Six weeks before Pesach the office on Beverly Boulevard fills with paper. Companies write back, or refuse to. A legal department permits an answer by phone and forbids one in writing. Another sends a letter that says the product holds gluten at four parts per million and so it stays safe. The rav reads each reply against the question that runs under all of them, whether a trace of a grain derivative, inert, unswallowable, fit for no dog, still counts before God on the one week a year when a mashehu counts. He has done this for more than three decades. The list began at five pages out of the Kollel of Los Angeles. It runs now to a book that the Baltimore Star-K cosponsors, several thousand products, mailed once to a woman in Montana who told him she trusted the Kollel’s health information over her own doctors.
Rabbi Gershon Bess sits as rav of Congregation Kehilas Yaakov at 7211 Beverly Boulevard, in the stretch of Los Angeles that the frum world calls Hancock Park and the maps call Beverly-La Brea. He came up through the yeshivos of Philadelphia, then Ponevezh in Bnei Brak, then Lakewood, then the Kollel here, and he stayed. He gives daf yomi at six in the morning. He sits on the Bais Din of the Rabbinical Council of California. The community calls him its senior posek, and the title carries weight that an outsider underrates, because a posek does not advise. A posek rules. When he ruled, some years ago, that a worm found in wild salmon stayed forbidden, he did not say he found the stringent view persuasive. He said the lenient ruling stood contradicted by Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv (1910-2012) and Rav Shmuel Wosner (1913-2015), and he put his name to the correction so that no man could keep quoting those sages in favor of a leniency they had refused.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote that every human culture is a project against death. In The Denial of Death he argued that man is the animal who knows he will rot, and who cannot live inside that knowledge, and who therefore builds a system that promises him a share in something that does not rot. Becker called these hero systems. A hero system tells a man what counts as significance, what counts as cowardice, what a life adds up to when the body fails. It hands him a script for cosmic heroism and lets him forget, most days, that he dies. Becker thought religion the oldest and frankest of these systems, the one that names the terror out loud and answers it without apology.
A posek lives at the center of such a system, and the two terrors take a shape there that they take nowhere else.
The first terror is annihilation. The answer the system gives him is the chain. He learns the same tractate his rebbe learned, who learned it from his rebbe, back through the Chofetz Chaim, Rav Yisrael Meir Kagan (1838-1933), back through the Rishonim, back to a wet morning at a mountain. A man who teaches the same page that will be taught after he dies does not die in the way other men die. His ruling on the salmon outlives his lungs. The list goes out next spring under his name whether or not he draws breath to mail it. Becker would call the chometz book a small immortality project, and he would not mean the phrase as mockery. He would mean that a man found a way to weigh several thousand objects against eternity and to leave the weighing behind him, intact, transmissible.
The second terror is the one Becker took from Otto Rank (1884-1939), the horror of the creature. Man defecates and bleeds and ages and wants, and he cannot bear to be only that. The posek’s answer is the most thorough that any system has built. Halacha takes the animal facts, the eating and the sex and the blood and the death, and runs each one through a law that reaches back to Sinai, and so the creature stops being a creature. The mascara on a woman’s lash becomes a question of cosmic standing. The worm in the fish becomes a ruling that the Talmud already anticipated. Nothing the body does stays merely biological. The system catches every surface of the animal and lifts it. This is why the cautiousness looks excessive from outside and feels like devotion from inside. The care is the lifting. A man who treats the four parts per million as if heaven watched has converted his own creatureliness into significance, which is the thing Becker said every man dies without and cannot live without.
He gave things up to stand there. Becker’s heroes always do. The yeshiva years subtract the wider world’s heroisms one by one. The boy who could have chased money chases a sugya instead. The young man who could have made a name in the street makes it in the beis medrash, where the currency is a sharp question and the proof is whether the gedolim answer your phone call. Bess tells of asking Rav Meir Soloveitchik, the Brisker Rav’s son, whether the list was worth continuing, since it cost so much labor, and being told that the Brisker Rav, Rav Yitzchok Zev Soloveitchik (1886-1959), would not buy medicine after Pesach from a pharmacy unless a frum pharmacist had sold its stock before the holiday. The story is a transmission. It says: your stringency is not yours, it descends, you are a link and not a source. When Bess says he is not the last word but only one of the words, he states the deepest article of his hero system. A man who is the last word stands alone and dies alone. A man who is one of the words belongs to a sentence that no single death can finish.
Now take the values he lives by, and watch what happens to each one when it crosses into a system built against death by other means. Becker’s hardest lesson hides here. The words do not travel. A sacred value is not a stone that every culture picks up and weighs the same. It is a sound that means one thing in this cosmos and another thing in the next, and the men who use it rarely notice they are speaking different languages.
Take truth.
For the posek, truth is faithful transmission. The salmon worm is true or false depending on what the sources hold and on what Elyashiv said in the room and not in the rumor. To correct a misquotation of a sage is to defend the truth, because the truth lives in the chain and a broken link is a lie. A commenter on the worm ruling jabbed back from another cosmos. He wrote that the worm had always lived in the world, that the Creator of the Torah had not missed it, that to think the worm a new arrival was nonsense, since we do not believe in evolution. He thought he was scoring a point. He had wandered into a marine biologist’s house and started rearranging the furniture. For the biologist the same worm, Anisakis, carries truth of a different kind. It is true because its lifecycle runs through krill and fish and marine mammals, because you can trace it, because the next dissection will either confirm the trace or break it. The biologist’s truth bends to the next observation. The posek’s truth bends to the prior authority. Same animal in the same flesh, two truths that cannot share a table, because one descends from Sinai and the other ascends from the sample.
A trial lawyer holds a third truth. For the litigator truth is what survives cross-examination, what an evidence rule admits, what twelve strangers will credit. He does not ask whether a thing happened. He asks whether he can prove it happened by the means the court allows. The 2015 statement that Bess signed with three other rabbis leaned on exactly this truth and named it. The statement explained that slander law makes an accuser liable unless the accuser can prove the charge, that the proof becomes impossible when the victim’s identity stays hidden, that the accused holds a constitutional right to face his accuser. To the litigator that paragraph reads as competent. To the survivor it reads as a wall.
Take caution.
The posek’s caution is worship. He goes beyond the letter because the letter is the floor and the love of God lives above it. A founder in a glass building eight miles west holds the opposite creed. For him caution is the thing that kills companies. Move fast. Ship it. The man who waits for certainty arrives second, and second is dead. He might read the four-parts-per-million correspondence as a sickness, a fear of action dressed as virtue. A heart surgeon stands somewhere between them and shows that the same word can discipline without sanctifying. The surgeon’s caution is total, checklist by checklist, but it answers to the body on the table and to the morbidity numbers the department publishes each quarter, not to a week in spring when a hidden trace offends heaven. Three men, three cautions. One sanctifies. One destroys. One saves lives and stops there.
Take honor.
Kovod haTorah is a cosmic quantity. When Bess made his protest he made it, he said, for the honor of the Torah, which means the honor of the sages who carry it, which means the honor of the chain that holds off death. To diminish a gadol is to thin the rope every Jew hangs from. A Marine sergeant uses the same English word and means the unit, the men beside him, the flag that will fold over a coffin. A duelist two centuries back meant a thing he would shoot a friend to keep. The modern corporation has nearly lost the word and runs on its thin cousin, reputation, which is honor with the soul removed, honor as the thing a public-relations office protects. And then there is the survivor, for whom the word arrived as a noose. Sima Yarmush stood up in California and said the rabbis had failed her when she came forward as a girl. In the long comment thread that followed, a voice told her she owed the four rabbis a public apology, that her speech was a chillul Hashem, a desecration of the Name, that she had committed the sin of lashon hara against men whom thousands trust on every matter of life. Inside the posek’s hero system that rebuke is coherent. Honor is real, honor is owed to the carriers of Torah, and a public accusation that cannot be proven damages the honor and the chain at once. Inside the survivor’s hero system the word honor names the force used to keep her quiet. The same five letters. A sacrament in one cosmos and a gag in the other.
Take protection.
This is where the systems collided in public, and the collision is worth slowing down, because it shows Becker’s point at full size. In 2001, after three abuse cases shook the community, a group of rabbis formed the Halachic Advisory Board, and Bess joined it. Their 2015 statement described what they do. They route cases to the authorities where the law requires it. Where a family will not file, they require the offender to undergo evaluation by a credentialed agency, to sign a release, to comply with the experts’ recommendations, and they follow up. They wrote that they would go beyond the letter of the law to protect victims, families, and communities, and a retired LAPD supervisor, Paul Bishop, vouched that they never held back information and moved past their own comfort to do right.
For the Halachic Advisory Board, protection means containment that keeps the kehillah whole. Note the third noun. They protect victims, families, and communities, and the community sits in the sentence as a body with standing, a thing that can be wounded and must be shielded. The community is the vessel that carries the chain that defeats death. To shatter it is not a side cost. It is a desecration on the order of the harm.
For Jewish Community Watch, the advocacy group that backed Sima and that Meyer Seewald founded, protection means the opposite operation. It means sunlight. Name the man. Warn the next town. Strip the title. A predator who keeps his standing keeps his access, and a community spared its scandal is a community that fed its children to the scandal. The comment thread carried the charge in plain words. The rabbis, one wrote, sent the abuser to another community with children and warned no one, and the new town learned of his record only late. Others answered that he started his own institution rather than being placed, that the family was brought to the police and refused to press charges over fear for a daughter’s shidduch prospects, that the rabbis begged them to file and they would not. The facts stay contested in the record, and an honest writer leaves them contested. The structure does not. The structure is clear. One hero system measures protection by what stays intact. The other measures it by what gets exposed. A move that satisfies the first betrays the second by definition, and no amount of good faith on either side closes the gap, because the gap is not about faith. It is about which death each system most fears. The board fears the death of the community. The advocate fears the death of the next child. Each calls its fear protection, and each hears the other’s protection as the very danger it formed to fight.
The police supervisor holds a fourth meaning again. For Bishop, protection runs through charges filed and evidence preserved, and where no one files, he said himself, there is little the law can do. The epidemiologist might hold a fifth, protection as the warning issued to every exposed party regardless of any single person’s wish for privacy, because the pathogen does not respect privacy. Set them in a row and the word fractures into five objects that share a spelling and nothing else.
Becker did not write to make any of these men comfortable. He wrote to show why they cannot agree and why they cannot stop. Each one stands inside a system that converts his terror into purpose, and the systems are not negotiable, because to surrender the system is to face the thing the system was built to hide. Ask the posek to weigh the community lighter and you have not asked him to revise a policy. You have asked him to loosen his grip on the rope over the pit. Ask the survivor to weigh the community’s wholeness against her warning and you have asked her to feed the next child to the silence that swallowed her. Neither can do it. Neither should be expected to find it easy.
Three coordinates, then, for reading a man like Gershon Bess without flattering him and without condescending to him.
First, the stringency and the discretion grow from one root, and the root is reverence. The care that weighs a trace of alcohol against heaven is the same care that hesitates before a public accusation it cannot prove and a rupture it cannot heal. A reader who admires the first and despises the second has not yet seen that they are one disposition facing two objects. The work is to judge the object, the trace and the accusation, separately, and to grant that a single devotion produced both.
Second, the word that travels best between hero systems is the word most likely to start a war, because each speaker assumes the other means what he means. Truth, honor, caution, protection. When the posek and the survivor both say protection and mean opposite operations, the shared word does not bridge them. It hides the canyon until someone falls in. The honest move in any such fight is to stop trusting the shared vocabulary and to ask what each speaker fears most, since the fear, and not the word, is the thing that will not move.
Third, a man who calls himself one of the words has told you how to bury him and how he hopes to escape burial. He does not want to be the last word, because the last word is final and a finished sentence is a dead one. He wants to be a clause in a sentence that no one finishes, the chain that runs past his lungs and carries his ruling on the salmon and his list of cosmetics into a spring he will not see. Becker would say the wish is human to the bone. The wish is the denial of death wearing its oldest and most disciplined clothes. Whether the sentence he serves is the sentence God is writing, or a sentence men wrote and attributed to God, is the question his whole system exists to keep him from asking, and it is the question that the woman behind the mechitza, speaking into a room that did not want to hear her, asked on his behalf.
