And yet, the explanations never seemed to me completely sufficient. Millions upon millions of Jews, were put to death with relative ease. As the character Vogel says, "It took four soldiers to lead a thousand Jews to the gas chamber." Could he be right that it was because the Jews were inherently weak, that they were too selfish to make the personal sacrifice to save their brethren if not themselves? The thought disturbed me. And then I had another thought. Maybe it wasn't because they were selfish. Maybe it was because as Jews we are programmed to be hopeful. We are culturally and religiously hardwired to believe that there is always a Promised Land if only we can get through the trials and tribulations of the wilderness. And so even when parents were separated from their children on the selection ramp, and even when they had their belongings stripped from them and were told to line up for disinfecting showers, their hopelessly hopeful minds continued to believe with every fiber of their souls that all would end well, families would be reunited in hugs, and they would survive. And then I thought about the Israeli national anthem Hatikvah, which literally means The Hope, and I said to myself that the Nazi Surgeon could not be more wrong. He was wrong, tragically so, because he viewed hopefulness as weakness, and in doing so was himself expunged of any humanity, because hope is the very essence of being human. To deny hope in others, or to use it for personal gain, to take advantage of it and use it for manipulation, is a moral crime of the highest order. Perhaps maintaining hope in the face of unspeakable atrocities, and not willingness to die for a cause, is the greatest heroism of all.