In 1958 a yeshiva boy of eighteen stood in line at 770 Eastern Parkway to receive a piece of matzah from the Rebbe before going home to his parents near Yankee Stadium for the Seder. The Rebbe handed him a second errand. Deliver matzah to a family across the Bronx, past the zoo, in a part of the borough that turned dangerous after dark. The boy called his mother. Start the Seder without me. He took the subway, the subway broke down, and when he climbed out he emptied his pockets of every coin, including the fare home, because a Jew carries no money on the holy day. He walked the rest of the way and found a housing project for the blind. He knocked. He smelled bacon and saw bread on the table. He put a smile on his face anyway and told the man he had come with matzah from the Rebbe and would like to tell the story of Passover. The man brought in his pregnant wife and two small girls, both of them blind. The boy stayed until one in the morning. Only at the end did the man explain how he knew the Rebbe. A doctor had urged the couple to abort the pregnancy, since their disease blinded their children. They had written to the Rebbe. He answered them to have faith in God and have the child.
That boy was Baruch Shlomo Eliyahu Cunin (b. 1940). The whole of his life sits inside that night. A man hands him a task. He throws away his own way home to keep the law. He walks toward the forgotten Jew in the dangerous dark, and he sits at the unkosher table without flinching, because the point is never the table. The point is the soul at it.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the grammar for reading such a life. In The Denial of Death he argues that man is the animal who knows he will die, and that every culture answers this knowledge by building a hero system, a structure of roles and rules through which a person earns the feeling that he counts, that his days leave a mark the grave cannot erase. The hero system tells you what a life is for, what a victory looks like, where to spend yourself. Becker’s claim cuts deeper than most readers expect. He is not saying religion comforts the frightened. He is saying that culture as such is a project against annihilation, that the broker and the soldier and the artist all reach for the same thing the saint reaches for, and that the only difference among men lies in which hero system they pour themselves into and how honestly they admit what they are doing.
Cunin pours himself into one system with a clarity that startles. We do not even know his birthday with confidence. The public record fixes the date of his wedding to Miriam Loksen, November 19, 1964, and gives the year the Rebbe sent him west, 1965, and the number of his children, thirteen, and almost nothing of the private man, because in this hero system the self is not the unit of account. Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, is. When the Rebbe sent him to California he used a word of war. “Shlomo, zolst aynnemen gantz California.” Shlomo, you should conquer all of California. Cunin asked how. Start with the big cities or the outlying towns? The Rebbe told him to start with the outlying areas, because he had heard there were many Jewish students in Berkeley.
Hold the word conquer to the light and watch it change shape in different hands. A Marine drill instructor hears conquest and pictures terrain taken from an enemy and held by force. A founder pitching venture capital hears it and pictures market share, a category captured before a rival captures it. For Cunin the word carries no enemy of flesh at all. The enemy is forgetting. The territory is a count of Jews reached, a Chabad House in a town that had none, a pair of tefillin laid by a man who had not laid them in forty years. He built one of the first such houses in the world and grew the network past two hundred across California and Nevada. He measures the conquest the way the Rebbe taught him to measure it, soul by soul, and so a word that means killing to one man and selling to another means rescue to him.
The same drift runs through every value he holds. Take money. To a venture capitalist money is a scorecard and a lever. To a Trappist monk money is a snare to be fled. Cunin treats money as a consecrated thing, a medium through which a soul changes hands. He tells the story without embarrassment. He went to a wealthy man, took a check, and reported to the Rebbe’s secretary the donor’s Hebrew name and the blessing promised in return, a grandchild brought back to Judaism. The grandchildren returned, he says. Money in this system is not wealth. It is a transaction in eternity, the visible sign of an invisible exchange.
That belief carries a cost the wider world records in a different ledger. In 2014 a federal judge, Morrison England, ruled that Chabad of California had knowingly failed to comply with the terms of a homeland security grant from the state and had falsely assured the government that written financial controls existed when they did not. The judge called Cunin’s deposition testimony damning. He quoted Cunin’s view that grant advances, once paid, were no longer the government’s business, treated as gifts to Chabad, and wrote that a compelling argument could be made that the conduct was intentional. Read that ruling beside the fundraising story and you see one act seen from two hero systems. From inside Cunin’s, money given to the Rebbe’s work passes out of the secular order and into the sacred, where an auditor has no standing. From inside the system of federal compliance, the same belief is a finding of fault. The dollars do not move. The cosmology does.
The books make the clearest case of all. The Schneerson Collection, twelve thousand volumes and manuscripts gathered by the Lubavitcher Rebbes, was seized by the Bolsheviks and held by the Russian state. To a museum registrar a book is an object to catalog, to keep at stable humidity, to leave where the law of property places it. To the Russian government the collection is national patrimony, a treasure of the people, spoils a country that lost twenty million dead in war will not surrender. To Cunin the seforim are none of these. They are held as hostages, and their redemption belongs to the redemption of the world, since the Chasidim hold that when the books come home the Messiah comes with them. The Rebbe appointed him to a delegation in 1991, and he carried the charge into American courts. In a story the movement tells with pride, he sent his teenage sons, yeshiva students, to ride the underground train between the House and the Senate and knock on doors until they had letters from seventy senators. A Senate staffer saw boys lobbying. Cunin saw his children carrying the Rebbe’s war. Judge Royce Lamberth later placed a fine of fifty thousand dollars a day on Russia for refusing to return the collection, and Chabad moved to seize Russian assets to collect it, and the Chasidim spoke the old phrase from an earlier court victory, Didan Notzach, victory is ours.
Notice the tense Cunin keeps. The Rebbe died in 1994. Cunin still speaks of the assignment in the present. “The Rebbe tasked us with returning the books.” Not tasked once, long ago. Tasks, now. Here Becker turns from theory to something colder and more moving. A hero system built to defeat death will not let its hero die. The Rebbe gives orders in the present tense because in this world he has not stopped giving them, and Cunin lives inside a porous reality the modern buffered self has mostly sealed off, a world where the dead still speak, where a book can suffer exile, where a check can ransom a grandchild’s soul. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) calls the secular settlement a subtraction story, the tale we tell of what remains once God and spirits and final purposes are stripped away. Cunin’s life runs that story backward. He refuses the subtraction. Everything the modern account removes, he keeps.
The fire shows what the keeping looks like under fire. In 1980 the West Coast headquarters in Westwood burned and three young men died. A lesser man grieves in private and rebuilds in silence. Cunin built a telethon. The idea came from Carroll O’Connor (1924-2001), the gentile actor America knew as Archie Bunker, who told him to put the rebuilding on television. So Cunin took the ashes and made a yearly broadcast of dancing rabbis and a tote board and Jon Voight (b. 1938) and Larry King (1933-2021) and the producer Jerry Weintraub (1937-2015), and for more than four decades the show has raised millions and turned a fatal fire into a public festival of life. A hotshot who fights wildfire understands fire as the thing to beat back. Cunin took the fire and fed it into the hero system, where even the death of three young men becomes fuel for the work. That is not callousness. It is the deepest logic of the project. Grief that does not build is grief wasted, and the dead are honored by the count of the living brought home.
Now the part that asks the most of a reader, and the most of the writer. The same reaching that walked toward the blind family in the Bronx reaches toward the grieving and the old, and from outside the hero system the reaching can look like predation. In 2011 an eighty-two-year-old widow, Maxine Coe, sued Chabad of California and Cunin and his son, alleging that the rabbis came to her the day after her husband died, while she grieved, offered to bury him in the Chabad plot and to support her for the rest of her life, and led her to sign over a Malibu home worth millions and to buy a Torah for a hundred thousand dollars. The suit alleged financial abuse of an elder, fraud, and negligent misrepresentation. These are the claims of a complaint, the woman’s account, not a court’s finding. Set them beside the matzah in the Bronx and you cannot pull the two acts apart, because they are the same act. To fold a grieving widow into the Rebbe’s work, to secure her husband a resting place among Chasidim, to bind her to the cause with a Torah scroll, is, from inside the hero system, the highest form of love, the same love that walked the dark Bronx street at midnight. From inside the hero system of elder law and fiduciary duty, the same approach reads as a complaint filed in Superior Court. I will not collapse the two readings into one. The honest thing is to hold them both and let the reader sit in the discomfort, because the discomfort is the truth.
Love is the word that travels furthest between systems. A hospice nurse loves by sitting with the dying and changing nothing, offering presence without an agenda. Cunin cannot love that way. His love always carries a mission. He cannot simply sit at the table. He must deliver the matzah, tell the story, bring the man back. The reaching is the love, and the reaching never rests, and that restlessness is at once the engine of two hundred Chabad Houses and the thing that draws a widow’s lawyer to the courthouse. The same trait builds the empire and files the complaint. Becker would say this is no contradiction. It is what a hero system does. It takes a single human drive and aims it at immortality, and the drive does not pause to ask whether every person it touches wished to be touched.
Even humility shifts. The modern buffered self prizes humility as self-effacement, the lowering of one’s own claim. Cunin tells of borrowing two hundred thousand dollars to build and never feeling right about asking the Rebbe for money, and the Rebbe corrected him. “Don’t be so humble.” In this system a humility that hides the work’s true need is a quiet form of pride, a man protecting his own comfort over the mission. The virtue inverts. To ask boldly for millions becomes the humble act, and to hold back becomes the proud one.
So what does a reader carry away who has read ten of these essays already and wants the eleventh to give him something new. Three coordinates, held in prose rather than nailed to a wall.
The first is that Cunin is a man whose self has fused so far into his hero system that his own death has almost no purchase on him, while the disappearance of the Jew terrifies him without rest. Study him and you study the theory in its pure state, the immortality project run to its limit, where a leader keeps giving orders from the grave and a man takes those orders as the plain facts of his day.
The second is that the traits we want to sort into the good column and the bad column refuse the sort. The walk to the blind family and the deathbed Torah and the seventy senators and the federal grant finding all flow from a single source, the reach toward the forgotten soul, which the hero system blesses and which the courthouse names. A reader who wants Cunin all hero or all villain has not understood Becker and has not looked at Cunin. The reach is one thing. It saves and it grasps with the same hand.
The third is the lesson for the rest of us, who imagine we live in the subtraction story, who think the dead stay dead and a book is property and a dollar is a dollar. Cunin shows what conviction costs and what it buys. It builds two hundred houses out of nothing and turns a fatal fire into a festival and stares down the Russian state over twelve thousand books. It also walks into a widow’s grief with a scroll and a deed. The man pays the full price of believing his hero system all the way down, and he collects the full return, and most of us, holding our beliefs at arm’s length, will never know either figure. Watch him and ask the only question Becker leaves us. Not whether he believes too much. What we, who believe so carefully and so little, have given up to stay safe.
