The questions come by phone and by fax. A man in Memphis wants to know whether the chicken his wife salted is fit to eat. A widow in Los Angeles wants to know whether she may remarry, and when. A young couple stand at a window in a hotel near the dateline and ask where the Sabbath begins for them, since the sun and the calendar no longer agree. Rabbi Yosef Y. Shusterman takes the question, opens the books, and decides. He carries smicha and dayanus from the Lubavitcher yeshiva in New York. He directs Chabad of North Beverly Hills, sits on the Bais Din, serves on the Vaad Rabbonim Lubavitch, and answers sheilos from across the country. Men who know the field call him a posek of the first rank.
A posek decides. That is the whole craft. He does not write novels or found companies or run for office. He sits with a question and the long shelf of prior rulings and says permitted or forbidden, pure or impure, bound or free. The decision is the unit of his work, and the decision is also, in the terms Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us, the unit of his heroism.
Becker built his account of human life on a single hard premise. Man is the animal who knows he will die. He carries a body that rots and a mind that can picture the rot in advance, and the picture is unbearable. So he builds. He builds cultures, creeds, monuments, families, codes, and into each of these he pours the hope that some part of him will outlast the body. Becker called these structures hero systems. A hero system tells a man what counts as a life worth having lived, and it promises him that if he plays his part he will earn a share of something that does not die. The Denial of Death (1973) names the terror at the root. Escape from Evil (1975) names what men do to each other while fleeing it. Every culture, Becker argued, is at bottom a way of granting cosmic significance to creatures who suspect they have none.
Here the reading turns, because Becker also described two pulls inside every man. One pull drives him to stand out, to be the singular hero, the name that rings. The other drives him to merge, to dissolve into a power larger than himself and be carried by it. Most lives wobble between the two. The Chabad posek does something stranger. He seeks the highest standing through the deepest dissolving. He becomes a great authority by becoming, in his own account, no one at all.
The word for this in his world is bittul. Self-nullification. The Tanya, written by Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812) and studied in Shusterman’s beis midrash to this day, teaches that the Jew holds two souls, an animal soul that wants the world and a divine soul that wants its Source, and that the labor of a life is to thin the first until the second shows through. The goal is not to become a large self. The goal is to become a clear window. When Shusterman rules, the ruling carries weight to the degree that nothing of Shusterman clouds it. He does not say what he thinks. He says what the Torah holds, and the less of him stands between the question and the law, the more the answer endures. Becker’s hero wants to be someone forever. This hero wants to be nothing now, and that nothing is the form his forever takes. His name enters the chain of decisions, cited by men not yet born, because he kept his name out of the way.
Hold that paradox and the man’s sacred values come into focus. They are common words. Freedom. Joy. Home. Every hero system uses them, and each system means a different thing by them, because a value takes its meaning from the kind of immortality the system is selling. The word is the same. The world behind the word is not.
Take freedom. To the parolee walking out the gate with forty dollars and a bus ticket, freedom is the absence of the wall, the right to turn left or right with no one logging the choice. To the founder who just sold his company, freedom is capital, the power to do the next thing without asking. To the Stoic in the manner of Epictetus, freedom is the narrow sovereignty a slave keeps over his own assent when everything else is taken. Each of these men means something true, and each means something set by the death he is trying to outrun. The parolee fears the cage. The founder fears irrelevance. The Stoic fears the indignity of a soul jerked around by chance. Now bring the word to Shusterman. In his world freedom is cherut, the freedom of the Exodus, and the Exodus did not end in an open desert with no master. It ended at Sinai under a new yoke. The slave to Pharaoh became the servant of God, and Chabad calls the second condition the only freedom there is, because the man who answers to no law answers to his own appetite, and the animal soul is a harder master than any king. Freedom, here, is the yoke chosen with joy. To the parolee that sentence might sound like a fresh prison. To Shusterman it names the one door out of the prison the parolee cannot see.
Take joy. The word travels even worse. To the hospice nurse, joy is presence, the small grace of a good afternoon at the edge of death, joy with no future tense. To the ultramarathoner at mile eighty, joy is the body past its own complaint, the high that comes when the will wins. To the Epicurean it is a fine meal and a clear conscience and friends at the table. To the Pentecostal in a storefront church it is the Spirit landing, the room gone electric, the self swept out by a power from above. Chabad makes joy a command and a craft. Simcha is not the mood that arrives. It is the mood a man builds, on purpose, against the gravity of the animal soul, because despair is the soul’s true enemy and joy breaks the siege. A hasid trains himself toward simcha the way the runner trains toward the eightieth mile. He sings at the farbrengen until the singing changes him. Shusterman’s joy is labor that looks like ease. The runner might recognize the discipline. The nurse might recognize the defiance. Neither has the cosmos behind the feeling that the hasid has, the conviction that his manufactured gladness pleases the Infinite and hastens a world to come.
Take home, and the stakes rise, because home sits at the center of everything Shusterman does. To the refugee, home is the place that was taken, fixed forever in memory at the hour of leaving. To the developer on Wilshire, home is a unit, a price per square foot, an asset that throws off rent. To the merchant sailor three weeks out, home is the shore he carries in his chest, more vivid for the distance. To the hospice patient, home is the room he wants to die in rather than the ward. Chabad means by home something none of these men means. The Alter Rebbe taught that God created the lower world because He desired a dwelling in the lowest place, a dirah b’tachtonim, a home down here in the dirt and the traffic and the kitchens of Beverly Hills. The whole project of the Jew is to build that home, one permitted chicken and one honest scale and one lit candle at a time, until the physical world holds the Divine the way a house holds a family. So when Shusterman rules on the kashrut of a kitchen, he is not policing a diet. He is laying brick on the only house Becker’s frame cannot explain away, the house meant to make the impermanent world a fit address for what does not pass. The refugee’s home was lost in time. The developer’s home is priced in dollars. This home is under construction in eternity, and every ruling is a course of brick.
Now the chain, and the strange immortality it offers. Becker watched men reach for symbolic life through works that outlast the body, the book on the shelf, the firm with the founder’s name on the door, the child who carries the face forward. The posek reaches through the responsum. A teshuvah he writes today may be cited in fifty years by a younger dayan facing the same knot, and that citation is the only afterlife in writing that his craft allows him. Yet the craft also forbids him the founder’s pride. He cannot rule by his own light. He must show that his answer descends from the Shulchan Aruch and the Rebbeim and the long argument that runs back to Sinai, and the more faithfully he disappears into that line, the more his particular ruling stands. His name lasts because he subordinated his name. This is the engine the founder would find unintelligible. The founder’s monument bears his own face. The posek’s monument bears the face of the law, and his reward is to be a true link, indistinguishable in kind from the links before and after, carrying the current without dimming it.
The hero system has a center, and the center is a grave. Chabad ran for two centuries on the living presence of its Rebbe, and the seventh, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), drew the movement to a pitch of devotion that the world outside still struggles to read. He sent young couples to cities with no Jewish life and told them to build. He spoke of redemption as near. Then he died, and the death tore at the movement along its deepest seam, because a creed built on a living channel to Heaven had to decide what the channel’s death meant. Some hold that he did not in the full sense leave. Pilgrims still write notes and carry them to the ohel, his resting place in Queens, and ask him to intercede. Becker would call the Rebbe the transference object of the whole system, the figure onto whom men loaded their hunger for a hero who cannot fail. He would call the response to the death the test every hero system meets at last, the hour when the immortality it promised must answer to a body in the ground. Chabad met that hour not with collapse but with expansion, more emissaries, more institutions, more lit candles, and a posek like Shusterman stands inside that answer. He does not resolve the question of the Rebbe in a sentence. He lives the answer by continuing the work, by deciding the next sheilah, by keeping the house under construction while the founder lies in Queens and the disciples build on.
Set him beside the men this essay has summoned and the shape of his life comes clear. The founder wants the monument with his name on it. The parolee wants the open road. The runner wants the body’s victory. The nurse wants the good afternoon. The developer wants the rent. Each is a true man inside a true system, and each system is a way of refusing to be only a body that ends. Shusterman refuses in the rarest direction. He pursues permanence by erasure, authority by submission, a great name by the suppression of the name, a home for God by the ruling on a chicken. He answers the phone in Beverly Hills, where the cars cost more than the buildings in the towns his movement was bred in, and he treats the caller’s small question as a brick in a structure older than the city and meant to outlast it.
Three things to carry away from him.
The first is that his bittul is not weakness and not modesty in the ordinary sense. It is a wager about where lasting weight comes from. He bets that the self that pushes forward is the self that dies with the body, and the self that thins itself into a clear channel touches the one thing that does not. The wager looks like surrender. It works, in his world, as conquest.
The second is that his sacred words will keep misfiring across the lines between hero systems, and that this misfire is the ordinary condition of moral speech, not a failure to be repaired. When Shusterman says freedom he means the yoke, and the man who fought a yoke his whole life hears an insult. When he says joy he means a discipline, and the man who waits for joy to arrive hears a denial of feeling. The words cannot carry their meaning across the border alone. Only the whole system carries it, and a man who wants to understand the posek has to enter the house and see what the bricks are for.
The third is that the posek offers a clean case of the thing Becker spent two books circling, the human reach past death dressed in the costume of a particular creed. Shusterman would not accept the description. He does not think he denies death. He thinks he tells the truth about it, that the body is a garment and the soul goes up and the world is a home in the making. The frame and the man disagree at the root, and that disagreement is the honest place to leave them. Becker gives us the question every life answers in its own currency. Shusterman answers it in the currency of the law, by vanishing into it, and by deciding, one more time, whether the chicken may be eaten.
