The Shalhevet girls run the floor in a gym off Fairfax and the rabbi is on his feet calling the press. He coached this team to back to back national titles. He wears the beard and the kippah, he diagrams a trap defense on the whiteboard, the girls inbound and trap and the other bench calls time. He runs a girls’ varsity team to a national championship and he does not hear the contradiction the rest of us hear. He hears one thing where the rest of us hear two.
Open the Shulhan Arukh and you find his creed printed on the page. Rav Yosef Karo (1488-1575) rules first, in the body of the text, a Sephardic master writing in Safed. Then Rav Moshe Isserles (c. 1530-1572) answers in the gloss, a Polish master setting down the Ashkenazi practice Karo left out. Karo built the table. Isserles laid the cloth. The two never met. They share every page. Ask Rabbi Daniel Bouskila for the best book that holds both Jewish worlds and he names that page. The answer is a creed, not a compromise.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) argued that men build hero systems to hold off death. A hero system hands you a script for a life that counts, a way to earn a place in something larger that outlasts the body. The soldier earns it by charging. The martyr earns it by burning. The founder earns it by betting the house. The scholar earns it by being right where the others were wrong. Each system answers the one question that frightens us. Did I count. Will I last.
Most systems pay their highest wage to the extreme. The hero goes all the way. He does not hold two truths in one hand. He picks the side and dies on it, and the picking is the glory. Zeal reads as depth. Purity reads as courage. The man who holds both looks, from inside those systems, like a man with no spine.
Bouskila builds a system that runs the other way. In his, the hero is the man who holds both and refuses the cleansing choice. Moderation is the heroism. That is a strange thing to build, because almost every hero system on offer treats the middle as the place cowards hide.
Watch what he does with his working hours and the shape of the system comes clear. He translates dead rabbis so they speak again. Rav Ben-Zion Meir Hai Uziel (1880-1953) was Israel’s first Sephardic Chief Rabbi, a scholar of the first rank, and by Bouskila’s own telling a man most Israelis cannot place. Every Israeli city has a Rav Uziel street. Few who drive it know the name behind the sign. Bouskila reads the man back into the air. He gathers the responsa, the speeches, the letters, and he carries Uziel’s voice into rooms where it had gone quiet. Uziel taught that the split between Ashkenazi and Sephardi was an accident of exile, that no Jew is one or the other underneath, that the work is to unite and not to divide. That voice nearly vanished. Bouskila spends himself keeping it audible.
He does the same with the writer S.Y. Agnon (1888-1970), who sat in a Jerusalem study and built his murdered hometown out of sentences. In Agnon’s story the menorah of Buczacz disappears, and the children melt their lead dreidels to cast a new one, and the new lamp lights the synagogue every year until the killers come and put it out. Agnon writes the town back. Bouskila writes Agnon forward. The pattern holds. The hero beats death by keeping a murdered voice in the air, and the voice he most wants to keep is the moderate one, because the moderate voice is the first the world loses.
So take a word Bouskila treats as holy and watch it change shape as it crosses out of his hero system and into others. Take moderation.
On a parade deck a drill instructor leans into a recruit’s ear at a range of two inches. Moderation, in his system, is the thing that gets the platoon killed. Half effort on the rifle line is a dead Marine. He teaches the recruit to go past what the body wants to give, because the man who holds something back when it counts is the man who breaks. To him the middle is no virtue. The middle is the gap a round goes through.
Across the country a founder pitches a man in a fleece vest across a glass table. The founder says he is all in, mortgaged, no plan B, and the man in the vest writes the check for exactly that. Conviction is the asset. A hedge is a tell. In that system moderation means you do not believe your own thing, and a man who does not believe his own thing cannot be funded and cannot be a hero. The balanced founder is the founder nobody backs.
In a study group a woman who came to faith last year corrects a man who was born to it. She keeps the law to the letter, every stringency, because she remembers the looseness she left and she will not drift back. Moderation, to her, is the lukewarm water she climbed out of. The middle is the country she fled. Her hero is the one who holds the line hardest, and the rabbi who tells her to ease up sounds like a man trying to pull her back under.
In a different room a philosopher in the line of the Greeks teaches that virtue sits between two vices, courage between rashness and cowardice, and that the measured man is the high man. Here moderation is the summit. It is a cold summit, reasoned out, a balance struck by a calm mind for the sake of the good life. The Greek’s middle and Bouskila’s middle wear the same word and come from different fires. One is a conclusion. The other is a rescue.
In a small room a master of an old craft, a cantaor, a maker of one perfect thing, guards a tradition he will not change by a hair. To him tradition is a thing you receive whole and pass on whole, and the man who alters it is the man who breaks it. This is the word that splits Bouskila from him. For Bouskila tradition is a living tongue, not a sealed jar. He takes the tenth of Tevet, an old minor fast, and pours into it the memory of the Holocaust. He takes the four questions of the Seder and writes four new ones for a people that now holds a state. Tradition, in his hands, is a voice that keeps speaking to the room it is in. The craftsman keeps the jar sealed. Bouskila keeps the voice talking.
The same fracture runs through his other holy words. Unity, to a nationalist, means everyone made the same, the melting pot, the single tongue. Unity, to Bouskila, means Karo and Isserles on one page, two customs kept whole under one roof, the Sephardi and the Ashkenazi and the Teimani praying side by side in a Herzliya shul a block from his home, each keeping his own and all of them one. The stranger, to a border officer, is the figure to screen. The stranger, in the verse Bouskila and Uziel lean on, is the one God tells you to love, the ger, tomorrow’s Jew. Same word. Different gods behind it.
Moderation reads as heroism only inside a system with Bouskila’s dead in it. His dead are specific. The Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. The community of Salonika murdered in the war. The town of Buczacz that Agnon had to rebuild in ink. The classic Sephardic voice, balanced, tolerant, at home in both the law and the world, was nearly wiped from the map of living Judaism, squeezed by the zealous on one flank and the assimilated on the other. So when Bouskila holds the middle he is not splitting a difference and he is not hedging a bet and he is not reasoning his way to a calm Greek mean. He is pulling a drowning voice out of the water. His moderation is a war fought for the dead.
The system has a shadow. A hero made of the middle can turn the middle into its own wall. Hold both becomes a test, and the man who will not hold both gets pushed outside the unity in the name of unity. The call to unite can quiet a fight that deserves the open air. The work of keeping old voices audible leans on an audience that still wants to hear them, and some voices the world let go of for reasons of its own. And the moderate hero pays a price the zealot never pays. The maximalists on each side need an enemy to be heroes, and he refuses to be either one’s enemy, so he risks being legible to neither. The man who will not pick a side may find that both sides stop listening. That is the cost of his courage, and he carries it.
Back to the page. Karo in the body, Isserles in the gloss, two men who never met and never agreed and never left, holding their ground on the same sheet for five hundred years. Most hero systems make you choose between them. Bouskila built his life on the refusal. He stands where the body meets the gloss, in the white space between the two rulings, and he calls it home.
