The Quest for a Meaningful Life

How do we understand our role in this world and how do we find meaning? Is happiness the goal of life?

Our reflection on the importance of giving to others begins with that most fundamental question of how we understand our purpose of being in this world.

In this session, we will discuss the concept of simcha and Judaism’s countercultural message for our consumer society.

1. Darren McMahon, The Pursuit of Happiness in Perspective

Today, when not only Protestants, but Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims regularly offer their faiths in America as effective means to earthly happiness, it is more difficult still to discern religion’s main object. In a sense, they too serve the greatest of the modern gods, the most ultimate of ultimate ends: the god of good feeling, who now reigns here below.

2. Talmud, Sanhedrin 99b

Whoever commits adultery with a woman lacks understanding. Resh Lakish said: This alludes to one who studies the Torah at [irregular] intervals

3. Talmud, Arachin 10

Rabbi Abbahu said, Is it seemly for the King to be sitting on His Throne of Judgment, with the Books of Life and Death open before Him, while the people sing joyful praises to Him?

4. Maimonides, Laws of Megilla and Chanukah

However, we do not recite Hallel on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as they are days of return and awe and fear, not days of excessive happiness.

5. Deuteronomy 16:14-15

You shall rejoice on your festival – you, your daughter, your son, your slave, your maidservant, the Levite, the proselyte, the orphan and the widow who are in your cities. A seven day period shall you celebrate to Hashem, your God, in the place that Hashem, your God, will choose, for Hashem will have blessed you in all your crop and in all your handiwork, and you shall be joyous.

6. Key to Happiness: Give Away Money, Live Science

It doen’t surprise me at all that people find giving money away very rewarding,” Aaron Ahuvia, associate professor of marketing at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, explained. “People spend a lot of money to make their lives feel meaningful, significant and important. When you give away money you are making that same kind of purchase, only you are doing it in a more effective way.” He added, “What you’re really trying to buy is meaning to life.

7. Martin Seligman

To the extent that young people now find it hard to take seriously their relationship with God…or to be part of a large and abiding family, they will find it very difficult to find meaning in life. To put it another way, the self is a very poor site for finding meaning.

8. Victor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p.133

[M]an is responsible and must actualise the potential meaning of his life… The more one forgets himself – by giving himself to a cause to serve or a person to love – the more human he is and the more he actualises himself. What is called self-actualisation is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualisation is only possible as a side effect of self-transcendence.

9. Victor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, xvi-xvii

I remember my dilemma in a concentration camp when faced with a man and a woman who were close to suicide; both had told me that they expected nothing more from life. I asked both my fellow prisoners whether the question was really what we expected from life. Was it not, rather, what life was expecting from us? I suggested that life was awaiting something from them. In fact the woman was being awaited by her child abroad, and the man had a series of books which he had begun to write and publish but had not yet finished.

10. Victor Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, p.35

For as soon as we lend our minds to the essence of human responsibility, we cannot forbear to shudder; there is something fearful about man’s responsibility. But at the same time something glorious! It is fearful to know that at this moment we bear the responsibility for the next, that every deision from the smallest to the largest is a decision for all eternity, that at every moment we bring to reality – or miss – a possibility that exists only for the particular moment.

11. Megillat Esther 8:16

For the Jews, there was light and happiness (simcha) and joy (sasson) and honour.

12. Vilna Gaon’s commentary to Esther 8:16

Happiness is moving forward to reach an objective… and joy is afterwards, when one has already achieved the objective and feels joy in his heart.

The Jewish Challenge to Human Rights

Are Jewish perspectives on social responsibility compelling? Do they make a difference to the way in which we contribute to society and seek to enhance the lives of others?

In this session we will focus on the Jewish emphasis on responsibilities over rights and the imperative to challenge the world-that-is in the name of the world-that-should-be.

1. Daniel Bell, Reflections on Jewish Identity, Commentary

But if life is not present for me, if in the design of the universe “Man is like unto a breath,” as the Bible puts it, then why fight at all against any injustice or evil? Orthodoxy leads to quietism; suffering is the badge, one accepts it as the mark of fate. One of the more disquieting facts about Jewish behavior in the death camps, as a number of writers have remarked, was the extreme passivity of the people. We know about the ways in which hunger, fright, privation, can depersonalize an individual. But the fatalism that comes out of the religious tradition violates one’s conception of a personal autonomy. A modern man wants to believe that some portion of the universe does exist for him, in the here and now. The Orthodox view of Judaism is too constricted for such a man to feel at home in.

2. Karl Marx

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

3. Shemot Rabba 31:14

Nothing is harder to bear than poverty for one who is crushed by poverty is like one to whom all troubles of the world cling and upon whom all the curses in Deuteronomy have descended. If all the troubles were places on one scale and poverty on the other, poverty would outweigh them all.

4. Midrash Tanchuma

Once the waters had abated, Noah should have left the ark. However, Noah said to himself, “I entered with God’s permission, as it says, ‘Go into the ark’ (7:1). Shall I now leave without permission?” The Holy One Blessed Be He said to him, “Is it permission then that you are seeking? Very well, then, here is permission,” as it is said [Then God said to Noah] “Come out of the ark” (8:17).Rabbi Yehuda bar Ilai said: If I had been there I would have broken down the ark and taken myself out.

5. Bereshit 18:17-19; 23-25

God said, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am going to do? Abraham is about to become a great and mighty nation, and through him all the nations of the world will be blessed. I have given him special attention so he will command his children and his household after him, and they will keep God’s way, doing charity and justice. God will then bring about for Abraham everything He promised…He came forward and said, ‘Will you actually wipe away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are 50 righteous people in the city. Would you still destroy it, and not spare the place for the sake of the 50 righteous people inside it? It would be sacrilege to ascribe such an act to You – to kill the righteous with the wicked, letting the righteous and the wicked fare alike. Shall the whole world’s Judge not act justly?

6. Midrash Tanchuma

The wicked tyrant Rufus once asked Rabbi Akiva, ‘Which are more pleasing, the works of God or the works of human beings?’ Rabbi Akiva replied, ‘The works of human beings.’ Rufus asked, ‘Behold, the heaven and the earth – can human beings make anything like them?’ Rabbi Akiva replied, ‘Do not bring an argument from things which are altogether beyond human capacity. Speak only of things human beings can do.’ Rufus replied, ‘Why do you circumcise your children?’ Rabbi Akiva said, ‘I knew this was the point of your question. That is why I pre-empted you and said that the works of human beings are more pleasing than those of God.’ Rabbi Akiva then brought out ears of wheat and cakes and said, ‘These are the work of God and these are the work of human beings. Are the cakes not more agreeable than the ears of wheat?’

7. Rene Cassin, From the Ten Commandments to the Rights of Man

Thoroughly influenced as she was by the knowledge of both the American (1778) and the French (1789) Declarations of Human Rights which pass in silence over the duties, and dearly attached as she was to the principles of individual liberty which had just achieved the upper hand at such cost over the racial and totalitarian doctrines of Hitlerism and Fascism, Mrs. Roosevelt objected vehemently to the idea of setting forth anything but the rights of man. Animated by the same spirit, she successfully argued in favour of starting off each article of the new Declaration with the word “Man,” endowed with the particular Right mentioned in that article.

8. Irwin Cotler, I am Jewish

The Pirkei Avot instructed: Where people avert their eyes from evil, our responsibility must be to confront it – to stand up and be counted – which later found expression, I suspect, in my advocacy on behalf of oppressed Jews, and, indeed, oppressed peoples; and to write of a Duty to Protect under International Humanitarian Law, and the need for humanitarian intervention in the Balkans, Rwanda, east Timor and the like…[The mitzvah of Pidyon shevuyim (freeing captives) is] –probably the single most important value accounting for my defence of political prisoners over the years.

9. Midrash, Noach

A man who had bought a house of another found in its precincts a treasure-trove, which he took back to the seller, saying: ‘This is yours; I bought the house only, and not what may be found in it.’ The other, in refusing to accept the proffered treasure, argued that he sold the house, and the buyer was the rightful owner of all that might be found in it. The judge gave his decision that the son of the purchaser of the house should marry the daughter of the seller, and the young couple should receive the treasure as a dowry. As the onlooking Alexander of Macedon expressed his wonder at and approval of the wise verdict, he was asked by the judge how a similar suit would be decided in his own country. ‘In my country,’ replied Alexander, ‘the treasure would be taken by the Crown, and both parties would be deterred by the threat of death from laying any claim to it.

10. Rambam Laws of Lending and Borrowing 1:1

It is a positive mitzvah to lend to the poor, as it is said, “You should lend money to my poor, the poor of your people.” One might have thought this was a discretionary act. But the Torah teaches, “You must open your hand and lend him sufficient for whatever he needs” (Deuteronomy 15:8).

11. Tur YD 247

You should not start thinking, “How can I possibly reduce my wealth by giving to the poor?!” Rather, you should understand that the wealth is not yours, but rather a trust that you must use to carry out the will of the One who has entrusted it to you.

12. Cecil Roth, Jewish Contribution to Civilization, p.251

With this tradition [of charity as justice] in the background it was natural that the Jews should have played a conspicuous part, once they were given the opportunity, in every modern humanitarian movement. Indeed, the western world owes a recognisable part of its charitable organisations and outlook – apart from individual benefactions and personal participation – to Jews.