On a Shabbat morning the men walk to Beth Jacob along Olympic Boulevard, past the dealerships shuttered for the day, past the gated lawns of eight-figure houses. They wear dark suits in the heat. The eruv runs above them, a thin wire that turns Beverly Hills into a single home for the day, so a man can carry his child and a woman can push a stroller without breaking the law of the boundary. Inside, the sanctuary fills. Beth Jacob holds the largest and most fractious Orthodox congregation in the western United States. It’s the most difficult shul to lead. A producer sits near a cardiologist. A widow from Tehran sits behind a family that left Johannesburg. At the front stands Rabbi Kalman Topp (b. 1972), who came west from Queens in 2009 and built this room into a unified center of Modern Orthodoxy and Religious Zionism.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote that a man lives under two terrors. The first is death, the plain knowledge that the body fails and rots. The second follows from it: the terror that the life leading to that death meant nothing. In The Denial of Death Becker argued that culture exists to answer these terrors. Every society hands its members a hero system, a scheme of significance where a man can earn a place that outlasts his body. He builds something, fathers someone, serves a cause, writes a name somewhere it might be read after he stops breathing. The hero system sells immortality. The currency differs from one system to the next. The promise stays the same.
Topp serves the densest market for that promise in America. A mile from his pulpit, men sell their names to be cut into films and pressed into the sidewalk on a boulevard built for the purpose. The town runs on the oldest immortality project in new clothes. The body will fail, but the work survives, the face stays young on the screen, the name appears in the credits when the man is gone. Topp’s congregants live in that market. Some made fortunes in it. They know the terror it answers and the terror it leaves untouched, the morning the calls stop coming and a younger man holds the part.
The town also carries a story about Topp. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) named it the subtraction story: the modern account where the secular world stands as the real one, and faith stands as the comfort a man has not yet subtracted. On this account the producer who believes in nothing has seen the world as it is, and the rabbi keeps a warm illusion his congregants will outgrow. Topp does not argue back. He lives the refutation. He does not add God to a disenchanted Beverly Hills. He stands inside a fuller account, older than the town, where the producer’s hero system looks thin, unable to carry a man through the failure of the body it depends on.
Walk through Topp’s sacred words: the People, the Torah, chesed, and above all home. Beth Jacob means the house of Jacob. Topp speaks of the synagogue as a home where every kind of Jew finds a place, and of the Jewish People as a home that no exile ends, and of the Land as the home to which the People return. The word answers the terror of erasure with belonging to something that does not die.
Hold the word home up against the men and women who carry it through other systems.
A film editor in his seventies sits three rows back. He cut pictures that people still watch. For forty years home was the room where the work happened, the bay, the screen, the assistant who brought the coffee. He says the phone went quiet four years ago. “They use kids now,” he says. “They do it on laptops.” For him home was the work, and the work has moved to rooms he cannot enter. The terror Becker named arrives on schedule. Topp offers him a home the editing bay never promised, a seat that does not depend on the next call.
Two rows over sits a founder, thirty-four, who sold a company and bought a house above the flats. Home for him names a base, a thing to optimize, a place to leave at five for the airport. He keeps a second home in Austin and talks of a third. He came to Beth Jacob because his wife wanted the children to have what she had. He listens for the part that scales. Topp’s home does not scale. It asks him to stay, to come back next week, to know the man beside him for thirty years. The founder finds this strange and returns anyway.
Near the back sits a grandmother who left Tehran in 1979 with two suitcases. Home for her stands in a city she will not see again, on a street where her father kept a shop. She has built a new home on Olympic Boulevard and she knows what the word costs, that a home can be taken in an afternoon. When Topp speaks of the People as a home no exile ends, she hears it apart from the founder. She has tested the claim against a loss.
In this room the word home carries its heaviest freight. A member of Beth Jacob is the aunt of one of three Israeli boys taken and murdered in 2014. The congregation held a memorial for the boys in this sanctuary. When Topp speaks of the Land as home, he speaks to a family that buried a child for the claim. The Religious Zionist meaning of home runs through that family and lands on the far side of the world.
One word, then, and a different terror under each use of it. For the editor home meant the work, and the terror is obsolescence. For the founder home means a base, and the terror is the still room where nothing scales. For the grandmother home means what cannot be taken twice. For Topp home answers the oldest terror with the People, who continue when the man does not. Many hero systems sit in his sanctuary on a single morning, and his is one of them, offered to men who arrived carrying their own.
Topp inherited a pulpit that knows the terror well. Maurice Lamm (1930-2016) sat in this chair and wrote The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning, the standard Orthodox book on the subject. Topp has written his own pages on the passage from mourning to consolation. He preaches to men who fly home for funerals and sit shiva on folding chairs and say kaddish for a year. He knows the terror he answers because he has stood at the graves.
He bets a man can hold the covenant and Beverly Hills at once, that the eruv can run around the mansions and gather them into one home for a day. The warmth that draws every kind of Jew into the room can soften the demand the Torah makes on each of them. A home where all find a place asks less than a fortress. The love of the People that gives a man transcendent significance can bind the congregation to a nation whose costs fall on people far from Olympic Boulevard, on families like the one that buried the boy. Topp could flee these contradictions. He could go to a stricter enclave where the demand stays hard, or dissolve into the town where the demand disappears. He stays in the middle and carries both.
Place him on three coordinates. The terror he answers is erasure, the fading of a name, the morning the calls stop, the body that fails in a town that prizes the young body. The immortality he offers is a home in a People that does not die, a name written where the industry cannot reach and the obituary cannot close. The price is the middle, the warmth that risks softening the demand and the love of the People that risks not seeing the cost it carries to the far side of the world. A man who serves the house of Jacob on Olympic Boulevard lives at those three points at once, and serves them with a candor about death that the town around him spends a great deal of money to avoid.
