If a person is depressed and feels like his or her life is missing something, what do we do?
If your child says “I didn’t ask to be born!” What are you supposed to do? Prozac? Therapy? Both?
How do we cure that kind of thing?
“I didn’t ask to be born” is an absolutely true statement. Nobody asked to be born! In fact, the Torah tells us that our souls resisted being born.
Just like we didn’t ask to be born, but were born anyway, we didn’t ask to have to eat, but we do anyway, we didn’t ask to have to drink, but we do anyway, we didn’t ask to have to sleep, but we do anyway.
This means, first of all, eating, drinking, sleep, etc, aren’t our needs, they were imposed on us, and secondly, technically they aren’t “needs.” If a man breaks his leg, does he “need” a crutch? No, he needs to heal. Needing a crutch isn’t a “need”, its a handicap.
In truth, we don’t have any needs. We eat, sleep, and all the rest because God needs us to.
Humans will never be content being just human, because we know all this to be true. We know we don’t really “need” anything. We know that unless we were created for a purpose, nothing makes sense. So when a person is unhappy or not content, its not a sign of illness, its a sign of his or her humanity! In fact, if somebody is perfectly content and at peace in their regular lives, then something is wrong!
