On Tu Be’Shevat—the New Year for Trees, marking their renewed growth—HaRav Ginsburgh gave a class dedicated to psychological growth based in part on the writings of Viktor Frankl. What follows are some excerpts from the three-hour long class. The full transcript can be found on: www.patreon.com/posts/122430648
From Hearing to Meaning
We will begin our discussion tonight with the meaning of “meaning,” and particularly the role of meaning in life. To understand meaning, we may begin with the first word of the quintessential verse of Jewish faith, the Shema. The first word—shema (עַמְׁש)—literally means “hear” or “listen,” but it stems from the same root as “meaning” (תּעוָמְׁשַמ). There are commentaries that say that Moses wanted to say “See,” but the generation was not ready for it. Only in the future, when the Mashiach comes will we be able to “see eye to eye.” But other sources say that to say “hear” is greater than saying “see.”
In Chasidic tradition, “hear” is usually explained to mean derher, a Yiddish word that refers to inner hearing in the heart. Sometimes, this is referred to as the “point of truth” in a person’s heart. But “meaning” is something new. It stems from a word used by the sages, עַמְׁשַמ. Thus, meaning is not hearing physically in the ear and it is not derher—hearing in the heart. Meaning is, if anywhere, in the mind. It has some advantages even over the derher in the heart. So we have here three levels of “hearing”:
- hearing in the mind—meaning
- hearing in the heart—derher
- physical hearing—sound
Let us delve more deeply into this first model.
To hear exactly what is being said, we need to be an empty vessel. This is what Rashi writes regarding Betzalel who was able to hear what God said to Moses, even though he was not there. To listen well, I need to have a sense of submission in my psyche. This ultimately allows me to understand one thing from another (רָבָּ דְךֹוּתִר מָבָּד)—the main ability of the sefirah of understanding.
On top of the ability to hear, which is a product of submission in the psyche, there is a property of hearing described as, “the ear discerns between words [or arguments]” (ןָחְבִּין תִּלִן מֶזֹא). There is what the ear hears, and there is what one discerns from what one hears with one’s ear. Understanding (הָינִּב) is related to the word for “between” (יןֵּב). In this verse, discerning refers to the ability to tell the difference between what is true and what is false. This is already an example of separation in the psyche. The inner hearing that is in the heart constitutes the ability to understand by telling the difference between true and false. The heart separates between true and false.
But there is another even deeper type of hearing: understanding the meaning of what is said. First, I hear and understand the intent of what is being said, but I do not yet understand the full meaning of what I heard. To understand the meaning of what was said means to know the goal, the purpose of what was said. It is also about understanding the context of what was being said. Hearing meaning involves my complete world-view. To understand meaning is to see how what was said aligns with the purpose of my life, the purpose for which I was created.
So these three stages: to hear, to understand, and then to get the meaning. The last stage is really something recent, from the past two generations or so. The final stage of meaning is a type of sweetening. The full process then is that first a person has to empty himself in submission, then he mulls it over and understands it internally, that is the separation, and finally, he gets the meaning which is the sweetening.
Let’s present the complete model, our first for tonight:
- hearing in the mind—meaning—sweetening—relating what was said to purpose of life
- hearing in the heart—derher—separation—discerning between true and false
- physical hearing—sound—submission—understanding one thing from another
Meaning as Motivation
In modern philosophy, many philosophers, almost all of whom are Jewish, compare the concept of “meaning” (תּעוָמְׁשַמ) with truth. They go together. But “truth” it is not exactly the same as “meaning.” There are in general 5 different definitions of what truth is in today’s philosophy. There is a third word, which is also different: “content” (תוכן). There are many theories of content, beginning with the theory presented by Viktor Frankl whose work the Lubavitcher Rebbe liked very much.
Frankl’s most popular book, which sold 16 million copies worldwide, is Man’s Search for Meaning. He argues that the driving force in our life is our search for meaning. Before him there were two other Viennese psychologists: Freud and Adler who argued differently. Freud believed that the main motivator for human beings is pleasure. Freud’s greatest students left him in the end. Apart from Jung who was not Jewish, all of his disciples were Jewish. Alfred Adler too went from being one of the founders of the psychoanalytic movement under Freud to being one of the first to part ways with him. For Adler, the motivation in life is power, social power, political power, etc. But for Frankl the true motivation is meaning.
- main motivation in life
- Viktor Frankl—meaning
- Alfred Adler—power
- Sigmund Freud—pleasure
All three were Jews, and once again, the Lubavitcher Rebbe most strongly identified with Frankl and the centrality of meaning in life.
Truth, Content, and Meaning
So now we have three words that apply to any statement. There is the content of the statement, its meaning, and its truth. To better understand the difference between these three dimensions of a statement or proposition, let’s see how they relate to our mind.
Content relates to the conscious mind. When we are considering the content of a statement, we need to analyze it in a way that we can fully understand it. To do so we use our conscious mind. But to uncover the meaning of a statement or proposition, we need to take into consideration our unconscious. The unconscious is both that which is referred to as the sub-conscious, and what is referred to in Chasidut as the super-conscious (usually designated as the crown). Understanding the meaning that a certain proposition has for me requires that I be aware of my unconscious mind, including both its sub and super-conscious aspects. It is not enough to analyze it using my revealed, conscious mind. The truth of a statement, which we will call the “point of truth” that I find in the statement is higher than both its content and its meaning. The truth of a statement is its source within the essence of my unconscious.
Put another way: truth is at the highest level. It resides entirely in my unconscious. Meaning is acquired when I begin to internalize the truth of a statement and make it applicable to my life. Thus, the truth gives rise to meaning in my life; it is the projection of the unconscious onto the conscious mind. After that, whatever is conscious should be studied for its content. The Rebbe very much liked this word “content” (תוכן). He wanted people to be filled with content, which suggests that he wanted people to go through this process from truth, to meaning, to content.
- truth—unconscious
- meaning—projection of unconscious on conscious mind
- content—conscious mind
Viktor Frankl
Now let’s discuss Viktor Frankl. He was a Holocaust survivor. He was in concentration camps for 3 years, where all his family, including his pregnant first wife, were murdered. He had one sister that was able to flee to Australia. When he got out of the camps, he continued his career at the University of Vienna. He was the head of the department, but all the students were followers of Freud. They didn’t attend his lectures. He was so in despair that he decided to leave Vienna and move to Australia to be with his sister. Just as he was filling in the immigration papers to Australia, after a few weeks that he hadn’t come to work, some woman appears at his door. She says, “I have a message for you from the Lubavitcher Rebbe,” whom Frankl knew nothing of. He was not in a good mood and did not receive her kindly. Nonetheless, she told him that the Rebbe’s message was that he should not despair, keep working, and eventually your method will prevail. When he heard this, he burst into tears. He didn’t even know who the Lubavitcher Rebbe was. He told this woman, who later became a friend of the family, that he was about to leave everything behind, but now that he heard this from the Rebbe, he decided to reassess and he eventually became the founder of Positive Psychology, the most rectified form of psychology in our generation.
There are three letters in which the Rebbe mentions him. One is to a famous neurologist in the US. He writes that he is surprised and pained that Frankl’s method has not been publicized enough. Today it is very popular, but back then it was not yet. Then there is a second letter in which the Rebbe commends the one psychologist who had the boldness to go against Freud and all those that follow him and then he mentions him.
There is a third letter in which the Rebbe answers someone who thought that the only type of psychology was Freud’s. But the Rebbe writes that this is not true. His greatest students went against him. He mentions Jung and Adler. And then mentions Frankl’s psychology. So, these are three testaments to how much the Rebbe admired Frankl’s work.
Frankl’s Notion of God
Regarding every psychologist, one might inquire whether they believe in God or not. Frankl did not like organized religion. Again, the Rebbe really advocated for his psychology and very much wanted it to spread around the world. After many years, the Chabad Shaliach to Vienna, Rabbi Biderman, was able to speak to Frankl despite the difficulty. He wanted to speak to him because it turned out that every year Frankl sent a donation to Chabad in Vienna.
What did Frankl believe in? He said that a God who demands from everyone that they believe in Him is a small God for him. In his first marriage he was married to a Jewish woman who was killed in the Holocaust. When he remarried, it was with a non-Jewish woman, a Christian woman who put a large cross in their home. It was only when he passed away at the age of 92, that she discovered that every day he would don tefillin and pray by heart whatever he remembered. He did the same when traveling, all in secret.
Frankl believed in God, but not the God of organized religion. For him God is either the ultimate meaning or God is beyond meaning; this hints to the “One of truth” (תֶמֱאָד הָחֶא) that is beyond all, or as he calls him meta-meaning (same as ultimate meaning).
To make some sense of this notion of God as meta-meaning, let us say that when God is described as meta-meaning, that corresponds to the level of the soul known as chayah, the living-one of the soul. The chayah “touches and does not touch” the mind. It is constantly hovering over the mind (יֵּטַא מָלְי וֵּטַמ).
But when he refers to a God who is beyond meaning, then he is relating to the highest part of the soul, the yechidah. It is a part of the super-conscious that does not even touch upon the mind. Of course, we cannot remain in doubt because of his statement that a God who demands to be believed in is a small God. The answer to his claim, and he would certainly agree with this, is that God is the essence of all good. What he doesn’t like to use our terminology is that God become some kind of object. So, he says that if God is some kind of object that everyone is required to believe in, he doesn’t want any part of it. He wants a personal God, a God who is entirely good. There is a well known dispute whether we have a commandment to believe in God or not. Maimonides writes that faith in God needs to be turned into knowledge of God. This is meta-meaning. But others argue that you cannot make faith a commandment. You can’t command someone to have faith. The same is asked about “You shall love Havayah your God,” how can you command someone to love. Either you do or you do not. Faith, like love, is something spontaneous from the soul. The Ba’al Shem Tov answered this question by saying that the commandment is not about having faith, but to reflect upon faith, upon God. So if I would now come to Frankl and tell him that even if we have a commandment to have faith it is for no other reason than that God wants you to have good. Not that he wants to force himself upon you.
Post Traumatic Growth
We turn to another very important topic: post traumatic growth. This is perhaps the topic that made him popular around the world. He lost his entire family including his young wife in the Holocaust and he came out of it with spiritual growth. Today there are many studies about people who have experienced trauma but attest to having had experienced post traumatic growth. There are between 30 and 70 percent who state this as their experience. It turns out that the greater the trauma the greater the growth.
We will connect this with the verse said about Mashiach: “Tzemach is his name and from underneath himself he will grow” (חָמְצִיו יָּתְחַּתִמּ וֹמוְׁח שַמֶצ). We explain now that his growth comes from his trauma. We recently said that the world understands Mashiach as some kind of tragic figure, which in the Bible begins with the figure of the Tammuz. Since this is the way that people understand Mashiach and we want the entire world to await the Mashiach, then we need to explain that indeed the Mashiach is someone who goes through such trauma and then experiences growth from it. The Zohar says that anyone who descends from his level, it is likened to death.
So now we have 3 different aspects to Frankl’s psychology: 1) there is a God who is beyond meaning, 2) that man is motivated by his search for meaning, 3) how a person deals with trauma—this is the most important essence of psychology. When a person experiences growth after trauma, he is able to serve God in a new way. In the beginning there is darkness and then there is light. The Mashiach displays this. This is the Rebbe’s Messianic formula of lights of chaos within rectified vessels. The chaotic lights are those that experienced shattering.
The Historical Development of Anxiety
We turn now to another important topic: Anxiety. In Hebrew, we can translate “anxiety” as either הָדָרֲח, which we will translate as “dread,” or הָגָאְּד, which we will translate back to English as “worry.” There are existential anxieties. An anxiety is a sudden onset acute attack. But “worry” (הָגָאְּד) is ongoing; it is a permanent state. Now, worry can be something positive, like when we say that the secrets of the Torah are only revealed to one whose heart worries within. There can be many different subjects for worry. One might worry about why Mashiach has not come, why there is evil in the world.
In general thought, it is said that there are 3 existential worries, these are also historical: the most natural, primal worry of humanity is death. Anxiety that comes out of the innate fear of death, is called anxiety from non-being: I am afraid that I will cease to exist.
After the development of organized religion there appeared a new type of worry or anxiety called guilt, a guilt complex. States and churches take advantage of this anxiety. In Chasidut we say that this could be a very positive force too. The greatest tzaddikim viewed themselves as the worst person. They were also encouraged to work harder by their sense of non-being.
The third anxiety is emptiness. This is the anxiety that our generation has. Our generation is not afraid of death or from guilt, but rather that we will not have meaning. This of course is Frankl’s understanding.
- intellectual (לָכְּׂשֻמ)—anxiety of meaninglessness
- emotional (ׁשָּגְרֻמ)—anxiety because of guilt
- habitual/innate (עָּבְטֻמ)—anxiety of non-being (death)
Now, the existential anxiety of not having meaning comes from being, not from non-being. In fact, in some ways it is even the opposite from the anxiety of non-being, because it is an anxiety that my being has no meaning.
Historically, there has been a great elevation in this respect. Still, it doesn’t weaken the level of anxiety. On the contrary the last one, meaninglessness might be much worse than the anxiety of non-being.
How do these three existential anxieties appear in contemporary Jewish life? The situation in the Jewish world and particularly in the Land of Israel is such that these anxieties prevent us, collectively, from being able to fully win against our enemies. We established a state despite the opposition of our neighbors. This leads to an existential fear, worry, and anxiety—particularly among strong Zionists—that in just a moment the state will be destroyed, it will die. This is truly a reflection of the fear of death—in this case, the demise of the most precious thing in your eyes: the existence of the Jewish people as a people, in your view.
Regarding guilt, there is something even deeper. The main source of personal guilt is Christianity, which uses the burden of guilt to control its followers. For Jews, the main guilt is not so much personal guilt, but the guilt of “because of our sins we were exiled from our land,” not my personal sins but our collective sins. So we have collective guilt; we have anxiety that we are "a guilty nation." Essentially, this is a copy, a reflection, of what the nations say about us. When did this reach its peak of sharpness? During the Holocaust, in fact. As is known, the psychology of many people during the Holocaust was that the victim justifies the aggressor. These two anxieties together already prevent us from acting as we should; they neutralize and cancel our ability to win fully.
The third factor, the main existential anxiety of our generation, emptiness makes us feel that the effort to win is not worth it, since nothing is really worth it. We sense that reality is empty of meaning. This is a worry, which neutralizes the strength to go all the way, because the effort is not worth it. This is just an example of how to understand our lack of ability to win our wars because of these 3 existential anxieties.
1. Rashi on Exodus 38:22.
2. Job 12:11.
3. Viktor Frankl can also be identified as the precursor to the modern development of Positive Psychology.
4. Class given on eve of 4th of Shevat, this year.
