On Loving When You Aren't Loved Back | September 2025

The genius and relevance of Viktor Frankl

When I started Craft Sourdough, I wanted to bring people together around the idea of delighting our friends and family, and doing the work to make those celebrations memorable.

Rule number one when you want to bring people together: don’t talk politics. So, I’ll try not to, but I might bend that rule a little.

Something I’ve been re-experiencing lately is my love of French, the language, the bread culture, the idealized way of life. And that’s put me in a somewhat odd place, because I know that antisemitism has been on the rise quite a bit in France over the past few years.

But everyday, I take a few minutes to try saying the prettiest sounds in any language, even if it’s only “How are you?” I’ll take mental breaks by watching some French baker create magic in their oven. And of course, I love spending time with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on nearly everything that he wrote.

So I find myself loving a culture which I sense doesn’t love me back.

And this brings me to one of the most important speeches ever given. It was delivered by Viktor Frankl, Holocaust survivor and psychotherapist. In it, he shares his view that collective guilt doesn’t exist. One cannot blame an entire society for the sins of the individuals.

He goes on to say that he visited the United States 63 times since he was liberated from the camps and each time he came back to Austria. As he explains, “Not because Austrians loved me so much, but because I loved Austria, and love, as we know, is not always reciprocated.”

To me, this is one of the keys of finding ways forward in loving all the beauty that the world has to offer. Of course, one has to be careful, and shouldn’t wander into a dangerous area. But we have lovely ways of bringing all parts of the world, all cultures, into our homes and minds in a way that expand the majesty of humanity and the loveliness of life.

Dr. Frankl goes on to argue that the Nazi party advanced a worldview of race as a primary means of definition. It was insanity and should never be adopted by any people at any time ever again. So when a Jewish couple is killed outside of a meeting in Washington DC with the shooter shouting, “Free Palestine," that’s Nazi ideology in action. And when a 73-year old man in Illinois kills a 6-year old Arab boy for fear of what he would become, that Nazi ideology in action.

To avoid this trap, we need to end the Nazi ideology. Too often we think of ending “antisemitism,” which I’m all for. But that isn’t the real problem. Antisemitism is just a branch growing out of race thinking. Too often we think of ending Antisemitism by taking a stand against another target race group. That just perpetuates race hate. To end the cycle, we need, as Dr. Frankl says,

“That we heed the call of the day… For all those who are of good will, shall finally reach out their hands towards each other, across all the graveyards and ditches.”