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.