Before Viktor Frankl was deported from Austria in 1942, he had the manuscript for his first book on psychology sewn into the lining of his overcoat. The first thing that happened when the Jewish prisoners arrived at a Nazi concentration camp was that they were told to strip and shower. They never got their own clothes back.

At first Frankl keenly felt the loss of his manuscript. Then he found a paper in the pocket of the coat he was given, and written by hand on this paper he read the Shema Yisrael. This was a spiritual experience for Frankl, evidence that God could still speak to him, even in the horrors of a Nazi death camp.

What is the Shema Yisrael? The words are Hebrew, translated to English they say “Hear O Israel.” They introduce the passage in Deuteronomy 6 that is considered the foundation of the Jewish faith.

Of the Christian faith also. We read in Matthew 22 and Mark 12 that when Jesus was asked what was the first, or the great, commandment of the law, his response began with a portion of the Shema Yisrael.

Here are the first four verses of the Shema Yisrael as found in Deuteronomy 6:4-7.

Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD:
And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart:
And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

Frankl observed in the Nazi prison camps that those who survived were not necessarily those who were the strongest physically, but those who had the strongest conviction that there was a meaning to their life. Frankl survived and went on to establish a new form of psychiatry, diverging from Freud and all those who had come before him. He taught that men and women are spiritual as well as physical beings and that our greatest need for emotional and mental health is a sense of meaning.