The Rebbe once received a letter from a man wrestling with feelings of worthlessness and intractable depression. He wrote to the Rebbe that he saw no value in his continued living, and that he was contemplating taking his own life. The Rebbe wrote back:

“Surely you know that one of the basics of our religion and our Torah is to have complete bitachon [trust] in Hashem, Whose benevolent Hashgachah Pratit [Divine Providence] extends to each and everyone individually, and Who is just and good…This certainly leaves no room for pessimism or despair, G‑d forbid.

“As for your wondering how much your life may be worth as things now stand—this is quite incomprehensible, since you surely know the saying of our Sages, referring to every Jew, without exception, ‘I was created to serve my Creator.’”

Could there be anything more important than such a special Divinely-given task and mission in life?”1

For the countless wounded souls he encountered, the Rebbe offered the strong and loving medicine of Divine responsibility, which, he insisted, could light the way out of even the deepest spiritual abyss. For those suffering from depression, trauma, despair, and even thoughts of suicide, the Rebbe taught that there was no need to find a reason to live. Rather, as in the story above, he taught that every person is born with the greatest reason of all to live—a Divinely-appointed, one-of-a-kind mission that their soul alone can fulfill.

He Needs You

This was the course of treatment offered by R. Manis Friedman to a despondent young man who had been hospitalized after attempting suicide. Having repeatedly failed to accomplish his goals, the young man concluded that he was altogether worthless and had become convinced that suicide was his only option. But even his attempt at that had failed. He was at rock bottom. While hospitalized, he received several visitors, none of whom had been able to help him out of the voracious darkness that threatened to consume him.

R. Friedman, a Chasid of the Rebbe, arrived to find the boy in bed listlessly watching television, a portrait of despair. The boy hardly acknowledged the rabbi, and before he could even say hello, the boy said quietly, “If you are here to tell me what the priest just told me, you can leave now.”

Taken aback, the rabbi composed himself and asked, “What did the priest say?”

“He told me that G‑d loves me, which is a load of garbage. Why would G‑d love me?”

It was clear to R. Friedman that this boy had lost sight of his own value and purpose, and that he considered himself utterly unlovable in light of his own perceived failure.

“You may be right,” he replied.

That was the last thing the boy expected to hear from a rabbi. Now he was paying attention. R. Friedman continued, “But one thing’s for sure. He needs you… The very fact that you were created means that G‑d needs you. He had plenty of people before you, but He added you to the world’s population because there is something you can do that no one else can. And if you haven’t done it yet that makes it even more crucial that you continue to live, so that you are able to fulfill your mission and give your unique gift to the world.”2

Echoing the Rebbe’s perspective, R. Friedman offered the only route out of a self-destructive bias that leads many into a pit of despair. It may be common to remind those who find themselves in such a state just how much they are loved. But the rabbi, based on the Rebbe’s teachings, offered a different delivery system for G‑d’s healing and redeeming love—a life of purpose that is rooted in selfless service to G‑d and humanity. This redemptive awareness was offered as medicine for what had become a near fatal disease—too much self-emphasis, which had left very little room for G‑d and the uniquely uplifting holy purpose He had woven into the young man’s life.

Time and again, rather than merely telling the legions of pained and broken souls who came to him for guidance and support that they were merely loved, the Rebbe insisted that they must love—just as they had been created to do in their own precious way.

From Self to Service

The Rebbe once shared this healing viewpoint with renowned clinical psychologist and author Dr. Ruth Benjamin. During a private audience, Benjamin had asked the Rebbe to share wisdom for people suffering like one of her patients who had attempted suicide only to be saved by Benjamin, who intervened and rushed him to the hospital in time to save his life. Later, during a visit amid his recovery, the patient had confounded the doctor by saying, “You are responsible for my being alive. Now give me something to live for.”

Having been unable to produce a satisfying answer in the moment, Dr. Benjamin asked the Rebbe what he would recommend saying to someone with a similar request.

“Tell him that he is part of G‑d’s world,” the Rebbe replied. “And that means that he has to answer to G‑d.”3

The Rebbe’s answer resounds with one simple, monumental truth: You matte r! You are an indispensable part of G‑d’s great plan, and you thus carry a duty to live up to His faith in you!

This point led them further into a discussion about remedies for suicidal despair, including some patients for whom Holocaust experiences had brought intolerable anguish. The Rebbe said that Dr. Benjamin should tell her Jewish patients that with so many Jews murdered, those alive today have a double duty. They must live not only for themselves but also for those who are no longer here.

“When they realize this, they will find that their own turmoil will pass,” he said.

Again and again, the Rebbe emphasized this crucial point: For those suffering from soul-crushing despair, even to the point of self-destruction, the way out of the existential abyss is to shift our focus from self to service, whether that be to G‑d or to someone who is waiting for us along the path of our Divine purpose.

Heart of Darkness

In the case of Dr. Benjamin’s patients and consistently in his public teaching and private counsel to those in turmoil and need, the Rebbe shared this perspective, which is strikingly similar to one espoused by pioneering Austrian psychologist and neurologist Dr. Viktor Frankl. Indeed, the Rebbe wrote admiringly about Dr. Frankl’s therapeutic approach: “It is obvious [that] some doctors have helped and healed their patients in straight ways, especially since one professor (Dr. Frankl) found the courage in his soul to declare and announce that, contrary to the opinion of the famous founder of psychoanalysis (Freud), faith in G‑d, and a religious inclination in general, which gives meaning to life, etc., is one of the most effective ways of healing.”4

Dr. Frankl’s novel perspective on resilience and healing was deeply informed by his own devastating experiences in Nazi concentration camps, where he witnessed the power of purpose to help people endure unimaginable trauma and suffering.

Dr. Frankl himself was arrested and transported to a Nazi concentration camp with his wife and parents in September 1942. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished. But he, prisoner number 119104, had survived.

In his bestselling book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he chronicled his experiences in the camps, he concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died often came down to two things: meaning and purpose. As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning and purpose, even in the most life-extinguishing circumstances, were far more resilient and likely to survive than those who did not.

In the three years he spent in Auschwitz, Dr. Frankl survived and helped others to survive by inspiring them to discover a purpose in life, even in the midst of hell on earth. In his book, he provides the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing left to live for.

“In both cases,” he writes, “it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.”5

For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, it was a series of books that he needed to finish. Each of these men, with Dr. Frankl’s encouragement, found fuel to continue their journey in the sublime promise of service.

“A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life,” Dr. Frankl wrote. “He knows the ‘why’ for his existence and will [thus] be able to bear almost any ‘how.’”6

Elsewhere he observed, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.”

Poignantly, Dr. Frankl’s view of the human psyche corresponds quite closely with the Chasidic understanding of our unique nature: We have a soul beneath the surface of the self, and this soul forms the foundation of our very being and purpose, which connects us intrinsically to others and to G‑d. He believed that the activation of this inner axis is what allows us to heal, survive, and even thrive amid suffering.

Darkest Before Dawn

Over the years, Frankl’s unorthodox and daring theory of human psychology brought constant derision of his life’s work by his colleagues in the field. His view of human nature differed in certain key areas from the party-line views that dominated the discipline of psychology before the war, making him and his work a consistent target of scholarly derision.

It was this very demeaning of his deepest held beliefs regarding the inner makeup of the human being that led to his own breaking point in 1960. Though he had survived the attacks of the Nazis on his body, he could no longer bear the attacks of his peers on his soul. In an act of despair, Dr. Frankl decided to upend his entire life, close his practice, suspend his research, and take his family from Vienna to live in Australia.

It was at that moment when Marguerite Kozenn-Chajes, a well-known opera singer and descendant of Vizhnitz Chasidim, knocked on his door in Vienna. Dr. Frankl came to the door and found a sharply dressed woman whom he had never met before standing on his doorstep.7 8

She announced herself as the bearer of a personal message addressed to him by a Chasidic Rebbe, R. Menachem Mendel Schneerson, from Brooklyn, New York. Upon hearing this startling explanation for her visit, and recognizing the name of the Rebbe, he promptly invited Mrs. Chajes inside to speak privately.

“The Rebbe asked me to tell you,” she began, “that you must not give up. You must be strong. Do not be disturbed by those who ridicule you. You will succeed, and your work will achieve a major breakthrough.”

Upon hearing the Rebbe’s reassuring voice from afar, Dr. Frankl broke into tears. He had only just recently been filling out his immigration papers to Australia, and he had, tragically, finally given up. But the Rebbe’s reaffirmation of his purpose brought Dr. Frankl back to life, just as the good doctor had done for so many others.

After regaining his composure, Dr. Frankl was ignited with renewed commitment to continue his life’s work. Following his fateful message from the Rebbe, Dr. Frankl redoubled his efforts to spread his unique insights and therapeutic approaches to mending the fractured human psyche. Not long afterward, his magnum opus, Man’s Search for Meaning, was translated into English, sparking immediate popular interest in his work and worldview that has endured to this very day. That work alone has been translated into twenty-eight languages and sold more than ten million copies, giving birth to an entire genre of self-help literature as well as the field of logotherapy, Dr. Frankl’s unique philosophy and practice of psychological health and healing.

Both the Rebbe’s and Viktor Frankl’s purpose-driven path to psychological healing and spiritual survival can be summed up in one of Frankl’s most penetrating declarations, “The way to find meaning is not to ask what we want from life. Instead, we should ask what life wants from us.”

Indeed, our Divine purpose is the answer to this most human prayer. Our every action is how we say amen.

This was the life-saving advice given by the Rebbe to a man who had survived the Holocaust. Having witnessed the murder of his family at the hands of the Nazis, he had decided he would never have a family of his own and had concluded he had nothing left to live for. On the advice of his rabbi, he traveled from his home in London to visit the Rebbe, hoping to receive guidance.

Arriving at 770 [Chabad headquarters in Brooklyn], the man was granted an audience and poured his heart out to the Rebbe, crying out: “The Holocaust ripped my whole life and my family from me. I cannot sleep at night because I’m reliving the horrors I’ve seen. I have decided never to get married and bring children into this dark world.”

The Rebbe looked deeply into his eyes and said, “Given your terrible loss, I understand your feelings. Just know that your entire family is watching you, and they care deeply about you. If you live the life of a dead person, you are only continuing the tragedy of their death. If you live a life of love, you will bring them some comfort. The only thing you have left is the love you have for your family and the love you will give to other people…

“Otherwise, why did G‑d leave you on Earth; for what reason?”

Here the Rebbe reminds the man that his survival was part of G‑d’s plan and was His way of saying, “I still need you!”

“Find a way to show love to the people around you, and that love will bring light back into your life. Even if you don’t feel up to it, just do it.”

Urged by the Rebbe’s insistence, the man made a commitment that day to bring joy to the people at his synagogue by distributing sweets to others. He discovered that the joyful recipients of his gifts rekindled his heart one smile at a time.

Later, he said, “My life is far from easy, but I found a purpose…and the Rebbe taught me a way to bring light into my life, through the love that I give to others.”9

With this critical, purpose-igniting message, the Rebbe helped heal a generation of displaced and broken survivors, transforming them into a taskforce of Divine light and love. In one encounter after another, he lifted people from the mire of their own suffering with the radical rejoinder—G‑d needs you! In so doing, he turned people who had every reason to expect the worst from life and humanity into people who would devote their lives to finding and redeeming the best in humanity and the world.