Israel, Meaning, and Happiness

Israel is an anomaly in the Western landscape.

While most Western nations grapple with plummeting birth rates, identity crises, and a creeping existential emptiness, Israel consistently ranks among the happiest countries in the world – placing 8th in the 2025 World Happiness Report – and leads by a significant margin in fertility rates compared to other Western nations. Notably, according to research by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, even secular and traditional-non-religious Jewish women maintain a fertility rate above 2.2 children – higher than any other OECD country. A third striking data point is Israel’s startup density: according to Start-Up Nation Central, Israel produces one startup for every 1,400 citizens.

How is it possible that a society living under constant security threats, wracked by sharp internal tensions, and burdened by a punishing cost of living still produces such high levels of happiness, hope, and desire to bring new life into the world — alongside a relentless drive to create, innovate, and build new companies?

The answer, it seems, lies not in another economic indicator or pop-psychology framework, but in a concept that has been quietly pushed to the margins of contemporary Western discourse: faith and meaning.

Postmodern culture has done a thorough job dismantling the traditional sources of human meaning. In the name of freedom and individual autonomy, the great structures that once anchored a person’s identity — family, community, religion, nationhood — have been gradually hollowed out. These were the frameworks within which a person knew who they were, where they belonged, and why they got out of bed in the morning. The post modern Western individual is left “free,” but also profoundly alone — tasked with conjuring meaning from nothing, without any grand narrative to hold them.

Radical progressive discourse has gone further still. It doesn’t merely deconstruct these institutions — it wages open war against them. Family is framed as a cage. Nationalism is treated as inherently suspect. Religion is cast as oppressive. Community is seen as a threat to individual expression. But when everything is dismantled, the person themselves begins to fall apart.

Israel, by contrast, represents a combination that is nearly incomprehensible to the Western eye: a liberal, democratic, technologically advanced society in which the classical institutions of modernity have not just survived – they have strengthened. Family is not a nostalgic relic but a living value. Nationhood is not a source of shame but of identity. Religion, however contested, continues to supply a language of meaning. And community still functions as a genuine obligation, not merely a lifestyle option.

In Israel, the individual and the collective were never fully severed. A person is not only an “I” — they are a son or daughter, a member of a society, a participant in a historical story. Even today, young soldiers frequently report feelings of deep fulfillment  even joy in combat service. There is a mission. There is meaning. There is the visceral sense of being part of something larger than yourself.

The world struggles to absorb this contradiction. On one hand: Start-Up Nation, innovation, science, and technological leadership. On the other: cultural conservatism, religious attachment, and fierce national identity. For much of the West, Israel represents not merely a statistical outlier, but an ideological challenge — living proof that it is possible to be modern without surrendering a sense of belonging, free without being severed from meaning and family, progressive without erasing your roots.

This is not merely an impression. Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who founded logotherapy, argued that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power, but the search for meaning. Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, reached a similar conclusion: in his PERMA model of wellbeing, meaning — belonging to something larger than oneself — stands at the very center.

Perhaps this is why the desperate search for meaning in the Western world takes such extreme forms: the adoption of totalistic ideologies as quasi-religious frameworks, or the turn toward new identities and belief systems, sometimes entirely foreign to one’s own cultural context. When there is no story, every story becomes seductive.

At the heart of all this, I want to propose a deeper explanation — a worldview that may account for all three of these phenomena together.

What holds Israeli society together may not be historical memory or civic solidarity alone, but one foundational belief: that life is good, and that it is worth living. This belief is not always consciously articulated, but it runs through the collective consciousness — perhaps even at subconscious level.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, in his commentary on the portion of Bereishit, that the great innovation of the Torah — and of the Jewish people who carry it — is not man’s faith in God, but God’s faith in man. The belief that man is fundamentally good, that the world is good, and that it is destined to become even better.

This deep conviction, whether conscious or not, affirms both the person and life itself. In Hebrew, the word me’ushar (מאושר) carries a double meaning: it means both “affirmed” or “validated” and “happy.” What is affirmed — in the sense of having purpose and value — is also, by the same word, joyful and fulfilled.

Trust in ourselves and in the world is no small thing in the postmodern age. When a person believes deeply that life is good and worth living, life becomes charged with purpose and meaning — not as an abstract idea, but as a living feeling present in the choices of everyday life.

And from that, everything follows: the desire to bring children into the world, the willingness to build and create, the drive to repair and improve. The deep satisfaction with life — as individuals, as a society, as a nation — remains strong and enduring, in spite of every physical and cultural challenge of our time.