We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. (Dr. Viktor Frankl)In the forward to Dr. Viktor Frankl’s bestseller, Man’s Search For Meaning, Rabbi Harold S. Kushner writes, “Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as (Dr. Sigmund) Freud believed, or a quest for power, as (Dr.) Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning. The greatest task for any person is to find meaning in his or her life. Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. Suffering, in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.”
Frankl survived Auschwitz but lost his entire family in the concentration camps. Despite suffering deprivations and conditions that most of us cannot imagine, he believed that the salvation of man was “through love and in love” and refused to let his extreme circumstances change his hopeful outlook and demeanor. In his book, he quotes Friedrich Nietzsche: “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker.” (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger) and “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’.”
Frankl said it does not matter what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us. He suggested that we stop asking the “meaning” of life and instead think of ourselves as those being “questioned by life.” “Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct,” he said.
Frankl said that at any moment, man must decide, for better or worse, what will be the monument of his existence, and he then gives us a method by which we can consistently make good choices for ourselves, which he calls “the essence of existence”: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now. It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man’s sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended. Such a precept confronts him with life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself.”
Finally, Frankl says, “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them … The crowning experience of all for the homecoming man (i.e., the former prisoner in concentration camps) is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore – except his God.
“I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space."
Frankl survived Auschwitz but lost his entire family in the concentration camps. Despite suffering deprivations and conditions that most of us cannot imagine, he believed that the salvation of man was “through love and in love” and refused to let his extreme circumstances change his hopeful outlook and demeanor. In his book, he quotes Friedrich Nietzsche: “Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker.” (That which does not kill me, makes me stronger) and “He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear almost any ‘how’.”
Frankl said it does not matter what we expect from life, but rather what life expects from us. He suggested that we stop asking the “meaning” of life and instead think of ourselves as those being “questioned by life.” “Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right conduct,” he said.
Frankl said that at any moment, man must decide, for better or worse, what will be the monument of his existence, and he then gives us a method by which we can consistently make good choices for ourselves, which he calls “the essence of existence”: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now. It seems to me that there is nothing which would stimulate a man’s sense of responsibleness more than this maxim, which invites him to imagine first that the present is past and, second, that the past may yet be changed and amended. Such a precept confronts him with life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself.”
Finally, Frankl says, “No one has the right to do wrong, not even if wrong has been done to them … The crowning experience of all for the homecoming man (i.e., the former prisoner in concentration camps) is the wonderful feeling that, after all he has suffered, there is nothing he need fear anymore – except his God.
“I called to the Lord from my narrow prison and He answered me in the freedom of space."
Et lux in tenebris lucet ... (and the light shineth in the darkness.)
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