In early 1984, R. Moshe Kotlarsky, one of the Rebbe’s emissaries and future vice-chairman of Merkos L’Inyonei Chinuch, received an urgent phone call from the Rebbe’s secretary with a mission. The Rebbe wanted him to travel immediately to the island of Curaçao, though he wasn’t told why.

R. Kotlarsky departed for Curaçao together with R. Levi Yitzchak Krinsky, who was then a yeshivah student. Upon landing, they took a taxi to the local synagogue and encountered a man who was leaving the building. They approached him and told him that they were sent by the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

The man appeared stunned, his eyes widening. “Then you must have come for me.”

After regaining his composure, he introduced himself as Chaim Groisman, a non-observant Jew whose son attended the local public school. After a period of peaceful attendance, changes had occurred within the school’s administration, and they began requiring Jewish students to participate in Catholic worship services on Sundays. He shared that his young son Eli had been expelled from the school after a confrontation with its headmaster over his refusal to attend those services.

The series of events affected their social connections with the other residents of the island, leaving them feeling isolated and helpless.

“I had just come to the synagogue to pray for guidance!” the man exclaimed.

After a lengthy and heartfelt conversation, R. Kotlarsky encouraged Chaim to send his son abroad to receive a Jewish education, and he invited Chaim to come to Chabad Lubavitch headquarters in Brooklyn for a visit. While there, Chaim decided to enroll his son Eli in the Lubavitcher yeshivah.

After their stay in Crown Heights, Chaim wrote a two-page letter to R. Kotlarsky. The letter was filled with gratitude for the help provided, as well as the privilege of spending time in the Rebbe’s uplifting presence.

He concluded his letter with these earnest words:

“I would like you to extend to the Rebbe my most sincere appreciation and other good feelings, but for lack of good English I do not know what words to use. Just tell the Rebbe that a small Jew from Curaçao felt that the Rebbe touched my soul; thank you for doing it.”

R. Kotlarsky passed this letter on to the Rebbe, who sent the following poignant response to Chaim:

“I was pleased to receive your regards through our esteemed mutual friends.

I must, however, take exception to your referring to yourself as: “a small Jew from Curacao.” There is surely no need to emphasize to you at length that every Jew, man or woman, has a Nefesh Elokis [Divine soul], which is a “part of G‑dliness above,” as explained in the Tanya, beginning of chapter two. Thus, there is no such thing as “a small Jew,” and a Jew must never underestimate his or her tremendous potential.”1

The Rebbe’s insistence that there is no such thing as a small Jew represents a bold response to one of the great challenges of our times. Namely, that despite living in an era defined by unprecedented achievement, many of us still somehow struggle with feelings of insignificance, inadequacy, aimlessness, and lack of purpose.

Born into a world that so often denies any inherent significance or meaning to our existence, we clamor to craft a satisfying sense of self as we struggle through life, building our personal worth from a host of external validations—accomplishments, accolades, success, and status.

But even if we succeed in these gratifying pursuits, many of us still struggle with a lingering doubt about our personal value and purpose.

This conundrum was highlighted by the Rebbe shortly after he assumed the mantle of Chabad leadership, when he observed: “The great challenge of today’s youth is the sense of inadequacy they carry: ‘Mi ani u’mah ani—Who am I, and what am I?’”2

So often this crucial existential question is accompanied by a despondent, whispered insistence: “I am small. I am nobody.”

Origin of the Species

This endemic sense of smallness is no accident. Indeed, the notion that we are born void of intrinsic value results primarily from a fundamental shift in the way we understand the source of our selfhood, and what lies beneath the vast complexities forming our identities.

Today, due to the entrenchment of dominant theories regarding human origin and development, our identity is perceived as something we must struggle to construct during the course of our lives.

This vacuous approach to identity formation was championed by framers of our depersonalized sense of self, including Aristotle, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. Tracing back as far as ancient Alexandria and built through centuries of theoretical inquiry, these men ultimately crystallized a narrative that says we are merely the product of accidental intersections between biological, evolutionary, and psychological imperatives. This view has manifested more recently in the popular notions that we are a random dance of particles, probabilities, and genetic expressions.

Together, these men birthed a paradigm that ceaselessly hammers home the notion that we come into this world bereft of any true value or intrinsic nobility. Even as scientific theories behind this dour sentiment have evolved and shifted over the years, the resulting view that we are fundamentally insignificant continues to be reinforced.

Steven Hawking, one of the great scientific celebrities of our time, summarized it thusly,

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I cannot believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.”3

Based on this cynical worldview, we are told that if we want to be somebody, that somebody must be crafted, curated, and cobbled together. All of this intrapersonal effort amounts to an impossible attempt to become through our own efforts what the Rebbe insists we already are at birth—inherently, infinitely, and irrevocably valuable, worthy of love, and Divine by design.

In the Rebbe’s own words:

Our Sages said that “Each and every soul was in the presence of His Divine Majesty before coming down to this earth,” and that “The souls are hewn from under the seat of glory.” These sayings emphasize the essential nature of the soul, its holiness and purity…4

In but a few concise words, the Rebbe deconstructs the prevailing materialist mindset and reveals our spiritual foundation and fundamental composition.

For each of us, this G‑dly essence—eternal and pure—represents a sacred inheritance, which includes our unique purpose, as well as all the tools required to live up to it.

Moreover, though each of us is made, like Adam, in the image of our creator, each inherited spark of the Divine and the purpose it imparts is entirely unique—a distinct, holographic reflection of G‑d’s perfect wholeness.

As the Mishnah teaches:

“Adam was created singly [rather than in pairs like the other living creations]... to proclaim the greatness of the Holy One, Blessed Be He, for a human being casts many coins with one die and they are all alike, each one the same as the other, but the King of kings, the Holy One, Blessed Be He, has cast all of humanity with the die of the first man, and yet not one of them is like his fellow.”5

This Divine spark at the root of our being imprints each of us as utterly unique, endows us with our own distinct purpose, imparts more significance to our lives than could ever be accumulated or earned, and is, in the Rebbe’s view, who we truly are and always will remain in essence.

Put simply: You don’t have a soul; you are a soul.

Rather than seeing ourselves as small and insignificant, the Rebbe urges us to internalize the fact that our intrinsic identity and essence is an embodied piece of the Divine. This empowering perspectival shift positions us to proactively answer the crucial questions of life—who am I, why am I here, and what is my purpose on earth?