Answer

Hello.
I agree with most of what he says, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy. It’s psychology (some of it cheap, dime-store psychology). He isn’t talking about what is right, but about what gives satisfaction and what is useful, and also, on the factual level, what motivates people. Sometimes he presents his claims as right and wrong, but that’s a deception. He doesn’t justify anything with a normative argument. It’s all declarations, some of them stated as if they were facts, and others are psychological recommendations (what will give you satisfaction and motivate you to act).
I don’t know him, but he seems to belong to those philosophy lecturers who are not philosophers and don’t really understand what philosophy is. They’re actually engaged in psychology (like most of the existentialists). Existentialism is considered a philosophical movement or a field within philosophy, but in fact it is psychology—and even worse than psychology, since its assertions are made declaratively, without the factual basis that proper psychology ought to have (which, as is known, usually doesn’t exist there either).
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Questioner:
According to what he says, does it follow that someone who observes commandments for their own sake is really only satisfying his psychological drive for meaning, and not observing the commandments for the sake of the commandments? In other words, would that person observe commandments were it not for that drive for meaning?
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Rabbi:
That is indeed what follows. But it is said without any basis. By the same token, one could say the same about him: that the search for meaning is nothing but a particular case of the pursuit of happiness, except that in his case happiness comes from meaning rather than from money or ordinary pleasures. So what is the essential difference? After Frankl published logotherapy (man’s search for meaning), people said of him that this was the fourth Viennese school. After Freud, Adler, and Jung with honor and sex, came Frankl. That really shows that for him meaning was no more than an urge like any other urge, whereas meaning belongs to an entirely different conceptual and mental sphere. Meaning is connected to truth, not to satisfaction and psychological motivation. Shimon Danan falls into the same mistake.
I’m already starting to get the itch to write something about this too.