For years, Viktor Frankl’s books occupied a cherished spot on my shelf. I would often recommend Man’s Search for Meaning to friends over coffee, explaining logotherapy’s principles with the confidence of someone who understood suffering—at least intellectually. That illusion shattered on October 7, 2023.
That morning, as sirens wailed across Israel, my 21-year-old son—a tank sergeant with an infectious laugh and dreams for the future, like so many young Israelis—was killed defending our southern border. In an instant, all my academic knowledge about grief crumbled. The theories I had taught in lecture halls suddenly felt hollow, written in a language I no longer recognized.
“How could a concentration camp survivor speak about meaning?” I found myself wondering in the small hours, staring at photos of my smiling son, forever frozen at 21. “How can I, having buried my child, possibly find meaning in this unjust world?” These questions echoed not just in my home, but in hundreds of Israeli living rooms left with similar gaping wounds.
Returning to Frankl’s work with new eyes
As we approach March 2025—marking 120 years since Frankl’s birth—I find myself returning to his work with new eyes. The psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz after losing his parents, brother, and wife developed a therapeutic approach centered on finding meaning even in the most unbearable suffering. Today, his ideas pulse with renewed urgency through our wounded nation.
Frankl’s “tragic triad”—pain, guilt, and death—has shifted from academic concept to daily reality. The searing pain of absence. The whispered guilt: “Why him?” The disorienting presence of death that changes how others see you, speak to you—or avoid you altogether.
A week after the funeral, I forced myself back to work. Through a chance encounter with Professor Tami Ronen in a university corridor, I found myself joining a logotherapy study group led by Professor Pninit Russo-Netzer. The synchronicity felt like my son’s gentle nudge from somewhere beyond.
Among Frankl’s many insights from the camps, one feels especially prophetic now: prisoners who maintained a purpose—reuniting with loved ones, completing unfinished work—had markedly better chances of survival. The human spirit, he taught, can withstand almost anything if anchored to meaning.
Before October 7, I would casually reference the “existential vacuum”—that inner emptiness Frankl believed was endemic to modern society. Today, I see that vacuum in its rawest form when speaking with other bereaved families. Yet alongside the emptiness, I witness something extraordinary: Israelis, living under constant existential threat, finding ways to thread meaning into new patterns of living.
Parents establish foundations in their children’s names. Siblings complete degrees their brothers or sisters never got the chance to finish. Communities create memorial spaces that somehow manage to nourish the living.
I caution myself, and others, against romanticizing this suffering. Frankl never claimed suffering was necessary for meaning—only that meaning could be found even there, in the darkest places.
My first meaningful conversation after returning to work was with a colleague who had lost his brother years earlier. We discussed Frankl’s distinction between freedom from and freedom for. Israel was founded to give Jews freedom from persecution. But today, we face deeper questions: Freedom for what purpose? What kind of society are we building? What values sustain us?
The events of October 7 revealed extraordinary courage in ordinary people—young men and women often dismissed as apathetic or self-absorbed. As Frankl wrote of his time in the camps, “Some behaved like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one he actualizes depends on decisions, not on conditions.”
When I feel lost, I return to Frankl’s words: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” I cannot bring my son back. But I can choose how I carry his memory—by loving more fully, guiding my other children, writing his story, and creating spaces where his absence becomes a different kind of presence.
This, to me, is the freedom Frankl described—not freedom from suffering, but the freedom to choose our response to it.
As we mark Frankl’s 120th birthday amidst ongoing global upheaval, his message transcends psychology. It becomes a guide for survival, resilience, and hope. The search for meaning is not a philosophical luxury. It is essential medicine.
And in this search, Viktor Frankl walks beside us—a quiet, steady guide who mapped the territory of suffering and discovered paths through it.
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