Happiness vs. Meaning
Rabbi Noam Raucher (Sukkot 2021)
This past week my students learned about Sukkot and the nature of temporary things verses permanent things. This reflection is dedicated to them.
In 1941 Viktor Frankl, a prominent Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist in Vienna was faced with a decision that would change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl applied for a visa to America which was granted that same year. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first.
Frankl knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. And yet, as a newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety. In America he could distinguish himself even further in his field.
I’m curious, for anyone reading this, if you were in Frankl’s shoes, would you stay with your family, or leave for America?
In her biography of Frankl, Anna Redsand recounts that he was at a loss for what to do. He repeatedly asked himself, “Should I leave my parents behind?… Should I say goodbye and leave them to their fate?” Where does my responsibility lie?
When he returned home, he found the answer. A piece of marble was lying on the table. His father explained that it was from the rubble of one of the nearby synagogues that the Nazis had destroyed. The marble contained the fragment of one of the Ten Commandments — the one about honoring your father and your mother. With that, Frankl decided to stay in Vienna and forgo whatever opportunities for safety and career advancement awaited him in the United States. He decided to put aside his individual pursuits to serve his family and, later, other inmates in the camps.
In September 1942, he was arrested and transported to a concentration camp with his wife and parents. Three years later, when his camp was liberated, most of his family, including his pregnant wife, had perished.
But in his bestselling 1946 book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl concluded that the difference between those who had lived and those who had died — other than by being murdered by Nazis — came down to one thing: Meaning.
As he saw in the camps, those who found meaning- even in the most horrendous circumstances- were far more resilient to suffering than those who did not. He wrote, ”Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Frankl worked as a therapist in the camps. In his book he gives the example of two suicidal inmates he encountered there. Like many others in the camps, these two men were hopeless and thought that there was nothing more to expect from life, nothing to live for.
He writes: “In both cases, it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them.” For one man, it was his young child, who was then living in a foreign country. For the other, a scientist, who had a series of books that he needed to finish. Frankl adds:
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.”
The books emphasis on meaning seems to be at odds with our American culture, which is more interested in the pursuit of individual happiness than in the search for meaning. Think of that well known phrase in the Declaration of Independence about “undeniable” and “unalienable rights” to: “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
But Frankl, writing from the perspective of a European wrote, “it is a characteristic of American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’”
Research has shown that having purpose and meaning in life increases overall well-being and life satisfaction, improves mental and physical health, enhances resiliency, enhances self-esteem, and decreases the chances of depression. Apparently, the single-minded pursuit of happiness is ironically leaving people less happy. Frankl new that “It is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”
In the Journal of Positive psychology researcher from four different institutions demonstrated that leading a happy life is associated with being a “taker” while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a “giver.”
These researches write that: ”Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided”.
How do the happy life and the meaningful life differ? Happiness, they found, is about feeling good.
Most importantly from a social perspective, the pursuit of happiness is associated with selfish behavior.
One of these researchers, Kathleen Vohls concludes that “Happy people get a lot of joy from receiving benefits from others while people leading meaningful lives get a lot of joy from giving to others,”
In other words, meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants. People who have high meaning in their lives are more likely to help others in need. Vohls adds, “If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping others in need”.
So it seems that partly what we do as human beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it does not necessarily make us happy. Any parent, teacher, social or healthcare worker knows exactly what I’m talking about.
These researchers add: “Meaning is not only about transcending the self, but also about transcending the present moment. While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting.”
Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. “Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life.” That sounds like a very Jewish idea to me: When we recall our history, are we overwhelming happy about it, or do we search for meaning from it?
One last thought about the research. I’m not trying to convey that happiness is bad. It’s not. It’s a good thing and perfectly natural. It just represents a different set of priorities in life. Priorities that we all have, and that make us human. And as our research is showing, it’s certainly not the only thing in life worth striving for.
Sukkot, like human beings, possess a dual sensibility. Rabbi Jeffery Rubinstein points out that seen one way, it is the most joyous festival of the entire year, a time when the crops have been harvested, the storehouses are full, and thanks are given for the gift of sustenance. In the rabbinic liturgy, Sukkot is designated “the time of our rejoicing” zeman simchateinu, and the rabbis nostalgically recalled the temple celebrations that occurred at Sukkot as the happiest times when the entire people joyously celebrated in harmony.
But from another perspective, Sukkot is tinged with anxiety over the coming rains and uncertainty regarding the harvest of the following year. In this respect it resembles the “Days of Awe”, a season when fates are decided and one prays in fear and trembling for a favorable judgment. On Sukkot it is not the individual’s fate that is decided, as is the case on Yom Kippur, but the collective fortune of the community, which always depends on rain and on the fertility of the earth.
The sukkah itself also possesses a dual symbolism: One being everlasting divine shelter- God’s protection from the elements. While the temporary nature of the sukkah imparts a sense of the fragility of life, of human vulnerability, impermanence and mortality. In this respect one could say that both the festival and the sukkah point to two dimensions of human experience.
We know that our rituals and traditions are more than just rote performance. They exist to teach us lessons about life. Even though we are meant to burst out in celebration of our own happiness during this festival, we can also focus on how our practice should be used to help others.
The sukkah serves as a tool for ritual celebration and as an instrument for making meaning in our lives. It’s basic structure reminds us that sometimes all we need in life are basic things- that happiness is not derived from our material possessions. And at the same time it makes us empathetic to people who don’t get the choice of sleeping in basic housing, who are always residing in temporary shelters.
The sukkah places an expectation on us that we will take what we have learned from the experience inside it and use it to give back to others. Either in the security of basic needs, or in regularly showing kindness towards others.
Important as ever, we can also use the sukkah to help us sit in and find meaning in the discomfort from this ongoing pandemic. We all felt major shifts in our routine and ways of life when lock-down and quarantine first began. And many of us continue to wonder how much longer this whole pandemic will continue. How much longer will we need to wear masks? How often will we need to get vaccinated? How many boosters are necessary? All questions that remind us that we can’t get too comfortable yet with what’s going on. Dwelling in the sukkah should help us reflect on what it means to actually live in temporary state without definite walls or boundaries that we can enjoy. A state of being of non-permanence that holds us in our constant growth as spiritual beings.
Perhaps then, the search for happiness during a pandemic, will be seen as an exercise in futility, and the quest for meaning in the temporariness of life will become the prize that will allow happiness to ensue.
May we enjoy all that this temporary and ever-changing life has to offer.
