Alos hashachar reaches Pico Boulevard at 5:39 a.m. in the spring, the first gray before sun. The men come on foot toward 9040, past the kosher pizza place with its gate down, past the bakery, to a storefront that sold furniture for decades and now holds a shul. Adas Torah sits in the heart of Pico-Robertson, a few blocks of Los Angeles where a man can live a whole life inside the eruv and never use a car on Shabbos. Inside, the men hang dark hats on the pegs and open the Gemara before the city wakes. At the front, for two decades now, sits Rabbi Dovid Revah, who came from Toronto by way of Gateshead, Brisk, and Lakewood, and took this shul a year after its founding.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote that every man carries two terrors. He will die. And the life that ends in death might have meant nothing at all. In The Denial of Death Becker argued that culture answers these terrors by handing each man a hero system, a scheme of significance where he can win a permanence the grave does not touch. He builds, he fathers, he conquers, he makes a name. The hero system sells immortality. The currency changes from one system to the next. The promise holds.
Most hero systems pay in victory, and most victories keep a score.
A fighter wins when the other man stays down past ten. A sprinter wins by a hundredth of a second, his name on the board until a faster man erases it. A dealmaker wins at the close, the wire cleared, the other side holding less. Homer’s warriors chase kleos, the undying fame a man buys by killing better men than himself in front of witnesses. Each of these victories needs a loser. Each keeps a number. Each lasts until a larger number arrives.
Revah’s shul publishes a Torah journal. The men named it Nitzachon. The Hebrew root carries two meanings at once, victory and permanence, the win and the forever. The lot on Pico sold furniture for decades under the name Victory. Men win a different victory there now, one with no opponent and no scoreboard.
At 6:35 in the evening the daf yomi begins. The men learning the page in Pico learn the same page that night in Lakewood, in Gateshead, in Bnei Brak, in Melbourne, and the same page their grandfathers learned, and their grandfathers’ grandfathers. Rava asks and Abaye answers in the present tense. Rashi (1040-1105) sits at the margin, ready with a word. A boy of nineteen and a grandfather of sixty argue with both as contemporaries. When a man finishes a tractate he says the Hadran, we will return to you and you will return to us, and he closes the volume and opens the next. He has not beaten anyone. He has joined something that cannot be beaten because it does not compete. Netzach. He wins by continuing.
This turns Becker’s usual hero on his head. The standard hero stands out. He wants the unique self to register on the cosmos, the name carved where it might be read after he stops breathing. Revah’s hero points the other way. He makes himself small, a vessel for words older than his name, a link in a chain that asks him not to be remembered but to be faithful. Here the paradox closes, because the self-effacement holds the most complete immortality project of them all. The boxer’s victory dies when a younger man knocks him down. The runner’s record dies the next Olympics. The Torah the man learns at the 6:35 daf has outlasted every empire that tried to end it, and it does not lean on his name surviving. It leans on the text surviving, and the text has buried its enemies.
The world Revah came up in keeps a different ledger of rank. Gateshead in the north of England, Brisk in Jerusalem, Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood, the largest yeshiva in America. He joined the Kollel of Los Angeles in 1995 and sat and learned. In this world a man’s standing rests on his lomdus, the depth and edge of his learning, on the analytic method Reb Chaim Soloveitchik (1853-1918) built in Brisk, on which yeshiva shaped him and who his chavrusa was. Money buys a man little here. A scholar can drive a fifteen-year-old sedan and hold the room because of what he carries in Bava Metzia. The hats look the same on the pegs. The status moves underneath, measured in pages.
Many hero systems share the block on a single morning. A trader davens the early minyan and steps out to the phones, two scoreboards running, the market and the daf. A surgeon comes to the 8:00 and goes to cut, a man who wins when the patient walks out. Revah keeps no scoreboard. He teaches the page, and the page keeps him.
The Gemara in Berachos says that since the Temple fell, the Holy One has in His world only the four cubits of halacha. Revah’s world narrows to those four cubits, and the narrowing holds both the victory and its price. A life given to the page is a life not given to a hundred other rooms a man might have entered. The world that teaches bittul, the effacing of the self before the text, runs its own quiet contests, fierce under the humility: whose son tested into which yeshiva, whose chiddush landed, whose line runs back to which rav. And the prize this hero system holds highest, the man who sits and learns and asks nothing else of his days, the tradition hands to men. His wife and daughters live partly inside a scheme of significance whose summit they reach by another road than his. He sees that or he does not. The honor in him shows in what he did not chase. He did not move for the larger pulpit or the wider name. He stayed on the old furniture lot for two decades and taught the daf in the dark before work.
Three coordinates locate him. The terror he answers is the smallness of one life set against the depth of time, the fear that a man comes and goes and the years close over him. The victory he offers is netzach, a permanence with no opponent and no number, a seat in a conversation that has no date and admits a boy and a grandfather on the same terms. The price is the four cubits, the world narrowed to the page, the quiet contests of men who preach their own smallness, the lives beside him reaching for prizes his hero system cannot hand them. A man who learns the daf on the old Victory lot wins by continuing, and offers a victory that keeps no score in a city that keeps little else.
