The most important Jewish idea I’ve heard since October 7th

The most important Jewish idea I’ve heard since October 7th,
by Rabbi Steven Abraham, Future of Jewish, 2026-06-14.

We live inside a strange theology in much of the West, and it has seeped into our synagogues too, so it is worth saying plainly. Call it the gospel of relentless positivity. It teaches that pain is a problem to be solved, that grief should come with a deadline, that the healthy soul is the one that has moved on, and that the right thing to say to a suffering person is that everything happens for a reason. It is the spirituality of the refrigerator magnet, and it mistakes a good mood for faith.

Rachel has a name for it, and she earned the right to give it one. She calls it “toxic positivity.” And against it she sets a phrase she went hunting for one sleepless night, when she sat down and typed into a search engine the question of what the opposite of “toxic positivity” might be. The answer that came back to her was two words: tragic optimism.

She has said it felt like something pressed into her hands. It named exactly what she had become.

The phrase belongs to Holocaust survivor and famed psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, who set it down in 1984 in the postscript to his bestselling book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” He is a man who built his entire understanding of the human soul in the worst classroom that has ever existed.

Frankl defined tragic optimism with terrible precision: It is the choice to remain optimistic in spite of what he called the tragic triad, the three facts that no amount of cheerfulness will ever dissolve — pain, guilt, and death. The whole question of his life, the question the Nazi concentration camps put to him and that he refused to stop answering, was whether a human being can still say yes to life in spite of everything.

Notice what he is not saying. He is not promising that things turn out well. He is not telling the prisoner that the barbed wire has a silver lining. He is saying something far harder and far more dignified, that meaning remains possible inside the catastrophe, that suffering can be turned into something, that even the shortness of a life can become a reason to act rather than a reason to give up.

And he insists, gently and immovably, that you cannot command optimism. You cannot order a grieving mother to hope any more than you can order her to laugh. Hope has to be given a reason. That is why the gospel of good vibes is not merely shallow but cruel. It demands the feeling while refusing to supply the reason, and then it blames the brokenhearted for failing to smile.