We spoke yesterday about how our yearning to feel close to Hashem is sourced in the fact that our neshamah wishes to return home, to reside again under Hashem’s Holy Throne.
We experience the source of our neshamah’s roots in another way as well.
Imagine you are as musically gifted as Beethoven. Elaborate musical compositions just pop into your head. You sit at a piano and instinctively know how to play. But aside from being a musical genius, you are also a fairly decent computer programmer. When the time comes to support your family, you take a computer course and work long hours as a programmer and earn a very respectable salary. Would you be satisfied?
Of course not!
You would be yearning to plumb the depths of musical theory and learn the intricacies of the various instruments, to study musical notation and record your scores to be played by a full orchestra.
All this has nothing to do with ego. You simply wish to bring your talents to full bloom. Psychologists refer to the need for self-fulfillment, for realizing one’s potential, as “self-actualization.” One of life’s greatest pleasures is when one’s potential is being used, and conversely, one of its deepest frustrations is when it is not. As the saying goes, “What a man can be, he must be.”
Hashem placed this need within us to motivate us to grow.
Our neshamah comes from the highest of places. Its potential is immeasurable. With its tefillah it can tear up gezeiros; with its learning it can fathom the deepest mysteries of Hashem’s Torah.
You - and every Jew - therefore have this immense longing to actualize your neshamah’s potential, a potential that is rooted in its source, its attachment to its Creator.