On a Friday afternoon in west Los Angeles, in a home a few blocks off Pico, a folding table goes up in a living room that already has a dining table. Women arrive. One carries a foil pan of kugel. One carries a baby on her hip and a diaper bag that cost more than the table. They set down salads and a tray of cut melon and a bakery box tied with string. The host has been doing this for thirty years.
Chana Heller directs the Jewish Women’s Initiative at Aish Los Angeles. She holds a master’s in social work, studied two years at Neve Yerushalayim in Jerusalem, married a psychotherapist named Rabbi Dov Heller, and raised five children who now have children, nineteen grandchildren, most of them in Israel. Her work brings Jewish mothers, many of them raised with almost nothing of the tradition, into its practice. The brochures lean on three words. Love. Warmth. Home.
A newcomer stands at the kitchen island. A friend asked her to come, and the email said dinner, and so she came. She runs a small business. She has a Peloton, a therapist, and a calendar app that color-codes her children’s swim meets. She thinks she is here to learn something, or to get a free meal, or to be a good friend, and she has not settled on which.
“You light two candles,” Chana says, to the room more than to her. “Some add one for each child. Your great-grandmother lit them. Your daughter will light them after you.”
The newcomer thinks, that is a lovely idea, and reaches for a cracker. She has heard the sentence. She has not heard what was said.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) spent his last books on a single claim. A man knows he will die, and the knowledge is unbearable, and so he builds his life as a defense against it. In The Denial of Death and then in Escape from Evil, Becker argues that culture supplies the defense. Every culture hands its members a hero system, a scheme that tells a man what counts as a life worth having lived, what counts as significance, what part of him might outlast the grave. The hero system answers the terror. It says: do these things, become this kind of man, and you will not have been nobody. You will have mattered against the dark.
The scheme differs from place to place and people to people. A Viking earns his name in battle and drinks in a hall after death. A Mandarin earns it through the examination and the ancestral tablet. A Silicon Valley founder earns it by building a thing that did not exist and seeing his name in the press. Each scheme is a separate bet on how to beat death, and each draws a man toward a separate picture of the good life. Becker’s point cuts deeper than tolerance or taste. The hero systems do not merely prize different things. They load the same words with different cargo. A word like freedom, a word like home, a word like strength, points at one structure inside one scheme and at another structure inside another, and the men who use the word rarely notice they are not talking about the same thing.
This is the room the newcomer has walked into. Chana Heller hands her words she already owns. Home. Freedom. The hidden. The newcomer hears them in the only scheme she has, and assumes she has understood.
Take home first.
For the newcomer, home is the place she returns to after the part of life where things happen. The office is where she is judged. The gym is where she improves. The home is the soft interior, the recovery room, the set for the photographs she posts. It holds her. She does not expect it to mean much beyond her own span. When she is gone the house will sell.
For Chana Heller, home is the engine. The Hebrew calls the woman akeret habayit, the foundation of the home, and the phrase carries no scent of the recovery room. The home she describes produces the next link in a chain that runs back through every grandmother to Sinai and forward past her own death through grandchildren she watches grow up over video calls from a suburb of Jerusalem. The candles, the table, the bread, the rhythm of the week, these are not comforts laid on top of life. They are the place where the people of Israel renew themselves once every seven days, in ten thousand kitchens at once, and have done so under emperors and commissars who are now dust. The home is where the dead stay alive and the unborn arrive. A woman who keeps it well has reached past her own grave with both hands.
Now hand the word to other men and watch it change shape again.
Give it to a venture founder in Santa Monica. Home, for him, is a base of operations, an address, an asset class, the thing the second liquidity event pays for. His hero system locates his value in what he ships and what the market says it is worth. Home is overhead. The good life is the cap table.
Give it to a French chef who holds three stars. Home is the dining room he built and the kitchen behind it, and the lineage is real to him, the mother sauces, the masters he trained under, the cooks he sends out who open rooms of their own. His chain runs through technique. The chef and the rebbetzin both speak of a line that outlasts the man, and both mean it, and the lines do not touch. His passes through the plate. Hers passes through the womb and the covenant.
Give it to a long-distance sailor who crossed two oceans alone. Home is the boat, forty feet of teak and Kevlar, and beyond it the open water, which he calls the only place he feels at home, by which he means the only place no one can reach him. For him the word points away from people. For Chana Heller it points at nothing but people, generations of them, stacked.
One word. Four schemes. Four bets on what a man does with the years before the dark, and the word bends to the bet every time.
Take freedom.
The newcomer prizes it above almost everything, though she would struggle to say what she means. She means options. She means the right to leave, to choose, to revise. Her hero system, the one the culture issued her, makes the unencumbered self the hero, and freedom is the self with the fewest cords on it. A constraint is a small defeat. A vow frightens her. She kept her maiden name and her own bank account and a clause about the dog.
Chana Heller will spend a class on Shabbos, and what she offers the newcomer under the name of freedom looks at first like the opposite. For one day in seven, no phone. No car. No buying, no selling, no fixing, no scrolling, no work of any kind. To the newcomer this is a list of things taken away. Then the rebbetzin says the word the newcomer thought she owned. This, she says, is the freedom. One day a week the market cannot reach you and the self that must always produce is sent out of the room. You stop being a worker and a brand and a set of metrics. You sit at a table with people who knew you before any of that and will love you after it. The cords the newcomer guards against turn out, in this scheme, to be the thing that frees her from a harder master, the one who lives in her phone and counts.
Now run freedom through other men.
A Marine gunnery sergeant means something near the rebbetzin and far from the founder. He earned his freedom, he will tell a recruit, by giving it up, by submitting to the unit until the submission became a kind of power, and the recruit who guards his autonomy hardest is the one who will get men killed. Freedom, in his scheme, lives on the far side of discipline, not in its absence.
A dissident poet who wrote in a Soviet kitchen and passed his pages hand to hand means freedom as the uncensored line, the sentence the state could not make him unsay. His hero system stakes everything on the word that survives the regime, and the regime did fall, and some of the lines are still read. For him, to keep silent for safety is the one death that counts. Tell him that one day a week he should put down the pen and the argument and rest, and he hears a betrayal of the only immortality he trusts.
Set the poet beside the rebbetzin and the gap opens wide. He bets his deathlessness on the named work, the line with his name under it, the monument of language that points back at the man who made it. She bets hers on the opposite move, and here the essay reaches the thing worth saying.
Take the hidden.
Chana Heller teaches tzniut, usually rendered modesty, and the rendering misleads. The newcomer hears modesty and thinks of hemlines and a slightly punitive committee. What the rebbetzin describes is a claim about where the real lives. The holiest objects in the tradition sit behind a curtain. The most intimate parts of a life are guarded, not posted. A diamond is not left on the sidewalk. The teaching holds that what a man keeps hidden he treats as precious, and what he displays he cheapens, and that the interior life, unseen, is the weightier one. The unseen is the more real.
Set that against the scheme the newcomer arrived with, where visibility is the asset and the unseen barely exists. Her hero system runs on the post, the profile, the brand, the metric, the public mark. To be unseen is to be nobody. The founder agrees. The poet agrees, for his own reasons, the witness who keeps quiet has failed. Three schemes, and all three locate the hero in the seen, the named, the recorded.
Now Becker’s whole argument turns over.
Every hero system answers death, and almost every one the newcomer knows answers it by making the self large. Leave a mark. Build the thing. Sign the work. Be remembered. The founder’s name on the building, the poet’s name under the line, the athlete’s record in the book, the influencer’s archive of a thousand posted days. The bet is that if enough of me is recorded and seen, some of me will not die. It is a brave bet and a fragile one. The building gets a new name. The record falls. The archive scrolls off the feed. The man who staked his deathlessness on being remembered has staked it on the one thing he cannot control, the memory of strangers, which is short.
Chana Heller’s scheme makes the opposite bet, and the strangeness of it is easy to miss because she is so warm and the kugel is so good. Her hero system reaches for the same prize, a life that outlasts the grave, and reaches for it by making the self small on purpose. The candle she lights is the same flame her great-grandmother lit, and the point is that it is the same flame and not a new one. She does not sign it. She adds no improvement. She wants her name to vanish into the chain so completely that her granddaughter in Jerusalem, lighting the same two candles in fifty years, will feel no seam where Chana Heller used to be. The erasure of her name is not the price of her immortality. It is the method.
This inverts the founder’s bet at the root. He needs to be remembered, and so his project dies the day the last person forgets him, which is soon. She needs only the chain to continue, and the chain does not need to recall any single link by name to carry the flame past her. Her scheme survives the thing that destroys his, the forgetting of the individual, because it never asked the individual to be remembered. She trades a personal immortality, brittle and loud, for a shared one, durable and quiet. A Trappist monk who took a vow of silence and lies in an unmarked grave made a cousin of this trade, gave up his name to disappear into something that does not die, and the cousin marks the difference too, because the monk has no children and the line he joins runs through the cloister and the liturgy rather than through the womb. The rebbetzin’s chain is made of bodies. Hers continues in flesh that calls her Bubbe.
Becker thought the religious solution was the boldest of the hero systems, because it does not pretend the self is enough and does not flinch from the size of the problem. He admired it without being able to take it. Watching Chana Heller is watching a version of that solution worked out by a woman in a kitchen, in real time, on a mother who came for the food. The mother guards her name, her brand, her options, her visibility, all the deathless-making goods her own scheme prizes, and the rebbetzin is teaching her, gently, over kugel, to want the opposite goods, the hidden, the bound, the unsigned, the merely continued. Neither of them states it as a contest between two schemes for beating death. They use the same warm words and assume the words agree.
Late in the evening the newcomer helps carry plates to the sink. She has eaten well. She has laughed. Something has reached her that she cannot name, and on the drive home, alone with the phone she did not touch for four hours, she notices the quiet and does not reach for it.
“You’ll come back?” Chana asked at the door, holding both her hands.
“I think I will,” the newcomer said, and meant it, and still did not know what she had agreed to, which is that she had been offered a different way to not die, and had liked the taste of it before she understood the terms.
The candle burns down. No one wrote her name on it. That is the whole idea.
