This week, I saw something tragic. Our cousins had a baby who was born extremely premature and lived in this world for only a few minutes. My cousin and I spoke about the unique gift of breath, and how every breath carries its own unique praise of G-d.

Which made me think deeply about something on my mind since the Holiday of Shavuos.

There is a well-known teaching of our Sages, that when G-d gave the Torah at Mount Sinai, every Jewish soul was present. Not only the generation that left Egypt, or those who were physically alive at that time.

Every Jewish soul that would ever be born (or convert) into the Jewish people was there at Mt. Sinai making a covenant with G-d.

That means that Sinai was not only a national event. G-d was not only making a covenant with the Jewish people as a collective whole. He was making a covenant with each and every single soul.

Every soul had to be there. Every soul had to be part of the covenant. Even the souls that had not yet been born had to receive their own unique piece of the mission.

Which means there is no such thing as an unnecessary or redundant soul.

Sometimes, from our human perspective, a soul can seem like it did not have time to do much. We measure life in years, in accomplishments, in memories, in stories, in what a person built, taught, gave, or changed.

But a soul is not measured only by time.

A soul that is here for eighty seconds and a soul that is here for eighty years are both sent by G-d. We may not understand the mission of a soul that came into this world for only a few minutes.

But just because we don’t understand it, does not mean there was no mission.

There is a famous story about Rabbi Akiva. Before he became a great and famous Rabbi, he was a simple shepherd. One day, he saw water dripping onto a stone. Drop after drop after drop. Over time, those small drops made a hole in the hard rock.

When Rabbi Akiva saw how the constant dripping of the soft water could transform the rock he famously said, if soft water can........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)