A few weeks ago, I was reading the national bestseller list published in Israel Hayom when I noticed something surprising. There, sitting in the top ten among all the new releases, was a book first translated into Hebrew fifty years ago: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. In 2026, in the middle of a war, this book is one of the ten bestselling books in Israel.
I’ve read Man’s Search for Meaning multiple times. It is one of those books you can never forget, a book that has stayed with me since I first read it when I was a sophomore in high school. Frankl was an Austrian Jewish psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, Dachau, and two other Nazi concentration camps. His central argument, built from everything he experienced in those camps, is this: meaning is not a luxury. It is what keeps people alive. The prisoners who lost their sense of purpose inevitably lost their will to survive.
Intrigued by the popularity of the book, I asked around. A friend explained that pre-military academies across Israel buy the book as a year-end gift for their students before they enter the army, which likely explains the spike in sales. That may be true. But think about what that means. Out of every book ever written, these academies chose this one to give Israel’s young soldiers. That is not a random decision.
Why this book? Why now?
“And it shall come to pass afterwards that I will pour out My spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy; your elders shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” (Joel 3:1)
Throughout the Hebrew Bible, the pattern is consistent: the people of Israel drift into corruption and abandon God, while a small number of towering individuals — the prophets — stand apart from the nation and rebuke it. Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah — the prophet is always the exception. The nation is always the problem. The prophet speaks precisely because the people are corrupted.
Joel is describing something entirely different. Not one prophet rebuking a corrupt nation, but an entire generation that seeks God. Sons and daughters, elders and young men, all of them. Rabbi David Kimchi explains that prophecy was once limited to individuals of exceptional spiritual preparation — but Joel’s vision is of God’s spirit resting on the nation as a whole.
Rabbi Meir Wisser, writing in the nineteenth century, takes this further: what Joel describes is a democratization of divine inspiration. In earlier generations, prophetic connection with God was the achievement of rare individuals who spent years preparing themselves to receive it. Joel is promising that this barrier will be removed entirely. God’s spirit will no longer be the possession of a spiritual elite, but rather the common experience of an entire generation. This is not a replay of biblical history but its culmination, the moment Israel has been moving toward all along.
For two and a half years, Israeli soldiers have left careers, graduate programs, businesses, and young families to serve in the most sustained military mobilization in Israel’s history. Hundreds of thousands of reservists have given up their financial security, their comfort, and in too many cases their lives, to defend their people. When you are sleeping in a tent in Gaza, when your friends are being killed beside you, when you have walked away from everything that defined your comfortable civilian life — Viktor Frankl’s question becomes the only question that matters: What am I living for?
That question has cracked open hearts that years of chasing normalcy had sealed shut. “And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” (Ezekiel 36:26).
Israeli newspapers are filled with stories about the changes sweeping through secular Israeli society: a musician in Tel Aviv who studies Torah for two hours every morning before her day begins, praying the full morning, afternoon, and evening services; a film student at Tel Aviv University who became religious after October 7; a bereaved mother whose son was killed in the war who now studies Torah from the rabbi who taught him, working through material her son had already mastered, holding onto it as her way of staying connected to him.
Surveys across Israel show dramatic growth in belief in God, Shabbat observance, and synagogue attendance among people who were entirely secular just a few years ago. When Israelis are asked what happened, the answer that keeps coming back is: “It’s something from within.”
“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord GOD, “when I will send a famine on the land — not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD.” (Amos 8:11)
This is not a handful of individuals, not a small religious revival in one community. It is a broad, unmistakable movement across Israeli society — precisely the kind of widespread yearning for God that Joel described. Why is Man’s Search for Meaning on Israel’s bestseller list in 2026? Because an entire generation is asking Frankl’s question — and beginning to find the answer. As Joel prophesied, the day is coming when it will not be only holy prophets and rare individuals who yearn for God’s presence, but an entire generation of Israel. That day, it appears, is coming sooner than we think.
