On the anniversary of October 7, Rabbi Nicole Guzik told her congregation that Sinai Temple would mourn, and then it would dance again. She did not promise the dancing would erase the mourning. She promised both, in that order, on the same floor. A man who has buried someone hears that promise one way. A man who has buried no one hears it another way, or does not hear it at all.
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) wrote that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot live inside the knowing. So he builds a hero system, an arrangement of roles and duties and sacred words that lets him feel he counts in a way the grave cannot cancel.
Two terrors sit under every such system. The first is death, the plain fact of the body that fails. The second runs deeper and lasts longer. It is insignificance, the dread that the life adds up to nothing, that a man passes through and leaves no mark on anything that outlives him. Becker called the answer to both terrors the project of heroism, and he saw that no man builds it alone. He borrows it. He borrows permanence from a group that will stand after he falls. Becker named this symbolic immortality, and a synagogue is one of the oldest engines ever built for it.
Guzik and her husband, Rabbi Erez Sherman run that engine in Westwood, as co-senior rabbis of a Conservative congregation more than a century old, the seat held before them by David Wolpe (b. 1958). The word they spend most, the coin worn smooth in their hands, is belonging.
Walk it through their hero system first. Guzik writes that you belong at the table, and she means the Passover table, where the door opens and the stranger is fed and no one is turned away for arriving late or arriving broken. She trained as a marriage and family therapist and built a mental health center inside the synagogue, and she talks about a loneliness epidemic as a thing a congregation can answer. The answer is belonging. You are not a customer of this place. You are claimed by it. Sherman works the same coin from the locker room. His podcast sits at the seam of sports and faith, and his lesson from the bench is that a man plays for the man beside him, that the team holds the player and the player holds the team. He builds alliances, with Black athletes who decry Jew hatred, with Hindu and Indian communities, and each alliance widens the circle of who stands with whom.
In their hands belonging carries a specific weight, and the weight comes from the dead. The mourner cannot say kaddish alone. He needs ten. So ten gather, on a Tuesday morning when nine of them have somewhere else to be, and the tenth man’s grief becomes the congregation’s business. The dead belong too. They are read aloud on the anniversary of their deaths, year after year, long past the point where anyone in the room knew them. This is what belonging buys in the synagogue. It buys a place in a story that started before you drew breath and continues after you stop, and the price of the place is that you owe the same standing to the next mourner, and the next. You belong by showing up for people you did not choose. That is the heroism on offer. A man earns his significance by carrying others toward a permanence none of them reach alone.
Now watch the word refuse to hold still.
A rifleman in a fire team belongs too, and he would laugh at the table. He belongs to four other men, and the belonging is purchased in a currency the synagogue does not trade. He belongs by being willing to die for the man on his left and by trusting that man to die for him. Ask him about the flag and he shrugs. “You don’t fight for the flag,” he says. “You fight for your guys.” His hero system answers the two terrors by making death itself the entry fee. He cannot be annihilated as long as the unit holds his name, and the unit holds the names of its dead with a fury no congregation matches. His belonging is sealed in blood and shame, and the worst thing a man can do is leave a man behind. The word means devotion unto death. It does not mean a seat at a meal.
A founder on Sand Hill Road belongs, and he means something else again. He wears the vest. He belongs to the people in the room when the term sheet is signed, to the cap table, to the mission written on the wall. He earns his place by shipping, by being load bearing, by output no one else can replace. “Are you a builder,” he asks the new hire, “or are you noise?” His hero system promises a kind of permanence too, the product that outlives the man, the company that runs after he is gone, the dent in the universe. His belonging is conditional and he knows it. The day he stops shipping he stops belonging, and he has watched it happen to better men. So he never stops. The terror of insignificance drives him at two in the morning when the office is empty and the build is broken, and belonging, for him, is the thing he rents each day by being indispensable.
A woman in a white garment at an all night vigil in Lagos belongs, and her belonging arrives from above. She was nothing, she will tell you, and then she was found. She belongs to the body of Christ, washed and born again, and the proof is the testimony she gives standing up, the before and the after. Her hero system answers death by defeating it outright. The grave is not the end of the story but a doorway in it. She does not earn her place by service to the next mourner. She receives it by grace, and she keeps it by faith, and the congregation around her sings until dawn because the belonging is a gift that must be returned in praise.
A young man behind a ring light belongs to his audience, and the audience is a number that moves. He belongs by engagement. The algorithm decides each morning whether he still counts, and he refreshes the screen the way the rifleman checks his weapon. His hero system promises immortality of a thin and modern kind, the clip that travels, the name that trends, the small permanence of being watched. He cannot say who the people watching are, and they cannot say who he is, and still the belonging is real to him, more real on some days than the people in his home. “If they stop watching,” he says once, when the light is off, “who am I.” He does not expect an answer.
And a monk in a saffron robe, holding an alms bowl at first light, does not belong at all, and calls the refusal his freedom. The self that craves a seat at the table is, to him, the disease. He works to extinguish the wanting, not to feed it. His hero system is the strangest of them, because it answers the terror of death by dissolving the one who fears it. There is no name for the dead to hold, because there was no fixed self to die. He stands outside the whole transaction, and from where he stands the table and the locker room and the cap table and the ring light all look like the same fever, men clutching at a permanence that cannot be clutched.
One word. Six men, and a seventh who has trained the wanting out of himself. The synagogue’s belonging is none of theirs, and theirs is none of the synagogue’s, and a rabbi who says you belong here is heard, by each of them, in a different language.
Set against Guzik and Sherman one rival they meet in the flesh, because their work brings him to the door. He is the universalist, and he holds belonging sacred as fiercely as they do, which is what makes him a rival and not a stranger. He belongs to humanity. His hero system tells him that the boundary is the sin, that any line drawn around a people is the old crime in a new coat, and that the heroic life consists of widening the circle until it has no edge. He hears a synagogue organize itself around a people and a land, and he feels the line as a wound. Sherman has met this rival on campus, where rabbinical students once turned their anger on him, and he has built a program to send Jewish teenagers into that weather prepared. The argument looks like politics. Under the politics it is two hero systems fighting over the same word. The universalist says belonging that stops at a border is not belonging but its counterfeit. The rabbi says belonging that stops nowhere holds no one, that a circle without an edge is not a circle and cannot keep a mourner warm. Each accuses the other of betraying the sacred thing. Each is right inside his own ledger and wrong inside the other’s.
There is a second rival, quieter and closer, and it lives inside Guzik’s own toolkit. The therapeutic self is a hero system too, and a powerful one in her city. It holds the authentic individual sacred, his truth, his flourishing, his boundaries. It teaches that a man belongs to a group only so far as the group serves his becoming, and that when the obligation costs him his real self he should walk. Guzik carries the therapist’s license and the rabbi’s. She imports the vocabulary, mental health, destigmatize, process the grief, and the import does real good. It also smuggles in a rival creed. The covenant says you owe the tenth man your Tuesday morning whether or not it serves your flourishing. The therapeutic self asks what the Tuesday morning is doing for you. These two cannot both sit at the head of the table. She holds them together by main strength, and the holding is the most interesting thing she does.
How aware are they of the trade-offs? More than most, and the awareness shows in practice rather than in doctrine. Guzik does not say the covenant and the therapeutic self pull apart. She enacts the seam by refusing to let either win, pairing the mourning and the dancing, putting the therapist’s couch inside the sanctuary instead of across town from it. Sherman does not say that every alliance draws a line as it builds a bridge. He acts as though widening the circle and defending its edge are the same job, and on most days, for his people, they are. Their self-knowledge runs through their hands. Ask them to name the cost in words and they reach for hope, which is the right word for a rabbi and the wrong word for an accountant.
So name the cost yourself, in the only ledger that prices it.
The shape of their hero is the one who carries others toward a permanence none reaches alone, who earns his significance by showing up for people he did not choose, and who keeps the door open so the latecomer and the broken still find a seat.
The rival they fight without naming is not the antisemite, whom they name often and well. It is the universalist who loves belonging as much as they do and concludes that the loving requires no line, and behind him the therapeutic self that loves the individual so well it cannot see why he owes the tenth man anything at all.
And the cost their ledger cannot price is the man the warm table is not for. To make an inside warm you must have an outside. The synagogue’s gift to the lonely is real, and it is bought with an edge, and somewhere past the edge stands the Jew who cannot belong on these terms, the one whose truth the covenant cannot hold, the one for whom the open door is a door into a room he can never make his own. Guzik can count the people she has gathered in. She cannot count him, because he never comes to the table to be counted, and a hero system measures its triumphs and goes quiet about the people its triumphs are built to keep out. That silence is the price. They pay it the way every congregation has always paid it, by keeping the door open and the line drawn, and by trusting that the warmth inside is worth the cold it makes at the edge.
