On a Thursday night the email goes out. It lands in thousands of inboxes across time zones, a man in Melbourne reading it Friday morning, a woman in New Jersey reading it over coffee, a soldier somewhere reading it on a phone. The column carries a name at the bottom, Rabbi Yisroel Ciner, and a series title that ran for decades on Project Genesis, Parsha Insights. The copyright lines on the early ones say 2000, 2003. The voice in them does a steady thing each week. It opens the portion, brings down a comment from the Ramban or the Sforno or the Nesivos Shalom, then turns, without warning, to a hospital corridor or a high school trip or a letter from a stranger in Poland, and lets the old text read the present life. The man writing has a method. He takes a verse most people walk past and stands underneath it until it holds weight.
This is a hero system at work, and it pays to say what that means before saying what his is.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that a man knows he will die and cannot live inside that knowledge. He builds, with his culture, a scheme that lets him feel he counts beyond his own short span. Becker called these schemes hero systems. Each one tells a man how to earn worth that death cannot cancel. The soldier earns it through courage, the scientist through discovery, the mother through her children, the artist through the made thing that outlasts the hand. The terror runs deeper than the fear of the grave. Underneath sits a second dread, the suspicion that a man amounts to nothing, that his life leaves no mark on the order of things, that the universe does not register him at all. Becker called the body a problem the symbolic self keeps trying to outrun. The hero system is the answer a culture hands its members so they can rise each morning and act as though their days add up.
Rabbi Ciner’s answer arrives early and stays fixed. A Jew earns cosmic worth by binding himself to Torah and by binding other Jews to it after him. The worth does not come from achievement the world can see. It comes from transmission, from study that passes hand to hand across generations, from one more soul brought inside the covenant. He studied at Ner Israel, then moved to Israel with his wife, Natalie, to help start the kollel at Neveh Zion. Neveh Zion takes young men who arrived at Judaism late or barely at all and walks them in. That work tells you the shape of the scheme. The hero is not the man who already knows. The hero is the man who turns toward the text and the man who turns him.
I want to show his sacred values, and then show a thing Becker saw and most readers miss. A sacred value is a word, and the same word names different goods inside different hero systems. A man hears “growth” and thinks of one thing. Another man hears it and thinks of its opposite. The word stays. The world behind it changes. Walk the words across enough lives and the architecture of each life stands out against the others.
Take growth.
In Rabbi Ciner’s world a man grows by adding. He learns a page he could not learn last year. He fixes a trait. He moves up, aliyah, closer to God, and the motion has no ceiling, which is why a man past seventy can say the best is yet to come and mean it as plain description rather than cheer. Growth here points upward and forward forever, because the thing a man grows toward has no top.
Now hand the word to a venture capitalist on Sand Hill Road. Growth means the curve. It means a company that doubles, a market that opens, a number on a Tuesday larger than the number on the Monday before. The VC reveres growth the way the rabbi reveres it, with the whole weight of his life behind the word, and the two men can sit at the same dinner and never know they pray to different gods. For the VC, flat is death. A thing that holds steady has already begun to die, because in his hero system worth lives in the rate, in the slope, in compounding. He cannot rest in a good number. The rabbi can rest in a finished tractate and then start the next one, but the rest is real. The VC gets no rest, because the curve that flattens kills the story he tells about why he counts.
Hand the word to a Trappist monk in a Kentucky abbey. Growth means subtraction. He grows by wanting less, by emptying the self until what remains can hold God without crowding Him out. Add nothing. Strip. The monk and the rabbi both rise before dawn and both call the rising growth, and they move in opposite directions inside the same word, the rabbi filling, the monk hollowing.
Hand it to a hospice nurse. She watches growth run backward all day and has made her peace with a definition the other three cannot use. For her a man grows by learning to lose well, by arriving at the end without rage, by saying the thing he never said. Decline and growth are the same motion seen from her chair. The rabbi’s forward arrow and her downward one cross at a point neither man on Sand Hill Road nor the monk could name.
Four men and a woman, one word, five worlds.
Take home, and the welcome that goes with it. Beth Jacob in Irvine calls itself a place where a Jew of any background sits down and feels he belongs, Americans and Brits and Persians and South Africans and Mexicans in one room, and the rabbi’s wife runs a table the congregation calls legendary. Hospitality, hachnasat orchim, sits near the center of the scheme. The home opens. The stranger eats. To bring a man in is the work, not a courtesy attached to the work.
A Bedouin host in the Negev guards the same value with a ferocity the Irvine table does not need. A stranger under his tent eats and sleeps safe for three days, and the host will fight to defend a man he met an hour ago, because the honor of the tent stands or falls on it. Home there means a boundary a guest crosses into total protection. Open the flap and the desert outside no longer touches him.
A Mormon missionary in a foreign city carries home in his chest and has no building for it. Home is the work, the next door, the companion at his side, and he learns to feel at home anywhere because the hero system asks him to plant the home rather than return to it. He and the rabbi both prize welcome, and the rabbi welcomes men into a house that stands, while the missionary welcomes himself into houses that do not yet know him.
A merchant marine engineer feels home as the steel under his boots, a ship that moves, a berth he can sleep in while the world rolls past. He would not understand the Bedouin’s fixed tent or the rabbi’s fixed shul. For him a home that cannot move is a trap. The word names the floor he stands on, wherever the sea has carried it.
Take purity, the value behind the mikvah that Natalie Ciner runs and behind the laws of family life it serves. Purity here means a return to a state, a woman immersing and rising changed in standing though not in body, a married life ordered by separation and reunion across the month. The water does nothing chemical. It does everything covenantal. Purity is a relation to God’s command, restored by an act the body performs and the soul registers.
A heart surgeon means something near and far at once when he scrubs in. His sterile field admits no contamination, and a single breach ends the case, and he guards the boundary with a vigilance the rabbi might recognize. Yet his purity is microbial and the rabbi’s is sacral, and the surgeon’s water cleans in fact while the mikvah’s water cleans in covenant, and the two men would argue all night about whether the other one’s purity is purity at all.
A competitive freediver means purity as a single clean breath held against a hundred feet of pressure, a body emptied of panic, a mind with one thought and no other. His purity lives in a moment and dies when he surfaces. The rabbi’s purity recurs on a calendar and renews a bond. The freediver chases a state he cannot keep. The rabbi keeps a practice that returns.
Now the line the man signs his life with. The best is yet to come.
Set it beside a startup founder who says the same words on a Monday all-hands. The founder means the next round, the bigger office, the exit that vindicates the years. His future is a destination, and if he reaches it the words go quiet, because a founder who has sold the company and bought the house has nowhere left to point. The rabbi’s future has no exit. Redemption stays ahead of him by design, and he can say the words at any age because the thing he waits for cannot arrive inside history and end the waiting. The founder’s hope can be cashed. The rabbi’s cannot, and that uncashable quality is the source of its strength, not a flaw in it.
Set the words beside a climate scientist reading her own models. For her the honest sentence about the future runs the other way, and she has trained herself to say the harder thing and live in it. The rabbi and the scientist both face forward, and one sees a dawn that has not broken and the other sees a tide that has not crested, and the same posture, the eyes ahead, carries opposite freight.
Set them beside a man told he has six months. Here the rabbi’s line stops being a slogan and becomes a test. To a dying man “the best is yet to come” either insults him or saves him, depending on what the future means. If the future means more years, the words are a cruelty, because he has none. If the future means a relation to God that death opens rather than closes, the words might be the only true thing anyone says to him all week. The rabbi who buried his own father, Dr. Oscar Ciner, and wrote about the weeks after, did not learn the line from a book. A man does not say the best is yet to come from the easy side of a grave unless he has stood on the hard side of one and chosen the sentence anyway.
That choice brings the subtraction story to the door.
Charles Taylor (b. 1931) named the account modern people tell about how the world lost God. The story says we did not invent unbelief, we subtracted illusion, peeling away the old comforts until the bare facts stood exposed, and what remained, matter and mortality and the indifferent sky, had been the truth all along under the decoration. Becker fits this story in part and breaks it in part, and the break is where Rabbi Ciner lives.
Becker would read the whole apparatus, the email and the mikvah and the Shabbos table and the line about the future, as a defense against the terror of death. He called such defenses vital lies, the necessary fictions a man tells so he can stand up and work. A hard reader of Becker takes the next step and says the rabbi sells comfort, that the cosmic worth is a story, that the man in Melbourne reading the column on Friday morning soothes a wound that has no cure. The subtraction story finishes the thought. Strip the Torah away and you find a frightened animal who built a beautiful house over his fear.
The account captures something true. A man does fear death, and the hero system does answer the fear, and Rabbi Ciner has spent his life handing the answer to others. He might not flinch at that description. The yeshiva world has its own word for the human condition, and it does not pretend men are calm about dying.
The account leaves out the question it pretends to settle. The subtraction story assumes the thing subtracted was a coat over the real body. Rabbi Ciner’s whole life rests on the claim that the covenant is the real body and the indifferent sky is the coat. He does not argue that Torah comforts. He argues that Torah is true, and that the comfort follows from the truth the way warmth follows from a fire rather than the fire from the warmth. Becker showed that every man needs a hero system and cannot live without one. Becker did not show that every hero system is false, and could not, because the need for meaning and the truth of a particular meaning are different questions, and the second one no psychology settles. The rabbi grants the first and stakes everything on the second. That is the live argument, and it does not resolve in a column or an essay. It resolves, if it resolves, somewhere neither the writer nor the reader can see from here.
Three things to keep in view.
The first concerns the size of the audience and the smallness of the unit. The column reaches thousands and the work counts in ones. A kollel at Neveh Zion turns one young man, then another. A mikvah serves one woman on one night. The hero system scales by addition of single souls, never by the curve the founder watches, and the man who built his life on it can say the best is yet to come without a number to back the claim, because the worth he chases never lived in the count.
The second concerns the father and the son. Dr. Oscar Ciner healed bodies. His son tends souls and buried him and kept writing. A doctor’s worth ends with the patient’s life, however long he extends it, and the son chose work whose product, he holds, the grave cannot reach. Watch the value travel one generation and shift its ground, the father’s medicine and the son’s Torah both fighting death, the father on death’s own terms and the son on terms he believes lie past it.
The third concerns the words themselves. Growth, home, purity, the future. Rabbi Ciner uses them the way the venture capitalist and the surgeon and the freediver use them, with his whole life behind each one, and he means by each one something none of the others mean. The lesson holds past him. When two men share a sacred word and nothing else, they mistake the agreement for kinship and the kinship for safety, and the mistake runs quiet until a Shabbos table seats the rabbi next to the founder and both of them say they live for growth and neither hears the gap. The work of reading a man starts there, at the word he loves, with the patience to ask what world stands behind it before assuming it is yours.
