In The Power of Meaning: Crafting a Life That Matters, Emily Esfahani Smith draws on personal interviews, the work of classical humanists, her own experiences, and the new field of social science she terms “happiology” to answer the age-old question of how to give life meaning. She concludes that there are “four pillars of meaning”—purpose, storytelling, transcendence, and belonging—necessary for personal fulfilment. Alice B. Lloyd writes in her review:

Our souls seek whatever pushes us beyond our selves and holds us there in contemplative service to something greater. Smith grants primacy to love. A story from the life of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, unites the pillars. Frankl, then a prisoner in a concentration camp, was marching on a cold morning with his fellow inmates when he thought of his wife and realized, “love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: the salvation of man is through love and in love.” The giving of oneself unto another is always the first best reason to live another day.

Still, in the end, it’s hard to ignore the extent to which Smith’s four pillars—belonging, transcendence, purpose, storytelling—resemble the same psychic needs served by that old-time religion. It’s our secular age that relegates to social science such matters, like a person’s readiness to face death, that used to be settled more or less exclusively on God’s terms.

In fact, reading her accounts of psychological studies and groundbreaking therapies, I couldn’t get this one line from the 1980s movie The Creator out of my head: “When science finally peers over the crest of the mountain, it will find religion has been sitting there all along.”

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.