{"id":193927,"date":"2026-06-18T09:24:32","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T17:24:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193927"},"modified":"2026-06-18T09:28:02","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T17:28:02","slug":"the-two-monuments-of-yorba-linda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193927","title":{"rendered":"The Two Monuments of Yorba Linda"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Chabad campus Rabbi David (Dovid) Eliezrie<\/a> (b. 1951) built sits a mile and a half from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library<\/a>. Nixon<\/a> (1913-1994) lies buried there, beside the small frame house where he was born, under a slab of black granite cut with a line from his first inaugural about the peacemakers. Down the road stands Beth Meir HaCohen<\/a>, a synagogue, an education center, a mikvah. Two men raised two monuments on one stretch of Orange County<\/a>. Each monument says the same thing in stone. A man can outlast his body. Each man meant a different world by it.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) gave us the word for what they share. In The Denial of Death<\/i> and Escape from Evil<\/i> he argued that a man knows he will die and cannot live with the knowledge, so every culture hands him a hero system, a scheme for earning a place that death cannot cancel. The hero system tells him what counts, what a life is for, how to win significance and hold it past the grave. Religions do this. Nations do this. Armies and markets and guilds do this. Becker’s claim ran wide. The immortality project is the human animal’s first business, and most of what looks like piety or politics or ambition is a man trying to feel he will not simply rot.<\/p>\n

Set the two neighbors side by side and the point comes clear. Each spent his best decades on a project against oblivion. Nixon ran his through the nation. He wanted History to seat him among the men who shaped the century, and when the country threw him out he spent twenty years writing books and granting interviews to plead his case before the only judge he recognized, the future. The library a mile and a half from Eliezrie’s shul is the closing brief in that case. Eliezrie runs his project through a different court. He does not address History. He addresses the Almighty, and behind the Almighty the long file of Jews who came before him and the longer file he believes will come after, out to the day of redemption.<\/p>\n

Watch the words the two projects share. Then watch them split.<\/p>\n

Take the word service. Nixon served his country, and service meant the arena, power held and used and lost and defended in print. To Eliezrie service means avodah, the work a man owes his Maker, kept in a different ledger, where one act done for Heaven can outweigh a public career. The two men could stand at a microphone and say I have given my life to service and agree on nothing beneath the sentence.<\/p>\n

Now say the word soul to Eliezrie. You name a piece of God. Chabad<\/a> teaches that the Jewish soul is chelek eloka mimaal, a portion of the Divine above, and a portion of God does not die, does not get lost, does not finally corrupt. Every Jew carries one. The gangster carries one and the law professor carries one and the boy who has never seen a Sabbath candle carries one, and the spark in each waits to be brought home. Here is the reason a young couple agrees to spend a life in a town with few Jews and fewer who want them. The Rebbe<\/a>, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), sent young men out the way a general sends scouts. Eliezrie went to the University of Miami<\/a> in 1973, to Anaheim<\/a> in 1981, to Yorba Linda<\/a> in 1988. He did not choose the post. A shliach does not choose. He is sent, and the sending is the honor.<\/p>\n

Say the same word, soul, to a field geneticist and he hears a story the brain tells about itself, a serviceable fiction stitched from memory and appetite and gone when the tissue cools. He builds his own hero system out of the work, a paper that holds up, a finding that carries his initials into the literature after he is ash. He counts that as enough because he has decided nothing else is on offer.<\/p>\n

Say it to a Trappist<\/a> in his Kentucky abbey and the soul is real and made by God and bound for judgment, and still his road runs opposite to Eliezrie’s. He saves his own by leaving the world. He keeps silence, tends the bees, prays the hours, and treats the streets full of strangers as the danger, not the harvest. Eliezrie combs those same streets for sparks. Same God, same word, two heroisms that would not recognize each other across a dinner table.<\/p>\n

Say it to a man in the Arizona desert who has paid to have his head frozen at the moment of death. To him the soul is a pattern of information and death an engineering problem the century has not yet solved. He bets his whole significance on a future technician who will read the pattern back into a body or a machine. His monument is a steel flask of liquid nitrogen<\/a> and a contract. He and Eliezrie both refuse to grant death the last word. One waits on the Messiah. One waits on the upload.<\/p>\n

A Comanche<\/a> on the southern plains two centuries back heard, in the nearest word his tongue had, a name kept alive in the songs of the band, immortality measured in valor and held in the mouths of the living. A hospice nurse in Long Beach<\/a> makes no claim about any of it. She holds a hand. Her hero system asks one thing, that the dying not die alone, and she counts her life in those hours. None of these people is confused. Each lives inside a working answer to the same fear, and the answers do not translate.<\/p>\n

The land tells the story too. To the agent who sold the Eliezries their lot, Yorba Linda reads as a market, square footage and school ratings and the cachet of a presidential neighbor. To Eliezrie the same ground is galus, exile, the long scattering of his people among the nations. Exile is not empty country to him. It holds sparks, and a place with sparks in it is a place worth a life. The agent and the rabbi walk the same cul-de-sac and stand in two different cosmologies.<\/p>\n

He coordinates Chabad relief when the earth breaks. After the Nepal quake, after the storm that drowned the Rockaways, Chabad men arrive with food and cash and hands. Rescue, to a Coast Guard<\/a> swimmer, ends when the body reaches the deck. No rescue ends there for Eliezrie, because the body pulled from the water carries a soul, and the soul travels a longer road toward a world made whole.<\/p>\n

He wrote the movement down. The Secret of Chabad<\/em><\/a> came out in 2015 and won a National Jewish Book Award, and now he labors on a life of the sixth Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn<\/a> (1880-1950), the man who carried Chabad out of Soviet prisons and across an ocean. A skeptic might read the books as Eliezrie’s own bid for permanence, ink against the grave, the same wager Nixon made with his memoirs. The skeptic would not be wrong about the wager. He would be wrong to think Eliezrie hides it. The tradition states the terms in the morning prayers. The body is dust and returns to dust. The soul does not. Eliezrie has spent his life on the second half of that sentence, and a book that hands the next generation the chain he received is the point of the chain.<\/p>\n

Becker would not rank the two monuments. He would say only that he can see them both for what they are, two men who could not bear to vanish and built against it with the materials their cultures gave them, one a granite slab and a presidential seal, one an eternal light over an ark. The candor he asks of his reader is to look at one’s own project the same way, to know it for a project and not flinch. Eliezrie would not flinch. His whole creed rests on the wager that the project is no project at all but the truth of things, that the soul he chases through Orange County is a real piece of God and the redemption he works for will arrive. Nixon staked everything on the verdict of a future that cannot speak. Eliezrie staked everything on a Judge he believes already has.<\/p>\n

A mile and a half apart, the slab and the lamp. Both burn for the same reason. Each man would tell you the other has the reason wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Chabad campus Rabbi David (Dovid) Eliezrie (b. 1951) built sits a mile and a half from the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Nixon (1913-1994) lies buried there, beside the small frame house where he was born, under a slab of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chabad"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t