On a Friday afternoon in Herzliya the light off the Mediterranean goes flat and gold, and a man who once carried a rifle for the United States Marine Corps sits down in front of a camera and starts to teach. By the clock in Los Angeles it is still morning. The talk lands in homes across the city where people have listened to him for thirty years. Mordecai Finley (b. 1954) grew up in Southern California, served three years in the Corps, took his discharge as a sergeant in 1976, spent a year on a kibbutz, and came back to take degrees at the University of Southern California and a rabbinic ordination at Hebrew Union College. In 1993 he and his wife Meirav built a synagogue called Ohr HaTorah out of nothing and ran it for years from a book-lined office in a Valley Village strip mall. Newsweek once put him on a list of the country’s influential rabbis. He holds a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. He took small parts in David Mamet films. He teaches now from Israel and calls the work a Center for Wisdom. The center of that work, the thing he comes back to week after week, is the soul.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us the tool for reading a life like this one. In The Denial of Death he argued that a man cannot bear the plain knowledge that he will die and rot, and so every culture hands him a hero system, a set of rules for earning the feeling that he counts in the scheme of things, that some part of him will outlast the body. Becker called the private version the causa sui project, a man trying to father himself, to be the cause of his own significance. He called the price of it the vital lie. A hero system tells a man what counts as winning and names the great threat he has to beat. It loads its key words with a charge that holds only inside its own walls. Say the soul inside Finley’s world and you have named the field where a man wins or loses everything. Carry the same word into another hero system and the charge shifts, or thins, or drops to nothing.
Finley’s hero is the man who wakes. He teaches the death of the ego and the resurrection of the authentic self. He works in mussar, the Jewish discipline of character that runs back to Yisrael Salanter (1810-83), and he splits the self into a lower part that grasps and lies and a higher part that sees. The task is to refine the soul the way a smith refines metal, to manage one’s own consciousness, to train. He took a word from the Israeli army, devekut l’misima, devotion to the mission, and he means by it a clarity that holds when the pressure comes. The soul in this world is real. It outlasts the body. A man cleans it or fouls it, and the cleaning is the work of a life. The immortality here is both plain and double: the soul that survives, and the line carried forward, three of his four children in Israel and two of them veterans of the army, and the students who take the practice and hand it down. Evil in this system is sleep. The enemy is the unexamined ego, the comfortable lie a man tells himself so he does not have to look.
Now move the word.
In a lab on a coast somewhere a cognitive scientist runs a subject through a scanner and watches the predictions light up. She is kind about it. When a visitor uses the word soul she gives a small smile and waits. For her the hero system is the slow advance of knowledge, the great enemy is the story people tell because it soothes them, and the only thing that outlasts her is the result that holds up when others try to break it. The soul is a folk tale the brain tells about the brain. “Show me where it sits on the scan,” she says, and she is not being cruel. She would refine the model, not the man.
In a forest in Thailand a monk in ochre robes sits in a hut the size of a closet. A novice asks him where the self goes at death. The old man does not answer the question he was asked. “Find the one who is asking,” he says. In his world there is no soul to refine. The hunt for one is the disease. The hero system is the end of craving, the threat is clinging, and the prize is the stopping of rebirth, which is the stopping of the very self Finley wants to polish. To this man the loving care of a personal soul is the trap with the best bait.
In a glass office above the Bay a founder in a gray T-shirt talks about his bloodwork and his cold plunge and the supplements he times to the hour. For him the soul is a pattern, the connectome, information that can be copied off failing hardware onto something that does not fail. The body is a device. The hero system is the defeat of death by engineering, the enemy is decay, and the immortality is plain and technical, a backup rather than a World of the Soul. “We are not going to die,” he tells the room. “We are going to debug.” He might find Finley’s soul charming and impossible to test.
In a hall hung with marigolds a teacher of Advaita speaks softly to a circle of seekers who flew in for the week. Atman is Brahman, he tells them. The single Self wears every face. Your particular soul is a mask, and to spend your life improving the mask is to sink deeper into the one error that holds you. “The one you are improving,” he says, “is the one you must see through.” His prize dissolves the man Finley trains.
In a Black Pentecostal church in Memphis, and later in a club down the street, the word means feel. Soul is the thing in a voice that cannot be faked, the body given over in sound, the depth under the performance. The hero system is the music. The enemy is the phony, the singer who hits the notes and moves nobody. The immortality is the record and the one night the room caught fire. This is the cousin closest to Finley, since both name a depth beneath the surface, yet the singer’s depth lives in the throat and the crowd, far from any ladder of higher and lower. “You can hit every note and still have no soul,” the bandleader says, and everybody in the band knows exactly what he means.
In a white clapboard church a Reformed pastor preaches that the soul is real and that it is corrupt past saving by any man’s effort. Grace alone. To him Finley’s refinement is the oldest mistake there is, salvation by works, a man scrubbing at what only God can wash. The hero system is election, the enemy is the pride that thinks it can save itself, and the immortality is given and never earned. “The heart is deceitful above all things,” he says, reading from Jeremiah. “You cannot counsel it clean.” Same word, soul, and the opposite order: stop polishing.
The other words crack the same way. Finley prizes clarity, the clarity the Corps gave him, devotion to the mission. To the monk clarity is an empty mirror. To the founder it is clean data. To the pastor it is the conviction of one’s own sin. To the singer it is the note landing true in the chest. Discipline splits along the same lines. The soul is the spine that holds Finley’s whole frame upright, and when you pull that word out and hand it to the others, the frame they build around it stands on different ground and points a different way.
Here is the turn Becker forces. He argued that the hero system is a needed lie, the vital lie of character, the way a man keeps the terror of death out of the room he lives in. Finley built a hero system whose content is the refusal of comforting lies. Wake up. Die to the ego. See what is in front of you. Asked once about his own spiritual struggles, he said, to be honest, that he carries no trouble and no conflict, and he traced that steadiness to the Marines. Read through Becker, the confident man who fights no inner war is not a man without a hero system. He is a man whose hero system works. The terror has been handled. The vital lie has done its job so well that it stopped feeling like a lie and started feeling like clarity.
Becker meant no contempt by that, and neither do I. He thought every man needs the thing, that the choice is never naked truth against illusion but a sturdy hero system against a broken one, or against collapse. The honest question a reader can put to Finley’s soul, or to the monk’s no-soul, or to the founder’s backup, is not which one feels best. It is which one is true, what it costs, and whether the man who lives by it can look at his own death without flinching and without lying. Finley says his can. That claim is the wager at the heart of his hero system, and it is the same wager, in other clothes, that every hero system asks a man to make.
The soul, in Finley’s world, is the field where a man wins or loses. Move the word and the field moves. For the monk there is no field, only the seeing through. For the founder the field is silicon. For the pastor the field belongs to God and the man stands as a spectator at his own rescue. For the singer the field is the room on a good night. Becker’s point holds across all of them. Each system hands its man a word, charges it with everything he has, and tells him that to lose there is to be erased. Finley spent a life teaching one of those words. He spells it soul, and he means it.
