Biblical Series: Exodus | How to Strengthen Yourself Through Suffering | Episode 4 Clip

There and there were people who have only good in their life, relatively speaking, who don't believe in God. So I'm challenging my own question because I've wrestled with this. I think the hardest law in the 613 laws of the Torah is to love God with all your heart and all your soul. I long believed that's the hardest. I have no problem trying to throw yourself into existence fully as if it's good. Yes, and that's a rough one because serious look at it. That's right. That's right. That's right.

So, Soldier Knitson was struck in the concentration camps by goodness, though constantly. It was out of that seed of the observation of goodness [Music] emerged. Therefore, in some, no, in no small part, salsa Neeson is a prophet. And he said, well, he said that he viewed, he really noticed particularly—and he was atheistic when he went into the camps—that the devout religious believers were able to maintain their moral integrity in camp and physical. Yes, yeah, not always, because he said, no, like, let's not push this. Sometimes people just got shot. But he saw people, and he tells very compelling stories of people who thrived and became healthier in the face of the privation under the ultimate moral authority of their own shining soul.

The stories in the Gulag, especially in volume two, are unbelievably compelling, and Frankel said similar things. Solzhenitsyn was particularly careful not to say that doesn't mean I'm saying that everyone who failed failed because of their moral flaws or that purity of heart would necessarily save you. He's a complex thinker, but that's one of the miracles, I think, he saw. When I was talking about him earlier, because he talked about how some people were hardy and robust, and he was careful to say it's like you can secret your way to health in a Gulag. Right, he wasn't being flippant about it, but he was noticing that some people who had—and they wouldn't cooperate, right? Yeah, they were never to become trustees.

And they tell the—it was Cool Hand Luke. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s also the epistemic human, the epistemic humility, though the difference between the presumption that you know all there is and it's bad, and you're saying I don't have it all. I mean, you think those last words that Job says at the very end of the book of Job, "Therefore have I uttered that I understood not things too wonderful for me, which I knew not." Right, that at the end of it all, saying I didn't actually understand the whole picture.

Well, it's also hope in that, you know, because one of the things is that if you're suffering terribly, there's two options in front of you. In some sense, one is you're suffering terribly and it's unjust, and you're suffering terribly because the cosmos itself is flawed in its fundamental structure. And that's really Kane's complaint against God. The other possibility is you're suffering at least in part because you're not everything you could be. And that's a terrible burden to take on to yourself because it's the burden of your own suffering. But it's also unbelievably hopeful because it could be that— I think maybe Frankel recounts that story. I don't remember where I read it—a woman who visited a psychiatrist and who said to the psychiatrist, "I really hope there's something wrong with me."

And the psychiatrist said, "Why?" She said, "Well, if there's something wrong with me, there's hope because I might be able to fix it. But if there's something wrong with the structure of existence, so I'm fated to suffer in this way, then why? Everything's despair." And the people that I have seen who've transcended their tragedy and malevolence that have pursued them, they did have that sense of their own ignorance even with regards to the conclusions they drew about their suffering.

And so Frankl himself has this very odd story at the end of the book where, after this array of unspeakable horrors, he then talks about this particularly sadistic, brutal figure whom he'd known from some clinic, the Stein whatever in Indiana or something. And then he says that he heard a story that this man, this concentration camp figure, had been sent off to a Russian camp at the end of the war and then heard from another colleague that this brutal figure had actually been extremely humane and supportive as an inmate of a Soviet camp. And it's that very enigmatic ending of Frankel's book where it's almost as if to say even where you're convinced that there's evil that's irredeemable, maybe there's still room for redemption.

I know that's a bit—it seems like a bit, but it is. Why is that idea considered so dangerous? What idea? This idea that, because, you know, even when we want it to be well— we want it to—it immediately goes into blaming the victim. Like, even you went to pains to say he wasn't saying that anybody could ride through the inner light of their soul and come out positively in a Gulag. But there's such a resistance against this notion. It's almost outside the Overton window to say you can alleviate some of your own suffering by your orientation towards the world. It's almost considered a dangerous proposition now.

And we have to go to pains to make caveats about it when we even mention it. Yeah, well, it's a tricky business. When my daughter was young and she was really ill, I told her when she was very young, I said to her, "Don't you use your illness as an excuse ever because you'll confuse yourself. Then you won't know what you can do." You're going to have a hard time doing things, but if you use your illness as an excuse, if you corrupt yourself morally—which you have in some sense every right to do because of the depth of your suffering and which would be perfectly understandable under the circumstances—it will do nothing at all but make the situation far worse.