Live Your Greatness

Live your greatness.

If I could, that is all I would say every day, all day to everyone: Live your greatness.

If I would have to take one single, concentrated message from the Lubavitcher Rebbe, that is what I would say: Live your greatness.

If I would have been asked to distil the meaning of “freedom”, to be free, that is all what I would have said: Live your greatness.

There are people who make a change in the middle of their lives and discover, suddenly, that they possess a greatness that they hadn’t known about.

There are people who remember how once, in the past, when they were young, they lived their greatness.

A friend of mine, a Chabad shaliach in a large country, told me this week: “I live on twenty-five percent. I know what I am capable of, I know my abilities, because when there is no choice, I suddenly become a lion, and all the power that Hashem has granted me is expressed. I would like to express it even when there is a choice.”

Almost every person who met the Rebbe will tell you how the Rebbe, very quickly, elevated them to live their greatness. Because when the Rebbe demanded “twice over” or said again, “He has one hundred, he wants two hundred”, he was not only demanding, not only giving one the strength, but mainly uncovering the existing strength, when most people didn’t know about it themselves.

A person who was a slave and becomes free suddenly discovers within himself powers that he thought he probably didn’t have. And it doesn’t matter if this is a slave who is leaving Egypt or a person who is leaving a job that is like slavery to him. Perhaps what I’m really aiming at are the people who burst through their personal limitations acquired over the years, usually “thanks” to people who were around them when they were growing up and becoming what they are.

Because true freedom is the neutralization of the limiting and inhibiting factors.

I will end with a quote from a letter the Rebbe wrote on the 11th of Nissan 5718 (1958), addressed “To our brethren, Bnei Yisrael”:

May Hashem yitbarach help, that the “time of our freedom” that is coming upon us for the good, will bring to every man and woman freedom from all disturbances – material and spiritual – and enable them to thrive, in happiness and good heartedness, level after level, until the time of our full-fledged freedom – the true and complete Redemption by Mashiach tzidkeinu, soon, in our days.”

Shabbat Shalom, a Kosher and Happy Peach,

…I apologize for digging so much…

Rabbi Zalmen Wishedski