Mount Herzl, the morning of January 16, 2023. A man climbs the path between the graves to take command of the army. An hour earlier, in the prime minister’s office, they pinned the rank of lieutenant general on him. His name is Herzl. The mountain is named Herzl, for Theodor Herzl (1860–1904), the journalist who dreamed the state into argument. The new chief was named for an uncle, a paratrooper, killed in the fight for this same city in June 1967, a few months before the nephew was born. So the soldier who now holds the whole army stands on a hill of the dead, named for the founder, wearing the name of a man the state could not keep alive.
Ernest Becker (1924–1974) builds his work on a plain claim. Man knows he will die, and the knowing breaks him, so he builds a second self that does not die. In The Denial of Death Becker names the structures we raise against the knowing. He calls them hero systems. A hero system tells a man what a brave life looks like and what reward outlasts the grave. It answers the first terror, that the body rots in the ground, and the second, the dread that the life added up to nothing. Every people runs one. Every man enlists in at least one, mostly without noticing he signed.
Herzi Halevi (b. 1967) enlists before he can speak. The name does the enlisting. A child in Jerusalem receives the name of a dead soldier and a dead visionary at once, and the gift is a debt. You will stand in for the man who fell. You will not waste the life he lost. His mother’s people kept their place in this city for fourteen generations. Her line runs back to the household of Rav Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), the chief rabbi who taught that the secular state was the lower step of a holy stair, the foundation under the throne. His father’s people came off a boat from Russia carrying the dream like contraband. The boy grows up keeping Shabbat. He joins the religious scouts. He studies philosophy at the university and learns to ask what a man owes the dead and why a city is worth more than the men who hold it. He becomes a paratrooper, then a commando, then the first observant Jew to run the country’s military intelligence, then the first chief of the army to make his home in a settlement past the old line. Each rung of that ladder is a rung of one hero system, and the system has a shape. The shape is the shield. The brave life stands between the enemy and the children. The reward that outlasts the grave is the people, who go on.
His army tells a different story about itself, and the gap between the two stories is where the truth sits.
The army’s story runs like this. We are a professional instrument. We are clean of politics, clean of faith, clean of the old fevers. On the day he takes command Halevi says the army must answer to security and to nothing else. The sentence sounds like a subtraction. We have removed the priests and the prophets and the party men, and what remains is pure craft, the cold service of survival. Becker spends a career taking sentences like that apart. The secular order, he argues, did not retire the hero system when it retired the rabbi and the priest. It changed the costume. It kept the immortality project and called it realism. The proof stands at attention in front of you. The army that swears it serves only security is the army of return, the answer to the ovens, the negation of the long exile, the body the murdered millions were promised and never got. There is nothing cold about it. It runs the largest death-denial in the life of the people, and it runs it in the language of logistics and readiness so no one has to say the holy words out loud.
Halevi’s body breaks the subtraction story open. The kippah on the head of the intelligence chief, the home in Kfar HaOranim, the blood of Rav Kook, the dead uncle in the name. You cannot read this man as pure craft. He is the seam where the sacred shows through the fabric of the professional. He studied philosophy, he said once, to use it, not to admire it, and a soldier who studies philosophy to use it studies death for a living. That is the work under the work. He prepares, in peace, for the day the shield is tested. He believes peace is the season to make ready for war, which is another way of saying he never forgets the first terror for an afternoon.
Now take his central word and turn it in the light. The Hebrew is achrayut. The English is responsibility. Watch it mean six things to six men, and mean none of them the way Halevi means it.
To the master of an old sailing ship, responsibility is a place to stand. When she goes down he stands on the bridge and lets the boats go first, and the standing is the whole of his honor, and the water takes the honor with the man. To a Roman commander it is a blade. He has read of the consul who rode into the enemy line to buy the legion a victory with his own death, and he keeps the short sword close in case the day calls for it. Responsibility, for him, discharges through the body. You pay it by ending. To a surgeon it is a room with bad light and folding chairs, the morbidity conference, where he stands and says the patient died and here is the cut I made and here is the cut I should have made. He does not die. He learns, and the room learns, and the learning is the point, and the dead man does not come back to grade the lesson. To a chief executive responsibility is a clause his lawyers wrote. The company carries the loss. The indemnity carries him. He keeps the house in the hills and the second house by the water, and the word never touches his skin. To a penitent in the dark of the confessional it is a thing you say aloud to a screen, and the priest says the words back, and you walk into the street washed and weightless, the sin filed in heaven, the soul current again. To a man in the dock at a Moscow trial responsibility is a costume the state makes him wear before it shoots him, a confession to crimes he did not commit, so the men who ran the famine can call the famine someone else’s fault.
Six men, one word, and not one of them stands where Halevi stands.
When the army he commands fails on the morning of October 7, 2023, and the killers come over the fence and through the gate and into the safe rooms, and twelve hundred die in a day, and two hundred and fifty go into the tunnels, Halevi writes a letter. He says the army failed in its task to guard the citizens, and the failure was under his command, and it will stay with him as long as he lives. Then he sets a date and steps down. Read him through the six men and you see what kind of responsibility this is. It is not the sea captain’s, because he does not go down with her; he lives, and the living is the heavier sentence. It is not the surgeon’s clean conference, though he orders the inquiries written. It is not the executive’s clause, because no clause shields a man whose god is the people and whose ledger is the dead. He gives up ten months of a term and the rank he climbed forty years to reach, and he gives it so the body that outlives him keeps its shape. The steward holds the thing in trust and steps aside when his hands have failed it, so the thing survives the failure of his hands. He is answerable to the children behind the shield, and to the dead uncle in his name, and, he believes, to God, whose name he capitalizes in his prayers and who keeps a longer book than any commission. The resignation is not a death. It is the nearest a living man comes to the consul’s blade while staying alive to be judged.
Turn a second word in the same light. Deterrence. The Hebrew is hartaa. It is the whole theology of the shield reduced to a threat. Persuade the enemy that to strike you is to die, and he will not strike, and the children sleep. Watch this word split too.
To a card sharp deterrence is a reputation. The table has seen him raise into a bluff and call into a monster, and now the table folds when he breathes, and he wins hands he never plays. To a rancher it is the scent the wolf catches on the wind, the dog, the rifle in the truck, the dead coyote on the fence post as a notice to the rest. To a boy on the first morning at a hard school it is the fight he picks with the biggest boy in the yard so that no one tries him for three years on the strength of one bloody afternoon. In each, the threat of harm buys peace because the other man wants to live.
Then there is the man in the tunnel. Yahya Sinwar (1962–2024) builds a hero system out of the opposite material. He sells his people death as the prize. The martyr does not fold at the table, does not smell the wolf and turn for home, does not weigh the biggest boy and back down. He has already paid the price deterrence threatens. He has sold the price as the reward. Against a man like that the whole calculus of the shield goes quiet. Deterrence is a sentence in a language he has stopped speaking. October 7 is the morning two immortality projects collide and the older one learns its god has a blind spot. Halevi’s hero system runs on the fear of death. It met a hero system that married death and called it a wedding. The shield did not bend. It was aimed at the wrong fear.
How much of this does the man see. More than most who wear the rank. The press called him the philosopher-general before the war, half in praise and half in mockery, and the mockery had a point, since a thinking soldier reads aloof to men who want a wall to lean on. In 2002 he raised doubts about a plan to seize the Palestinian leader from his compound, and the doubts helped kill the plan, which marks a man who questions the operation while the room wants the trophy. His resignation is itself a feat of sight. He names his own failure in his own hand while the men around him reach for other names to pin it on. He sees, in short, almost everything a man can see from inside the system.
The wall of his sight is the wall of the system. He can indict his command. He cannot indict the god. He can say the shield failed, and mean it to his bones, and still not ask whether deterrence was ever the right altar, whether forty years of preparing for war in the season of peace trained the army to fight the enemy it understood and miss the one it refused to imagine. The most honest man inside a hero system reaches a fence and stops, because past the fence lies the question the system cannot let him ask and stay a soldier. He took responsibility for the failure. He did not, and perhaps no man in that uniform could, take responsibility for the frame.
Three coordinates, then, to fix him by.
The shape of the hero. He is the steward. Not the conqueror, not the prophet, the steward who holds a thing he did not make and will not outlive, and who steps down the moment his hands betray it so the thing keeps its shape without him. He carries the dead in his name and hands the army on intact. That is the brave life his system honors, and he lived it to the letter.
The unnamed rival. He is the man in the same building who shared the failure and paid none of its price. For the steward, the self is a transient holder of something larger, and you surrender the self when you fail the trust. For the rival, the self is the project. Survival in the chair is the immortality. He will not resign because resigning ends the only thing he is trying to keep alive, which is himself in power. The two men stood in the same office on the same hard morning. One wrote a letter and set a date. The other found other names.
The cost the ledger cannot price. The army’s books can count the dead and the freed and the rockets spent and the rank surrendered. They cannot enter the true charge. The man who said the words “under my command” carries the twelve hundred and the tunnels for the rest of his life, by his own promise, while the architects of the long quiet that fed the enemy sleep in their houses and run for office and capitalize no god’s name in any prayer. The deepest cost of being the kind of man who pays is that the books are not balanced. You pay, and the others do not, and the ledger has no column for that. The steward steps onto the path at Mount Herzl among the graves, carrying a dead man’s name, and forty years later he walks back down it carrying twelve hundred more, alone, while the men who should walk beside him stay in the warm rooms and let him.
