The Elie Wiesel Living Archive

at The 92nd Street Y, New York. Supported by The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity

Meaning

The quest for meaning as our principal goal in life

Apr 04, 2000

In this, the third in a series of four talks about four words (darkness, struggle, meaning and faith), Professor Wiesel addresses the quest for meaning as our principal goal in life. He questions the meaning of history, especially the madness that erupts in history, the meaning of Jewish survival, the hatred against Jews and the meaning of the twentieth century. Professor Wiesel teaches us that not only does meaning change with time and the change of language but that meaning is rarely offered to us simultaneously. Sometimes it takes centuries for meaning to catch up with an event or for us to discover it.

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Subthemes:
1) Meaning of Text
2) Meaning in Nazism and Communism?
3) Stories of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov
4) Rabbi Nachman, as forerunner of Kafka
5) Miracle of Jewish Sovereignty in Ancestral Land in the Twentieth Century
6) Story of the Seven Beggars
7) Paltiel Kossover, Yiddish Poet and Communist
8) Campo de’Fiore in Rome, and in the Warsaw Ghetto
9) Meaning of Meaning, and Opposite of Meaning
10) Meaning and Memory
11) Meaning in History
12) Goals vs. Meaning
13) Meaning as Transcendence
14) Meaninglessness (Absurdity) of War
15) Search for Truth
16) Meaning in Biblical Stories
17) Meaning in Secular Stories
18) Kossover’s Last Letter to His Son Grisha
19) Turbulent Events of the Twentieth Century
20) Meaning in Holocaust Memoirs
21) Israel and the Six Day War as Redemptive Events for Jews in the Twentieth Century
22) Meaning as Mystery
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