Finding Meaning in the Midst of Pain

When life confronts us with hardship, we face a fundamental choice. We can ask, “Why is this happening to me?”—a question born of pain, disempowerment, and a sense of victimhood. Or we can ask, “Why is this happening for me?”

This second question doesn’t deny suffering—it reframes it. It opens the door to meaning. It invites us to consider what might be learned, transformed, or deepened through the experience. It affirms our agency, even in adversity. Growth often begins in places we would never choose, but cannot avoid.

This perspective is central to Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer at Google X. For most of his life, Gawdat lived in a world driven by logic, performance, and achievement. But none of it prepared him for the sudden death of his 21-year-old son, Ali, after a routine surgery. Faced with unimaginable grief, Gawdat turned to what he knew best—analytical thinking. But this time, he applied it to human happiness and suffering. His insight led to a deceptively simple formula:

Happiness ≥ Your perception of events – Your expectations of how life should be

In other words, happiness isn’t determined by circumstances alone, but by how we interpret them—and by the expectations we bring to them. Suffering often arises in the gap between perception (“How I think I’m doing”) and expectation (“How I believe life was supposed to turn out”). When we narrow that gap—not by lowering standards, but by expanding perspective—we create space for resilience, even joy. Gawdat echoes this truth: even in darkness, we retain the capacity for meaning-making.

Even in darkness, we retain the capacity for meaning-making.

Our foresight is limited. What seems like misfortune may hold the seeds of redemption; what looks like success may unravel with time.

I’ve experienced this in my own life. For years, I dreamed of attending a particular graduate school. I worked relentlessly—tutors, late nights, a flawless application. And I was rejected in the first round. I was devastated. Other schools admitted me, but I couldn’t let go. I deferred, reapplied—and during that unexpected year, I met my wife. That "failure" became the most important redirection of my life. Had things gone “according to plan,” we might never have crossed paths.

Assigning Meaning

To live is to interpret. We don’t simply experience events; we assign them meaning. As Steve Jobs said in his Stanford commencement speech, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.” That retrospective connection doesn’t erase pain—but it can transform it. We don’t choose everything that happens to us, but we do choose the narrative we build around it.

This insight appears in the Torah. When Moses asks to see God’s glory, the response is: “You will see My back, but My face shall not be seen” (Exodus 33:23). We rarely understand divine logic in real time. Only in hindsight do we glimpse a kind of coherence. We may not control the plot, but we are not passive characters. How we walk the path reshapes what the path becomes. King Solomon wrote, “A righteous person falls seven times and rises again” (Proverbs 24:16). The righteousness is not in perfection—it is forged in the falling and the rising.

That’s precisely what Moses does in Deuteronomy. He recounts the Jewish People’s journey—not merely as a chronicle, but as interpretation. He reframes their failures, highlights divine guidance, and holds the people accountable: In doing so, Moses models how to turn experience into instruction—how to reclaim agency through reflection.

Moses transforms their memory of bondage—not as a mark of victimhood, but as a foundation for empathy and moral responsibility.

We see this approach again when Moses restates the Ten Commandments. The core content remains, but certain details shift. In the commandment to observe Shabbat, for instance, the mitzvah isn’t grounded in creation—as in Exodus—but in memory of slavery: “And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt…” (Deut. 5:15). Here, Moses transforms their memory of bondage—not as a mark of victimhood, but as a foundation for empathy and moral responsibility.

Tisha B’Av’s Call for Renewal

The sages of the Talmud do the same. They didn’t merely record the destruction of the Temples—they sought meaning. The First Temple, they taught, fell because of idolatry, bloodshed, and immorality. The Second Temple? Because of sinat chinam—baseless hatred. These were not just historical diagnoses; they were moral reckonings.

Contrast this with Josephus, the Jewish historian writing for a Roman audience. In The Jewish War, Josephus recounts the fall of Jerusalem as a series of military miscalculations, political betrayals, and Roman might. His narrative is shaped by strategy and empire. The Talmudic Sages, by contrast, viewed history as ethical inquiry. Suffering, they argued, has causes—and therefore, it also has lessons.

Tisha B’Av is not just a day of mourning for two buildings. It commemorates the devastation of Jewish sovereignty in the Jewish homeland. The commencement of the exile. But within that grief lies a call to renewal. Every attempt to make sense of the pain is an act of healing. “Let us search and examine our ways, and let us return to God” (Lamentations 3:40).

The question is not whether we will suffer. We will. The question is: what will we make of that suffering? How will we interpret it? What will we learn, and who might we become? Because, as Viktor Frankl—Holocaust survivor, psychiatrist, and philosopher—tells us, “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be meaning in suffering.”