Why doesn’t telling someone to pray more or learn more always help?
By Rabbi Shalom Landau.
Rabbi Landau teaches that general advice misses the person. “When you tell someone, go daven more, go learn more, go do more chesed, it’s not his mission, it’s not going to work for him.”
The reason, he explains, is that Hashem created each person to get the good feeling only when he is doing his own mission. More of something that isn’t his won’t bring him to life. But when he is living his mission, “the way Hashem created you, you feel very, very excited, alive, energized.”
So the question to ask is not how to do more of everything. “You don’t need everything to heal. One real sense of purpose.”
Related concepts: A mission with your name on it · Advice is not control
In A Soul at Peace: The Vitality That Comes from Your Mission
Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level
Surface claim
Advice that is not a person’s own mission won’t bring him vitality.
Deepest human truth
In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that every soul has “one specific point that it, and only it, can bring to life.”
More questions from this teaching
More answers: Purpose, Character, and Masculine Leadership · All questions · Questions about Rabbi Landau and Rivnitz