The Exhilaration of Intention

I just had an amazing realization during a keynote address I gave to the Chabad of California annual rabbis’ conference.

The realization was, and is, that I am here in this world for a Purpose. A Purpose I have never understood. But a Purpose which, as I spoke to the Chabad Schluchum (rabbis), became as clear to me as anything I have ever felt or experienced.

The realization was, and is, that I am a Jew. I was born as a Jew. But, aside from my bar mitzvah at age 13, I have never lived as a Jew.

Since meeting the joyful rabbis of Chabad not that long ago, I have come to the amazing realization that I have been preparing myself all my life to become an earnest, dedicated Jew. A man whose life has been brought to this place just for the purpose of assisting Chabad’s Chasidic rabbi’s in their deeply held mission to bring the light of their Rebbe to the world’s Jewry.

I am here for that. Isn’t that extraordinary? To understand this as a fact without question that I am actually here, have been here, will always be here, just for that, and nothing else but that? I could never have told you this a week ago. I could never have told you this two minutes before I stood up to speak. I could never have realized this until that very moment when it came to me as a bolt of lightning comes to us, that I am here for that.

And as I experience that, a rush of extraordinary energy possesses me. Energy from which effuses a boundless stream of innovation, of insights, of creativity, of imagination, of inspiration, of Purpose, of divine light. Of invention. I am here for that!

With everything I have done in my life, the books I have written, the companies I have created, the small business owners and entrepreneurs whose lives my path has crossed and inspired, with all of that, nothing has ever come even close to the experience I am having as I write this to you…

I am here for that!

I am here for that!

And as I experience that thought, and as the energy lifts me higher than I have been for years, I know that this realization will touch everything I do from this moment forward. It will touch you, as well as it touches me. Because I know that this experience…I am here for that!…is the experience each and every one of us is longing for, living for, dying for.
And yet, we most often never realize it.

Why? I can’t say. But my thought is that if you stay on the course, if you persist toward a question of meaning, if you determine for yourself that you will never settle for something less than this…I am here for that!…it will appear one day for you, just as it has appeared this day for me.
I am here for that…and, as a result of that, I know, as well, that I am here for you.