The campervan runs north on the Stuart Highway with a six-foot menorah strapped to the roof and two toddlers asleep in the back. Outside the window the plain goes red to the horizon. The man at the wheel wears a black coat and a black fedora in heat that drops tourists where they stand. He has driven fifty hours from Melbourne. He looks for a man he has never met, whose name he may have copied out of a country phone book because it sounded Jewish, a man who might not know what the word means when someone applies it to him.<\/p>\n
This premise carries the 2017 documentary Outback Rabbis, by Danny Ben-Moshe, which follows two couples from Chabad of Rural and Regional Australia. Rabbi Yossi and Malki Rodal cover the center and the long emptiness between towns. Rabbi Ari and Mushkie Rubin work north Queensland out of Cairns, which Rubin calls the Miami of Australia, a thousand miles from Brisbane. The founder, a Melbourne businessman named Sauli Spigler, took a four-week, six-thousand-mile drive across the outback in the 1970s after the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), called on his followers to find Jews wherever they had scattered. Spigler came home and built an organization on a single sentence. No Jew gets left behind.<\/p>\n
The whole enterprise hangs on one adjective applied to other people. Lost. The men and women in the van look for lost Jews. The Jews they find are, from the standpoint of the van, lost, whether or not they feel lost, whether or not they wish to be found. Hold that word. Everything in this essay turns on it.<\/p>\n
Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gives us the tool. In The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil he argues that man is the animal who knows he will die and cannot bear the knowledge. To make life livable, man enlists in a hero system, a scheme of cosmic value that tells him what counts as a life well spent and lets him feel that his small days add up to something death cannot cancel. The hero system hands a man a script for significance. Religion is the oldest and most complete of these scripts. It does not soften death so much as deny it, by folding the mortal self into an order that outlasts the body.<\/p>\n
Most hero systems make a man the hero of his own immortality. The Chabad shaliach runs a stranger version of the script, and this is what a reader who has worked through ten of these essays has not yet seen. His significance runs through someone else. He earns his place in the eternal order by reaching another man’s soul. Chabad teaches that every Jew carries a pintele Yid, an indestructible spark, dormant in the man who keeps nothing and eats anything, and that one deed wakes it. One wrap of tefillin. One Shabbat candle. The shaliach does not need the lost Jew to believe. He needs him to do, once. That single act, in this account, lifts a world and draws the redemption of all things one step closer. So the hero borrows the stranger’s spark to light his own cosmic ledger. The fifty-hour drive buys him nothing he can keep for himself. It buys the chance that a man in Coober Pedy lights a candle he has never lit, and that the candle does work in worlds the driver will never see.<\/p>\n
Set out the values that hold this man together, because each one reads as devotion from inside the van and as something else from every seat outside it.<\/p>\n
The search comes first. The shaliach goes where he is sent and counts distance as nothing. Fifty hours on the highway with toddlers and an RV, natural creeks standing in for the ritual baths of Melbourne, kosher food ordered through an app from the middle of nowhere, a black wool coat in forty-degree heat. The discomfort is the offering. A comfortable errand would prove the search too small.<\/p>\n
The single deed comes next, and it inverts the modern premise of sincerity. The surrounding culture asks a man what he believes and treats the answer as the core of him. The shaliach asks a man to act and trusts the act to carry its own freight. Belief can come later or never. The candle still rises.<\/p>\n
Then comes blood over consent, the hardest value for the secular order around it to take. In the film a man tells the rabbi he wants to convert, and the rabbi waves him off. Being Jewish is hard, he says, and sends him to think again. The man who chooses gets discouraged. The man who never chose, who did not know, who carries the descent through a grandmother three towns and two generations back, gets chased across a continent. Modern Australia runs on choice. You are what you elect to be. This hero system runs on claim. You are what you descend from, and the descent holds whether you asked for it or not. The convert offers his will and the rabbi hesitates. The lost Jew offers nothing and the rabbi drives all night.<\/p>\n
Joy is the method, not argument. The music, the warmth, the food, the readiness to look a little absurd with a menorah bungeed to the car. Self-erasure sits under all of it. The shaliach presents himself as an extension of the Rebbe’s will rather than an author of his own plan, and the small self he gives up returns to him as a part in a story that does not end.<\/p>\n
Now run the word back through other hero systems and watch it refuse to hold still. Lost means a different thing in each, and the men who use it will never mean the same thing by it.<\/p>\n
To the Arrernte man whose country the highway cuts, lost names the man with no country, no kin to fix him, no Dreaming to tie him to a stretch of ground that has held his line since before lines were counted. The van crosses his sacred text at a hundred kilometers an hour to reach a stranger of its own descent. He knows the shape of the errand, a people keeping faith with its own across hard distance. The content belongs to another world. To him the driver in the black coat, loyal to a bloodline carried over oceans and unmoored from any soil, looks like the lost one.<\/p>\n
To the man who came to the center to vanish, the solo walker who sold the house and drove until the map ran out, lost is the achievement. He worked years to slip the rolls and the calls and the people who knew his business. Being found ends the thing he drove out here to find. The rabbi’s good news, that someone crossed a continent to locate him, lands as the small death he fled.<\/p>\n
To the Theravada monk, lost names the grasping after a self that wants a name, a lineage, a fixed and lasting place in the order of things. Release the self and the question dissolves. The rabbi fastens a name and a descent onto a soul and calls that rescue. The monk loosens every name and calls that freedom. They sit on opposite banks of the same river and each sees the other drowning.<\/p>\n
To the founder running on impact metrics, lost names the unoptimized life, the soul not yet entered in a ledger of measured good. He asks the cost per soul. Two weeks of a family’s labor and a tank of fuel for one candle that may never be lit again strikes him as poor math, charity that flatters the giver more than it moves the world. To the rabbi the math runs the other way. One soul holds a world, and a world has no price, so fifty hours buys a bargain past reckoning.<\/p>\n
To the Calvinist, lost names the reprobate, the man outside an election no campervan reaches. Grace falls where God has already chosen, before the rabbi turned the key, before the lost Jew was born. The rabbi’s confidence that the deed itself shifts the account reads to him as men trying to purchase what only God gives, the old error in a new coat.<\/p>\n
There are more seats than these. The census officer combs the same country phone book for the same uncommon surnames, and to him lost means off the rolls, untracked, a gap in the count. Same act, opposite spirit. A widow on a remote station might hear the knock and decide the lost ones are the people who need a stranger’s God to feel real. Each system manufactures its own lost and its own found, then hands the single word across the fence to men who will never load it the same way.<\/p>\n
So the man in the bush is not lost to himself. He is lost only inside a scheme that has already settled what found will mean. Two men share a continent, a century, a surname, and stand inside accounts of a saved life that do not touch. One of them drove fifty hours to close the gap. The gap he means to close exists only on his map.<\/p>\n
The film follows couples, and the hero system gives the wife a fixed place that does not trade with her husband’s. She lights the candles, carries the home in the van, teaches the children at a fold-down table between towns. From a hero system built on the interchangeable career self, the arrangement reads as confinement, a woman shut out of the work that counts. From inside, the rebbetzin holds the load-bearing center of the whole errand. The candle she lights on a Friday in a town of a hundred and ninety-four does the cosmic work the long drive exists to produce. The same arrangement, read from two systems, comes out as cage and as crown.<\/p>\n
End where the work ends, with a candle. A man in Cairns wrote to Rabbi Rubin that one Friday he took his small daughter’s hand to light the Shabbat candles and help her say the blessing, and found she already knew it from the rabbi’s Hebrew school. He thanked the rabbi for not forgetting one more forgotten Jew. The father had not gone looking. The lineage ran through him to a child who learned the words before he thought to teach them. Becker reads the structure at a glance. A mortal man drives fifty hours into the heat so that a child he may never see again becomes, in the only account he trusts, eternal, and so that he himself, through her spark, joins the order that death does not close. The man folds his family back into the van. The menorah catches the last of the light. He turns the key for the next town, and the next name in the book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The campervan runs north on the Stuart Highway with a six-foot menorah strapped to the roof and two toddlers asleep in the back. Outside the window the plain goes red to the horizon. The man at the wheel wears a … Continue reading