A Personal Note
As we approach the New Year, I want to extend to you my personal blessings for a sweet and healthy year.
I also want to take this opportunity to thank all of you who have sent me your kind wishes and blessings for the New Year. We are told that all those that bless, shall be blessed. May your blessings be fulfilled many times over in your life.
May you have a year of love and peace, a year of marriage and joy, a year of healthy children and nachas, a year of material and spiritual success, a year of health and wealth, a year of life with purpose. Those that need special blessings in health or other matters, may G-d see what you need and fulfill it in the fullest measure. Above all, may we all have a year of global peace and redemption.
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If you could request one thing of G-d, what would it be?
The single most important need in life is to know why you are here; to recognize your personal mission statement. Everything else follows.
Just as a business or any project could not succeed without a mission statement – a vision and an objective that defines the direction you take – how much more so when it come to your entire life: You must have a mission that drives all your activities and endeavors. Without a mission, everything you do will be compromised and rendered dispensable.
You may request wealth, health and all the amenities that make life comfortable. However if you do not know your own personal mission, all these gifts will leave you unfulfilled, and thus, unhappy. A business may have abundant material resources, but without its mission, it will not succeed. We should all be blessed with everything material and spiritual, but never forget that these are means to an end: Fulfilling your unique calling.
Rosh Hashana is the collective birthday of the human race. It is therefore the time of year when we reconnect and re-embrace our personal mission in this world, our Divine calling – the reason G-d sent us to Earth; a time when we realign all our interactions and experiences with our higher calling.
Of all that is important to us, the one that is more necessary than all others is to recognize the purpose of your life.
May you be blessed with discovering (or rediscovering) your unique calling, together with all the resources to fulfill that calling.
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As we enter the New Year I would like to declare my renewed commitment to fulfill my mission: To create an environment where all are welcome to explore our common and unique spiritual journey. To produce programs, events and publications that will help us all discover our calling and integrate it into our personal and professional lives.
I am excited to share that this year we will be taking this work to an entirely new dimension – stay tuned.
I thank you for all your support, including financial support, which provides the fuel so that we can continue our important work. At this time of year, it is especially appropriate to add in giving tzedakah (charity), which opens up new channels of blessings for the New Year.
I thank all our staff and friends – high quality people – dedicated to helping others and transcending their own comfort zones.
Above all I want to thank all the special souls that I have met directly or indirectly through my travels and writings. The written word – especially sent via e-mail – presents a unique challenge. The reader knows much more about the writer than the writer knows about the reader. It’s actually quite unbalanced. That is why I greatly appreciate receiving your feedback and thoughts, even your critique and rebuttals.
However I must say that all of you have enriched my life and the work that I do. Even if you have not written to me, perhaps vibes flow back through cyberspace. You have taught me – and continue to teach me – the beauty and the agony of life; the dignity of struggle and the courage of pain; the vulnerability of love and the strength of selflessness; the insecurity of being a taker and the security of being a giver. You have taught me to be more sensitive and understanding of the complexities of life, and also to be more joyful and less intense about the simple innocence that we all carry.
You have enriched my life indeed. Hopefully I can reciprocate.
Thank you.
May it be a truly blessed year, a year of simchas (joyous celebrations) – with openly revealed blessings that we can all appreciate.
With warmest wishes for a shana tova u’metuka,
Simon Jacobson
P.S. In response to many of your requests how to make a donation to us in honor of the New Year, please call us at 718-774-6448.
It is an honor to partner with you in bettering the lives of so many people.
All donations are tax deductible.
