In the recently posted tale about the elderly rabbi approaching the end of his days on earth, there was one question that he feared: Zusya, why weren’t you Zusya?  It is a question that gives us a tremor deep inside, even if our surface mind doesn’t really know what to do with it.  We might say, quite logically, why should it be important to be ‘Zusya’?  Isn’t this blog full of posts about forgetting oneself? And yet our heart responds and we sympathise with the rabbi, for we also have doubts about what we have done with our life.

Hazrat Inayat Khan often quoted a verse by the Sufi poet Sadi : ‘Every soul is born for a certain purpose, and the light of that purpose is kindled in his soul’  It means that each soul has something specific to accomplish, something unique to that being, just as every seed sown in the garden will produce a different plant in a different place.  One seed will become a rose, another a jasmine, one will stand near the fountain, another will grow by a wall in the sun, and so on.  In the story, the rabbi did not expect to be asked ‘why weren’t you Abraham?’  That prophet has already been, a pure and perfect ‘Abraham’ whose spirit has served his God for thousands of years, and if we were to try to be him again, we could only produce a poor copy.  We can learn from the teaching and the examples of the great souls; we would be foolish not to find guidance in them, but we are not made to be them; we are made to be ourselves.

Then, we might ask, what about forgetting oneself? Where does that come into the picture?  In talking about the purpose of life, Hazrat Inayat Khan said that everyone has a minor purpose and a major one.  The minor purpose is unique to each person and is a preparation for the major purpose, the realisation of Truth.  We could take as an example a musician, who must first learn to master the specifics of his or her own body and the intricacies of the instrument, and to shape the mind according to the disciplines of music. It is a long apprenticeship, involving many hours of practice.  Then one day, perhaps without warning, the musician loses him or herself completely in the music and just plays; at that moment the musician is no more there, and only the music is.  That is a picture of the path of life.  We begin by working with what we have been given, our circumstances and our individuality, and by that we prepare ourselves, so that someday, instead of playing the music, it is the music that plays us.

The story of Rabbi Zusya reminds us that no one is here by chance; we have each come for a purpose, and it is our solemn responsibility to fulfil that purpose.  To accomplish that, as part of the process we may have to attempt and discard innumerable versions of our ‘self’, but after all, how many times must a musician play a scale badly before it approaches perfection?