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A Serious Man: Finding Purpose & Meaning in a World with No Answers

For the month of July 2010, SWIVL recommend the film, A Serious Man.  A Serious Man tells the story about one person’s search for answers to existential questions about the purpose of life and its meaning.  In many ways the film it is a philosophical and theological wrestling match where history intersects with the future to determine the present.

A Serious Man is a modern day story of the biblical figure, Noah.  For Noah, storm clouds are on the horizon. A funnel cloud threatens to return creation to chaos. Apparently this is a fitting punishment for a society bathed in violence and bloodshed. We all know that Noah hearkens to God’s commands; he builds an ark and helps animals enter two by two. But who is Noah before the flood? What is the young Noah like?

In his book, Sages and Dreamers, Elie Wiesel, recipient, paints a picture of Noah as a character who leaves much to be desired. He never acts, he only reacts. He never aspires to grandeur; he is mired in routine. To paraphrase Jean Paul Sartre, he took great events and reduced them to small circumstances.

However, when the storm hits, Noah is all action. Ignoring the calamity around him, he builds an ark. Noah is responsible for his family; he cares for the animals and is committed to life. This is Noah at his best. He is selfless, devoted, and tireless.

A Serious Man reminds us that though we may kick and scream, though we may protest or try to hide, there are times when despite our best effort, we cannot stop or change the future. In those instances, rather than holding back the flood, we must use our energy to find a new sense of purpose – to respond to problems when seemingly no solution exists. 

This is the lesson that the main character in A Serious Man must learn.  Although life may be disorienting, cruel, and indifferent, we must still be responsible, self-reliant and resilient.  Life is not necessarily finding answers to our problems. It’s about living with them. In the words of poet Ranier Maria Rilke: Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves … Perhaps then, some day far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way to the answer. 

Moving from theory to practice, the 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning, by Viktor Frankl chronicles his experiences as a inmate and describes his psychotherapeutic method of finding a reason to live. According to Frankl, We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that 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. 

We can learn a lot about purpose and meaning from Wiesel and Frankl: compassion, sympathy, and care.  We can also learn about purpose and meaning from the film, A Serious Man.  Perhaps, more importantly, however, we can unlearn much of what we think we know.

June Book of the Month - "The World Turned Upside Down" by Melanie Phillips

 

Is there a world-wide cultural collapse?  Is the United States no longer a culture of success?   Has England become a satellite for Moslem extremists?  Is multiculturalism a Trojan horse for cultural relativism and anything goes?  Have we lost our ideals that promote a strong work ethic, an independent spirit, and the primacy of the family? 

 

If these questions intrigue you or arouse your curiosity, you will want to read the SWIVL recommendation for June 2010, The World Turned Upside Down by Melanie Phillips.

According to Phillips, the West is losing both its rationality and its freedoms. The West is succumbing to a "soft totalitarianism," which not only is creating an ugly mood of intolerance but is undermining its ability to defend itself against Islamic aggression. While the Islamists are intent on returning the free world to the seventh century, the West no longer seems willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it brought into being.

The basic cause of all this unreason is the erosion of the building blocks of western civilization. We tell ourselves that religion and reason are incompatible, but in fact the opposite is the case. It was Christianity and the Hebrew Bible that gave us our concepts of reason, progress and an orderly world-the foundations of science and modernity.

The loss of religious belief has meant the West has replaced reason and truth with ideology and prejudice, which it enforces in the manner of a secular inquisition. The result has been a kind of mass derangement, as truth and lies, right and wrong, victim and aggressor are all turned upside down. In medieval-style witch- hunts, scientists who are skeptical of global warming are hounded from their posts; Israel is ferociously demonized; and the United States is vilified over the war on terror-all on the basis of falsehoods and propaganda that are believed as truth.

Thus the West is losing both its rationality and its freedoms. It is succumbing to a "soft totalitarianism," which not only is creating an ugly mood of intolerance but is undermining its ability to defend itself against Islamic aggression. While the Islamists are intent on returning the free world to the seventh century, the West no longer seems willing or able to defend the modernity and rationalism that it brought into being.

With cold, perceptive, exhaustive and persistent passion, Melanie Phillips dissects the phenomenon among disparate movements, to reach disturbing but compelling conclusions about the erosion of modern progressive society – a society based on personal responsibility, independence, and self-reliance - by ideologies whose surprising interconnections are meticulously identified. One can only hope that her book will penetrate the information cocoon into which many of our intelligentsia have have sealed themselves."  Continue reading.

Judaism and the Link between Human and Nonhuman Animal Abuse

Judaism views the proper treatment of nonhuman animals as a priority. Unnecessary cruelty to nonhuman animals is strictly forbidden, and in many cases, nonhuman animals are accorded the same sensitivity as human beings. This concern is unusual throughout the world. Most civilized nations did not accept this principle until quite recently (and certainly not in the Moslem world); cruelty to animals was not outlawed until the 1800s, and even now it is not taken very seriously.

The primary principle behind the treatment of animals in Jewish law is preventing tza'ar ba'alei chayim, the suffering of living creatures. Judaism expresses no definitive opinion as to whether animals actually experience physical or psychological pain in the same way that humans do; however, Judaism has always recognized the critical link between the way a person treats animals and the way a person treats human beings.

A person who is cruel to a defenseless animal will undoubtedly be cruel to defenseless people. Modern psychology confirms this understanding, with many studies finding a relationship between childhood animal cruelty and adult criminal violence.

Sadly, the converse is not always true, and those who love animals do not always value human life: Hitler loved animals; the animal rights group PETA wrote a letter to Arafat telling him, when he blows up a bus full of Israelis, could he please not hurt a donkey to do it. Click here for more.