Why I Am Walking the Camino: Hope, Meaning, and the Vision of a Living Handbook

Where do we find hope and meaning in our lives?

How do human beings rebuild meaning, hope, and inner strength after loss, trauma, upheaval, and major life transitions?

In about three and a half weeks from now, I will begin walking the 800-kilometer Camino de Santiago across Spain.

There are several reasons I am undertaking this pilgrimage at this time for nearly 40 days (and 40 nights!). For me, this journey is much more than a long trek or pilgrimage. It is a culmination of my own life’s journey, but also of many questions that have been on my mind — and in my soul — for decades.

To me, it is a “next step” on a path that has carried me — and I use that word intentionally — through challenges, journeys, questions, encounters, and reflections over many decades.

Over the years — through my father’s Holocaust story, my doctoral research on reflections of second-generation Holocaust survivors in the second half of life, my work in meaning-centered coaching and Sage-ing, my studies in hope and resilience, and especially after October 7th — I have found myself returning again and again to one central question:

What drives some human beings to “choose life” while others are not able to do so? What are the deep inner rebuilding resources that life offers us even when there is no clear path, answer, or vision in sight? How can these profound life resources reach those most in need — in mind, body, and spirit?

Growing Up in the Shadow of Survival

Growing up in the United States in the 1960s and 70s, I did not take much interest in — and did not fully understand — what it meant to be the child of a Holocaust survivor who had lost almost his entire world.

My father and one sister survived, but all the rest were lost in the town of Zhetl, today in western Belarus.

My father somehow rebuilt a life again.

Around him were other survivors who had also somehow continued — people who met in displaced persons camps, rebuilt families, created friendships, supported one another in life, and carried memory forward while trying to live again.

As a child, I did not yet understand the depth of what I was witnessing.

Only later in life did I begin to ask myself:

What gave these people the strength to continue?What allowed them to choose life again after unimaginable devastation?

Years later, during a deeply moving family memorial journey to Zhetl in 2000 — a journey I later turned into the short film Sacred Legacy — something awakened more deeply in me.

Walking through the town, standing and crying with my father near the mass graves of my grandparents, relatives, and community members, I began to feel that questions of hope, suffering, memory, resilience, and meaning were not abstract philosophical questions.

They were deeply human questions. Existential questions. And perhaps, ultimately, universal ones.

For me, this journey of 26 years ago was a turning point that opened chambers of meaning within me that until then I had not fully appreciated.

Searching East and West

Throughout my life, many influences shaped me deeply — Judaism, Buddhism, Eastern philosophy, nearly five years spent in Asia in my twenties, martial arts, yoga, meditation, wisdom traditions, existential psychology, coaching, Sage-ing, life story writing, logotherapy, and the teachings of Viktor Frankl.

But over time, I increasingly found myself most moved by those moments when people face profound rupture in life: loss,illness,aging,trauma,grief,major transitions,or the feeling that life itself has broken apart beneath them.

No one wants suffering.No one wishes for trauma or heartbreak.

But eventually, all of us encounter some form of it.

This is what Buddhism calls dukkha — the reality that life is inseparable from change, impermanence, vulnerability, and loss.

To live life means learning to live meaningfully with dukkha, and still remain connected to the forces of hope and meaning in life.

As a life coach and group facilitator for more than 22 years, I have had the privilege of accompanying many people through transitions in their lives.

Yet increasingly, what touched me most were not questions of success or productivity, but the deeper existential questions:

What helps people continue when everything feels broken?How do people rediscover meaning?How do they reconnect to hope?How do they choose life again?

After October 7th

After October 7th, these questions became even more urgent for me.

I had just returned from another deeply emotional journey connected to Zhetl and to documenting my own family story through my dissertation work. I was still carrying the experience of walking through erased landscapes of memory, standing at mass graves, and reflecting on my father’s story and the resilience of survivors.

Then October 7th happened.

As the scale of the massacre and trauma became clearer, something inside me converged.

My father’s legacy, my studies, my work in hope and meaning, my own aging journey, the collective trauma in Israel, and my encounters with survivors and grieving families — all of it came together.

I realized more deeply than ever that hope is not merely optimism.It is not positive thinking. It is not denial.

Hope is an inner orientation toward life even in darkness.A willingness to continue searching for meaning. A capacity to imagine that light can still exist after devastation — even if the path is not marked and there is no plan.

We will all know suffering in life.Dukkha prevails.

But it is how we meet those situations in life that influences our ability to go on.

The rebuilding part is a challenge we will all face.

Will we have the resources, knowledge, opportunity, mindset, and support to help that rebuilding come into being?

What I found after October 7th, 2023 — and through the many painful and tragic events that followed — is that people deeply want meaning.They want hope.

But how to make that happen remains a very open question.

I realized that many people today are searching for this connection within themselves, but often do not know where to turn.

Some go to therapy, coaching, or faith support. Some read books. Some seek support groups. Some feel isolated and lost — and more often than not, overwhelmed.

Too much.Too scattered.Too many voices.

Many people do none of the above, often struggling with a deep loneliness and sense of “nowhere to go.”

The Vision of a “Living Handbook”

But what if there were also something more accessible? Something easy to return to. Something deeply human and personal that people could turn to during difficult moments in life.

This is what gradually gave birth to the vision of what I now call a “Living Handbook.”

The “Living Handbook” is not meant to be a traditional self-help book, textbook, or academic work.

It is not something I imagine people simply reading once from beginning to end and placing on a shelf.

I imagine it more as a companion.

A companion for people navigating grief, loss, transition, uncertainty, heartbreak, aging, trauma, searching, and renewal.

A resource people can easily return to and dip into to find stories, ideas, wisdom, and practical tools for those difficult moments when we need hope and do not know exactly where to go.

What Will Be in This “Living Handbook”?

I envision it bringing together several different kinds of wisdom woven together.

There will be stories — stories of people walking the Camino de Santiago carrying their own struggles, losses, questions, illnesses, griefs, longings, and hopes.

These deeply human stories will form the heart of the book.

These will be the people I will meet on my Camino journey.

There will also be practical tools — reflections, exercises, journaling prompts, contemplative practices, and approaches inspired by what I think of as the spirit of post-traumatic growth: not only surviving difficult experiences, but growing through them in meaningful ways.

These will be grounded, honest, and inviting.

Another part of the handbook will bring together some of the fascinating research being done today around hope, resilience, optimism, grief, healing, aging, meaning, and human flourishing.

So much wisdom exists in research, yet most people never encounter it in an accessible and human form.

It needs to be gathered and presented in a way that is understandable and alive.

And finally, there will be my own reflections from a lifetime of searching and living — a distillation of experiences, stories, insights, and observations gathered through decades of exploring the question of meaning and hope in life.

I want this handbook to feel:

accessible, human, usable.

Not heavy. Not preachy. Not coming from above.

But something people can open in moments of loneliness, confusion, heartbreak, or searching and perhaps find:

a story,a reflection,a practice,a quotation,a moment of inspiration,or simply the feeling that they are not alone.

This is one of the deepest reasons I feel called to walk the Camino.

Why the Camino?

Many people have asked me:

Why the Camino de Santiago?Why walk nearly 800 kilometers across Spain?Why choose a centuries-old pilgrimage route for a project about hope, meaning, resilience, and human transformation?

The answer is not simple.

Of course one can create such a “Living Handbook” without ever leaving one’s home. But that is not the way I see creating such a project.

I want to be there to walk with others. I want to do it and be it myself. I want the path to speak to us, as it always can if we give it the opportunity to engage us.

The Camino is one of the few places left in the modern world where people intentionally step out of ordinary life and enter a slower, deeper journey — not as a quick experience, but as something that requires time, effort, discomfort, and openness.

People come to the Camino carrying all kinds of things:

grief,loss,illness,aging,burnout,questions,transitions,heartbreak,uncertainty, dreams,searching,or simply the feeling that something in their life needs attention.

Some come after divorce.Some after trauma.Some after losing loved ones.Some after retirement or loss of employment.Some after cancer.Some because they feel lost.Some because they are searching for God, meaning, healing, silence, or a new beginning.

And many arrive without fully knowing why they came at all.

The Camino creates a unique human environment for this kind of searching.

Part of it is the walking itself.

Every day you wake up and continue.Step after step.Village after village.Rain, heat, exhaustion, uncertainty, beauty, loneliness, companionship.

The journey strips life down to something simpler and more essential.

You carry only what you need.

You become attentive to your body, your thoughts, your emotions, your memories, your pains, your moods, and your limits.

Walking day after day creates space for reflection in a way modern life rarely allows.

But the Camino is not only an individual experience. One of the remarkable things about the Camino is the social ecosystem that surrounds it:

the albergues (communal hostels for pilgrims),the shared meals,the conversations,the chance encounters,the international community of pilgrims,and the mutual support that naturally emerges among strangers.

People from all over the world walk together, often speaking with unusual honesty because everyone is temporarily outside of ordinary roles and routines.

There is something profoundly human about that.

And because the journey is long — not one day, but many weeks — something begins to happen internally as well.

The body changes.The mind slows down.Old thoughts surface.Questions emerge.People begin confronting parts of themselves they may have avoided for years.

The Camino becomes not only a physical challenge, but also an emotional, psychological, and spiritual journey.

For me, this length matters enormously.

Transformation usually does not happen instantly.Insight takes time.Healing takes time.Conversations take time.Trust takes time.Meaning often unfolds slowly.

The Camino creates conditions for that unfolding.

Another reason I am drawn to the Camino is its incredible diversity.

The route moves through changing landscapes, climates, histories, villages, cities, mountains, plains, forests, cathedrals, and cultures.

It carries layers of history stretching back centuries, yet every pilgrim experiences it in a completely personal way.

On the Camino, you remain who you are, but you also become part of a temporary global community of pilgrims — something beyond nationality alone, perhaps even a kind of shared human identity.

No two Caminos are the same.

And perhaps most importantly, the Camino is a place people already intuitively associate with searching.

It has become a modern pilgrimage route not only for religious people, but for human beings trying to make sense of life.

That makes it, for me, an extraordinary living laboratory for the questions that have guided much of my own life and work:

How do people rebuild after loss?How do they reconnect to meaning?What helps people continue?Where does hope come from?What helps human beings remain human during difficult times?

As part of this “Living Handbook” project, I hope to walk slowly, stay in the albergues, meet people human being to human being, and listen deeply to the stories people carry within them.

Not as a researcher standing above others.Not as an expert with answers.

But as a fellow traveler.

Some of the people I will meet on the way I hope to reconnect with after returning home, in order to create more structured and in-depth conversations and interviews.

We shall wait and see.

I believe the Camino gathers together people who are often standing at important thresholds in their lives.

And through listening to their stories — and through my own experience walking this long pilgrimage — I hope to better understand something about resilience, hope, meaning, healing, and the human spirit.

In the end, the Camino is not only about arriving in Santiago.

It is about what unfolds along the way.

Would You Like to Walk With Me?

If this vision speaks to you, and if you would like to support this Camino journey and the creation of the “Living Handbook,” I would be deeply grateful for your encouragement and support as this project unfolds.

This is not a commercial project, but one with a social and human orientation that will entail hundreds of hours of walking, listening, writing, reflection, interviewing, and follow-up before the handbook is completed.

My hope is to make it available at very low cost — or even free — to people who would not otherwise be able to access it.

My desire is not to create profit for myself, but to bring something meaningful into the world that may help people during difficult times in their lives.

This is the spirit of the journey.This is the spirit of the “Living Handbook.”This is the spirit of the campaign.

The campaign will remain open for approximately another two weeks.

Would you like to walk with me?

Support the Camino and “Living Handbook” Project

https://whydonate.com/fundraising/walking-toward-hope-a-companion-for-hope-and-meaning-