A recurrent theme in many presentations of Judaism is its incorporation of physicality into the service of Hashem. The way in which Torah subsumes under its program for human living every last aspect of our lives however seemingly distant from or even counter to spirituality is indeed something unique to Judaism. This aspect is especially pronounced on Purim when wine witticism and song along with lavish feasting take center stage on that most spiritually exalted of days. Purim says Rav Hutner is the time when the holiness of the body of the Jew is made apparent.

Another way to express the same idea is to say that Judaism enables the Jew to mine his life minute by precious minute for maximal meaning. There is no experience or situation no aspect of the natural world without or the emotional world within nothing in all that comprises our material existence that one cannot tap for the meaning inherent within it.

This ought to be one of Torah’s strongest draws for our secular brethren if only we make the case to them. Every kiruv activist’s calling card should include this direct appeal: Got Meaning? After all meaning in life is what everyone is after whether they consciously know it or not.

More spiritually attuned individuals feel the void acutely while others attempt to still the emptiness with the ersatz soul-fillers that abound in life. But kol asher neshamah b’apo all who possess a soul that descended here from On High and that desperately seeks reconnection to that place are searching — though they may know not for what. Not for naught does the Amora Rav (Bava Kamma 3b) interpret the Mishnaic term mav’eh the seeker as a reference to man.

In Man’s Search for Meaning renowned Austrian-Jewish psychologist Viktor Frankl’s primer on the therapeutic approach he named logotherapy the author posits that the most basic human psychic need is to live a meaningful life. Named one of America’s ten most influential books by the Library of Congress it grew out of the “research” he pursued in a most tragic laboratory of human behavior — a Nazi concentration camp.

There as Prisoner 119104 Frankl witnessed all the layers of normal interests and pursuits being stripped away with only the bare most indispensable of human needs — food sleep but also meaning in the sense of hopes and goals — remaining. It was that sense of meaning in the form of knowing there was someone or something to yet live for that gave those who survived the resiliency they needed to face the ineffable suffering of that place. Such a person Frankl wrote “knows the ‘why’ for his existence and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’$$$SEPARATE QUOTES$$$”

Frankl clearly distinguished between the search for meaning and the pursuit of happiness writing that “it is a characteristic of the American culture that again and again one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy.’ But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to ‘be happy.’$$$SEPARATE QUOTES$$$” Indeed he observed “[i]t is the very pursuit of happiness that thwarts happiness.”

A great deal of research in recent years into happiness confirms Frankl’s conclusions. In a recent article in The Atlantic for example Emily Esfahani Smith reports on a forthcoming study in the Journal of Positive Psychology:

[T]he researchers found that a meaningful life and happy life overlap in certain ways but are ultimately very different. Leading a happy life the psychologists found is associated with being a “taker” while leading a meaningful life corresponds with being a “giver.”

“Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow self-absorbed or even selfish life in which things go well needs and desire are easily satisfied and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided ” the authors write.... In other words meaning transcends the self while happiness is all about giving the self what it wants....

In the words of Martin E. P. Seligman one of the leading psychological scientists alive today in the meaningful life “you use your highest strengths and talents to belong to and serve something you believe is larger than the self.”

One particularly interesting finding of this study is that people

whose lives have high levels of meaning often actively seek meaning out even when they know it will come at the expense of happiness. Because they have invested themselves in something bigger than themselves they also worry more and have higher levels of stress and anxiety in their lives than happy people. Having children for example is associated with the meaningful life and requires self-sacrifice but it has been famously associated with low happiness among parents including the ones in this study.

Is it any wonder then that with Americans in hot pursuit of happiness their declining fertility rate is endangering the country’s very future? Jonathan Last author of the new book What to Expect When Nobody’s Expecting makes exactly that connection in last week’s Wall Street Journal:

The root cause of most of our problems is our declining fertility rate.… This dual problem — a population that is disproportionately old and shrinking overall — has enormous economic political and cultural consequences.…

A raft of research shows that if you take two people who are identical in every way except for childbearing status the parent will be on average about six percentage points less likely to be “very happy” than the nonparent.…

There have been lots of changes in American life over the last 40 years that have nudged our fertility rate downward. High on the list is the idea that “happiness” is the lodestar of a life well-lived. If we’re going to reverse this decline we’ll need to reintroduce into American culture the notion that human flourishing ranges wider and deeper than calculations of mere happiness.

Esfahani Smith presents two other important differences between happiness and meaning quoting a research study by Roy Baumeister a social psychologists atFloridaStateUniversity:

Meaning is not only about transcending the self but also about transcending the present moment.... While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now it ultimately fades away just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting....

Meaning on the other hand is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future. “Thinking beyond the present moment into the past or future was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life ” the researchers write. “Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future.”

Having negative events happen to you the study found decreases your happiness but increases the amount of meaning you have in life.... “If there is meaning in life at all ” Frankl wrote “then there must be meaning in suffering.”

All of the above can give us new insight into the true nature of Purim and how we spend the fleeting hours of that elevated holy day. Rather than being a time of “happiness” in the pedestrian sense it is a day of indulgence in pure meaning (“Absolut Meaning” if you will... ) a day of simchah — the deep joy that only meaning produces.

Alone among the nations that in our long history have sought to vanquish us Amalek has neither hegemonic aspirations nor religious designs. It stands for one thing only: nothing. It is nihilism radical meaninglessness incarnate. This is the source of its undying hatred for the one nation that proclaims that all of existence is shot through with meaning in potentia just waiting for man to reveal it.

Hence the singular way to fight Amalek and ultimately banish it forever is through the daylong extraction of precisely such meaning: by partaking of the most physical of delights in the context of the spiritual; by reading aloud the scroll that finds G-d’s hand in seemingly unconnected historical events and speaks of how out of the depths of despair and looming annihilation the Jewish People rediscovered national purpose; by spending the entire day as indefatigable givers going beyond ourselves by giving tzedakah to the poor and gifts to everyone else using wine to draw us out from within ourselves to embrace the other.

Meaning endures connecting past present and future just as emes also connoting everlasting truth is composed of the first middle and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. And therefore Purim deepest of days will never become obsolete.