What Is Your Shelihut? 

Annie Lewis, Director of Recruitment and Admissions for Religious and Educational Leadership, JTS

After this past year full of grief and devastation unrolled, we are still trying to catch our breath. I find myself remembering an afternoon in a performing arts school in the center of Jerusalem at the end of October. After October 7, the pro-democracy movement in Israel reorganized overnight into a volunteer outfit supporting the needs of displaced civilians and soldiers called up to serve. Schools and community centers were transformed into control centers. Along with fellow clergy and lay leaders of the Conservative Movement, I joined a mission to Israel with the Fuchsberg Center. We stood with volunteers of all ages and backgrounds in a black box theater—packing groceries, toiletries, underwear, and uniforms. Our hands and hearts were ready to do something, anything, to help and to heal. I prayed, “Ribono shel olam, Master of the Universe, I am here. Help me to be of service—to You, to my beloved Jewish people, to this broken and beautiful world.”

Each of us is put into this world to till and to tend to it, and each of us has our own part to play. As we begin a new year, we are given the gift of reconnecting with our passion and our purpose. We ask, “How can I be of service? What is my shelihut? What is my holy assignment for this life, for this moment, for this singular body, for this soul?”

In his book of essays about the High Holidays, titled Yemei Zikaron (Days of Remembrance), Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik includes an essay on this very theme. He marvels that God sends Moses to confront Pharaoh in the Exodus story. It is shocking that an all-powerful, eternal God would appoint a mere mortal messenger to be a copartner in the miracles of redemption. Soloveitchik teaches that we can understand this choice by considering that God created humanity in the Divine image (betzelem Elohim). “Each one of us is a messenger of the Creator,” Soloveitchik writes. “Each human life has a distinct mission (shelichut).” We are here, each exactly as we are, in this particular place and moment, for a reason.

On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we ask our Creator to remember us. We allow ourselves to be seen by God, who knows us inside and out, who knows our essence. In intimate moments of prayer and contemplation, we can catch a glimpse of ourselves as God sees us. These holy days invite us to experience anew that we are, each one of us, created in the Divine image and to discern once again the calling of our shelihut: How am I meant to use my gifts to bring more goodness into the world? 

Every one of us is a shaliah, a representative of the Divine tasked with repairing the world. In my work as director of Recruitment and Admissions for Religious and Educational Leadership at JTS, I have the blessing of sitting with individuals who see their shelihut as sharing the light of Torah by becoming rabbis, cantors, and Jewish educators. It is an honor to support our inspiring students and prospective students who seek to serve and to lead in these crucial and dizzying times. This season, may we listen deeply to the blare of the shofar and to the still small voices within us. May we hear our unique call to service. May we respond, “Hineni. I am here.”

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