Luke Ford

A girl of fourteen sits in Crown Heights with a problem. The year is sometime in the 1950s. A new school has opened, advanced, untested, and the administration wants her in the first class. She does not want to go. She writes to the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), and she names her fear. She does not want to be a guinea pig. The word does the work that fear always does. It tells her where she stands in the order of things: expendable, a test subject, a body the experiment can afford to lose.

The Rebbe reads the letter. He takes a pen. He crosses out two words and writes one in their place. Guinea pig becomes pioneer.

She enrolls. Years pass. She becomes the principal.

Rabbi Mendel Kalmenson tells this story in Positivity Bias, his 2019 book drawn from the Rebbe’s letters and talks, and the story carries the whole argument of his life. One edit. The facts of the case do not change. The school is still new, still untested, the girl still first through the door. What changes is the name of her place in the cosmos, and with the name, everything that follows from it. A guinea pig endures the experiment. A pioneer leads the migration. The same girl, the same risk, two different worlds.

Kalmenson runs Chabad of Belgravia and serves as rabbi of Beit Baruch, in a London postcode of stuccoed terraces, embassies, and the quiet money that does not need to announce itself. He came from Chabad.org, where he edited for years, and he has carried the Rebbe’s teaching into more than fifty countries. He has written Seeds of Wisdom, A Time to Heal, Positivity Bias, People of the Word, and On Purpose, and he sits as associate editor of the Chumash Project. Across a camera and a low table he has hosted more than a hundred and fifty conversations under the title People of Interest, among them the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker (b. 1954), the Auschwitz survivor and clinician Edith Eger (b. 1927), and the former chief rabbi of Israel Yisrael Meir Lau (b. 1937). He is a fluent man in a tailored black coat who can hold a room of skeptics and a room of the bereaved, sometimes the same room.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us the tools to read a man like this. In The Denial of Death Becker argued that the human animal lives under two terrors and builds a hero system to survive them. The first terror is death itself, and beneath it the smaller daily terror of creatureliness, of being a body that leaks and ages and forgets, a thing the universe does not need. The second terror is meaninglessness, the suspicion that the whole show signifies nothing, that the cosmos is cold and the suffering random. A hero system answers both. It tells a man that his life counts, that his acts register on some permanent ledger, that he is, in the local idiom, a pioneer and not a guinea pig.

Kalmenson’s hero system has a name he gave it himself. He calls it a positivity bias, and the word bias is honest, because he does not claim the cheerful man sees more. He claims the cheerful man sees deeper. The negativity bias, the pull toward doom and grievance, sits in the wiring and feels like realism. Kalmenson, following the Rebbe, calls it a shallow reading of a deep text. Look further, he says, and the good is there, hidden under the misguided act and the bad event, a point of divine purpose folded into the worst of it. Life is good at the root. The good is open to anyone. It comes from clear sight, not from wishful feeling, and a man chooses it, the way the girl chose the word pioneer.

Set this against the wound it was built to close. The Rebbe assembled his movement out of survivors, men and women who had counted their dead in the millions and arrived in Brooklyn with the negativity bias fully earned. To stand before such a congregation and say the world is good is not a greeting card. It is a claim staked against the strongest counterargument in human history. Kalmenson knows this, and he never softens it. The Rebbe’s optimism, he writes, drew its force from the brokenness it answered and from the Rebbe’s own losses. Here is the first terror and the second terror at once, death in its industrial form and meaning in its hardest test, and a hero system raised on the exact ground where most systems collapse.

Now the harder work, and the part that earns a reader who has seen the shape of these essays before. Kalmenson’s sacred words look plain. Good. Healing. Joy. The core of a person. A skeptic hears them and thinks he knows what they mean. He does not. A sacred word means almost nothing on its own. It draws its sense from the hero system that holds it, and carry the same word into another system and it turns into a stranger wearing familiar clothes. Watch the word travel.

Take the word good, the keystone of the whole structure. In Kalmenson’s mouth good is a claim about the architecture of reality. A personal God made the world on purpose, the purpose is benevolent, and providence threads every event, so that a thing called bad is a surface and the good runs under it like a water table. Good is not a mood and not a verdict on the day. It is the grain of the wood.

Carry that word to a hospice ward in a different city, into the mouth of a palliative physician who has signed more death certificates than she can name. For her, good has nothing to do with the grain of the universe. Good is a clean line into a vein, a dose that holds, a family that arrives before the breathing stops. She does not look under the cancer for a hidden point of purpose. She thinks the search insults the dying. Good, in her hero system, means comfort delivered against a thing that has no meaning and never will. Her heroism lies in fighting a pointless enemy with skill and tenderness and refusing the consolation that it adds up to anything.

Carry the word again, to a Reformed seminarian in the American South who reads John Calvin (1509-1564) at a kitchen table. He uses good a hundred times a week and means the opposite of Kalmenson at the level of the human core. The seminarian holds that the heart of man is fallen, bent, incapable of good on its own steam, and that any good in a person arrives from outside, as grace, unearned. Tell him every human is good at the root and he hears a soft lie that flatters the creature and robs the Creator. His hero system makes him a vessel for a goodness that is never his own. Kalmenson’s makes the divine spark the man’s own deepest possession. Same word, good, and the two men face away from each other across it.

Carry it to a laboratory and the word stops working at all. Steven Pinker, whom Kalmenson has interviewed, uses good with care and means something measurable: fewer wars per capita, longer lives, less cruelty per year, the slope of the line in The Better Angels of Our Nature bending down. For Pinker good is an output of reason and institutions, a number that improves, and the universe behind it stays blind, a process with no opinion about us. Two men sit at the low table and both praise reason and progress and the good, and the words match while the worlds do not. Kalmenson’s good descends from a purposing God and waits to be uncovered. Pinker’s good gets built by people against a cosmos that offers no help and intends nothing. The conversation can run for an hour in apparent agreement because the shared vocabulary hides the gap underneath. That gap is the whole subject of this essay.

Carry it once more, to a Zen teacher leading a Tuesday sitting in a rented studio. He flinches at good the way you flinch at a bright light. Good and bad, in his system, form the pair of opposites the mind must put down. To call the world good is to keep grasping, to keep the self busy sorting reality into columns, and the sorting is the sickness. His heroism is to stop, to let the categories fall, to meet the moment before it gets a label. Kalmenson wants you to see the good under the event. The Zen teacher wants you to see the event with nothing added, not even good.

Five mouths, one word, five worlds. Add a sixth and let it stand for the live nerve of the matter. A woman raised in the late Soviet Union, schooled by her grandmother to expect the knock at the door and the empty shelf, hears good as a setup. In her hero system the man who calls the world good has not been paying attention, or worse, he is selling something. Vigilance kept her people alive. Hope got them sent east. To her the positivity bias looks like a failure of nerve dressed as faith, and she trusts the pessimist the way you trust a man who checks the locks.

So the same syllable, good, names the grain of the universe, a dose of morphine, the fallen human heart, a downward war statistic, an illusion to release, and a con. Kalmenson’s hero system does not float above this disagreement. It takes one side of it, and a strong side, and the strength is paid for.

Here is the cost, told straight. A system that finds the good under every event must do something with the man who looks and finds nothing. Push the positivity bias hard enough and the person who stays broken starts to feel like a failure of sight. He hears, under the kind words, an instruction he cannot follow. Look deeper, see the purpose, choose the better word. He looks. He sees a dead child and no purpose at all. The hero system, at its weakest, can hand him a second wound on top of the first, the shame of the man who could not manage to be a pioneer.

Kalmenson knows this danger better than his critics do, and his answer to it sits in his other book. A Time to Heal, from 2015, gathers the Rebbe’s letters to the bereaved, and the book holds a tension that the cheap version of positivity never reaches. The Rebbe insists that all of it belongs to a divine plan and that the good is real, and in the same breath he makes room for grief, for the cry against heaven, for the widow who cannot explain the death to her children. Faith and human frailty do not cancel each other. A man may thank God for the life that was and still rage at the loss of it, and both prayers count. The Rebbe lets the mourner speak first. Before the burial he counsels silence, presence, shared tears, no rush to the lesson.

And then the turn that defines the system. The Rebbe redirects the question. Not why me, which has no floor and no bottom, but what now. Pain left to sit will fester and curdle and leak out sideways. Pain harnessed becomes fuel for a cause, a school, a kindness, a name carved into the future. This is the hero system doing its deepest work. It cannot promise the survivor that the death made sense. It can promise him a task, and the task confers the one thing the second terror threatens to strip away, the sense that his act registers and endures. Healing, in Kalmenson’s mouth, means the channeling of grief into building.

Set that word, healing, beside the others and watch it split the same way good did. For a grief therapist trained in the lineage of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004), healing means a process honored at its own pace, stages allowed to unfold, no foreman calling for action before the mourner is ready, and the push toward what now might land as a shove. For a trauma clinician, premature meaning is a known hazard, a frame imposed too early that can reopen the wound rather than close it. For a Stoic reading his Marcus Aurelius on the train, healing means amor fati, the embrace of fate exactly as it fell, with no plan to redeem it and no God to thank. For Viktor Frankl (1905-1997), who walked out of the same camps as Edith Eger, healing comes through meaning chosen in the worst place, and here Kalmenson’s word and Frankl’s word nearly touch, two men insisting that a person keeps the freedom to assign significance even when the world has taken everything else. Eger, across the table from Kalmenson, carries that Frankl inheritance in her own key, the survivor who decided that the only prison left was the one in her mind. Nearly touch, and still not the same, because Frankl’s meaning is a human act against an indifferent void and Kalmenson’s good is a divine fact waiting under the void to be found.

This is where a reader can stand and look in both directions at once, which is what these essays are for. Kalmenson’s hero system is strongest at the bedside of the survivor who is sick of why and hungry for a task, the man who needs his suffering to build something so that it stops eating him alive. To that man the positivity bias is not kitsch and not denial. It is a rope. The same system strains at the bedside of the depressive, for whom seeing good is the exact faculty that has failed, and who can hear the whole teaching as a verdict on his eyesight. And the system meets its real test in the space between the two, in whether seeing good stays an insight offered or hardens into a demand imposed. The Rebbe edited a willing girl’s letter and gave her a word she could choose. The danger of every positivity bias is the day it stops offering the word pioneer and starts requiring it, the day the man who cannot see the good is told, gently, that the fault lies in his looking.

Kalmenson sits in Belgravia and keeps the offer open. He brings the skeptic to the table and lets the skeptic talk. He gathers the letters of the bereaved and lets the widow rage before he hands her the task. He took a teaching forged on the worst ground in human memory and made it portable, a thing a man in a hospice or a boardroom or a Tuesday sitting might pick up and turn over. The word good will mean something different in each of those rooms. He knows that, and he says it anyway, and he says it to the one congregation that had every reason to call him a liar and a fair number who called him a rope instead.

In 1958 a yeshiva boy of eighteen stood in line at 770 Eastern Parkway to receive a piece of matzah from the Rebbe before going home to his parents near Yankee Stadium for the Seder. The Rebbe handed him a second errand. Deliver matzah to a family across the Bronx, past the zoo, in a part of the borough that turned dangerous after dark. The boy called his mother. Start the Seder without me. He took the subway, the subway broke down, and when he climbed out he emptied his pockets of every coin, including the fare home, because a Jew carries no money on the holy day. He walked the rest of the way and found a housing project for the blind. He knocked. He smelled bacon and saw bread on the table. He put a smile on his face anyway and told the man he had come with matzah from the Rebbe and would like to tell the story of Passover. The man brought in his pregnant wife and two small girls, both of them blind. The boy stayed until one in the morning. Only at the end did the man explain how he knew the Rebbe. A doctor had urged the couple to abort the pregnancy, since their disease blinded their children. They had written to the Rebbe. He answered them to have faith in God and have the child.

That boy was Baruch Shlomo Eliyahu Cunin (b. 1940). The whole of his life sits inside that night. A man hands him a task. He throws away his own way home to keep the law. He walks toward the forgotten Jew in the dangerous dark, and he sits at the unkosher table without flinching, because the point is never the table. The point is the soul at it.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the grammar for reading such a life. In The Denial of Death he argues that man is the animal who knows he will die, and that every culture answers this knowledge by building a hero system, a structure of roles and rules through which a person earns the feeling that he counts, that his days leave a mark the grave cannot erase. The hero system tells you what a life is for, what a victory looks like, where to spend yourself. Becker’s claim cuts deeper than most readers expect. He is not saying religion comforts the frightened. He is saying that culture as such is a project against annihilation, that the broker and the soldier and the artist all reach for the same thing the saint reaches for, and that the only difference among men lies in which hero system they pour themselves into and how honestly they admit what they are doing.

Cunin pours himself into one system with a clarity that startles. We do not even know his birthday with confidence. The public record fixes the date of his wedding to Miriam Loksen, November 19, 1964, and gives the year the Rebbe sent him west, 1965, and the number of his children, thirteen, and almost nothing of the private man, because in this hero system the self is not the unit of account. Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), the seventh Lubavitcher Rebbe, is. When the Rebbe sent him to California he used a word of war. “Shlomo, zolst aynnemen gantz California.” Shlomo, you should conquer all of California. Cunin asked how. Start with the big cities or the outlying towns? The Rebbe told him to start with the outlying areas, because he had heard there were many Jewish students in Berkeley.

Hold the word conquer to the light and watch it change shape in different hands. A Marine drill instructor hears conquest and pictures terrain taken from an enemy and held by force. A founder pitching venture capital hears it and pictures market share, a category captured before a rival captures it. For Cunin the word carries no enemy of flesh at all. The enemy is forgetting. The territory is a count of Jews reached, a Chabad House in a town that had none, a pair of tefillin laid by a man who had not laid them in forty years. He built one of the first such houses in the world and grew the network past two hundred across California and Nevada. He measures the conquest the way the Rebbe taught him to measure it, soul by soul, and so a word that means killing to one man and selling to another means rescue to him.

The same drift runs through every value he holds. Take money. To a venture capitalist money is a scorecard and a lever. To a Trappist monk money is a snare to be fled. Cunin treats money as a consecrated thing, a medium through which a soul changes hands. He tells the story without embarrassment. He went to a wealthy man, took a check, and reported to the Rebbe’s secretary the donor’s Hebrew name and the blessing promised in return, a grandchild brought back to Judaism. The grandchildren returned, he says. Money in this system is not wealth. It is a transaction in eternity, the visible sign of an invisible exchange.

That belief carries a cost the wider world records in a different ledger. In 2014 a federal judge, Morrison England, ruled that Chabad of California had knowingly failed to comply with the terms of a homeland security grant from the state and had falsely assured the government that written financial controls existed when they did not. The judge called Cunin’s deposition testimony damning. He quoted Cunin’s view that grant advances, once paid, were no longer the government’s business, treated as gifts to Chabad, and wrote that a compelling argument could be made that the conduct was intentional. Read that ruling beside the fundraising story and you see one act seen from two hero systems. From inside Cunin’s, money given to the Rebbe’s work passes out of the secular order and into the sacred, where an auditor has no standing. From inside the system of federal compliance, the same belief is a finding of fault. The dollars do not move. The cosmology does.

The books make the clearest case of all. The Schneerson Collection, twelve thousand volumes and manuscripts gathered by the Lubavitcher Rebbes, was seized by the Bolsheviks and held by the Russian state. To a museum registrar a book is an object to catalog, to keep at stable humidity, to leave where the law of property places it. To the Russian government the collection is national patrimony, a treasure of the people, spoils a country that lost twenty million dead in war will not surrender. To Cunin the seforim are none of these. They are held as hostages, and their redemption belongs to the redemption of the world, since the Chasidim hold that when the books come home the Messiah comes with them. The Rebbe appointed him to a delegation in 1991, and he carried the charge into American courts. In a story the movement tells with pride, he sent his teenage sons, yeshiva students, to ride the underground train between the House and the Senate and knock on doors until they had letters from seventy senators. A Senate staffer saw boys lobbying. Cunin saw his children carrying the Rebbe’s war. Judge Royce Lamberth later placed a fine of fifty thousand dollars a day on Russia for refusing to return the collection, and Chabad moved to seize Russian assets to collect it, and the Chasidim spoke the old phrase from an earlier court victory, Didan Notzach, victory is ours.

Notice the tense Cunin keeps. The Rebbe died in 1994. Cunin still speaks of the assignment in the present. “The Rebbe tasked us with returning the books.” Not tasked once, long ago. Tasks, now. Here Becker turns from theory to something colder and more moving. A hero system built to defeat death will not let its hero die. The Rebbe gives orders in the present tense because in this world he has not stopped giving them, and Cunin lives inside a porous reality the modern buffered self has mostly sealed off, a world where the dead still speak, where a book can suffer exile, where a check can ransom a grandchild’s soul. Charles Taylor (b. 1931) calls the secular settlement a subtraction story, the tale we tell of what remains once God and spirits and final purposes are stripped away. Cunin’s life runs that story backward. He refuses the subtraction. Everything the modern account removes, he keeps.

The fire shows what the keeping looks like under fire. In 1980 the West Coast headquarters in Westwood burned and three young men died. A lesser man grieves in private and rebuilds in silence. Cunin built a telethon. The idea came from Carroll O’Connor (1924-2001), the gentile actor America knew as Archie Bunker, who told him to put the rebuilding on television. So Cunin took the ashes and made a yearly broadcast of dancing rabbis and a tote board and Jon Voight (b. 1938) and Larry King (1933-2021) and the producer Jerry Weintraub (1937-2015), and for more than four decades the show has raised millions and turned a fatal fire into a public festival of life. A hotshot who fights wildfire understands fire as the thing to beat back. Cunin took the fire and fed it into the hero system, where even the death of three young men becomes fuel for the work. That is not callousness. It is the deepest logic of the project. Grief that does not build is grief wasted, and the dead are honored by the count of the living brought home.

Now the part that asks the most of a reader, and the most of the writer. The same reaching that walked toward the blind family in the Bronx reaches toward the grieving and the old, and from outside the hero system the reaching can look like predation. In 2011 an eighty-two-year-old widow, Maxine Coe, sued Chabad of California and Cunin and his son, alleging that the rabbis came to her the day after her husband died, while she grieved, offered to bury him in the Chabad plot and to support her for the rest of her life, and led her to sign over a Malibu home worth millions and to buy a Torah for a hundred thousand dollars. The suit alleged financial abuse of an elder, fraud, and negligent misrepresentation. These are the claims of a complaint, the woman’s account, not a court’s finding. Set them beside the matzah in the Bronx and you cannot pull the two acts apart, because they are the same act. To fold a grieving widow into the Rebbe’s work, to secure her husband a resting place among Chasidim, to bind her to the cause with a Torah scroll, is, from inside the hero system, the highest form of love, the same love that walked the dark Bronx street at midnight. From inside the hero system of elder law and fiduciary duty, the same approach reads as a complaint filed in Superior Court. I will not collapse the two readings into one. The honest thing is to hold them both and let the reader sit in the discomfort, because the discomfort is the truth.

Love is the word that travels furthest between systems. A hospice nurse loves by sitting with the dying and changing nothing, offering presence without an agenda. Cunin cannot love that way. His love always carries a mission. He cannot simply sit at the table. He must deliver the matzah, tell the story, bring the man back. The reaching is the love, and the reaching never rests, and that restlessness is at once the engine of two hundred Chabad Houses and the thing that draws a widow’s lawyer to the courthouse. The same trait builds the empire and files the complaint. Becker would say this is no contradiction. It is what a hero system does. It takes a single human drive and aims it at immortality, and the drive does not pause to ask whether every person it touches wished to be touched.

Even humility shifts. The modern buffered self prizes humility as self-effacement, the lowering of one’s own claim. Cunin tells of borrowing two hundred thousand dollars to build and never feeling right about asking the Rebbe for money, and the Rebbe corrected him. “Don’t be so humble.” In this system a humility that hides the work’s true need is a quiet form of pride, a man protecting his own comfort over the mission. The virtue inverts. To ask boldly for millions becomes the humble act, and to hold back becomes the proud one.

So what does a reader carry away who has read ten of these essays already and wants the eleventh to give him something new. Three coordinates, held in prose rather than nailed to a wall.

The first is that Cunin is a man whose self has fused so far into his hero system that his own death has almost no purchase on him, while the disappearance of the Jew terrifies him without rest. Study him and you study the theory in its pure state, the immortality project run to its limit, where a leader keeps giving orders from the grave and a man takes those orders as the plain facts of his day.

The second is that the traits we want to sort into the good column and the bad column refuse the sort. The walk to the blind family and the deathbed Torah and the seventy senators and the federal grant finding all flow from a single source, the reach toward the forgotten soul, which the hero system blesses and which the courthouse names. A reader who wants Cunin all hero or all villain has not understood Becker and has not looked at Cunin. The reach is one thing. It saves and it grasps with the same hand.

The third is the lesson for the rest of us, who imagine we live in the subtraction story, who think the dead stay dead and a book is property and a dollar is a dollar. Cunin shows what conviction costs and what it buys. It builds two hundred houses out of nothing and turns a fatal fire into a festival and stares down the Russian state over twelve thousand books. It also walks into a widow’s grief with a scroll and a deed. The man pays the full price of believing his hero system all the way down, and he collects the full return, and most of us, holding our beliefs at arm’s length, will never know either figure. Watch him and ask the only question Becker leaves us. Not whether he believes too much. What we, who believe so carefully and so little, have given up to stay safe.

The questions come by phone and by fax. A man in Memphis wants to know whether the chicken his wife salted is fit to eat. A widow in Los Angeles wants to know whether she may remarry, and when. A young couple stand at a window in a hotel near the dateline and ask where the Sabbath begins for them, since the sun and the calendar no longer agree. Rabbi Yosef Y. Shusterman takes the question, opens the books, and decides. He carries smicha and dayanus from the Lubavitcher yeshiva in New York. He directs Chabad of North Beverly Hills, sits on the Bais Din, serves on the Vaad Rabbonim Lubavitch, and answers sheilos from across the country. Men who know the field call him a posek of the first rank.

A posek decides. That is the whole craft. He does not write novels or found companies or run for office. He sits with a question and the long shelf of prior rulings and says permitted or forbidden, pure or impure, bound or free. The decision is the unit of his work, and the decision is also, in the terms Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us, the unit of his heroism.

Becker built his account of human life on a single hard premise. Man is the animal who knows he will die. He carries a body that rots and a mind that can picture the rot in advance, and the picture is unbearable. So he builds. He builds cultures, creeds, monuments, families, codes, and into each of these he pours the hope that some part of him will outlast the body. Becker called these structures hero systems. A hero system tells a man what counts as a life worth having lived, and it promises him that if he plays his part he will earn a share of something that does not die. The Denial of Death (1973) names the terror at the root. Escape from Evil (1975) names what men do to each other while fleeing it. Every culture, Becker argued, is at bottom a way of granting cosmic significance to creatures who suspect they have none.

Here the reading turns, because Becker also described two pulls inside every man. One pull drives him to stand out, to be the singular hero, the name that rings. The other drives him to merge, to dissolve into a power larger than himself and be carried by it. Most lives wobble between the two. The Chabad posek does something stranger. He seeks the highest standing through the deepest dissolving. He becomes a great authority by becoming, in his own account, no one at all.

The word for this in his world is bittul. Self-nullification. The Tanya, written by Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812) and studied in Shusterman’s beis midrash to this day, teaches that the Jew holds two souls, an animal soul that wants the world and a divine soul that wants its Source, and that the labor of a life is to thin the first until the second shows through. The goal is not to become a large self. The goal is to become a clear window. When Shusterman rules, the ruling carries weight to the degree that nothing of Shusterman clouds it. He does not say what he thinks. He says what the Torah holds, and the less of him stands between the question and the law, the more the answer endures. Becker’s hero wants to be someone forever. This hero wants to be nothing now, and that nothing is the form his forever takes. His name enters the chain of decisions, cited by men not yet born, because he kept his name out of the way.

Hold that paradox and the man’s sacred values come into focus. They are common words. Freedom. Joy. Home. Every hero system uses them, and each system means a different thing by them, because a value takes its meaning from the kind of immortality the system is selling. The word is the same. The world behind the word is not.

Take freedom. To the parolee walking out the gate with forty dollars and a bus ticket, freedom is the absence of the wall, the right to turn left or right with no one logging the choice. To the founder who just sold his company, freedom is capital, the power to do the next thing without asking. To the Stoic in the manner of Epictetus, freedom is the narrow sovereignty a slave keeps over his own assent when everything else is taken. Each of these men means something true, and each means something set by the death he is trying to outrun. The parolee fears the cage. The founder fears irrelevance. The Stoic fears the indignity of a soul jerked around by chance. Now bring the word to Shusterman. In his world freedom is cherut, the freedom of the Exodus, and the Exodus did not end in an open desert with no master. It ended at Sinai under a new yoke. The slave to Pharaoh became the servant of God, and Chabad calls the second condition the only freedom there is, because the man who answers to no law answers to his own appetite, and the animal soul is a harder master than any king. Freedom, here, is the yoke chosen with joy. To the parolee that sentence might sound like a fresh prison. To Shusterman it names the one door out of the prison the parolee cannot see.

Take joy. The word travels even worse. To the hospice nurse, joy is presence, the small grace of a good afternoon at the edge of death, joy with no future tense. To the ultramarathoner at mile eighty, joy is the body past its own complaint, the high that comes when the will wins. To the Epicurean it is a fine meal and a clear conscience and friends at the table. To the Pentecostal in a storefront church it is the Spirit landing, the room gone electric, the self swept out by a power from above. Chabad makes joy a command and a craft. Simcha is not the mood that arrives. It is the mood a man builds, on purpose, against the gravity of the animal soul, because despair is the soul’s true enemy and joy breaks the siege. A hasid trains himself toward simcha the way the runner trains toward the eightieth mile. He sings at the farbrengen until the singing changes him. Shusterman’s joy is labor that looks like ease. The runner might recognize the discipline. The nurse might recognize the defiance. Neither has the cosmos behind the feeling that the hasid has, the conviction that his manufactured gladness pleases the Infinite and hastens a world to come.

Take home, and the stakes rise, because home sits at the center of everything Shusterman does. To the refugee, home is the place that was taken, fixed forever in memory at the hour of leaving. To the developer on Wilshire, home is a unit, a price per square foot, an asset that throws off rent. To the merchant sailor three weeks out, home is the shore he carries in his chest, more vivid for the distance. To the hospice patient, home is the room he wants to die in rather than the ward. Chabad means by home something none of these men means. The Alter Rebbe taught that God created the lower world because He desired a dwelling in the lowest place, a dirah b’tachtonim, a home down here in the dirt and the traffic and the kitchens of Beverly Hills. The whole project of the Jew is to build that home, one permitted chicken and one honest scale and one lit candle at a time, until the physical world holds the Divine the way a house holds a family. So when Shusterman rules on the kashrut of a kitchen, he is not policing a diet. He is laying brick on the only house Becker’s frame cannot explain away, the house meant to make the impermanent world a fit address for what does not pass. The refugee’s home was lost in time. The developer’s home is priced in dollars. This home is under construction in eternity, and every ruling is a course of brick.

Now the chain, and the strange immortality it offers. Becker watched men reach for symbolic life through works that outlast the body, the book on the shelf, the firm with the founder’s name on the door, the child who carries the face forward. The posek reaches through the responsum. A teshuvah he writes today may be cited in fifty years by a younger dayan facing the same knot, and that citation is the only afterlife in writing that his craft allows him. Yet the craft also forbids him the founder’s pride. He cannot rule by his own light. He must show that his answer descends from the Shulchan Aruch and the Rebbeim and the long argument that runs back to Sinai, and the more faithfully he disappears into that line, the more his particular ruling stands. His name lasts because he subordinated his name. This is the engine the founder would find unintelligible. The founder’s monument bears his own face. The posek’s monument bears the face of the law, and his reward is to be a true link, indistinguishable in kind from the links before and after, carrying the current without dimming it.

The hero system has a center, and the center is a grave. Chabad ran for two centuries on the living presence of its Rebbe, and the seventh, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), drew the movement to a pitch of devotion that the world outside still struggles to read. He sent young couples to cities with no Jewish life and told them to build. He spoke of redemption as near. Then he died, and the death tore at the movement along its deepest seam, because a creed built on a living channel to Heaven had to decide what the channel’s death meant. Some hold that he did not in the full sense leave. Pilgrims still write notes and carry them to the ohel, his resting place in Queens, and ask him to intercede. Becker would call the Rebbe the transference object of the whole system, the figure onto whom men loaded their hunger for a hero who cannot fail. He would call the response to the death the test every hero system meets at last, the hour when the immortality it promised must answer to a body in the ground. Chabad met that hour not with collapse but with expansion, more emissaries, more institutions, more lit candles, and a posek like Shusterman stands inside that answer. He does not resolve the question of the Rebbe in a sentence. He lives the answer by continuing the work, by deciding the next sheilah, by keeping the house under construction while the founder lies in Queens and the disciples build on.

Set him beside the men this essay has summoned and the shape of his life comes clear. The founder wants the monument with his name on it. The parolee wants the open road. The runner wants the body’s victory. The nurse wants the good afternoon. The developer wants the rent. Each is a true man inside a true system, and each system is a way of refusing to be only a body that ends. Shusterman refuses in the rarest direction. He pursues permanence by erasure, authority by submission, a great name by the suppression of the name, a home for God by the ruling on a chicken. He answers the phone in Beverly Hills, where the cars cost more than the buildings in the towns his movement was bred in, and he treats the caller’s small question as a brick in a structure older than the city and meant to outlast it.

Three things to carry away from him.

The first is that his bittul is not weakness and not modesty in the ordinary sense. It is a wager about where lasting weight comes from. He bets that the self that pushes forward is the self that dies with the body, and the self that thins itself into a clear channel touches the one thing that does not. The wager looks like surrender. It works, in his world, as conquest.

The second is that his sacred words will keep misfiring across the lines between hero systems, and that this misfire is the ordinary condition of moral speech, not a failure to be repaired. When Shusterman says freedom he means the yoke, and the man who fought a yoke his whole life hears an insult. When he says joy he means a discipline, and the man who waits for joy to arrive hears a denial of feeling. The words cannot carry their meaning across the border alone. Only the whole system carries it, and a man who wants to understand the posek has to enter the house and see what the bricks are for.

The third is that the posek offers a clean case of the thing Becker spent two books circling, the human reach past death dressed in the costume of a particular creed. Shusterman would not accept the description. He does not think he denies death. He thinks he tells the truth about it, that the body is a garment and the soul goes up and the world is a home in the making. The frame and the man disagree at the root, and that disagreement is the honest place to leave them. Becker gives us the question every life answers in its own currency. Shusterman answers it in the currency of the law, by vanishing into it, and by deciding, one more time, whether the chicken may be eaten.

Late on a Sunday night the rabbi sits alone at the microphone in a Koreatown studio, white shirt, black slacks, the fringes of his tzitzit hanging loose, and he tells Los Angeles he has the answers if the city has the questions. A heavy Brooklyn accent carries into cars on the 405 and kitchens in Whittier. Most of the callers do not pray as he prays. A woman wonders whether she should feel afraid. A man at a supermarket once asked Chaim Mentz (b. 1959) which synagogue he leads, and Mentz, uneasy in that moment, told the stranger he belonged to none, and now he hands the small lie to his audience and asks them to judge him. They call in and forgive him. He has carried a city into a conversation about fear, about suspicion, about how a man treats the stranger at the next register, and he has done it without opening a Bible. He does this every week. He calls his work the best kept secret in Bel Air, and the phrase carries two meanings at once, which he half knows.

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us a way to read a life built like this one. Man knows he will die, and the bare knowledge would unmake him, so he raises a project that lets him feel he counts in the order of things, that his days leave a mark the grave cannot wipe out. Becker called the project a hero system. A culture hands its members a set of roles and a ladder of value, and a man climbs, and the climbing persuades him that his life carries weight past his own body. The Denial of Death sets out the wager. Escape from Evil sets out the bill, since a man often buys his own significance by denying it to someone weaker. The hero system answers a terror. Read the terror and you read the man.

Mentz lives inside a particular hero system, the one the Lubavitcher Rebbe (Menachem Mendel Schneerson, 1902-1994) built and sent across the world: the shliach, the emissary posted to a city to reach every Jew he can find. The campaign rests on a claim about the soul. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812) taught that every Jew carries a divine spark that no failure can extinguish, a flame that flickers under the most secular life. The shliach goes out to fan that flame, one home at a time, and each home he warms counts toward the redemption of the world. So Mentz earns his cosmic standing through a strange route. He does not raise a monument to himself. He sets a table, and every guest who sits at it and feels at home becomes a brick in his standing before the Rebbe and before God. His denial of his own death runs through his refusal of other men’s spiritual death. The vehicle that carries him to significance passes through the souls of other people. That route shapes everything he does, down to the smile he admits he uses on purpose.

Two terrors hold him. The first wears the face of the bored Jew handed a book he cannot read, the man who hears the word “orthodox” and pictures black coats and a long list of refusals and walks the other way. For a secular sociologist this man simply drifts from a tradition. For Mentz the same man stands at the edge of a cosmic loss, a spark about to go dark, a delay in the world’s repair. He cannot bear the closed door. His whole craft answers it: no fees, no questions about your background, no guilt about the man you married or the woman you married, a smile at the threshold that grants acceptance before you have done a thing to earn it. The second terror runs underneath the first and shows itself rarely. A man whose entire vocation pours warmth outward, who receives the confessions of celebrities who cannot trust their own inner circle, who keeps every secret and asks for none in return, risks a quiet fate. He becomes the confessor with no confessor. The warmth flows one way. Who comes for the rabbi at the open door? He calls himself the best kept secret, and the joke conceals the dread. To be received by everyone and known by no one. To be the smiling host of a house full of guests and to walk, after the last car leaves, into a kitchen that has fed the world and ask whether anyone tasted him.

Subtract the system and look at the man underneath, since Becker says the system clothes a creature who would shiver without it. Take away the Rebbe and the campaign and the divine spark, and what remains is a warm Brooklyn man who likes people and fears the silence, a born host, a talker who needs a room to talk to, a performer who wants the top-rated show and got it, a 4.5 rating on Saturday nights and a wish for his own slot on cable. Strip the theology and he reads as a gifted broadcaster with a hunger to be heard. Now restore the system and watch the same traits change their nature. The hunger to be heard becomes the drive to reach the unreached. The need for a room becomes the shul in his living room. The performer’s smile becomes the open door of the soul. The wish to matter at scale becomes the wish to gather more sparks. The man does not change. The frame around him changes what the man means, and that is the whole of Becker’s argument, that the same animal appetites turn holy or hollow depending on the drama a man enlists them in.

Watch what happens to his sacred words once you grant that other men live inside other dramas, that the words are tokens in different games and pay out differently in each. Take his favorite, acceptance, the one he repeats until it sounds like a creed. Inside his system acceptance means recognition. He does not suspend his judgment of you; he relocates the verdict to a place where it has already come back as love, the divine soul that precedes your conduct and outlasts it. The intermarried husband gets no discount on his soul. The secular Jew who writes hate mail because the rabbi sounds too Jewish gets no discount either. Now hand the word to other men. A gunnery sergeant means the reverse: acceptance comes only after the crucible, and warmth offered to a man who has not bled for it reads as an insult to the men who did. A hospice nurse means a third thing: she accepts the dying man to walk him out of life, not to call him back to it, and her acceptance has no telos beyond company. A venture capitalist accepts a founder by pricing him, and the term sheet stands in for the embrace. A Cistercian novice learns that his abbot accepts him only as he disappears into the Rule, that acceptance and self-erasure arrive together. Five men, five accountings, one word. Mentz stands nearest the nurse and farthest from the sergeant, and he parts from the nurse on the one point that organizes him, since his acceptance points not toward an ending but toward a beginning he wants to light.

His second word, family, splits the same way. He turns his home into the sanctuary and his children into what he calls his best advertisement, proof that a child can keep Shabbos and still move easily in the world, and the family becomes both the unit of the work and the dynasty of it, the son grown into a shliach beside him. A Sicilian grandmother hears family and thinks of blood, the long ledger of obligation, the Sunday table that feeds you and also collects what you owe. A startup founder says we are a family and means a wage subsidy, loyalty extracted against an at-will contract, the word doing the work that money will not. A Confucian elder hears family and thinks of the vertical line, ancestors above and sons below, order before affection, duty before warmth. A foster parent hears the word as a vow made against the failure of blood, chosen and provisional at once. Mentz extends his family by invitation rather than by blood, which sets him apart from the grandmother and the elder, and he attaches no contract to it, which sets him apart from the founder. The guest becomes family by sitting down. That open border, the readiness to seat a stranger and call him kin by Friday night, holds the radical claim of his whole project, and it costs him, because a border that open never closes, and a house that admits everyone keeps no room for the host to be off duty.

His third word he made his slogan. The best kept secret. He refuses to advertise. He wants significance to arrive on its own feet, to seek him out, to validate him by coming uninvited, and this fits a man whose theology forbids the hard sell yet who still wanted the highest rating in the city. A luxury house means something colder by the secret: scarcity engineered to raise the price, the door you cannot buy your way through, which is how they charge you more. A Freemason means initiation, knowledge gated behind oath and ordeal. An intelligence officer means an operational fact whose exposure brings death. A mystic means the hidden God who withdraws as you approach, the truth that veils itself out of an excess of presence. Mentz sits between the luxury house and the mystic, and the honest reading holds both at once. He markets through his refusal to market, and he means the refusal as reverence, and a man can run a campaign and revere a secret in the same breath without either one canceling the other.

He keeps a fourth word lighter on his tongue, the door. He opens the door, he says, to your own spirituality, and he claims only the opening, not the furnishing of the room beyond it. A salesman hears door and thinks of the close. An evangelical missionary hears it and thinks of the altar call, the decision, the convert won. A therapist hears connection and thinks of the alliance, real and warm and bounded by the fifty-minute hour and the fee. Mentz refuses the convert, since he keeps his intermarried families as they are and never asks the gentile spouse to change, and he refuses the fee, since he will not make a man pay to pray. So his door opens onto neither conversion nor commerce. He wants the Jew to walk through it toward himself, not toward Mentz, and a shliach who succeeds at that watches the man he reached walk past him into a room the rabbi will never enter.

Becker warns that every hero system exacts a private tax, that the role can eat the man who wears it well. The college kids he befriended one by one still email him years later about their troubles, because they remember who their best friend was. Read that line slowly. He is the best friend of a great many people who each have other friends, and he gathers their dilemmas the way a radio host gathers calls, and the gathering feeds his standing and warms his nights and also leaves a question he does not put on the air. The celebrities come to his table to be heard by someone outside their circle who will keep what they say. He keeps it. He keeps all of it. A man who builds his significance on being the keeper of other men’s secrets builds it on a floor that gives no echo back. The smile he admits to using works, and it costs, and both halves of that sentence honor him rather than diminish him, because a man who knows his warmth is also a tool and offers it anyway has chosen the harder road than the man who never doubts his own sincerity.

Three coordinates locate him. The first sits at the threshold of his home on a Friday night, where the walk from the hidden shul ends and the table waits with the food his wife cooked, and the guest crosses from stranger to family in the time it takes to sit, and the rabbi watches the crossing and counts it toward a redemption he will not live to see finished. That threshold holds his answer to the first terror, the closed door he cannot abide, and he reopens it every week against the grave.

The second sits in the green room before a cable hit, or in the booth at midnight, where the warmth that gathers strangers becomes a signal broadcast to a city, and the line between the shliach who reaches souls and the host who needs an audience runs so fine that he himself cannot always find it, and need not, since the system he serves blesses the same hunger it puts to work. Watch him there for the place where the vocation and the appetite share one face.

The third sits in the kitchen after the last guest leaves, in the silence the essay can point to but the rabbi rarely names, where the best kept secret keeps the deepest secret of all, that the man who opens every door for others stands a long time at his own before he knows whether anyone waits on the other side to open it for him. A reader who has met ten such men should look there, at the quiet after the feast, where the cost of a generous hero system comes due, and where the generosity, paid in full and without complaint, earns him the regard the frame was built to measure.