c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Rabbi Rudin is the national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)

UNDATED _ Although I never met him or heard him speak, Viktor Frankl, who died recently in Vienna at 92, was one of my greatest teachers and spiritual heroes.

While in college, a professor recommended I read a psychology text by Frankl. At first I resisted, believing it would be a turgid tract about neuroses, repressions, and inferiority complexes.

But Frankl’s book, the classic”Man’s Search for Meaning,”was quite different. Reading it was a transforming experience that permanently changed the way I viewed life and its possibilities. And apparently, I was not the only one influenced by Frankl.

Since its publication in 1946,”Man’s Search for Meaning”has been reprinted 73 times and translated into 26 languages. It has sold more than 10 million copies. The book is an extraordinary case of the message and messenger being inextricably bound together.

Born and educated in Vienna, Frankl and most of his family were rounded up by the Nazis in 1942 along with thousands of other Austrian Jews. They were shipped to Auschwitz, where his parents, brother, and pregnant wife, Tilly, were all murdered.

Remarkably, during his three years as a prisoner, Frankl remained the teacher and psychiatrist. He keenly observed his fellow inmates and discovered a startling fact: a direct link between loss of faith in the future and giving up. Many people frequently lost hope, became apathetic, and fell into a deep paralyzing depression.

As a death camp prisoner fighting to stay alive, Frankl helped other inmates survive by”teaching that it did not matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us … we need to stop asking about the meaning of life, but instead to think of ourselves as those who were questioned by life, daily and hourly.” Frankl observed that the way people reacted to their situation in Auschwitz often determined whether or not they survived the ordeal. After the war, Frankl discovered that many who had survived the death camps had, like him, set a purpose for themselves.

He understood that we can’t always choose our circumstances or suffering, be we can _ and must _ choose how we react to life. No matter what our fate, Frankl argued that we are free to choose our attitudes. “I bear witness”, he wrote,”to the unexpected extent to which man is capable of defying and braving even the worst conditions conceivable … we may find meaning in life even when confronted with a hopeless situation.” Frankl would remind depressed prisoners that life still expected something from them _ even in Auschwitz. Perhaps it was only the thought of a precious child, the poignant memory of a youthful first love, or the image of a long forgotten sunset, but Frankl urged his fellow inmates to replay those memories and hopes over and over again.

Following his liberation in 1945, Frankl returned to Vienna, where he remarried, had a daughter, and actively taught the truths he had so painfully gained at Auschwitz. He became the chief of the neurological department at Vienna’s Polyclinic Hospital. Frankl called his humanistic theory”logotherapy,”or”the therapy of meaning.” He shook up the psychiatric world, especially Freudian psychoanalysis and drug therapies, by declaring that”our answer must consist not in talk or medication, but in right action and right conduct. Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems …” He was awarded 29 honorary degrees and taught at several American schools, including Harvard, Stanford, and Southern Methodist University. Yet, despite his many books and honors, Frankl’s pioneering efforts were least appreciated in his native Austria.

Frankl’s colleagues in other parts of the world attributed this neglect to a residual anti-Semitism that still exists in Vienna 60 years after Hitler and his hordes marched into the city.

Indeed, Viktor Klima, the Austrian chancellor, admitted as much in his tribute to Frankl. While calling him”a great humanist, scientist, and world citizen,”Klima employed a convenient euphemism to describe the ugly fact that Frankl and his work were virtually ignored in Vienna, saying the world-renowned psychiatrist had been”underestimated”in his hometown.

Happily, the”underestimating”anti-Semites will not have the last word.”Man’s Search for Meaning”now belongs to the world and so does its author.

MJP END RUDIN