Finding Meaning: An Existential Quest in Post-Modern Israel

From its trendy urban centers to its ancient deserts, Israel’s history is based on the rich heritage of traditions and contradictions. It is known as a start-up nation, with hospitable and warm interpersonal relationships, and a steady high-ranked happiness level. Yet, its deep political disparities and past traumas ripple beneath the surface of its culture, with unyielding existential threats looming from its neighbors and from within its borders. The turbulent Israeli settingDLcharacterized by salient existential threats, issues of identity and dialectic world viewsDLserve as a magnifying glass for unravelling a variety of significant ways through which the human fundamental motivation to find meaning in life is manifested.

Finding Meaning incorporates a conceptual framework for examining the post-modern, sociocultural Israeli scene that facilitates and triggers the search for meaning among its citizens. Combining theory, data, and illustrative case studies, this book unravels a variety of significant and fundamental manifestations of a quest for meaning under existentialist duress, carefully navigating the cultural context of post-modernist Israel. Written by experts in these areas, this book offers new insights into this quest by suggesting a new construct that weaves together the personal and cultural environment, highlights several key processes and dimensions that appear to characterize this search, and offers broad perspectives that contribute to the research at these intersections.

Finding Meaning is a pioneering book with an insightful, innovative, and hopeful lens for academic, scholarly, and some lay readers interested in meaning and contemporary Israeli society.

Ofra Mayseless is a former dean and current professor of developmental psychology at the University of Haifa, Israel; she is also the head of the Multi-University Center for the Study for the Human Spirit. She published over 100 articles and chapters, edited two books, and authored one. She
researches attachment, caring motivation, transition to adulthood, and spiritual development.

Pninit Russo-Netzer is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya; the head of the Compass Institute for the Study and Application of Meaning; and the co-developer of the Mindfulness-Based Meaning Program (MBMP). She has developed a synergistic integration between the
fields of positive psychology, resilience, phenomenology, existential psychology, logotherapy, and education, all combining basic research with practical application.