A young Persian Jew in a slim charcoal suit stands at the open bar of a Beverly Hills banquet hall, holding a vodka soda he has not touched. He is twenty-six. He sells commercial real estate. His mother has told him, more than once, that the girl across the room comes from a good family, and the girl across the room knows this, and so does he. The sushi station glistens under warm light. A DJ keeps the volume low enough for talk. Somewhere near the center of the room a short man with a graying beard and a kind face moves from group to group, learning names, asking after fathers and grandfathers, steering one introduction and then another. He wears a dark suit and a black velvet kippah. His accent is North London, clipped and dry, the vowels of a place few people in this room could find on a map. He is the reason the room exists. His name is Rabbi Yehuda Moses, and the young man at the bar is, to him, a soul that might be saved or lost.
To understand what the rabbi sees when he looks across that room, begin with the problem every hero system answers.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued in The Denial of Death that man lives under a sentence no animal carries. He knows he will die. He carries a body that will rot and a mind that imagines forever, and the gap between the two would drive him mad if culture did not hand him a way across it. Culture hands him a hero system. A hero system tells a man what counts, what a life adds up to, how he might purchase a portion of significance that death cannot repossess. Becker called this the immortality project. Some men buy their portion with works, some with children, some with conquest, some with art, some with money piled past any use. The currency changes. The purchase does not. Every man is trying to matter in a way the grave cannot cancel, and the rules for mattering come from the system he was raised inside or the one he later chooses.
Rabbi Moses was raised inside one of the strictest systems on earth.
He grew up in Stamford Hill, the square mile of North London that holds the largest Hasidic and strictly Orthodox community in Europe, some twenty-five thousand people who speak Yiddish on the street, dress as their grandfathers dressed in Hungary and Lithuania, marry in their early twenties to a match their families help arrange, and raise five and six and seven children in narrow Victorian houses with rooms added onto the roofs. A man there does not shake a woman’s hand who is not his wife. The schools teach Talmud and teach little else, and some of them teach so little else that the British state counts the boys as missing. The community grew out of a refusal. After the Holocaust nearly erased it, the survivors and their children built a wall against the modern world and called the wall holy. The point of the wall is continuity. The children carry what the parents carried, the parents carry what the murdered carried, and the chain holds.
From that enclave Rabbi Moses went into the great Lithuanian yeshivas, the engine rooms of Torah study. Sunderland under Rabbi Shami Zahn, of blessed memory. Lakewood East in Jerusalem. The Mir. Then ordination from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, under the Sephardic Chief Rabbi Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron (1941-2020), a man who could quote ten generations of rabbis and who held that established religion must know its limits. And here the line of the rabbi’s life bends in a way worth watching. A boy formed by the most inward-facing community in the Jewish world enrolled at Ner Le’Elef, a training center for outreach, and studied child development, public speaking, and communication. The wall-builders had raised a door-opener.
In 2002 he came to Los Angeles to lead the young professionals of Nessah, the great Persian synagogue of Beverly Hills, founded by exiles who fled Tehran after 1979 and carried with them a Judaism twenty-five hundred years old and a fierce drive to succeed in the new country. In 2007 he came to Mogen David in Pico-Robertson as senior rabbi and head of the Sephardic minyan. He runs the Shabbat shiur and the morning Megilah and the women’s Parasha class. He teaches grades five through eight at Maimonides Academy. He and his wife Dina have four children, and their names are Eliyahou Binyamin, Shira, Yosef Chaim, and Talia, names that carry kings and patriarchs forward into a fifth-grade classroom in West Los Angeles.
So the man at the singles night is not running a singles night. He is forging links in the chain. Becker would say the rabbi has bought the strongest immortality a man can buy, because his system pays him in two currencies at once. There is the literal portion, the soul that survives the body, the world to come, the resurrection. And there is the symbolic portion, the children with the patriarch names, the students at the academy, the souls he brings back to observance, each one a link he has welded so that the line from Sinai reaches one house further into the future than it might have. When the rabbi steers the real-estate broker toward the girl from the good family, he is trying to build a Jewish home, and a Jewish home is the workshop where the chain gets made. He does not fear that the young man will die. Every man dies. He fears that the young man will die without a link behind him, that the chain will stop in that handsome, well-dressed body, that two and a half millennia will end at an open bar in Beverly Hills.
Now take a single word and watch it break apart in the light.
Take success.
The young broker at the bar already knows what success is. He learned it before he could read. Success is the medical degree or the law degree or the buildings on Wilshire with your family’s name on the management company. Success is the house above Sunset, the daughter married well, the son who does better than the father, the table at the wedding where the important families are seated. The Persian Jews of Los Angeles spent two decades, one observer wrote, living like exiles ready to go home, suitcases half packed, and then their children grew up American and the suitcases stayed in the closet. Their hero system fused two terrors into one defense. There is the old terror, the pogrom, the revolution, the knock at the door, answered by wealth portable and large enough to survive any government. And there is the death terror underneath, answered by the dynasty, the name that outlives the man. For these families success is the proof that the family will not be erased, by Tehran or by time. It is a real immortality project, and it is a good one, and it has saved them more than once.
The rabbi from Stamford Hill looks at the same word and sees something else. Success, for him, is the boy who chooses to lay tefillin on a Monday morning when no one is watching. Success is the couple who keeps a kosher home because they want to, not because a mother is counting. Success is the college student who comes to a Shabbat table at Mogen David and comes back the next week. The buildings on Wilshire do not enter into it, except as a thing that might pull a soul away. Where the family sees the dynasty as the answer, the rabbi sees the dynasty as the danger, because a man can build a perfect dynasty of doctors and lose the one thing that, to the rabbi, makes a Jewish life a Jewish life. Same word. Two deaths, each defeated by a different victory.
Carry the word further out, past the Westside, and it keeps changing shape.
A Trappist monk in a monastery in Kentucky measures success by how completely he disappears. He takes a vow of stability and means to die in the same set of buildings he entered as a young man, and he rises at three in the morning to chant psalms that no audience hears, and the whole architecture of his life is built to wear the self down to nothing so that God might fill the space left behind. To him the rabbi’s four children and the broker’s buildings belong to the same illusion, the frantic human need to leave a mark. Success is the erasure of the mark. The man who wants to be remembered has, by the monk’s lights, already failed.
A founder in Menlo Park measures success by scale and exit. He wants the company to reach a hundred million users and then a billion, he wants the acquisition or the public offering, and underneath the metrics he wants what Becker said all the strivers want, a dent in the world deep enough that the world cannot close over it after he is gone. He keeps a mattress near the office. Home is where he recovers between sprints. He would find the monk’s vow of stability incomprehensible and the rabbi’s chain too slow, a four-thousand-year product with terrible growth.
A Marine gunnery sergeant measures success by the mission and the men. He brings everyone home. The unit is the immortality project, the Corps older than any Marine in it and certain to outlast them all, and the worst death is not his own but the man left behind, the link in that chain broken on his watch. He and the rabbi would understand each other faster than either expects, because both serve a line that runs through them and past them, and both think a man proves his life by what he refuses to abandon.
A hospice nurse measures success by a death that goes well. No cure, no rescue, no dynasty. She counts a life complete when a man dies without pain and without fear, his hand held, his accounts with the people he loves settled. To her the founder’s hunger looks like a sickness she has watched a hundred dying men finally put down, and the rabbi’s certainty about the world to come is a comfort she has seen do real work in a quiet room at two in the morning, whether or not she shares it.
A woman running her hundredth mile through the Sierra at night measures success by what her body will bear. The finish is the proof. The suffering is the point, the voluntary suffering that says, against the suffering she did not choose and the death she cannot refuse, that she is the one who decides what her flesh means. She would look at the rabbi’s open bar and his matchmaking and feel nothing, and the rabbi would look at her solitary hundred miles and ask the question he asks about every immortality project that ends with the runner, what link does it leave behind.
Six men and women, six meanings, one word. This is what Becker saw and what makes the comparison something more than a parlor trick. The meanings do not differ because the people are confused about what success means. They differ because each lives inside a different answer to the same sentence of death, and the word takes its content from the answer. Strip the hero system away and success is an empty syllable. Pour a hero system into it and it fills with children, or buildings, or silence, or a finish line, or a flag-draped box carried by men who kept their word.
Each hero system needs the others to be wrong. If the founder is right that the dent in the world is what counts, then the monk has wasted his life on his knees. If the monk is right that the self must vanish, then the dynasty on Wilshire is a monument to vanity. The systems cannot all be true, and a man’s whole defense against the terror depends on his being right, and so the mere existence of someone living well by another scheme is a quiet accusation. Becker thought this the root of human evil, in Escape from Evil, the need to discredit the other man’s path so that one’s own holds. Most men handle it by not looking. They stay inside the wall.
The rabbi from Stamford Hill cannot stay inside the wall, and that is what makes him worth an essay. His own community built the wall and he was raised behind it, and then he was trained to walk out the door and stand in rooms full of people whose idea of a life well spent threatens his at the root. The Beverly Hills family that measures success in degrees and buildings is, in Becker’s cold accounting, a standing argument that the rabbi has it wrong. He answers the argument not by attacking it but by trying to fold it inside his own. Keep the buildings, he tells the broker, in effect. Keep the success your mother taught you. Only let me add the link. Marry the girl, build the home, raise the child who carries the name. He is trying to make his hero system the one that contains all the others, the frame inside which a man can be a Beverly Hills success and a link in the chain at the same time.
Whether he can is the open question of his life, and he will not learn the answer, because the answer arrives in a generation he will not fully see. The chain reveals itself only in the keeping. A man welds his link and dies and only the grandchildren show whether the weld held.
The singles night ends near midnight. The DJ packs his gear. The sushi station goes cold. The broker has the girl’s number in his phone and does not yet know what he will do with it. The rabbi stands at the door, tired, shaking hands, in his accent from the square mile of piety four thousand miles away, telling the young people to come for Shabbat, to come learn, to come back. Tomorrow he teaches the fifth grade. The boys are ten and eleven. They carry names as old as the names of his own children. He stands in front of them in the morning, a man who walked out of the most closed world in Judaism to spend his life holding doors open, and he hands them the chain, and he hopes, the way every man inside every hero system hopes, that the thing he gives away outlives the hand that gives it.
