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There is an interesting Chassidic teaching that goes as follows:
The moment you were born is the moment that G-d told the universe that it could not exist without you.
What this means is that there is something that only you can offer the world, and that no two of us exist to bring to the world the exact same thing. In other words, each of us are extraordinary in our individual gift to the world.
Thus, the Talmud (-Shabbat 118b) tells us of a story in which Rav Yoseph asked Rav Yoseph the son of Rabba, “Your father, in what was he most vigilant in?”
The question on this is, that Rabba, a saintly sage of the Talmud, was vigilant in all of Torah and Mitzvot! The answer that is given in Kabbalah and Chassidus is that what the sages are teaching us with this question is that every soul has a unique relationship with a specific Mitzvah, and it is through the extraordinary vigilance of this specific mitzvah that his performance of all the other Mitzvoit become special. The word for vigilant is Zohir, which are the same Hebrew letters as the word Zohar, which means to brilliantly shine. Thus, from the mystical interpretation of Rav Yoseph’s question, Rav Yoseph was asking concerning Rabba, which was Rabba’s extraordinary Mitzvah, through which everything else that Rabba did shone with Rabba’s extraordinary brilliance.
However, experiencing being extraordinary takes more than just being born with a unique gift for the universe that none other have. According to Kabbalah and Chassidus, what being extraordinary means is that we share our extraordinary gift with the universe in an extraordinary way. What this means is that there is an ordinary way to perform and to share our unique gift with the universe, and then there is an extraordinary way to perform and to share our gift with the universe. In this lecture we are going to learn what it means to perform something in an extraordinary fashion, and how through this, we bring our extraordinary gift into all that we do.
This lecture is based primarily on a maamor the Rebbe delivered on this Shabbat, in 1965, exploring why the Torah counted the Jewish people again, and how this brings forth the Jewish peoples’ being cherished by G-d.
