Three men sit behind a long table in a room off the main sanctuary. A young woman sits across from them. She has studied for two years. She keeps Shabbos, she has learned the brachot and the laws of family purity and the order of the festivals, and she has come this morning to be told whether she is now a daughter of Israel or still a stranger at the gate. One of the three men is Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein (b. 1950). The court he sits on decides who enters the Jewish people. Not who joins a congregation. Who enters the people. The distinction carries the whole weight of the morning.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave the modern name for what that table protects. In The Denial of Death he argued that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot bear the knowledge, and that almost everything man builds he builds against that knowledge. Culture, on this reading, is a hero system. It hands each man a script for cosmic significance and a route out of the grave. Some routes promise the literal kind, a soul that outlasts the body. Others promise the symbolic kind, the name remembered, the work that stands, the child who carries the line. The Jewish people own a hero system as old and as explicit as any in the Western record. The chain of transmission runs from Sinai to the table in that room, and the woman who crosses it becomes a link in something the death of any single Jew cannot end. The court guards the entrance to the deathless.
Becker took the architecture from Otto Rank (1884-1939), who described two terrors rather than one. The first is the fear of death, the dread of dissolving, of the body that rots and the self that ends. The second is the fear of life, the dread of standing alone as a separate man, of carrying one’s own freedom with no larger thing to answer to. A good hero system answers both. The yeshiva answers both at once. The man who gives his years to the Law defeats death by joining a chain older than any grave, and he defeats the terror of standing alone by becoming a link instead of a self, a bearer of something he did not invent and cannot lose. Adlerstein took that double cure young. He earned Phi Beta Kappa at Queens College and semicha from Yeshivas Chofetz Chaim under Rav Henoch Leibowitz (1918-2008), one of the last roshei yeshiva formed in the pre-war European mold. The two trainings do not sit together at rest. The secular degree teaches a man to ask what a text is and where it came from. The yeshiva teaches him to stand inside the text and submit to it. Adlerstein carries both, and the friction between them runs under everything he has written since.
His writing turns on a small set of sacred words. Mesorah. Humility. Truth. The words look stable. They are not. A sacred word is a slot, and each hero system fills the slot with its own deathless object, so that men who use the same word mean different rescues by it.
Take the wish to outlast the body. A geneticist runs a sequencing lab above the bluffs in La Jolla. She is forty-four and works fourteen-hour days. Ask her what survives a man and she answers without sentiment. The body is a vehicle the genes drive and discard. What survives is the line, the replicator, the information that copies itself down deep time long after the carrier rots. She has made her peace with the grave by widening the frame until her own death looks like one cell shedding off a thing that keeps going. Permanence, to her, is the gene.
A trumpet player works a club off Central Avenue four nights a week. He is sixty and his lip is going. Ask him the same question and he talks about a recording from 1961 that he still studies, and a phrase inside it that he lifted and passed to younger players who will lift it from him. He expects to die broke. He does not expect the phrase to die. Permanence, to him, is the lick that keeps getting played in other men’s hands.
A gunnery sergeant, retired, drives down from Twentynine Palms for the unit reunion every year. He does not pray much. He believes in the wall with the names on it and in the men who read the names aloud. He holds that a man lives as long as his people say his name in the right room. Permanence, to him, is the reunion.
Adlerstein takes the same wish and fills the slot with the chain. A Jew lives because Israel does not die, and Israel does not die because the Law passes hand to hand without a break, and his own portion of permanence is the Torah he transmits and the students who will teach what he taught. Four men. One wish. Four deathless objects, and no two of them the same. The word permanence carries each man’s private rescue and hides how little the rescues share.
Take humility, the word Adlerstein reaches for when an argument grows dangerous. The geneticist prizes humility too. Hers is the humility of method. She holds every claim open to overthrow, keeps the next experiment ready to kill the last one, and counts the willingness to be wrong as the highest discipline her work allows. Humility, for her, opens every door.
A Cistercian monk in the hills near the central coast prizes humility above the other virtues. His is the emptying kind. He works to thin the wanting self until little stands between him and God, whom he calls Him without strain. Humility, for the monk, is the subtraction of the self.
A founder in a glass office south of Market keeps humility on a laminated card by the door. Stay humble, stay hungry. His humility is a posture that keeps a man from missing the next thing that will eat his company. He treats ego as a bug to patch. Humility, for him, is a competitive edge.
Adlerstein fills the slot with bittul, the setting aside of private judgment before the mesorah. His humility runs the other way from the geneticist’s. Hers opens the load-bearing claim to overthrow. His closes it. When he meets a hard question, the conflict of Genesis with the age of the rocks, the gap between the spade in the ground and the story on the page, he does not throw the claim open. He calls for humility, and the call means the chain knows more than the link, and the link should bow. The rabbi and the geneticist both speak honestly. They send the same word in opposite directions.
Take truth. A scholar who reads the Torah as the academy reads any ancient book wants truth as correspondence, the text matched against the record of when men wrote and why, and he wants it whether or not the people survives the telling. A trial lawyer wants truth that survives cross-examination, built to a standard, provisional, the best a room can establish before a verdict. A novelist wants the truth of the human heart and will invent a whole town to reach it, holding that the made-up thing carries more truth than the minutes of any meeting. Adlerstein wants truth the chain can carry without snapping. He will grant that a problem is real. He grants it often, and the granting is the honest part. Then he subordinates the truth of the problem to the survival of the covenant, because a truth that ends the people is, in his hero system, the one truth he cannot afford to hold.
A secular reader watching all this thinks Adlerstein drew the hard assignment and the geneticist drew the clean one. The reader thinks the rabbi clings to an old shelter while the scientist stands out in the open air of fact. Becker spent a career taking that comfort apart. Nobody stands in the open air. The geneticist’s deep time is her cathedral. The founder’s disruption is his salvation drama, complete with a fall and a rebirth and a chosen remnant who saw it coming. The sergeant’s brotherhood is his afterlife. None of them subtracted the hero system. Each relocated it and then forgot the relocating, which is the part that lets a man feel he reasoned his way clear of what every other man only inherited. Adlerstein at least knows the name of what he serves. He has read the Maharal (c. 1512-1609) on why the Oral Torah resists the page. He has translated Be’er Hagolah and sat for years with the Netivot Shalom of the Slonimer Rebbe (Sholom Noach Berezovsky, 1911-2000). A man does not spend those years without learning that he stands inside a structure built against the dark. He does not pretend to stand outside one. The deep-time priest rarely matches that much honesty.
Most men tend one hero system and live among others who tend the same one. Adlerstein tends several at once and keeps them from looking at each other. Consider the room he works.
An evangelical donor in Orange County funds Jewish causes because his reading of scripture ties his own salvation to the standing of Israel. He needs the rabbi across the table to be the real thing, confident, unbroken, a Judaism with no cracks showing. The donor’s afterlife runs in part through the Jew’s fidelity. Doubt in the rabbi reads to him as a fault in the foundation of his own hope.
A rosh yeshiva in a Lakewood-adjacent world respects Adlerstein’s Chofetz Chaim pedigree and grants the man a hearing he denies a professor. His hero system holds that the chain stays pure by staying closed, that authority survives through insulation, no concession to outside categories. He listens to Adlerstein only as long as Adlerstein never tells him the chain has human links.
A mother in Hancock Park sends her daughter to YULA because the school threads a needle. She wants a child who can hold a place at a secular university and still bentch after the meal. Her hero system is continuity through her children. She needs the rabbi to make Orthodoxy survivable in a world of admissions offices and dinner parties, and she needs him to do it without thinning the thing he preserves down to nothing.
A centrist reader of Cross-Currents wants depth without rupture. He wants to feel that a serious man has looked at the hard questions and stayed. His hero system needs a living example that honesty and the chain can share one body.
Each of these people runs an immortality project that direct contact with the others might crack. The donor cannot watch the rosh yeshiva treat his evangelical alliance as avodah zarah dressed for company. The rosh yeshiva cannot watch the professor read the Torah as a layered human document. The Hancock Park mother cannot watch either extreme without fearing for her daughter’s footing. Adlerstein stands at the junction and takes the friction onto himself. Becker had a word for what these audiences do to such a man. Transference. We hand the terror to a figure who seems able to hold it, and we let him carry what we cannot. Several of these audiences have handed Adlerstein that load. His calm is the thing they lean on. His silences are the tax he pays to keep the leaning possible. When he declines to say the destabilizing sentence, he protects no salary. He keeps the dark off four sets of people at once.
The pattern showed in the Slifkin affair. When the ban fell on Natan Slifkin (b. 1975) for writing that the sages erred on points of natural science, Adlerstein defended the man and defended the right to ask the question. He did not endorse the conclusion that might have followed had he pushed all the way. A full endorsement might have cost him more than standing. It might have cracked a hero system in plain view, shown the chain as possibly the work of human hands and so possibly mortal. He defended the man and the procedure and left the load-bearing claim alone. Read without sympathy, that looks like hedging. Read through Becker, it looks like a man refusing to pull the roof off a shelter full of people who have nowhere else to sleep.
The question worth pressing is how much of this he sees. A man can serve a hero system blind, mistaking the shelter for the open sky, or he can serve it with his eyes open, knowing the walls are walls and tending them anyway because the people inside are real and the cold outside is real. The years with the Maharal point to the second man. You do not translate a sixteenth-century defense of the Oral Torah against its rationalist critics without grasping that the tradition has always known itself under pressure and has always built to hold. Adlerstein writes like a man who knows the name of the thing he protects. He introduces a real tension, lets it breathe, then closes it with a call to humility or a turn to a higher synthesis, and the closing carries no innocence. It is a valve. Enough air to keep inquiry alive in the room. Not enough to burn the house. A man who builds a valve knows there is a fire.
Run the frame cold and Adlerstein shrinks to a functionary of terror, a man who manages other men’s fear of death for status and a teaching post. That reading costs more truth than it buys. The denial of death is not a vice he happens to have. It is the human condition. The geneticist and the founder and the sergeant carry it no less than the rabbi. Becker thought the most a man can do is choose his hero system with open eyes and offer it as a gift rather than force it as a weapon. By that test Adlerstein does well. He persuades. He translates. He hands people a structure they can live inside and does not pretend the structure is the sky. For the young man ravaged by illness (this was me in the early 1990s), his phone calls provide hope, strength and good advice.
Place him, then, on three readings. He names the terror with as little evasion as his position allows, a learned Jew who knows the chain is at once a gift from Sinai and a labor of human hands, and who does not flinch from holding both. He offers his hero system as a gift. He wins assent by translation, and the honorable shelter is the one a man can choose to enter and choose to leave. And he carries an uncommon share of other men’s fear, because a junction bears the load of every road that meets there, and he chose to live at a junction.
Return to the room off the sanctuary. The woman waits for the verdict. Three men decide whether she crosses into the people that does not die. Adlerstein has spent his life at this table, the place where the deathless thing checks who comes in and the cold outside presses on the glass. He knows what the table is for. He knows the chain is older than he is and will outlast him if he does the work, and he knows that men built every link by hand, including the one he holds. He guards the entrance anyway. Call it moderation and you miss it. He tends a fire he knows is a fire, for people he knows will freeze without it.
