Ed Feinstein (b. 1954) grew up in the back of his parents’ bakery on the western edge of the San Fernando Valley. The oven ran before light. Bread came whether the customers arrived happy or grieving, whether the morning’s news was good or terrible. A boy raised behind an oven learns that the world keeps its appointments. The dough rises on a schedule. The shop opens the day after the funeral.
Ernest Becker (1924–1974), in The Denial of Death, built an account of human life on two terrors. The first is plain. The body dies, and the man knows it, and no other animal carries that knowledge through an ordinary afternoon. The second runs deeper. A man can bear the thought of dying if he believes his life counted in some order larger than his body. He cannot bear the thought that it counted for nothing. So he builds a hero system, a scheme of significance that tells him he counts in a story larger than himself and that some part of him survives the grave. Religion is the most direct of these systems. It answers both terrors at once.
A rabbi runs a house built against both. Feinstein has run one at Valley Beth Shalom in Encino since 1993, and has been its senior rabbi since 2005, when he followed Harold Schulweis (1925–2014) into the chair. He has stood at more gravesides than he can count. He has sat on the edge of hospital beds and held the hands of men who knew the number of their remaining mornings. He has had colon cancer twice. The man who sells transcendence for a living has twice been handed the bill in his own name.
Here is the part a stranger misses. Feinstein does not, in the main, sell a personal heaven. His theology moves the prize. Schulweis taught a Judaism that put godliness ahead of speculation about God, that asked what a man does and not what happens to his soul. Feinstein took the lesson and made it a program. In The Chutzpah Imperative he argues that the Jew’s task is partnership with God in the repair of an unfinished world. In Tough Questions Jews Ask he tells the teenager that doubt is permitted and the afterlife is not the center of the matter. The immortality he offers is collective. A man lives on in the people, in the covenant, in the chain of generations, in the story told again at the table. He does not vanish, because the people does not vanish, and he has added his link.
This is a particular answer, and it sets his hero system apart from the one a stranger assumes a rabbi holds. The reward is not your face preserved forever. The reward is your name spoken at a seder you will not attend, your deeds folded into a story that runs past you in both directions.
The subtraction story stands against all of this. It is the tale the modern man tells about himself: that he has grown up, that he has subtracted the old illusions, that what remains when the superstition is gone is the bare and honest truth, a self that needs no scheme of significance and faces the dark without a story. Becker’s reply is that no one does this. The man who believes he has no hero system has only an invisible one. He has swapped the synagogue for the gym, the covenant for the brand, the chain of generations for the quarterly number, and he defends these with the heat of a man defending his soul, because that is what he does. Feinstein meets the subtraction story every week at the back of his own sanctuary, in the Jew who keeps the ethics and drops the covenant and cannot say why the ethics should outlast the dropping.
Now the value. Feinstein built a book around chutzpah, and the word carries his whole system. For him chutzpah is sacred audacity, the nerve to argue with heaven, to demand that the world be better than it is, to refuse the counsel of resignation. Abraham bargaining for Sodom has it. The prophet shouting at the king has it. The man who buries his child and rises to bless the next morning has it. Chutzpah, in his mouth, is the human half of the partnership, the standing to make demands of God and of oneself.
Carry the same word into other houses and watch it change.
In a glass building south of Market Street a man of thirty calls his investors and tells them he is burning eighteen months of runway on a bet the board rejected. He calls this chutzpah, and his people nod. For him audacity is disruption, the founder who breaks the rule and asks forgiveness once the valuation clears. His hero system promises a different immortality. The name on the company. The product that changes how a billion strangers spend their hours. He does not want a link in a chain. He wants to be the chain’s first link, the origin, the one the later story starts from.
On a ridge in a country the men at home cannot find on a map, a sergeant turns back into fire to drag a wounded private down the slope. The citation calls it valor. He calls it the only thing a man can do. The audacity here is not argument with heaven. It is the refusal to leave the body of a brother, and the hero system it serves runs on the unit, the flag, the honored dead, the names read aloud each year while the living stand at attention. He buys his immortality in the regard of the men beside him and the country behind them.
In a plain church with white walls and no images, an old man hears the rabbi’s word for audacity and flinches. To him the nerve to make demands of God is the first sin, the presumption that lost the garden. His value is submission. His hero system runs on election and providence, on the trust that a sovereign God has already settled the account, and the man’s task is to receive the verdict without complaint. What Feinstein calls courage, this man calls pride.
In a monastery where the bell wakes the men at three, a monk hears the same word and sees the disease he came to cure. The self that asserts, that demands, that wants its name to last, is the knot he has spent forty years working loose. His immortality is the reverse of a preserved name. It is release from the wheel of wanting, the dropping of the very self that chutzpah flatters.
So the word holds steady on the page and runs four different errands. Sacred partnership. Market disruption. Sinful pride. The illusion to be dissolved. Each reading makes plain sense inside its own house and near nonsense in the others. A value carries the meaning of the hero system that issues it, and little meaning outside it.
Does Feinstein know this? More than most men in his trade. The cancer is part of it. A man told twice that he might be dying does not preach the consolations secondhand. He has tested them on himself in the dark and come back to the pulpit able to say them without lying. His books push against the easy comforts. He tells the teenager that the Bible holds contradictions and that a thinking Jew may doubt and stay. He took godliness over metaphysics from Schulweis because he had watched metaphysics fail at the bedside and godliness hold. He wrote his doctoral study on Schulweis and the reinvention of the American rabbinate, which is to say he spent years on the question of how a modern rabbi keeps an ancient house standing once the literal heaven thins out. He knows the synagogue is, among its other errands, a house built against terror. He has said as much in his own words across thirty years from that bima. The self-awareness runs high, and it raises the harder question. What does a man miss when he sees almost everything?
Three coordinates locate him.
The shape of his hero is the man who keeps telling the story. Not the martyr, not the mystic, not the scholar walled in his books. The hero is the baker’s son grown up, the man who opens the shop the morning after the funeral and hands the bread across the counter, who turns his own private terror into a story the next person can hold. He defeats death by handing it forward changed. The storyteller outlasts the grave because the story does, and he has made himself a link the story runs through.
The rival he fights without naming is the self-enclosed modern man who wants the warmth without the covenant, the comfort of belonging with none of its claims. Feinstein spends his charm on the Jew at the back of the room who likes the music and the values and the community and will not be bound, who treats the synagogue as a service he consumes and a heritage he edits. Feinstein never calls this man an enemy. He courts him for forty years. But the whole weight of his work presses against the proposition that a man can keep the fruit of the covenant after he has cut the root, and the rival is that proposition, wearing the face of a charming and reasonable congregant.
The one cost his ledger cannot price is the man for whom the people’s survival is not his own. Feinstein’s immortality runs on continuity. You live in your grandchildren, in the seder you will not attend, in the link you added to the chain. To the man with children and a community this is rich. To the childless man, the one who founds no line and leaves no descendants and sits in no one’s memory at a future table, the offer thins to the point of cruelty, and he hears the thinness even as he is told it. The story that saves the people cannot save the man who falls outside the people’s reproduction. He still dies, and he still wants his own self to count, not the tribe’s. Feinstein’s house has a warm seat for the father and the grandfather. It has a harder time pricing the terror of the man who will not become an ancestor, for whom continuity is the one thing he lacks, and to whom the chain of generations arrives as the news that he is not on it.
The oven still runs before light. The bread still comes whether the morning’s news is good or terrible. Feinstein has spent his life teaching that this is enough, that the work goes on and the man joins it and is carried. For most of the people in his sanctuary, it is enough. The essay only asks after the few it is not enough for, and whether the man at the pulpit, who sees so much, lets himself see them too.
