If you could ask God one question, what would you ask?

Question 5

If I could ask God one question, and it is a question I actually ask God every single day it is: Ribbono Shel Olam, what do You want from me? What is my task in the world?

I believe that each one of us is unique. I believe that each one of us has a task that God wants us to fulfil that perhaps no one else can do, because nobody else is just where we are with a position and the influence and the contacts and the friends that we have. And the great challenge in life is to know what God wants from us. Theology, philosophy and all the rest of it, God has given us if not the answers, at least the clue to the answers. That’s why our highest value is we study Torah, we look for the answer there in Torah. But the one question that God can’t write in a book but can only speak the word to each of us in our own singularity is, to tell us what He wants from us, here, now.

And so, since I am not going to be able to get up to heaven in this life and actually ask Him that question, I will continue to look, and to listen, until I sense I know what it is that I am here to do.

I think that’s the best question anyone should ask God.

In partnership with TorahCafe (www.torahcafe.com), Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks recorded a series of short videos in May 2013, in answer to some of the most frequently asked questions of Judaism (and faith in general).