How Judaism Approaches the Question of Life’s Meaning

Astute observers have connected America’s political and social problems to a general “crisis of meaning,” and many of them have suggested that religious traditions hold the solutions to this crisis. Yet Alan Mittleman argues that this very framing—the question of “What is the meaning of life?”—is a modern one. Drawing on Ecclesiastes, the hasidic rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, and other thinkers, Mittleman tries to determine the Jewish approach to this question and its premodern equivalents. He shows, in conversation with J.J. Kimche, what Judaism offers that distinguishes it from nihilism, modern relativism, and more classical philosophical systems. (Audio, 70 minutes.)