FUTURE OF JEWISH
The Most Important Jewish Idea I’ve Heard Since October 7th
Rabbi Steven Abraham
June 13, 2026

…Rachel [Goldberg-Polin] 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. READ MORE