Late on a Sunday night the rabbi sits alone at the microphone in a Koreatown studio, white shirt, black slacks, the fringes of his tzitzit hanging loose, and he tells Los Angeles he has the answers if the city has the questions. A heavy Brooklyn accent carries into cars on the 405 and kitchens in Whittier. Most of the callers do not pray as he prays. A woman wonders whether she should feel afraid. A man at a supermarket once asked Chaim Mentz (b. 1959) which synagogue he leads, and Mentz, uneasy in that moment, told the stranger he belonged to none, and now he hands the small lie to his audience and asks them to judge him. They call in and forgive him. He has carried a city into a conversation about fear, about suspicion, about how a man treats the stranger at the next register, and he has done it without opening a Bible. He does this every week. He calls his work the best kept secret in Bel Air, and the phrase carries two meanings at once, which he half knows.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us a way to read a life built like this one. Man knows he will die, and the bare knowledge would unmake him, so he raises a project that lets him feel he counts in the order of things, that his days leave a mark the grave cannot wipe out. Becker called the project a hero system. A culture hands its members a set of roles and a ladder of value, and a man climbs, and the climbing persuades him that his life carries weight past his own body. The Denial of Death sets out the wager. Escape from Evil sets out the bill, since a man often buys his own significance by denying it to someone weaker. The hero system answers a terror. Read the terror and you read the man.
Mentz lives inside a particular hero system, the one the Lubavitcher Rebbe (Menachem Mendel Schneerson, 1902-1994) built and sent across the world: the shliach, the emissary posted to a city to reach every Jew he can find. The campaign rests on a claim about the soul. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812) taught that every Jew carries a divine spark that no failure can extinguish, a flame that flickers under the most secular life. The shliach goes out to fan that flame, one home at a time, and each home he warms counts toward the redemption of the world. So Mentz earns his cosmic standing through a strange route. He does not raise a monument to himself. He sets a table, and every guest who sits at it and feels at home becomes a brick in his standing before the Rebbe and before God. His denial of his own death runs through his refusal of other men’s spiritual death. The vehicle that carries him to significance passes through the souls of other people. That route shapes everything he does, down to the smile he admits he uses on purpose.
Two terrors hold him. The first wears the face of the bored Jew handed a book he cannot read, the man who hears the word “orthodox” and pictures black coats and a long list of refusals and walks the other way. For a secular sociologist this man simply drifts from a tradition. For Mentz the same man stands at the edge of a cosmic loss, a spark about to go dark, a delay in the world’s repair. He cannot bear the closed door. His whole craft answers it: no fees, no questions about your background, no guilt about the man you married or the woman you married, a smile at the threshold that grants acceptance before you have done a thing to earn it. The second terror runs underneath the first and shows itself rarely. A man whose entire vocation pours warmth outward, who receives the confessions of celebrities who cannot trust their own inner circle, who keeps every secret and asks for none in return, risks a quiet fate. He becomes the confessor with no confessor. The warmth flows one way. Who comes for the rabbi at the open door? He calls himself the best kept secret, and the joke conceals the dread. To be received by everyone and known by no one. To be the smiling host of a house full of guests and to walk, after the last car leaves, into a kitchen that has fed the world and ask whether anyone tasted him.
Subtract the system and look at the man underneath, since Becker says the system clothes a creature who would shiver without it. Take away the Rebbe and the campaign and the divine spark, and what remains is a warm Brooklyn man who likes people and fears the silence, a born host, a talker who needs a room to talk to, a performer who wants the top-rated show and got it, a 4.5 rating on Saturday nights and a wish for his own slot on cable. Strip the theology and he reads as a gifted broadcaster with a hunger to be heard. Now restore the system and watch the same traits change their nature. The hunger to be heard becomes the drive to reach the unreached. The need for a room becomes the shul in his living room. The performer’s smile becomes the open door of the soul. The wish to matter at scale becomes the wish to gather more sparks. The man does not change. The frame around him changes what the man means, and that is the whole of Becker’s argument, that the same animal appetites turn holy or hollow depending on the drama a man enlists them in.
Watch what happens to his sacred words once you grant that other men live inside other dramas, that the words are tokens in different games and pay out differently in each. Take his favorite, acceptance, the one he repeats until it sounds like a creed. Inside his system acceptance means recognition. He does not suspend his judgment of you; he relocates the verdict to a place where it has already come back as love, the divine soul that precedes your conduct and outlasts it. The intermarried husband gets no discount on his soul. The secular Jew who writes hate mail because the rabbi sounds too Jewish gets no discount either. Now hand the word to other men. A gunnery sergeant means the reverse: acceptance comes only after the crucible, and warmth offered to a man who has not bled for it reads as an insult to the men who did. A hospice nurse means a third thing: she accepts the dying man to walk him out of life, not to call him back to it, and her acceptance has no telos beyond company. A venture capitalist accepts a founder by pricing him, and the term sheet stands in for the embrace. A Cistercian novice learns that his abbot accepts him only as he disappears into the Rule, that acceptance and self-erasure arrive together. Five men, five accountings, one word. Mentz stands nearest the nurse and farthest from the sergeant, and he parts from the nurse on the one point that organizes him, since his acceptance points not toward an ending but toward a beginning he wants to light.
His second word, family, splits the same way. He turns his home into the sanctuary and his children into what he calls his best advertisement, proof that a child can keep Shabbos and still move easily in the world, and the family becomes both the unit of the work and the dynasty of it, the son grown into a shliach beside him. A Sicilian grandmother hears family and thinks of blood, the long ledger of obligation, the Sunday table that feeds you and also collects what you owe. A startup founder says we are a family and means a wage subsidy, loyalty extracted against an at-will contract, the word doing the work that money will not. A Confucian elder hears family and thinks of the vertical line, ancestors above and sons below, order before affection, duty before warmth. A foster parent hears the word as a vow made against the failure of blood, chosen and provisional at once. Mentz extends his family by invitation rather than by blood, which sets him apart from the grandmother and the elder, and he attaches no contract to it, which sets him apart from the founder. The guest becomes family by sitting down. That open border, the readiness to seat a stranger and call him kin by Friday night, holds the radical claim of his whole project, and it costs him, because a border that open never closes, and a house that admits everyone keeps no room for the host to be off duty.
His third word he made his slogan. The best kept secret. He refuses to advertise. He wants significance to arrive on its own feet, to seek him out, to validate him by coming uninvited, and this fits a man whose theology forbids the hard sell yet who still wanted the highest rating in the city. A luxury house means something colder by the secret: scarcity engineered to raise the price, the door you cannot buy your way through, which is how they charge you more. A Freemason means initiation, knowledge gated behind oath and ordeal. An intelligence officer means an operational fact whose exposure brings death. A mystic means the hidden God who withdraws as you approach, the truth that veils itself out of an excess of presence. Mentz sits between the luxury house and the mystic, and the honest reading holds both at once. He markets through his refusal to market, and he means the refusal as reverence, and a man can run a campaign and revere a secret in the same breath without either one canceling the other.
He keeps a fourth word lighter on his tongue, the door. He opens the door, he says, to your own spirituality, and he claims only the opening, not the furnishing of the room beyond it. A salesman hears door and thinks of the close. An evangelical missionary hears it and thinks of the altar call, the decision, the convert won. A therapist hears connection and thinks of the alliance, real and warm and bounded by the fifty-minute hour and the fee. Mentz refuses the convert, since he keeps his intermarried families as they are and never asks the gentile spouse to change, and he refuses the fee, since he will not make a man pay to pray. So his door opens onto neither conversion nor commerce. He wants the Jew to walk through it toward himself, not toward Mentz, and a shliach who succeeds at that watches the man he reached walk past him into a room the rabbi will never enter.
Becker warns that every hero system exacts a private tax, that the role can eat the man who wears it well. The college kids he befriended one by one still email him years later about their troubles, because they remember who their best friend was. Read that line slowly. He is the best friend of a great many people who each have other friends, and he gathers their dilemmas the way a radio host gathers calls, and the gathering feeds his standing and warms his nights and also leaves a question he does not put on the air. The celebrities come to his table to be heard by someone outside their circle who will keep what they say. He keeps it. He keeps all of it. A man who builds his significance on being the keeper of other men’s secrets builds it on a floor that gives no echo back. The smile he admits to using works, and it costs, and both halves of that sentence honor him rather than diminish him, because a man who knows his warmth is also a tool and offers it anyway has chosen the harder road than the man who never doubts his own sincerity.
Three coordinates locate him. The first sits at the threshold of his home on a Friday night, where the walk from the hidden shul ends and the table waits with the food his wife cooked, and the guest crosses from stranger to family in the time it takes to sit, and the rabbi watches the crossing and counts it toward a redemption he will not live to see finished. That threshold holds his answer to the first terror, the closed door he cannot abide, and he reopens it every week against the grave.
The second sits in the green room before a cable hit, or in the booth at midnight, where the warmth that gathers strangers becomes a signal broadcast to a city, and the line between the shliach who reaches souls and the host who needs an audience runs so fine that he himself cannot always find it, and need not, since the system he serves blesses the same hunger it puts to work. Watch him there for the place where the vocation and the appetite share one face.
The third sits in the kitchen after the last guest leaves, in the silence the essay can point to but the rabbi rarely names, where the best kept secret keeps the deepest secret of all, that the man who opens every door for others stands a long time at his own before he knows whether anyone waits on the other side to open it for him. A reader who has met ten such men should look there, at the quiet after the feast, where the cost of a generous hero system comes due, and where the generosity, paid in full and without complaint, earns him the regard the frame was built to measure.
