Raisin Heir Arrested for Harassing Jews in the Pacific Palisades

The home on Sunset Boulevard sold in March for $5.3 million. Bruce Lion, sixty-four, an heir to a Fresno raisin company, bought the house that shares a property line with the Chabad Jewish Community Center of Pacific Palisades. Within weeks he stood on his balcony and told the rabbi’s wife that she and her husband killed his lord and savior. He hosed down a congregant’s car. He played Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” and loud Christian devotional music while children walked to the preschool. He told a reporter, the day before his arrest, that it made him happy to inform the Jews next door they were going to hell. He called them pigs. He said the rabbi was hiding bodies on the property.
Rabbi Zushe Cunin runs the Chabad center on the other side of that line. He has run it for more than thirty years. After Lion arrived, several congregants asked him to move the services somewhere safer. Some of them had watched this same neighborhood burn fourteen months earlier.
On January 7, 2025, the Palisades Fire came over the ridge. Cunin and the other emissaries packed the Torah scrolls into the cars and drove out around one in the afternoon. He left the other valuables because he did not believe the building would go. He lost two Suburbans and sixteen public menorahs, the ones he sets around the city each Hanukkah. About seventy percent of his community lost their homes. All three rabbis lost theirs. The synagogue, by the work of the fire department, stood. From a hotel near the airport, fifty-five years old, Cunin gave his line to the displaced: from the ashes we will rebuild, bigger and better.
Now a man next door wants the same ground cleared by other means, and Cunin gives the fire and the man the same answer. He stays. He says he understands why people tell him to get out, and that staying is what he believes. He will not let a man like this terrorize the community.
To see why a sane man refuses the sane advice of his own congregation, you have to look at what the ground means to him, and then watch the same word change shape as it passes through the hands of every other man standing near that property line.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave the frame in The Denial of Death. Man is the animal who knows he will die, and he cannot live inside that knowledge, so he builds a hero system, a set of beliefs about what counts as a heroic life, and inside that system he earns a feeling of cosmic worth. The hero system is how a man buys himself a piece of permanence. It tells him that his days add up to something the grave cannot cancel. Becker called these immortality projects. Two men with two different projects, sharing one fence, are not in a property dispute. Each is a standing argument that the other’s path to permanence is a lie. That is why the heat between them runs so far past the size of the grievance.
Cunin belongs to a hero system with a sharp internal logic, and the man who built its West Coast branch was his father. Shlomo Cunin came out from Brooklyn in the 1960s, sent by the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), and built the first Chabad houses in California out of almost nothing. The Rebbe’s command was ufaratzta, break through, spread out, and the doctrine underneath it holds that the lowest, darkest, least promising place hides the highest spark, and that the work of a Jew is to go down into that place and draw the light up. You do not flee the dark corner. The dark corner is the assignment. The emissary is a soldier who holds a post the Rebbe gave him, and Chabad means the word in earnest; Cunin runs a children’s program called Tzivos Hashem, the Army of God. His brother Tzemach Cunin (1976-2019) ran Chabad of Century City and spent years of his short life trying to pry the Rebbe’s stolen library back out of Russia. The family does not measure a place by whether it is comfortable. It measures a place by whether it has been assigned.
So when Cunin looks at the ground between his building and Lion’s house, he sees holy ground, sanctified by presence, by prayer drawn down into a place that does not want it. A hostile antisemite on the far side of the fence is not a reason to leave. In this hero system he is closer to a confirmation. The hardest ground is the point. To cede it is to fail the man who sent him, and in Chabad theology the man who sent him is in some sense still present in the sending. Staying is the heroic act. Staying is how a finite man touches the thing that outlasts him.
Now hand the word ground to the men around him and watch it break into different things.
Bruce Lion has a hero system too, and his is older than the raisin money. In it the white Christian holds the land, and the Jew is the contaminant who killed the Lord and now hides bodies behind a fence. His ground is blood and soil and a deed. He bought five point three million dollars of California dirt and he believes the purchase came with the right to drive out the people who offend his god. He plays “War Pigs” at the children because, inside his story, he is the last honest man on the block and the noise is righteousness. His hero system requires the Jew next door to exist as an enemy. Without that enemy, Lion is a sixty-four-year-old man yelling at a preschool from a balcony, and some part of him cannot afford to know that.
A Marine rifle platoon commander hears ground and thinks terrain. The high ground, the ground you take at cost and do not give back, the ground that decides the fight before the fight. He measures it in fields of fire and dead men. To him Cunin’s refusal to move would read as discipline, the thing a man owes the people behind him, and the only question he would ask is whether the position can be held.
A Palisades real-estate developer, walking the burn scar a year after the fire with a broker and a soil report, hears ground and thinks dirt. Lots, comps, entitlements, setbacks, the cost of clearing a foundation, the spread between a teardown and a rebuild. For him the ground is an asset that throws off return, and a screaming neighbor is a disclosure problem that knocks four hundred thousand off the next sale. He would tell Cunin to take the insurance and the appreciation and rebuild in a market with fewer headaches. He cannot see why a man would hold a depreciating position out of love.
A Stoic in the line of Marcus Aurelius hears ground and points at the chest. The only ground a man holds is the ruling part of himself, the inner citadel, and the house, the fence, the deed, the slurs from the balcony, all of it sits in the column of things outside his control and therefore beneath his concern. He would admire Cunin’s calm and gently correct his attachment. Hold your judgments, the Stoic says, and let the man rage; his noise cannot reach the part of you that counts. Cunin would answer that the Stoic guards a single soul while the emissary was sent to draw down God into a street, and that you cannot do the second job from inside a citadel.
A Malibu surfer with thirty years in the same lineup hears ground and thinks of the break, and of localism, and of who gets the wave and who gets run off. His ground is the water off a particular point, claimed by presence and seniority and the willingness to paddle out when it is big and mean. He would grasp the refusal to leave faster than the developer ever could. You hold your spot. You do not let a kook take your peak. But his ground is a thing you defend for yourself and your few, and Cunin’s ground is a thing he holds open for strangers, including, in theory, the man on the balcony, if the man ever wanted in.
Set against all of them stands the wandering ascetic, the renunciate who has given up every fixed place on purpose. He hears ground and hears a trap. Attachment to a plot of earth is one more rope tying the soul to the wheel of suffering, and the free man owns nothing and stays nowhere and calls no fence his own. He would look at Cunin holding a contested lot against a hostile neighbor and a burned market and see a learned man clinging to dust. And here the two hero systems meet head on, because Chabad answers that God put the spark in the dust, that the physical world is the arena and not the obstacle, and that a Jew sanctifies the ground by staying on it, not by floating free of it.
One word. Holy assignment, blood inheritance, defended terrain, depreciating asset, indifferent externality, defended break, spiritual trap. Each man is sure his reading is the plain one and the others are confused. Becker’s point is that none of them reads the ground straight. Each reads it through the story he needs to make his own life weigh something against death, and the strength of his certainty rises with how much he has riding on it.
This is why the property line in the Palisades carries so much voltage. Lion needs the Jew to be the enemy or his whole frame collapses. Cunin needs the dark corner to be the mission or his father’s life and his brother’s death and his own thirty years bought nothing. Two immortality projects, one fence, no room for both readings of the ground to be true.
The congregants who told Cunin to move are not weak, and they are not wrong about the danger. They are reading the ground the way the developer reads it, as a place you can trade for a safer one, which is a sane reading and the reading most men live by. Cunin cannot take it, because his hero system does not let him price the ground at all. A man who will not name his price looks like a fanatic from the outside and a saint from the inside, and the same act earns both words, which tells you the act lives below the level of argument, down where a man decides what his life is for.
The court will sort out Bruce Lion. There is a competency hearing and a bail figure and a sentence of up to nine years and four months, and on the morning he was to be arraigned he would not come out of his cell, which is its own small confession about how much a man can bear to look at. None of that touches the deeper question the fence keeps asking, the one Becker would ask. When a man tells you he will not move, listen for what he thinks he is standing on. The fire could not move Cunin. The neighbor will not either. He is standing on the only ground his story recognizes as real, and from inside that story, leaving was never one of the options.