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.”

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.