Every morning, observant Jews around the world begin their day by reciting a prayer that sounds utterly devastating. Before they’ve even had their coffee, before they’ve checked the news or kissed their children goodbye, they stand before God and declare: “My God, the soul You have given me is pure.” But then comes the crushing follow-up, words that seem designed to destroy any sense of self-worth: “My God, before I was created, I was unworthy. And now that I have been created, it is as if I was not created.”
This is how millions of Jews start their dayāby announcing their unworthiness to exist. The prayer continues with equally brutal honesty: “Before You I stand, and if I have sinned and angered You, may it be Your will that I sin no more.” It reads like spiritual self-flagellation, a daily reminder of human inadequacy and cosmic insignificance.
This prayer, known as the Elokai Neshama, forms part of the morning blessings that religious Jews recite immediately upon waking. It appears in every prayer book, gets repeated in synagogues worldwide, and has been on Jewish lips for over a thousand years. For many, it represents the ultimate expression of Jewish humilityāthe recognition that we are nothing before the infinite God.
But why would God want His beloved children to begin each day by declaring themselves worthless? Why start the morning with despair instead of hope, with self-negation instead of purpose? What kind of spiritual practice begins by crushing the human spirit before it’s even fully awake?
The answer lies in a different reading of this prayer that transforms everything we think we know about human purpose and divine timing. The great Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook saw something in these words that generations had missedānot a confession of worthlessness, but a declaration of unprecedented significance.
Rabbi Kook explains that we must understand the word “kedai“āusually translated as “worthy”āin its deeper sense of “necessary” or “needed.” When the prayer says “before I was created, I was unworthy,” it is not expressing self-hatred. It is making a claim about God’s timing and individual purpose.
Scripture teaches us that God’s timing is perfect: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1).
Rabbi Kook applies this principle to human existence itself. Before you were created, throughout that unlimited span of timeāfrom the very beginning until nowāyou were not yet needed. The world functioned without you. If you had been necessary to fulfill some purpose or complete some task, you would have been created earlier.
But you were not created until now. And that fact reveals something extraordinary: only now, at this specific moment in history, is there something in the world that you alone can fulfill. The timing of your birth is not randomāit is deliberate.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov taught that when someone is born, it is because the world could no longer exist without them. This same principle applies to nations. When Israel was reborn in 1948, it was because the world could not continue to exist without the Jewish state fulfilling its unique role in history.
This insight gives new meaning to every human life. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks understood this when he wrote about the significance of counting in the Bible. When God commands Moses to take a census of the Israelites, He uses an unusual phrase in Hebrew: “Se’u et rosh“āliterally “lift the heads.” Rather than using simple words for counting, God tells Moses to “lift the heads of the children of Israel”.
As Sacks explains, this phrase emphasizes that each individual matters infinitely. When God counts people, He is communicating their individual worth. In Jewish law, something that is countedāsold individually rather than by weightāis never nullified, even in a mixture of thousands or millions of others. Each person has unique gifts and a contribution that only they can bring.
The prayer then states: “And now that I have been created, it is as if I was not created.” Rabbi Kook explains that this means: if our actions are aligned with the specific purpose for which we were created, then we are truly fulfilling our role. But if our actions are not directed toward this purpose, then we have not yet achieved what our creation was meant to accomplish. We exist physically, but we are not yet living as we were meant to live.
The Elokai Neshama prayer is not about worthlessnessāit is about irreplaceable significance. It declares that your existence at this moment in history is not accidental but essential. God waited billions of years to create you because only now is the world ready for what you uniquely bring. You were born precisely when the cosmos needed you most.
This understanding transforms how we view our current moment in history. We live in times of unprecedented challenge and opportunity. The Jewish people have returned to their land after two millennia. Ancient prophecies seem to be unfolding before our eyes. But we also face a great battle in which Islamists, woke progressives, and right-wing antisemites are all attacking the Bible and trying to destroy the friendship between Jews and Christians. We are all needed to fight back, to bring light to the world. We are not passive observers of these eventsāwe are active participants whose very existence is part of God’s plan.
The Elokai Neshama prayer is not about confessing inadequacy. It is about acknowledging our cosmic appointment. We are recognizing that God waited until this exact moment to place our unique souls in this world because the completion of creation requires our specific contributions. The prayer is not about self-denialāit is about accepting the awesome responsibility of being irreplaceably necessary.
We were all born at this time because we all have a critical role to play in bringing the final redemption. The world could not continue without us fulfilling our purpose. That is not arroganceāthat is the reality of God’s timing and individual destiny. When we understand this, the morning prayer becomes not a burden but a battle cry, not self-negation but a declaration of war against a broken world that desperately needs what only we can provide.