If someone has an incurable illness, is his life meaningless? If he is mentally deficient, is he nothing but a burden on society? What should we say about the elderly, who are no longer “productive”? What should our attitude be towards someone who is suicidal, who says he has considered the options and is free to choose suicide?
When a certain suicidal patient was declared mentally sound and released from hospital, Frankl considered him to be mentally sound but “spiritually astray,” and intercepted him as he was leaving the hospital. Frankl discussed with him the idea that human freedom is not freedom “from” but freedom “to” – freedom to responsibility. The man subsequently shifted his attitude about the value of his life.
Frankl was successful with suicidal patients because he didn’t “buy” their arguments that life is worthless. He posited that life is meaningful under every circumstance. (The Doctor and the Soul, p. 45-52)
It is no accident that today my attention was brought to an article relevant to this topic, in the Shabbat section of the newspaper Makor Rishon, January 4, 2013.
Ten years after the terrorist incident at Otniel Yeshiva, where four students were murdered, Yaakov Nagen contemplates what went on there.
The Talmud records a strange controversy: “The rabbis deliberated: For two and a half years, the house of Shamai and the house of Hillel argued. These said ‘It is preferable for man not to have been created than to have been created’ and these said ‘It is preferable for man to have been created than not to have been created.’ They concluded: It is preferable for man not to have been created than to have been created.” (Eruvin 13b)
The Talmud’s conclusion sounds pessimistic. However, Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbitza in his book Mei Shiloach explains that the word “preferable” in the sentence, noach, actually means “comfortable.” The place we came from and the place to which we will return as a disembodied soul is, in fact more comfortable than this world.
Every day, life presents us with challenges, and we choose. Sometimes we are aware of our choices. Often we are not even aware that we have come to a crossroads.
These choices manifest as questions such as: “Should I help someone else? Should I take responsibility? Should I invest in what is important in life? Should I change?”
These choices are usually not between doing good and bad but between doing good and doing what’s comfortable.
The awareness that the meaning of life is the will to do good and not the will to comfort can help us bring to awareness the meaning of the challenge and to make the right choices.
The two impulses in man are usually translated as the impulse for good and the impulse for bad. By defining it this way there is a danger that we will think it’s enough to refrain from wrongdoing, but this is not enough.
To actualize what we’re here for, we have to choose to do good, and that involves restraining the impulse to do what’s comfortable. This weakness is apparent in society as well.
Those people who have to struggle with pain and suffering understand from personal experience the statement: “It is preferable for man not to have been created than to have been created,” and they lose their interest in living.
Yet this feeling does not have to be the end of the story. Every person has the ability to continue to live with the understanding that he has to search for the good, to seek out what makes life satisfying and meaningful, and by so doing to overcome life’s difficulties.
A person has to strive to overcome and not succumb to the desire to give up. Despair is an expression of the “impulse for comfort.” At those times a person has to seek what is good and meaningful in life. Victory in the struggle between the “good” and the “comfortable” depends on us.
The writer relates that a certain widow told him that in the days after her husband was murdered that she could not wake up in the morning and say, “Thank you God, for giving me life.” – She didn’t want to live. She eventually understood that the fact that she did not die is a sign that God chose for her to live. This understanding allowed her to look for tasks that she can do in the world that would weave a tapestry of meaning into her life.
David Nagen writes, “Years after the terrorist incident, I stood at the grave of Noam Apter in Shilo and I understood for the first time that the teaching of ‘the good and the comfortable’ is the story of the attack in Otniel. When the terrorists started shooting [in the kitchen], the students shut and locked the door dividing between the kitchen and the dining hall, situated just a few meters distance from the circle of dancing students. Locking the door blocked the terrorists and gave the rest of the students time to organize themselves and return fire. In the last moments of their lives these [four] students chose the good over the comfortable, locked the door, and saved their friends.”