A boy walks a mile to shul and a mile back, beside his father, in Cleveland, in the years when his father is one of the city’s rabbis and his grandfather, the man he is named for, leads a congregation in Chicago. Years later a reporter asks the boy, now a rabbi in his fortieth year on his own pulpit, for his favorite childhood memory. He gives him the walk. Not a sermon. Not a triumph. Not a crowd. The walk. Two men on a sidewalk, one small and one tall, going to the same place his grandfather went and his grandfather’s teachers went, in Lithuania, out of the Slabodka yeshiva, before the place that made them was burned off the earth.
Begin with Rabbi Elazar Muskin there, because the walk holds the whole thing for America’s greatest congregational rabbi.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built his work on a single hard claim. Man is the animal that knows he will die, and the knowledge is too much to carry, so he builds a scheme of meaning that lets him feel he counts inside a story larger than his body and longer than his life. Becker called these schemes hero systems. A man wants to be a hero. He wants his days to add up to something the grave cannot cancel. Religion is the oldest of these schemes and, Becker thought, the most honest of them, because it says the terror aloud rather than dressing it as a stock portfolio, a flag, or a body kept lean at the gym.
Muskin’s hero system has a name his shul put on its logo. Where Community Happens.
The word does the lifting, so look at the word. He takes it from Hillel, in Pirkei Avot: do not separate yourself from the community. He repeats the line in interviews the way other men repeat their own. At the Shabbos table in Cleveland the community was the family’s bread and butter, he says, and Israel sat front and center in the talk. So when he uses the word he means a thing with edges and weight. He means ten men for a minyan on a Tuesday morning. He means the eruv that lets a mother carry her baby to shul on Shabbos. He means the mikveh, the chesed roster that brings food to a house of mourning, the names you know when you walk the street on a Saturday because you have prayed beside all of them. Community, for Muskin, is the body that carries the covenant from his grandfather to a child not yet born. It answers death by outliving any one member of it.
Now say the same word in other rooms, and watch it change.
A founder says community and sees a graph. Users, a Discord server, a curve that bends up and to the right. The terror under his project is irrelevance, the fear that he will pass through the world and leave no dent, and his community is the proof of the dent, churning and renaming itself every eighteen months, immortal as a logo and as thin.
A battalion officer says community and sees the men he would die for and who would die for him. Blood, not metaphor. The community is the unit, the dead are kept on the wall, and a man earns his place in it by what he is willing to lose. The terror it answers is the small death of meaning a man feels who has risked nothing.
A Trappist monk says community and means the opposite of all of them. His community exists to wear the self away, not to extend it. He wants no monument, no logo, no children. The brothers hold him to a silence that empties him toward God, and the immortality he reaches for is the one that begins where the self ends.
A preacher in a storefront church on a poor block says community and the room comes off its feet. The community is the Body, filled with the Spirit, singing back what he calls out, and death is already beaten, so the dead are not gone, only ahead.
An Armenian whose grandparents walked out of Anatolia says community and means memory under threat. The community is a wound kept open on purpose, a refusal to let the killers finish the work by being forgotten. To assimilate is to die a second time, this one self-inflicted.
Same word. Five terrors, five answers, five men who would not recognize what the others are protecting.
And there is the room I keep. The tribalist, the nationalist, the man of the old loyalties who says community and means the people. The nation does not die when he dies. It received him from the dead and will hand him to the unborn, and his small life draws its weight from that long line. The terror it answers is the terror of the rootless modern, the man from nowhere with no graves to tend.
Muskin’s answer rhymes with this last one. He too has a line, four generations of rabbis and the millions behind them. He too has a soil. He ran T’chiya Volunteers for eleven years, sending American college students into Israel’s development towns, and after October 7 he led five missions to Israel, one behind the other, and pointed back to the Soviet Jewry marches of the 1980s as the model for what a people owes itself in public. He has a blood, the peoplehood that the protester on his own block meant when he told a Jew to go back to Europe. When that man pointed his finger like a gun, Muskin named the act and then refused to inflate it. This was not a pogrom, he said. He would not lie upward even about an enemy. That is a man with the nationalist’s loyalties and not the nationalist’s appetites.
The nationalist makes the people the highest thing, the god at the top of the ladder. Muskin makes the people a servant of the thing above the people. The covenant outranks the tribe. The soil is holy because of a divine promise, not the promise holy because of the soil. Strip the God off the top and the structure does not stand, and he knows it, which is why the word on the logo is community and not blood. Religious Zionism is the hinge that lets both loyalties live in one man without either eating the other.
You can see the project at the moment he chose it. He marries in Israel in January 1985 and comes west on his honeymoon that July, having never seen the coast. He locks himself out of his wife’s uncle’s house, takes himself on a tour of the shuls, confuses Pico for Olympic, and walks in the wrong door. A man stops him on the street. Young man, what do you do for a living. A rabbi, he says. On the walk home the same man tells him a small shul across town is looking. Fewer than fifty families. Beth Jacob is the empire, the largest Orthodox shul west of the Mississippi, and this is the opposite of Beth Jacob. He takes it. He says later that he had always wanted to build a shul, that he never wanted to step into another man’s shoes and run a thing already made. He wanted to start something and watch it grow. Forty years on the membership runs near ten times what he found. Man for man, this becomes the most powerful line-up in the city.
Becker would call that the work. The man does not want to inherit a monument. He wants to build the vessel that carries life past his own death, and to feel his hand in every brick of it.
The cost. Asked about his day off, he says he does not have one, and the shul knows it. He pays for the community with his own body and his own hours, year after year, and the bill never stops coming. A community with an inside has an outside, and the warmth that one man feels walking the street and knowing every face is purchased by the line that decides whose face counts. On October 26, 2007, a Friday night, a man held him up at gunpoint, the terror under the whole project arriving for one moment in the flesh, the death his life is built to answer pressing a barrel into the rabbi on his way home from the work of answering it.
What lifts him toward the honorable is what he does with that boundary. He widens it. If a man is not welcome in his shul, he lets the other shuls know about the danger. He doesn’t shrink from taking hard decisions. He was the first to back the eruv and put it in the dues, because an eruv serves every observant Jew in the neighborhood and not only his own. He gathered the rival shuls, Beth Jacob and B’nai David among them, to learn the Tisha b’Av elegies together, and kept them coming for more than twenty years. Young Israel is one piece of it, he says. Not the whole. Mayor Hahn put him on the city’s Human Relations Commission, and his colleagues made him the first Los Angeles rabbi to lead the national rabbinic council. A smaller man builds a fortress. Muskin builds a shul and then spends himself keeping its doors propped open onto the street.
So place him by three coordinates and let the reader judge.
He locates the sacred not in the self and not in the nation alone but in the covenant community that carries both under God. That is the apex of his ladder, and he has never pretended otherwise.
He answers the oldest terror by transmission. He does not pretend death away. He hands on the road his father handed him, and the road outlasts the man who walks it. The grandfather is a photograph on the wall now. The boy who walked beside his father is the man five hundred families walk toward on a Saturday morning.
And he pays the price on his own account, the day off he does not take, the gun on the dark street, the boundary he keeps widening at his own expense. Asked in his fortieth year how he is, he says he is happy. The shul is booming. He is working full-time. He means it, and a man who has read Becker hears under it the only victory the frame allows a mortal. He built the thing that will keep going to shul after he can no longer make the walk.
