Living a Purposeful Life
Searching for Meaning in All the Wrong Places
Kalman J. Kaplan
Foreword by Michael Shapiro
Living a Purposeful Life
Searching for Meaning in All the Wrong Places
Copyright © 2020 Kalman J. Kaplan. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Jewish Publication Society of America Version of the Tanakh, copyright © 1917, 1955 by the Jewish Publication Society. All rights reserved.
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I dedicate this book to my late parents, Lewis C. Kaplan and Edith Saposnik Kaplan, both wonderful human beings and writers in their own right, who taught me that a sense of purpose comes from within, and that meaning cannot be approached directly but is found as a byproduct of living with purpose. And that each life is unique, precious, and of infinite value, on its own terms, regardless of age, wealth, health, social status, or religious-political affiliations or leanings.
I hope I have been successful in transmitting this message to Moriah, and to my descendants, Daniel, Reva, Levi, and Izzy, and theirs.
To everything there is a season, a time to every purpose under the heaven.
—Ecclesiastes 3:1
It is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a meaning: therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide face to face.
—Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Preface
He who has a “why” to live can bear almost any “how.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, Maxims and Arrows, 12
List of Tables
Table 1 Suicides in Greek Tragedy 29
Table 2 Suicides in the Hebrew Bible 36
Table 3 Suicide Preventions in the Hebrew Bible 38
Table 4 Job against Zeno 51
Table 5 Elijah against Ajax 80
Table 6 Jonah against Narcissus 114
Foreword
Kalman Kaplan’s distinction between Meaning and Purpose reminds me of an encounter I once had with a Hasidic rabbi on Devon Avenue in Chicago. He had agreed to meet with Confirmation students from my Reform synagogue in Champaign, whom I had brought to Chicago for the weekend to enrich their experience of Jewish life. The rebbe was a young man, but to my students his demeanor, sidelocks, and fringes made him seem to them like an ancient sage from remote antiquity. To break the ice, he went around the table asking them, girls included, what they hoped to do in their adult lives. Most of them answered in terms of vocational plans, plans they explained would bring them happiness. He wished them well in fulfilling their aspirations, many of which he deemed quite worthy, but he also issued a caveat about happiness. Happiness, he warned, is not gained by seeking it, but it rather comes unsought when one is fulfilling his or her responsibilities. He did not define these responsibilities, but I understood him to mean, or to include, what Kaplan describes as purposeful or purposive behavior inherent or intrinsic in human existence, that is to say, responsibilities to family and community based on obligations of love and loyalty. For me, Kaplan’s understanding of the meaning of life resonated with the rabbi’s comment on happiness: both meaning and happiness are byproducts of a life well lived, a life of fulfilled responsibilities. As Kaplan puts it in his final sentence, “Meaning cannot be found directly but only as a consequence of living with purpose.”
Like other scholars critical of Ancient Greece, Kaplan sees the twin poles of glory and shame in Athenian culture as encouraging individuals to actively seek meaning in their lives rather than allow it to emerge from sustained purposeful commitment and conduct. This hunt for significance, he argues, can be dangerous. It can lead one to undertake risky choices in pursuit of honor or public acclaim, and it can lead to the neglect or disparagement of unglamorous domestic and familial commitments, which the poet Linda Pastan in “Who Is It Accuses Us?” calls the truly “dangerous lives.” In Kaplan’s view, the purposefulness affirmed in the Hebrew Bible is far superior to the search for meaning encouraged in and by ancient Greek culture, a contrast he observes incisively across many areas of life. But Kaplan sees this contrast between the Hellenic and the Hebraic not only as a collision between two ancient civilizations, but as opposing tendencies within our own civilization as well.
Michael Shapiro
Preface
I write this preface in April 2020 during the onset of the COVID 19 virus thought to have originated and reach epidemic proportions in Wuhan, the capital city of the Hubei province of China at the end of December, 2019. I think this frightening plague that has fallen on us makes this book especially relevant. As I was rummaging through my library, a book popped out that I had read, or at least skimmed, more than twenty years ago: Viruses, Plagues, and History, by Michael Oldstone, professor at that time at the Scripps Research Institute, where he directed the Laboratory of Viral Immunobiology. I vaguely remember skimming it and then putting it aside—I have picked it up again. It was prescient in its warnings.
I remember a number of great works of fiction and history built around the theme of a plague. Samuel Pepys’s diaries chronicle the Great Plague of London in 1665–66. Edgar Alan Poe’s The Mask of the Red Death depicts a plague in an unnamed city in fourteenth-century Europe. In The Decameron, Giovanni Bocaccio writes of a small group quarantined in Florence during the Black Death. Thomas Mann writes of a cholera plague in Venice in Death in Venice and Albert Camus’s The Plague tells of an unspecified plague in Oran in French Algiers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes of Love in a Time of Cholera in an unnamed port city near the Caribbean Sea, probably Cartagena. And of course Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex begins with a plague overwhelming the city of Thebes, as does the Passover (Pesach) Haggadah, recounting the plagues leading to the exodus of Israel from Egypt. And I am certain that there are many other works of fiction that involve a plague or a catastrophe of one sort or another, for example, the story of Noah and the great flood or of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
In an age where so many of us have rushed around obsessively in a search for meaning, to the point of threatening or even committing suicide or self-destructive acts, we realize suddenly that the choice of life and death is not always ours. As Immanuel Kant said, we are awoken from our “dogmatic slumber.” The choice of life and death is not ultimately ours, as much as we may try to take it into our own hands. In whose hands is it then? The Greek moira (fate)? Luck? Destiny? Or is our life and death in God’s hands, expressed through scientific and medical knowledge. These are weighty questions which suddenly have become immediate. As we will illustrate in chapter 4, Zeno the Stoic overinterprets, indeed catastrophizes, a minor mishap, that is, stubbing or perhaps wrenching his toe, as a sign from the gods that he should depart. The biblical Job has no need for such a destructive search for meaning. He has a purpose. To live his life simply. And to do what he can to live his life purposively in the face of great upheaval that has befallen him.
This is what