Focus on What the World Needs from You

It's Not What You Want to Do that Counts

One of my most influential teachers was Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach. He was composer and an itinerant teacher. I met him when I was 15, and fell in love with his music. He was also very warm and hospitable to me and my family wanted me to leave him alone but he knew I needed him and he wanted me to be around him.

Shlomo was an extremely controversial person and he wasn't a regular type rabbi. He was the hippie rabbi and he attracted a following that was not like what most Chasidic rabbis would want. He gave smicha ("rabbinic ordination") to women years before any other Orthodox rabbi did and he dispensed with many of Judaism's laws revolving around separation between men and women.

Originally, Shlomo wanted to be the world's greatest Talmud scholar of his day. He was gifted with an incredibly brilliant mind, the ability to interpret the Torah in an unusual and unique way, and a prodigious memory, all of which would have equipped him to be one of the Gedolei Hador ("Torah luminaries") of his generation and a possible successor to Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, as the world's greatest, post WWII rabbi.

Shlomo was a talmid ("student") at Lakewood Yeshiva and he was a close pupil to Rabbi Aharon Kotler. One day, Shlomo decided that he should leave Lakewood and go to Lubavitch, because he wanted to do outreach. He told people that if he would nave stayed in Lakewood, he would have bettered himself but if he went to Chabad Lubavitch, and did outreach, he could better the world around him.

Initially, Shlomo had a conversation with the Lubavitcher Rebbe at the time and the Rebbe asked him what he wanted to do with his life. Shlomo expressed his desire to be a great lamdan ("scholar"). But the Rebbe told him, "Don't think of what you want to do, think of what the world needs from you."