A girl of fourteen sits in Crown Heights with a problem. The year is sometime in the 1950s. A new school has opened, advanced, untested, and the administration wants her in the first class. She does not want to go. She writes to the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), and she names her fear. She does not want to be a guinea pig. The word does the work that fear always does. It tells her where she stands in the order of things: expendable, a test subject, a body the experiment can afford to lose.
The Rebbe reads the letter. He takes a pen. He crosses out two words and writes one in their place. Guinea pig becomes pioneer.
She enrolls. Years pass. She becomes the principal.
Rabbi Mendel Kalmenson tells this story in Positivity Bias, his 2019 book drawn from the Rebbe’s letters and talks, and the story carries the whole argument of his life. One edit. The facts of the case do not change. The school is still new, still untested, the girl still first through the door. What changes is the name of her place in the cosmos, and with the name, everything that follows from it. A guinea pig endures the experiment. A pioneer leads the migration. The same girl, the same risk, two different worlds.
Kalmenson runs Chabad of Belgravia and serves as rabbi of Beit Baruch, in a London postcode of stuccoed terraces, embassies, and the quiet money that does not need to announce itself. He came from Chabad.org, where he edited for years, and he has carried the Rebbe’s teaching into more than fifty countries. He has written Seeds of Wisdom, A Time to Heal, Positivity Bias, People of the Word, and On Purpose, and he sits as associate editor of the Chumash Project. Across a camera and a low table he has hosted more than a hundred and fifty conversations under the title People of Interest, among them the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker (b. 1954), the Auschwitz survivor and clinician Edith Eger (b. 1927), and the former chief rabbi of Israel Yisrael Meir Lau (b. 1937). He is a fluent man in a tailored black coat who can hold a room of skeptics and a room of the bereaved, sometimes the same room.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us the tools to read a man like this. In The Denial of Death Becker argued that the human animal lives under two terrors and builds a hero system to survive them. The first terror is death itself, and beneath it the smaller daily terror of creatureliness, of being a body that leaks and ages and forgets, a thing the universe does not need. The second terror is meaninglessness, the suspicion that the whole show signifies nothing, that the cosmos is cold and the suffering random. A hero system answers both. It tells a man that his life counts, that his acts register on some permanent ledger, that he is, in the local idiom, a pioneer and not a guinea pig.
Kalmenson’s hero system has a name he gave it himself. He calls it a positivity bias, and the word bias is honest, because he does not claim the cheerful man sees more. He claims the cheerful man sees deeper. The negativity bias, the pull toward doom and grievance, sits in the wiring and feels like realism. Kalmenson, following the Rebbe, calls it a shallow reading of a deep text. Look further, he says, and the good is there, hidden under the misguided act and the bad event, a point of divine purpose folded into the worst of it. Life is good at the root. The good is open to anyone. It comes from clear sight, not from wishful feeling, and a man chooses it, the way the girl chose the word pioneer.
Set this against the wound it was built to close. The Rebbe assembled his movement out of survivors, men and women who had counted their dead in the millions and arrived in Brooklyn with the negativity bias fully earned. To stand before such a congregation and say the world is good is not a greeting card. It is a claim staked against the strongest counterargument in human history. Kalmenson knows this, and he never softens it. The Rebbe’s optimism, he writes, drew its force from the brokenness it answered and from the Rebbe’s own losses. Here is the first terror and the second terror at once, death in its industrial form and meaning in its hardest test, and a hero system raised on the exact ground where most systems collapse.
Now the harder work, and the part that earns a reader who has seen the shape of these essays before. Kalmenson’s sacred words look plain. Good. Healing. Joy. The core of a person. A skeptic hears them and thinks he knows what they mean. He does not. A sacred word means almost nothing on its own. It draws its sense from the hero system that holds it, and carry the same word into another system and it turns into a stranger wearing familiar clothes. Watch the word travel.
Take the word good, the keystone of the whole structure. In Kalmenson’s mouth good is a claim about the architecture of reality. A personal God made the world on purpose, the purpose is benevolent, and providence threads every event, so that a thing called bad is a surface and the good runs under it like a water table. Good is not a mood and not a verdict on the day. It is the grain of the wood.
Carry that word to a hospice ward in a different city, into the mouth of a palliative physician who has signed more death certificates than she can name. For her, good has nothing to do with the grain of the universe. Good is a clean line into a vein, a dose that holds, a family that arrives before the breathing stops. She does not look under the cancer for a hidden point of purpose. She thinks the search insults the dying. Good, in her hero system, means comfort delivered against a thing that has no meaning and never will. Her heroism lies in fighting a pointless enemy with skill and tenderness and refusing the consolation that it adds up to anything.
Carry the word again, to a Reformed seminarian in the American South who reads John Calvin (1509-1564) at a kitchen table. He uses good a hundred times a week and means the opposite of Kalmenson at the level of the human core. The seminarian holds that the heart of man is fallen, bent, incapable of good on its own steam, and that any good in a person arrives from outside, as grace, unearned. Tell him every human is good at the root and he hears a soft lie that flatters the creature and robs the Creator. His hero system makes him a vessel for a goodness that is never his own. Kalmenson’s makes the divine spark the man’s own deepest possession. Same word, good, and the two men face away from each other across it.
Carry it to a laboratory and the word stops working at all. Steven Pinker, whom Kalmenson has interviewed, uses good with care and means something measurable: fewer wars per capita, longer lives, less cruelty per year, the slope of the line in The Better Angels of Our Nature bending down. For Pinker good is an output of reason and institutions, a number that improves, and the universe behind it stays blind, a process with no opinion about us. Two men sit at the low table and both praise reason and progress and the good, and the words match while the worlds do not. Kalmenson’s good descends from a purposing God and waits to be uncovered. Pinker’s good gets built by people against a cosmos that offers no help and intends nothing. The conversation can run for an hour in apparent agreement because the shared vocabulary hides the gap underneath. That gap is the whole subject of this essay.
Carry it once more, to a Zen teacher leading a Tuesday sitting in a rented studio. He flinches at good the way you flinch at a bright light. Good and bad, in his system, form the pair of opposites the mind must put down. To call the world good is to keep grasping, to keep the self busy sorting reality into columns, and the sorting is the sickness. His heroism is to stop, to let the categories fall, to meet the moment before it gets a label. Kalmenson wants you to see the good under the event. The Zen teacher wants you to see the event with nothing added, not even good.
Five mouths, one word, five worlds. Add a sixth and let it stand for the live nerve of the matter. A woman raised in the late Soviet Union, schooled by her grandmother to expect the knock at the door and the empty shelf, hears good as a setup. In her hero system the man who calls the world good has not been paying attention, or worse, he is selling something. Vigilance kept her people alive. Hope got them sent east. To her the positivity bias looks like a failure of nerve dressed as faith, and she trusts the pessimist the way you trust a man who checks the locks.
So the same syllable, good, names the grain of the universe, a dose of morphine, the fallen human heart, a downward war statistic, an illusion to release, and a con. Kalmenson’s hero system does not float above this disagreement. It takes one side of it, and a strong side, and the strength is paid for.
Here is the cost, told straight. A system that finds the good under every event must do something with the man who looks and finds nothing. Push the positivity bias hard enough and the person who stays broken starts to feel like a failure of sight. He hears, under the kind words, an instruction he cannot follow. Look deeper, see the purpose, choose the better word. He looks. He sees a dead child and no purpose at all. The hero system, at its weakest, can hand him a second wound on top of the first, the shame of the man who could not manage to be a pioneer.
Kalmenson knows this danger better than his critics do, and his answer to it sits in his other book. A Time to Heal, from 2015, gathers the Rebbe’s letters to the bereaved, and the book holds a tension that the cheap version of positivity never reaches. The Rebbe insists that all of it belongs to a divine plan and that the good is real, and in the same breath he makes room for grief, for the cry against heaven, for the widow who cannot explain the death to her children. Faith and human frailty do not cancel each other. A man may thank God for the life that was and still rage at the loss of it, and both prayers count. The Rebbe lets the mourner speak first. Before the burial he counsels silence, presence, shared tears, no rush to the lesson.
And then the turn that defines the system. The Rebbe redirects the question. Not why me, which has no floor and no bottom, but what now. Pain left to sit will fester and curdle and leak out sideways. Pain harnessed becomes fuel for a cause, a school, a kindness, a name carved into the future. This is the hero system doing its deepest work. It cannot promise the survivor that the death made sense. It can promise him a task, and the task confers the one thing the second terror threatens to strip away, the sense that his act registers and endures. Healing, in Kalmenson’s mouth, means the channeling of grief into building.
Set that word, healing, beside the others and watch it split the same way good did. For a grief therapist trained in the lineage of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), healing means a process honored at its own pace, stages allowed to unfold, no foreman calling for action before the mourner is ready, and the push toward what now might land as a shove. For a trauma clinician, premature meaning is a known hazard, a frame imposed too early that can reopen the wound rather than close it. For a Stoic reading his Marcus Aurelius on the train, healing means amor fati, the embrace of fate exactly as it fell, with no plan to redeem it and no God to thank. For Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), who walked out of the same camps as Edith Eger, healing comes through meaning chosen in the worst place, and here Kalmenson’s word and Frankl’s word nearly touch, two men insisting that a person keeps the freedom to assign significance even when the world has taken everything else. Eger, across the table from Kalmenson, carries that Frankl inheritance in her own key, the survivor who decided that the only prison left was the one in her mind. Nearly touch, and still not the same, because Frankl’s meaning is a human act against an indifferent void and Kalmenson’s good is a divine fact waiting under the void to be found.
This is where a reader can stand and look in both directions at once, which is what these essays are for. Kalmenson’s hero system is strongest at the bedside of the survivor who is sick of why and hungry for a task, the man who needs his suffering to build something so that it stops eating him alive. To that man the positivity bias is not kitsch and not denial. It is a rope. The same system strains at the bedside of the depressive, for whom seeing good is the exact faculty that has failed, and who can hear the whole teaching as a verdict on his eyesight. And the system meets its real test in the space between the two, in whether seeing good stays an insight offered or hardens into a demand imposed. The Rebbe edited a willing girl’s letter and gave her a word she could choose. The danger of every positivity bias is the day it stops offering the word pioneer and starts requiring it, the day the man who cannot see the good is told, gently, that the fault lies in his looking.
Kalmenson sits in Belgravia and keeps the offer open. He brings the skeptic to the table and lets the skeptic talk. He gathers the letters of the bereaved and lets the widow rage before he hands her the task. He took a teaching forged on the worst ground in human memory and made it portable, a thing a man in a hospice or a boardroom or a Tuesday sitting might pick up and turn over. The word good will mean something different in each of those rooms. He knows that, and he says it anyway, and he says it to the one congregation that had every reason to call him a liar and a fair number who called him a rope instead.
