On a Sunday during Passover in 2001, Rabbi David Wolpe (b. 1958) stands at the bima of Sinai Temple on Wilshire Boulevard and tells a thousand people that the Exodus, the way the Bible describes it, is not the way it happened, if it happened at all. The room holds money. It holds Persian gold and Westwood real estate and the kind of quiet old wealth that arrives early and sits near the front. Some of these people drove past three Orthodox shuls to sit in a Conservative sanctuary led by the man Newsweek will later call the most influential rabbi in America. They came for him. And here he is, on the holiday that commemorates the founding miracle of the Jewish people, telling them the miracle may be a story.
The phone calls start that night. By the time Teresa Watanabe writes it up in the Los Angeles Times on April 13, the fight has spread to the Jewish papers and the Jerusalem Post and the radio. An Orthodox rabbi writes that Wolpe has chosen Aristotle (384-322 BC) over Maimonides (1138-1204). A Reform rabbi defends him by saying that arguing for the Exodus as literal history in the twenty-first century is like arguing the earth is flat. Wolpe himself says the historicity should not decide anything, because faith answers to a different court than archaeology.
Hold that word. Faith. Everyone in this fight uses it. Almost none of them means the same thing by it.
I want to read Wolpe through Ernest Becker (1924-1974), who argued in The Denial of Death (1973) that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot live with the knowledge. So he builds a hero system. A hero system is the whole apparatus a culture supplies to let a man feel that his life counts, that he stands inside a drama larger than his body, that when he dies something of him survives the rot. Money is a hero system. Lineage is one. Scholarship, sanctity, the nation, the startup, the kill count, the bloodline, the published paper. Each tells a man what a good life looks like and what a good death looks like, and each lets him believe, for a while, that he is more than meat. The terror underneath is the same in every man. The costume on top differs in every culture, and the costumes do not recognize each other.
Wolpe’s costume is meaning. His whole career is a long argument that a man can hold faith and doubt in the same hand, that he can know what the scholars know and still stand at the grave and say words that hold. He had a brain tumor cut out of his head twice. He went through chemotherapy for lymphoma. He buried his father, Rabbi Gerald I. Wolpe, a pulpit man before him. He wrote Making Loss Matter and Why Faith Matters and The Healer of Shattered Hearts, and the titles tell you the work. The work is to make suffering carry significance instead of crushing a man flat.
So when Wolpe says faith, here is what the word carries for him. Faith is a posture toward mystery. It survives the loss of the literal. It does not require that the sea split or that a man count the years in the desert. It requires that a man live as though his life answers to something, that he act with mercy because mercy is commanded by a voice he cannot prove and will not abandon. The hero in Wolpe’s system is the man who looks at the same evidence the atheist looks at and chooses, with his eyes open, to keep the tradition alive and to find God in the choosing. The coward, in this system, comes in two forms. One refuses the evidence and clings to the literal because he cannot bear a faith that costs him certainty. The other accepts the evidence and throws the whole inheritance away because he cannot bear a faith that gives him no certainty. Wolpe stands between them and calls that standing courage. His grandfather, by the way, was a vaudeville man, half of the act Cross and Dunn. The rabbi descends from a song-and-dance man, and the pulpit, in his hands, is a place where a man performs the holding-together of things that want to fall apart.
That is the value, painted inside its own house. Now watch the same word leave the house and walk into other houses, where it means something else entirely.
Take the rationalist. Wolpe debated the New Atheists for years,
Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011), Sam Harris (b. 1967), Richard Dawkins (b. 1941), Steven Pinker (b. 1954)
. Picture the archetype these men speak for, a research neurologist who builds his life on the warrant of evidence. For this man the hero is the one who believes exactly as much as the data permit and not one inch more, who dies without the comfort of a story because the story is false and a brave man does not lie to himself at the end. In his hero system, faith names the precise vice he has organized his life against. Faith is belief held in defiance of evidence, and belief held in defiance of evidence is the thing that flies planes into buildings. So when Wolpe stands up and says faith matters, the rationalist hears a learned man defending bad epistemology in a nice voice. He is not impressed that Wolpe gave up the literal Exodus. He thinks Wolpe gave up the easy fiction to protect the harder one. “You conceded the desert,” the rationalist says, “so you could keep the voice in the burning bush. I want you to concede the voice too.” The two men use one word and stand on opposite cliffs. They do not disagree about a fact. They worship different heroes.
Now turn to the Sinai literalist. Picture a kollel man in Lakewood, a young father who learns Gemara fourteen hours a day and supports six children on a stipend and his wife’s bookkeeping. For this man faith is emunah, and emunah is trust, and the trust runs to a specific event. God spoke at Sinai. The Torah came down whole. The chain of transmission, rebbe to talmid, has not broken in three thousand years, and he is the living end of it. His whole heroism rests on standing in that line. When Wolpe says the Exodus may not have happened, the Lakewood man does not hear a brave modern faith. He hears the floor give way. If the Exodus did not happen, no one stood at Sinai, and if no one stood at Sinai, the commandments have no Author, and if the commandments have no Author, then the fourteen hours a day and the six children on a stipend are a man arranging his whole life around a rumor. He cannot let the sentence stand, not because he is closed-minded, but because the sentence, if true, dissolves the cosmos he is a hero inside of. “He thinks he is saving Judaism,” the Lakewood man says of Wolpe. “He is sawing the branch and sitting on the far end.” Same word, faith. For Wolpe it survives the loss of the event. For this man it is the event.
Now the Tehrangeles patriarch, because in 2013 Wolpe announced he would officiate same-sex weddings, and the fight that followed ran straight through the Persian Jewish families who fill his pews. Picture an Iranian-born grandfather who came out of Tehran in 1979 with gold sewn into a coat lining and built a wholesale business from a stall to a tower. For this man the load-bearing word is not faith in the rationalist’s sense and not emunah in the Lakewood sense. It is something the rationalist has no slot for at all, the honor of the house, the unbroken descent of the name, the marriage of the son to the daughter of a known family, the grandchildren who carry the line forward past the old man’s death. This is his denial of death, and it is the oldest one there is. A man does not survive the grave in the patriarch’s system by believing the right propositions. He survives through his sons’ sons. So when Wolpe blesses two men under a chuppah, the patriarch does not hear inclusion and dignity. He hears the line being cut. The very organ of his immortality, the family that continues him, the rabbi has reached into and altered. “I gave to his temple for twenty years,” the patriarch says. “I did not give so he could tell my grandson that two men is a marriage.” Wolpe believes he is enlarging the covenant of faith. The patriarch believes Wolpe is severing the cord that ties a man to the future. They share a building. They do not share a hero system.
Now the pagan, because on Christmas Day 2023 Wolpe published “The Return of the Pagans” in The Atlantic and argued that the trouble with the modern West, on the Trumpist right and the woke left alike, is a return to paganism, to the worship of force and self and immanent power. The pagans wrote back. They pointed out that the man had not met any of them, that he was fighting a paganism out of old books, that monotheism has held the cultural throne for two thousand years and can hardly blame its troubles on the gods it dethroned. And underneath the squabble sits a collision of hero systems. For the contemporary Heathen or witch, the sacred is not above the world. The sacred is in the world, in the oak and the river and the body and the many powers that move through matter. There is no single transcendent Author issuing commands from outside the cosmos. There are presences, plural, encountered rather than believed. Faith is not even the right instrument here. You do not have faith in the river. You attend to it. So Wolpe’s God, the one transcendent singular voice that empties the grove of its spirits and the body of its sanctity, looks to the pagan like the original act of disenchantment, the imperial flattening of a living plural world into one jealous abstraction. Wolpe sees paganism as the worship of power without conscience. The pagan sees monotheism as the conscience that conquered every local holiness and called the conquest light. The word sacred sits between them, and it points up for one man and down and outward for the other.
Now one more. Take the longevity man, the Bay Area founder who has read his Kurzweil and takes rapamycin and tracks his sleep and believes, as a working assumption, that aging is an engineering problem and death is a bug awaiting a patch. He is the purest anti-Wolpe a culture can produce, and not because he is irreligious. He is the most religious man in the room. His hero system says the hero defeats death, full stop, not symbolically through children or covenant or the survival of meaning, but actually, in the body, by not dying. Becker would recognize him instantly as the death-denier who has dropped the symbol and gone for the thing. Faith, to this man, is the consolation prize losers accept because they could not solve the problem. Wolpe makes loss carry meaning. The longevity man intends to abolish loss. Wolpe’s brain tumor, in this frame, is not an occasion for faith. It is a malfunction that better tools will one day prevent. The two men look at the same skull beneath the same skin. One says, learn to make peace with it and find God in the peace. The other says, we are going to fix it, and your peace is surrender. There is no word they can share, because Wolpe’s whole vocabulary assumes the limit the founder has sworn to erase.
Five men, then, around one rabbi. The rationalist, the Lakewood father, the Tehrangeles patriarch, the pagan, the longevity founder. Hand each of them Wolpe’s Passover sentence, the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all, and watch it land five different ways. The rationalist thinks Wolpe stopped one concession short of honesty. The Lakewood man thinks Wolpe has knocked out the foundation and called it renovation. The patriarch barely cares about the Exodus and cares enormously about the wedding, because his immortality runs through the family and not through the text. The pagan thinks the whole quarrel takes place inside a monotheist’s house and wants the windows opened. The founder thinks the argument is a beautiful antique and intends to outlive all of them. None of them is stupid. None is acting in bad faith. Each defends the system that lets him feel his life counts and his death is survivable, and the systems do not translate.
This is the use of reading Wolpe through Becker. The temptation, when a man like Wolpe fights on five fronts, is to score the fights, to decide whether the Exodus happened and whether the wedding was right and whether the pagans had him dead to rights. That argument runs forever and persuades no one, because the parties are not weighing the same evidence on the same scale. They are standing inside different answers to the one question every man carries and few men name. How does a creature who knows he will die go on as though it counts. Wolpe’s answer is meaning, held against the evidence with open eyes, the tradition kept alive by a man brave enough to doubt it and stay. It is a real answer and a hard one, and it costs him the literalists on one side and the rationalists on the other and the patriarchs in his own pews. He spent twenty-six years at Sinai Temple selling a faith for people who could no longer believe and could not bear to leave, and that is a narrow ledge to build a temple on, and he filled it.
The brothers tell you something too. Paul Root Wolpe (b. 1957) became a bioethicist, the man who sits at the edge of medicine and asks what the new tools do to the old meanings. One Wolpe brother guards meaning against the erosion of belief. Another stands watch where the longevity founder’s tools meet the body and asks what we lose when we win. The same family, two posts on the same wall, both manning the line between what a man can now do and what a man can still bear.
Wolpe leans vegetarian, close to vegan, and serves on a rabbinic council for it, and even this fits. A man who has made his life’s work the widening of the circle of mercy, who reads the tradition as a long argument for compassion that has not finished arguing, declines to draw the circle at his own species. The same impulse that blesses the two men under the chuppah declines the lamb. His critics call it the dissolving of boundaries. He calls it the tradition catching up to its own best instinct. They are both describing the same act. They disagree about whether a widening circle is faith arriving or faith leaking out, and that disagreement, once again, is not about a fact. It is about which hero a man has decided to be.
Imagine all five of them at the funeral, then, the day they bury the rabbi. The rationalist thinks the prayers are lovely and false. The Lakewood man thinks the prayers are true and the man who said them spent his life undermining them. The patriarch counts the grandchildren and is satisfied or is not. The pagan listens for the many voices and hears only the one. The founder thinks the whole thing premature and preventable. And Wolpe, who is past arguing now, has already given his answer, in the books and the sermons and the twenty-six years. The sea may not have split. He stood at the shore anyway and told the people to walk, and a great many of them walked, and that, in his system, is what a man does with the time before the water closes over.
