A boy of ten sits with two documents. One is an Australian passport. The other is a green card stamped Resident Alien. He reads those two words and something in him goes cold. He is not American. He does not feel Australian. He does not feel Israeli, and he has never set foot in Iraq, the country his parents left after 1967. He looks at the card and he sees that no country will claim him. Then he reaches the one answer that holds. He decides that above all he is a Jew.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the grammar for that cold feeling. Man is the animal who knows he will die. He carries a mind that reaches the stars inside a body that ages, leaks, and rots, and he cannot bear the contradiction, so he builds a hero system: a structure of meaning that lets him earn a place in some order larger and longer than his own flesh. The hero system tells him what counts as significance and how to win it. Win enough of it and he can believe, against the evidence of the grave, that he amounts to something the worms cannot touch. The child of ten has no theory of death. He has its rehearsal. To belong to no country, to be claimed by no one, to be a resident alien on the earth, is the death terror handed to a boy in a wallet. The passport that is not a passport says the quiet thing out loud. You could vanish and no nation would record the loss.
The cheap reading arrives fast and we should clear it away first. The cheap reading says Rabbi Natan Halevy is a man compensating. The boy sorted into the dumb class at Hillel Hebrew Academy, the boy whose classmates laughed at his kippah, grows up and proves he is smart and proves he belongs, and the rabbinate is the proof. Becker’s whole argument cuts against this subtraction. There is no clean, uncompensated man waiting underneath the vehicle. Strip away the hero system and you do not find a free and clear-eyed individual. You find the creature alone with the terror and nothing to hold it. Every man you have ever admired was compensating for the same wound, the wound of being a body that dies. The question is never whether a man has built a vehicle. He has. The question is which one he built, whether he knows he built it, and whether the thing is honorable. On all three counts Halevy comes off better than most.
Look at the scenes that build the vehicle. At Hillel they ran a smart class and a dumb class, and they put him in the dumb one. He was a good reader. He carried the verdict into his thirties before therapy and self-work let him set it down. He tells an interviewer the logic he used to climb out. “If you are a rabbi, if you are reading the Torah and giving speeches, you cannot be that dumb.” He folds the wound and its repair into one sentence. The same man says you cannot love your fellow if you do not love yourself, which reads less like a sermon than like a note he wrote to a younger version of himself.
Then the kippah. He puts it on at Beverly Hills High School and Jewish kids laugh, and the shame doubles, because the mockery comes from inside the house. He spends a stretch off the derech. He does not hide this. A man who hides it has not finished metabolizing it. He has.
Then the father. The boy comes home from a year in Israel, enrolled in a Brooklyn yeshiva, weighing college and a trade, and he asks his father what to do. The father says: stay in yeshiva, learn to be a rabbi. The son is nineteen. He says, “I am going to honor my father.” Becker would stop the film here. The standard hero story runs the other way. The son overthrows the father, makes himself his own cause, becomes the author of his own life, the causa sui project that wants to give birth to itself. Halevy inverts it. He becomes a self by submitting to a word handed down. He merges into something older than he is and by merging he stands out, because few Iraqi men become rabbis. The Iraqis around him go into business, medicine, law. He goes into the chain. Becker, following Otto Rank (1884-1939), named these as the two pulls in every life: the urge to merge into something vast and the urge to stand out as someone. Most men can satisfy one only at the cost of the other. Halevy found the rare arrangement where the same act does both.
Now the word he keeps returning to. Pride. He quotes the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), on “the greatness and the pride of Jacob,” and he says this is his ethos, that every Jew should feel it, that the present trouble in Israel comes from a shortage of it. Sit with the word, because Becker’s deepest point is that a sacred word is not one thing. It names a different transaction inside every hero system, and the men who use it are not describing the same world.
To a Cistercian monk pride is superbia, the first of the deadly sins, the root from which the others grow, the thing he rises at three in the morning to starve. His whole life is the slow killing of the self that wants to be praised. To a Marine drill instructor on Parris Island pride is real and good, and it belongs to the Corps, never to the recruit. His craft is to break the boy’s private pride so the unit’s pride can take its place, and he succeeds when the boy stops saying I. To the man at the squat rack on Muscle Beach in Venice pride is the body raised to a monument, and here Becker permits himself a grim smile, because the body is the exact thing that fails, the leaking dying animal whose worship is the most honest and the most doomed immortality project on the boardwalk. To a founder pitching on Sand Hill Road pride is the product, the thing that scales past the maker, the company that runs the world after the funeral. To a Pashtun elder pride is nang, the honor of the name, and a man spends blood to keep the name clean because the name outlives him and the body never will.
Five men, five uses of one word, five different bargains with death. Set Halevy’s pride beside them and the shape stands out. His pride is not the monk’s enemy and not the founder’s engine. He did not build it and he cannot lose it by failing. The pride of Jacob arrives by inheritance. A man receives it the way he receives a language, and his task is to carry it forward and hand it on. This is immortality by transmission down a line, and the line runs through real places. It runs from Hakham Yosef Hayim of Baghdad, the Ben Ish Hai (1835-1909), whose rulings still set the practice at Kahal Joseph, through parents who carried the Baghdad melodies out of Iraq and across two oceans, to a congregation on Santa Monica Boulevard that keeps singing them. The resident alien who belonged to no country turns out to belong to something that predates every country in his passport and will outlast them. That is the answer the ten-year-old reached for and could not yet name. The card said he could vanish without a trace. The chain says he is a link, and a link does not vanish, because the chain remembers its shape.
He builds the symbolic vehicles too, the way Becker says we all do when we want our works to stand in for our flesh. The boy from the dumb class makes things. He produces a film, Stories of the Baal Shem Tov. He writes a book, Spiritual Banter. He paints, he records podcasts, he keeps a channel. He fathers five children and gives each a Hebrew name. Each of these is a hedge against the grave, a piece of him meant to keep working after he stops. None of this is vanity. It is the human labor of a creature trying to leave a mark that the dirt cannot erase, and he does it in the open, with his door, in his words, unlocked.
Becker asks us, in the end, to weigh the cost, and an honest accounting does not stop at praise. Every hero system buys its cosmic significance by drawing a line, and the pride of one people has, in other hands and other generations, hardened into contempt for the people on the far side of the line. This is the standing danger of the vehicle, not a charge against the man. Halevy’s stated version pushes against the hardening. He tells his children to love their fellow Jews and everyone, including non-Jews. His shul turns no one away for lack of money and welcomes Jews of every background. The generous form of the pride of Jacob heals the alien boy without requiring a debased outsider to feel tall. He has chosen the generous form. The work is to keep choosing it, because the armored form is always easier and always near, and the difference between the two is the whole moral content of the thing.
Three coordinates, then, to set him in the order Becker mapped.
He denies, as we all must, that he is the resident alien, the unclaimed boy, the creature who ages and dies and knows it. He took the worst news a child can receive about his own standing on the earth and built a life that answers it.
He affirms a chain older than the nations on his documents, a Jewishness that holds when passports do not, a pride that comes to him from Baghdad and Brooklyn and his father’s voice and that he is bound to pass to five children and a congregation.
And it costs him the permanent labor of keeping that pride open rather than armored, generous rather than walled, a door rather than a fortress. He carries the cost in the open, which is the most a man can do, and more than most men attempt.
