What makes a person feel truly alive and energized?

Rabbi Landau teaches that “every person has a mission,” and that Hashem created each person to get the good feeling only when he is doing his mission. When that mission is alive inside a person, it gives him a spark of vitality.

You don’t need everything in your life to work, he explains. You need “one real sense of purpose.” If you are living your mission, the way Hashem created you, “you feel very, very excited, alive, energized.”

That is also why generic advice often falls flat. When you tell someone, “go daven more, go learn more, go do more chesed,” but “it’s not his mission, it’s not going to work for him.”

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

A person feels alive when he is living his own mission.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

Why can someone do everything right and still feel flat?

In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau describes a man who prays, studies, and does kindness and still feels dull, “like a key turning in a lock, but the lock never opens.”

Underlying need or longing

A person doesn’t need everything to work. He needs one real sense of purpose.

Deepest human truth

Every soul has a unique mission, and Hashem made the feeling of being alive come from living it.

More questions from this teaching

• Why doesn’t telling someone to pray more or learn more always help?