Sometime in the middle 1970s a young rabbi takes his two boys to the La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Boulevard. They stand at the rail and look at the bronze mammoth in the lake of asphalt. The cow and calf trumpet from the shore while the bull sinks. Under the black surface lie tens of thousands of years of dire wolves and saber cats and ground sloths, each one pulled down, each death drawing the next animal to the same trap. The father, Marvin Hier (b. 1939), watches the tourists file past the casts of the bones. He wonders how many of them know what led to the war that killed a third of his people. Within a year he opens an institution so that one extinction will keep a witness. He names it for Simon Wiesenthal (1908-2005), the man who hunts the murderers so the murdered keep their names.
This is the home Ari Hier grows up in.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) finishes The Denial of Death in 1973, three years before that afternoon at the pits. His argument runs like this. Man is the animal who knows he will die, and who cannot bear the knowledge. He has the body of a creature that rots and the mind of a god who plans for eternity, and the gap between the two opens a terror he spends his life refusing to look at. Culture answers the terror. A culture hands each man a hero system, a set of standards by which he can earn the feeling that he counts, that his days add up to something the grave cannot cancel. The hero strains against oblivion. He writes the book, raises the sons, builds the monument, dies for the flag, sanctifies the Name. Becker says we do not choose whether to deny death. We choose only the costume we deny it in.
Two terrors sit under the work. The first is the fear of vanishing, of going under the asphalt and leaving no mark. The second is subtler. It is the fear of a life that signifies nothing even while it lasts, a span of years that touches no eternal thing. A hero system that works answers both at once. It promises that the man will be remembered, and it promises that the remembering points at something real.
Marvin Hier builds his answer in brick and film. The Museum of Tolerance. Moriah Films, two of which win the Oscar. The meetings with kings and presidents, the invocation read at a Washington inauguration. He converts the murder of six million into a permanent machine for refusing their erasure. His son Avi plans the Jerusalem building. His son Ari runs the Jewish Studies Institute, teaches Bible and the Prophets to the boys of YULA, and writes for the Jewish Journal on theology and history and the war that never quite ends. Ari does not inherit a synagogue. He inherits a hero system already poured into concrete, and then he chooses it again as a grown man.
You can watch him choose it in the spring of 2001.
That Passover, Rabbi David Wolpe (b. 1958) of Sinai Temple tells two thousand congregants that almost every working archaeologist agrees the Exodus did not happen the way the Bible tells it, if it happened at all. The Los Angeles Times runs it on the front page. A hurricane follows. Six rabbis buy an advertisement accusing Wolpe of severing the roots that bind the people to its faith. Dennis Prager (b. 1948) writes that Judaism stands on two pillars, Creation and Exodus, and survives the denial of the second no better than the denial of God. And Ari Hier answers in print with one line that tells you everything about the world he lives in. Rabbi Wolpe, he writes, has chosen Aristotle (384-322 BCE) over Maimonides (1138-1204), theories and scientific method over facts.
Read that line twice. The secular ear expects the rabbi to say he keeps faith in spite of the evidence. Hier says the reverse. He claims the facts and assigns Wolpe the theory. The transmitted record of the nation, carried mouth to ear for three thousand years, counts to him as the hard datum. The empty stratum in the Negev, the potsherds that fail to turn up, the settlement maps, all of that he files under speculation. Inside his hero system the chain of witnesses is the primary evidence and the trowel is the late guess. He is not waving away facts. He is telling you which facts hold the weight.
Now take the word he reaches for, “facts,” and walk it through other men in other hero systems, and watch it change shape in their mouths.
A field archaeologist crouches in the Negev with a brush and a sieve. For him a fact is what the ground gives up. Carbon dates, ash layers, the order of the strata. Silence in the soil is itself a reading. A people’s memory of its own founding arrives as a literary layer laid down centuries after the events it claims, and he treats it the way he treats any text, as a thing to be dated and doubted. He means no harm to anyone’s God. He has simply trained his hands to trust only what they can lift.
A theoretical physicist at Caltech holds a stricter rule still. A fact, to him, is a claim that survives every attempt to kill it. He holds his own beliefs loosely and counts the looseness as a virtue, because the man who cannot give up a hypothesis has left science for something else. The past, to him, is a reconstruction from present traces, never a deposit handed down intact. He would find Hier’s certainty not wicked but unscientific, and Hier would find the physicist’s lightness a luxury available only to a man whose dead are not at stake.
An investigative reporter downtown means a third thing again. A fact is what two sources confirm against the denial of a powerful man. Truth, for her, is adversarial, wrung from people who would rather it stayed hidden, and the byline that carries it is her own small bid against the pit. She and Hier both say they serve the truth. They have built their lives on different operations and call the results by the same word.
So the man who writes “facts over theories” is not lying and not stupid. He stands inside a hero system where the survival of the people is the load-bearing truth, and where to grant Wolpe’s point is to let the desert swallow the nation a second time. If the deliverance from Egypt drops to metaphor, the anchor of the covenant drags, and the six million in his father’s museum become a horror with no redemption waiting at the end of it. Wolpe thinks he can keep the faith and let the history go. Hier hears that as an offer to keep the roof while removing the foundation. From where he stands the offer is not generous. It is the most dangerous thing a learned man can say from a pulpit.
The same splitting happens with his other sacred word, remembrance.
For Hier, to remember is a commandment, and forgetting is the enemy’s victory completed from inside. The whole apparatus his family built runs on it. Names recovered, faces projected, the murderer denied the last thing he wanted, which was a world that moved on.
A hospice nurse in Pasadena holds the dying every week, and remembrance asks almost nothing so grand of her. It is a first name written on a whiteboard, a hand held at three in the morning, a body washed with care after the breath stops. She does not need the dead to live forever. She needs the next hour to be bearable for the one still in the bed. Her hero system spends itself on presence, and she would find a museum a strange place to put her love.
A griot in Mali carries his people’s dead in his mouth. The genealogy recited at the naming, the praise-song that runs back twenty generations, the meeting house carved so the ancestors look down from the posts. Forgetting a lineage kills a man a second time, and the cure is performance, not an archive. He and Hier both stake their lives against oblivion. One files; one sings.
A founder in Playa Vista uses a gentler word for the same fear and calls it legacy. The company that scales past him, the name on the building, the line in the prospectus about impact. The pit he wakes at night dreading is irrelevance, the product nobody downloads, the cap table that forgets he was ever on it. He would not say he denies death. He has only chosen to outrun it through the thing he ships.
Set these men beside each other and Becker’s point arrives without anyone having to argue it. Every one of them builds a hero system against the same terror, and every one of them mistakes his own costume for the bare truth of things. The physicist does not think his replication is a flight from the grave. The founder does not think the IPO is a tomb with his name on it. The nurse, holding the hand, may be the only one not pretending, and even she leans on a frame, the frame that says comfort given to one dying man redeems the night.
Which returns the question to Hier. Does he see his facts as a hero system’s facts? The 2001 line suggests not. A man who could see his anchor as chosen might not need to call the other man’s archaeology mere theory. But the demand is unfair, and it is unfair to all of us. Almost no one audits his own immortality project while standing inside it. The audit threatens the very thing the project exists to protect. We ask the rabbi to grant that his bedrock is a construction, and we never ask the physicist to grant that his detachment is one too, or the founder that his impact is a paper tomb. Hier carries a heavier load than most, because his hero system holds not only his own death but the murdered millions and the covenant that gives their deaths a meaning. A man guarding that much has earned some tenderness about his certainties.
Three coordinates, thene. He fears the pit that took his father’s people and very nearly took the chain itself, the erasure that the murderer wanted and the assimilationist completes by accident. He builds against it with the oldest tool his tradition owns, the transmitted word held as harder than stone, a record of witnesses he ranks above the empty trench. And the cost he pays is the cost of every load-bearing certainty. He cannot treat his own foundation as one foundation among the possible ones without feeling the floor move, and so the most learned form of humility, the kind that sees its own frame as a frame, stays closed to him, not from any failure of mind but because he stands on the very thing he would have to set down to see it. He keeps the names. He keeps them by refusing to let the desert have the last word. From inside his world that refusal is the work.
