At 6:18 on a Thursday morning, October 29, 2009, a man in a hooded sweatshirt walks down the ramp into the underground garage beneath Adat Yeshurun Valley Sephardic Congregation in North Hollywood and opens fire. Two men fall, both shot in the legs, one thirty-eight, one fifty-three, each arriving alone for the early service. The police call it a possible hate crime and never settle the motive. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa (b. 1953) comes to the synagogue and puts an arm around the rabbi for the cameras. A reporter asks a worshipper how the congregation took it. The worshipper says the rabbi had everyone back at prayer ten minutes after the shots.
Ten minutes. Hold that.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) built his late work around a plain claim. A man knows he will die, the knowledge sits in him like a stone, and he spends his life inside arrangements that promise he will not die, or will not die for nothing. Becker called these arrangements hero systems. In The Denial of Death he argued that culture hands each man a script for mattering, a way to earn a place that outlasts the body. Two terrors sit underneath the script. The first is death. The second is insignificance, the dread that a man might vanish and leave no mark, that the world will not notice he came and went.
A rabbi who restores the morning service ten minutes after a shooting answers both terrors at once, and he answers them with one word. Continuity.
The word sits in many mouths. It holds steady and the meaning moves.
On a slope in Burgundy a man walks his rows before dawn. The vines stand older than his grandfather. The cellar runs cold and dark and his father’s chalk marks fade on an old barrel. For him continuity means the domaine. He will die and the wine will carry his name, and a buyer in Tokyo will pour the vintage and say the family makes the best on the hill. His promise against death is land and a label.
In a home outside Seoul a family sets a low table for the dead on the anniversary. Rice, soup, fruit, each dish placed by rule, the men bowing and the ancestor invited to eat. For them continuity means the dead still come to the table. The line runs backward and the living feed it.
In an office off the 101 a founder tells his first engineers he wants to build something that outlasts him. He means the company. The cap table, the logo, the name on the building after the funeral. For him continuity means the going concern.
On a parade ground a color sergeant carries the regimental colors and the colors never touch the ground. Battle honors stitched into the silk, the regiment older than any man who marches under it. For him continuity means the line holds.
In a basement off a freeway a man past fifty still books the shows, presses the records, and turns down every offer for the catalog. Selling out is the one sin. For him continuity means the scene stays real after he goes.
Each man bets against time, and time wins most of these bets. The domaine sells in a bad year. The company gets bought and renamed. The regiment dissolves in a budget cut. The scene ages and empties. Their continuity is a hope wearing the clothes of a fact.
For the rabbi the word claims to be the fact. His chain runs to Sinai and past his own grave. The covenant has an Author, and the Author does not die, and a man who keeps the practice steps into a line that began before him and runs on after him by a guarantee no buyer can break. The dead pray with the living. The melodies came out of Morocco and carry an Andalusian sound, and a man in the Valley sings what his great-grandfather sang. The melody carries the line. The singing keeps it alive.
So, ten minutes. A bullet is an interruption, and interruption is the enemy, because the unbroken line answers death. Let a gunman stop the morning service and the service was never what the rabbi said it was. Resume in ten minutes and the claim stands. Nothing a man does with a gun reaches the thing the prayer protects.
A confident secular reader has a tidy account of all this. The Valley shul is an ethnic survival, sweet and a little sad, Moroccan Jews keeping old food and old tunes alive between a daycare and a parking structure. Subtract the supernatural and you have a community center with good cooking and beautiful melodies. The continuity is real, the reader says, and the rest is decoration.
Becker spent a career on the flaw in that account. Subtract a man’s hero system and you do not arrive at bare reality. You arrive at his next hero system. Take the covenant from the rabbi and he does not become a clear-eyed modern who has made his peace with the void. Nobody makes peace with the void. He reaches for the founder’s cap table or the vigneron’s label or some other promise that he will not wholly die. The reader who feels superior to the shul keeps his own vehicle and calls it realism. The rabbi at least names the terror his vehicle answers. He does not sell the chain as a wellness practice. He says a man dies, and here is the one thing death does not reach.
The chain that saves also binds, and an essay that loved the man and softened the cost would do him no honor. A rabbi for whom interruption is the enemy meets many interruptions wearing human faces. The son who leaves. The daughter who wants more than the women’s section gives her. The doubter who keeps coming and keeps not believing. The convert who stands before the beit din and gets weighed. The wife who needs a get and waits on men to grant it. As vice president of the Rabbinical Council of California the rabbi sits inside an authority that certifies food, runs a court, and decides who counts as in and who counts as out across thousands of homes. The line holds because someone holds it, and the holding falls hard on those who do not fit.
He might carry this knowledge. A man does not lead a congregation for decades without burying people he loved and standing under the canopy with couples who later walk away from everything he taught them. The honor lies in carrying the cost without dressing the vehicle up as free. He asks his people to bind themselves to a thread. He binds himself first and hardest. He does not hide the price in soft words.
Three coordinates locate the man. The first is what he holds sacred: the unbroken practice, a literal immortality, the dead davening beside the living and the living davening for the unborn. The second is the terror he answers: death, and beneath it the smaller death that haunts a small and hunted people, the fear of erasure, of a tradition snuffed out in one bad generation while the neighbors barely look up. The third is the cost: a community that treats interruption as the enemy presses hardest on its own restless members, and the thread that carries the faithful ties down the ones who want to leave.
Go back to the garage. 6:18, the ramp, the shots, two men down on the concrete. Ten minutes later the men who can still stand face east and say the words said that morning in a thousand other rooms and on ten thousand mornings before this one. The rabbi does the only thing his hero system lets him do in the face of death. He refuses the interruption. He picks the thread back up. From inside the system that is courage. From outside it is one more man managing the oldest fear in the species, the way the winemaker and the founder and the color sergeant manage it, with more candor than most and a heavier bill than he lets anyone see.
