By Betzy Lynch in La Jolla, California
As this week of Purim celebrations came to a close, I had the pleasure of taking part in one of the San Diego Center for Jewish Culture’s more delightful traditions: Shabbat Shakespeare. The evening pairs a Shabbat dinner with scenes from Shakespeare performed by the talented actors of JCompany Youth Theatre. This year’s selection was As You Like It.
For those unfamiliar with the play, As You Like It is a romantic comedy about exile, disguise, love, and self-discovery. The story begins when Duke Senior is banished by his brother and retreats to the Forest of Arden. His daughter Rosalind is later exiled as well and disguises herself as a young man named Ganymede, traveling to the forest with her cousin Celia. There they encounter a colorful cast of characters, including the famously melancholy philosopher Jaques, and a series of tangled romances. Through disguises, mistaken identities, and playful lessons about love, misunderstandings are untangled. In the end, identities are revealed, conflicts resolved, and several couples married, restoring harmony between court and forest.
As You Like It also contains one of Shakespeare’s most quoted reflections on life:
“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts.”
When the actor portraying Jaques skillfully delivered this famous monologue, I found myself drawn not just to the opening lines, but to the deeper passage that follows. Jaques goes on to describe the seven stages of life, from the helpless infant to the aging elder, each phase another role we play as we move across the stage of time.
It is a striking metaphor. Life as theater. Each of us entering, performing our parts, and eventually exiting the stage.
But it also raises a question: If the world truly is a stage, are we paying attention to the role we have been given to play?
Jewish tradition offers a remarkably similar insight.
Rabbi Meshulam Zusya of Anipoli, an early Hasidic master of the eighteenth century and a disciple of the Maggid of Mezeritch, once told his students: “In the world to come they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
It is a deceptively simple teaching. We are not judged against someone else’s greatness. We are asked whether we lived into the unique possibility of our own soul.
Shakespeare and Rabbi Zusya lived more than a century apart and in very different worlds, yet together they illuminate a deeply Jewish idea: tafkid, the belief that each soul enters the world with a particular purpose. But tafkid is not a single assignment given once and for all. It evolves as our lives unfold. Just as Jaques describes different roles across the stages of life, Judaism recognizes that our purpose changes as we change.
In childhood, our role is discovery. A child’s tafkid is to learn, to explore, to ask questions, to discover their gifts, and to absorb the values of the world around them. Ideally, childhood is not yet about achievement, but it is about possibility. The danger in those years is comparison. When children begin measuring themselves too quickly against others, they can lose sight of their own emerging voice.
The task of youth is not to be someone else. It is to begin the long process of becoming oneself.
As life progresses into adolescence and early adulthood, the role begins to shift. Strength grows, responsibility expands, and the question becomes not only Who am I? but also What will I do with what I have been given?
Adulthood often brings the work of building: families, careers, and communities. People raise children, guide institutions, support friends and strangers, and struggle toward justice in a complicated world. And yet Rabbi Zusya’s warning remains relevant here as well. In a culture that constantly encourages comparison, it is easy to measure our lives against someone else’s success.
But tafkid asks different questions: Am I living according to my gifts? Am I using what I have been given to serve others?
Later in life, the role shifts once again. Jewish tradition holds the later years in deep esteem. With time comes perspective. Experience softens certainty and deepens understanding. The tafkid of later life often moves from striving to guiding, from building the story to helping others understand it.
Elders mentor. They tell stories. They transmit values. They help younger generations see beyond the immediate moment to the larger arc of life. In this sense, the later chapters of life allow a person to become something like a narrator, someone who can step back and interpret the drama that once seemed so overwhelming while it was unfolding.
Rabbi Zusya’s teaching is often understood as a call to individuality. But perhaps it is also something more subtle: an invitation to inhabit each stage of life faithfully.
As Shabbat fades, grasp one more moment of reflection and try to imagine that when we reach the end of our play, could the question waiting for us in the world to come sound something more like this:
When you were young, did you grow?
When you were strong, did you serve?
When you were wise, did you guide?
And through all those scenes, were you truly yourself?
I am so grateful for the profound responsibility and privilege we share at the JCC: helping each person who chooses our community discover their tafkid, not just once, but at every age and every stage of life.
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Betzy Lynch is the CEO of the Lawrence Family JCC.