36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  Klapper had used the Yiddish expression for the lighting of the Shabbes candles, the same expression as Cass’s bubbe had used.

  “Come, please, Rav Klapper,” Azarya said, beckoning with his tiny finger for the professor to follow.

  Klapper shrugged and marched up the stairs after the child. Cass followed along, toting the small suitcase and the blue plastic bag with the thirteen-tailed shtreimel.

  Azarya led them down the narrow hallway to a bedroom, and Jonas Elijah Klapper entered and indicated for Cass to put his things on the bed and dismissed him. Azarya walked Cass back downstairs to the tiled vestibule. He reached up to open the heavy front door for Cass; he was taking his role as host seriously. Cass smiled down at him, and the child smiled back, raising his little round chin.

  “Do you remember me?” he asked in a soft voice.

  “Of course I remember you! You’re Azarya!”

  The child’s smile spread, so that not only were his wide-spaced blue eyes lit, but his pale skin, translucent in the way of fair-haired children, glowed.

  “I remember also you, Mr. Seltzer. And Miss Margolis. Is she coming also for Shabbes?”

  “No, I’m afraid she isn’t.”

  “She’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts?”

  “No, she’s far away. In another country.”

  “Not in the United States of America?”

  “Not in the United States of America.”

  “In Eretz Yisroel?”

  “No, not Eretz Yisroel either, but another country.”

  “Which?”

  “Venezuela.”

  “Venezuela.” He repeated it carefully, and then he smiled, a bit impishly. “Will you draw me a map?”

  “I don’t think there’s time now. It’s almost Shabbes. Maybe after Shabbes.”

  The child nodded, understanding that time was short, and stood out of the way as Cass moved toward the open door.

  “I can read English now.”

  Cass was already halfway down the sidewalk that led to the street. He turned back. The door was half open, and Azarya was inside, peeking around the side, his head at an angle, so that his side curl fell over the shoulder of his fancy white dress shirt, similar to the one Jonas Elijah Klapper was wearing under his kaputa.

  “That’s wonderful!” So much for Roz’s hysteria. She was letting her pique over the Hasidic attitude toward women color her whole view. “Who taught you?”

  “From the map. I learned from the map.”

  Roz had told Cass how she’d felt her scalp prickling as she figured out the meaning of Azarya’s crayoned drawing. Cass had resisted her effusiveness. He understood that the child was uncommonly intelligent, but he knew better than to leap to the sort of wild romanticizing that his girlfriend was indulging in. Mathematical talent often shows itself early. Probably a good fraction of top-notch math professors at places like Harvard and Princeton and MIT and Caltech had seemed, when they were small children, like geniuses to their classmates and teachers, not to speak of their families. Not all of them—in fact none of them—had grown up to be a Gauss. The overwhelming odds were that Azarya fell into this category. He’d take the SATs when he was in sixth grade, which is how the Center for Talented Youth at Johns Hopkins tests for entrance into its summer program, and he’d score high enough to take the special classes designed for kids like him. Or, in any case, that’s the kind of thing that would happen if he weren’t a Valdener. Azarya might be at the extreme tail of the bell curve, but there were enough like him to make a program like CTY worthwhile.

  Roz, pressing her case, had given Cass a short story by Aldous Huxley called “The Young Archimedes.” An Englishman, who has rented a villa in the Italian countryside, discovers that a sweet-natured peasant boy, Guido, is an untutored mathematical genius. The Englishman, kind and cultured, alone understands the prodigious nature of Guido, but has to go away. The venal woman who owns the land the peasants work has seen the Englishman’s interest in the boy and takes him away from his family, thinking she can make a performing musician out of him—Guido is musical as well—and become rich off his talents. The boy, missing his Euclid and his family, ends up leaping to his death. The conclusion has the Englishman walking back from the cemetery in Florence, where the child has been buried, the grief-stricken father beside him. They pause on a hill to look down at the inspired city laid out in the valley below. “I thought of all the Men who had lived here and left the visible traces of their spirit and conceived extraordinary things. I thought of the dead child.”

  The story was beautiful, but he still wasn’t going to accept that Roz had proved anything by presenting him with Aldous Huxley’s fiction.

  “I never would have pegged you for the Jewish-mother type.”

  “Me, a Jewish mother?” She cocked her head in a considering sort of way, as if she were trying on an outlandish outfit and finding it didn’t look bad. “How do you mean?”

  “You’re letting your imagination run away with you.”

  “Was Huxley letting his imagination run away with him when he imagined that child jumping out of a window when he wasn’t allowed to study his Euclid?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what he was doing. Letting the imagination run away is what fiction writers do. A piece of fiction doesn’t make predictions the way a scientific theory does. You can’t cite a fictional Guido to convince me of the danger to the non-fictional Azarya!”

  “Spoken like a true pre-med!”

  Pre-med or not, he felt something like Roz’s prickling rising up over his surface as he took in what the Rebbe’s son was telling him. Goosebumps are a legacy from our furry ancestors, who could contract the muscles around each hair follicle to fluff themselves up when they were frightened, making themselves look more formidable. Were our quadrumanous grandparents also capable of awe? Did their fur rise as the wind of the uncanny blew cold over them?

  The child put up his left hand and waved in the same infantile way he had that first time that Cass and Roz had met him, opening and closing his fingers. Bye-bye.

  Henoch lived in a black-and-white two-family house; it reminded Cass of a Linzer torte. Cass had first rung the bell of the wrong side. Henoch’s in-laws lived there, Yocheved’s parents, who were Israelis. Yocheved, who was already the mother of quite a few children—Cass knew better than to ask how many—was the oldest child of her parents, and there were, between the two families, a massive number of interlaced children, who seemed to mingle so inextricably he wondered if the parents always remembered who belonged to whom. Certainly Cass never got it straight. Several of Henoch and Yocheved’s children were older than the aunts and uncles they played with.

  “It’s late,” Henoch greeted him. He had looked harried and impatient the first time Cass had met him, at the meeting between Professor Klapper and the Rebbe, so it wasn’t surprising to find him looking harried and impatient now. He was a tall man, with a bony and intelligent face, his narrowed eyes looking like they were scanning the world for the details he had to record and rectify. “I’m already on my way to shul. Licht benching is in less than fifteen minutes, and there is a tish tonight at the shul. You and your professor will see something special. Berel”—and here Henoch indicated one of the gaggle of children gathered in the vestibule, ready to walk with their father, or their brother-in-law, to the synagogue; blonds and redheads preponderated, the little girls in plain dresses, their hair tied primly back with bands, and the boys in suits— “bleibt du. Ven dein cuzin wert zein zugegrayt nem im zu dem shul.”

  Berel stepped obediently from the crowd and nodded to Cass to follow him. Cass was going to sleep in a bedroom that was off the living room and was already jammed with two bunk beds and four small dressers. There was a cot set up in a corner for Cass, with sheets and towels neatly folded on top. Cass washed up hurriedly and changed into the dark-blue suit he was carrying in a plastic bag from the cleaners. His mother had bought it for him for a cousin’s wedding on his father’s side. She skipped all fa
mily gatherings on her own side.

  He hurried downstairs to Berel, patiently waiting at his post, and they walked quickly to the shul. As they got in sight of the vast white ornamented warehouse of a synagogue, Cass saw the last of the stragglers, hurrying in that distinctive walk he’d noticed: leaning precipitously forward from the waist, the straight back almost parallel to the sidewalk, taking furiously fast strides. “Scurrying” was the verb that suggested itself, but it carried the taint of the Nazi propaganda that had been shown in his pre–Bar Mitzvah classes in Persnippity, the disturbing film that showed swarms of rats pouring out of a sewer segueing into Jews who looked like the Valdeners scurrying down mazelike European streets.

  The sun had just disappeared, spraying the sky with a rosy gold that spread itself thickly onto the white turrets and tablet-shaped windows of the synagogue, so that the awkward architecture seemed, in the few moments of its illumination, almost as beautiful as the Valdeners themselves probably thought it was.

  “Tonight ist der tish,” Berel spoke for the first time to Cass. He was around twelve or thirteen, a somewhat pudgy redhead, with freckles and a sweet and docile manner. Cass couldn’t tell what Berel thought of him, a cousin who looked so different from the other cousins, who might not even know what a tish is. Was he intrigued, bemused, pitying, indifferent?

  “Yes,” said Cass to him now, and added, “I’ve always wanted to be at a tish,” to let Berel know that he knew what it was.

  Tish is the Yiddish word for “table.” In Hasidism, tish refers to the Rebbe’s table, and, metonymically, to the public event of sharing a meal with the Rebbe, or in any case watching him and his family and closest associates consume a meal and then receiving the shirayim, or remains. The shirayim consists of small portions of food—of fruit or kugel, or a glass of wine—that are distributed from the hand of the Rebbe. It’s a peculiarly Hasidic custom. There’s nothing like it in mainstream Judaism, and it underscores one of the stickier arguing points that separate the two: the locating of the Rebbe on a different scale of being, as possessing both a soul and a body closer to the divine than that of other mortals. In mainstream Judaism, the position of intermediary between man and God is left conspicuously vacant. In Hasidism, it’s occupied, and the major qualification is heredity.

  “I’ve never actually seen a tish,” his mom had told him. “It’s so important, the most intimate connection between the Rebbe and his Ha-sidim, that of course the Valdeners reserve it only for the men and boys. My bratty little cousins were taken, but I never even could get anybody to tell me what went on there. Except that my father once told me that, back in Hungary, the Hasidim would actually grab for the food on the Rebbe’s plate when he was done, scrambling belly-first over the tish top in a free-for-all for farfel.”

  “Tish-tish.”

  “My impression is that things are a bit more civilized now, with food given out instead of grabbed from the plate. But first it’s all passed through the hands of the Rebbe to get some of his holiness in it. It’s all part of the primitive folk biology mixed in with the dubious theology.” Deb Seltzer, the former Devoroh Sheiner of New Walden, delighted in describing the Valdeners in antiseptic, clinical terms. “The food that goes into a holy man must itself be holy, seeing how it’s going to become the Rebbe’s own flesh. It’s got sparks of the divine essence, which got misplaced in the great commotion that accompanied the creation of the world, little bits of God that got trapped inside matter the Rebbe tries to return to the heavens by ingesting—I kid you not. So the Rebbe shares his food, spreading the holiness around.”

  “So luckshen are holy?”

  “Well, not as holy as potato kugel. I bet there are tracts written on potato kugel.”

  As soon as they entered the doors of the synagogue, Cass heard male voices massed together in the sumptuous folds of song. The strains of melody didn’t prepare Cass for the sensory assault as they now entered the vast room where the Hasidim were gathered for prayer. For the second time that day, the neuronal circuits of his “What” system were overloaded, transposing sights, sounds, smells, so that the melody struck his nostrils with spices he couldn’t identify, and he heard beneath it the contained roar of the vast boiling sea of black, which gradually individuated into discrete men, hundreds rising steeply to the rafters in tiered waves from the small cleared center, dazzlingly white, a rectangle of gentle foam floating in the blackened sea. It was the homogeneity of the Valdeners’ appearance and the synchronization of their motion that liquefied them, the individuating features smoothed away by the identical beards and the payess and kaputas and shtreimlach, undulating waves made up of Valdeners swaying in unison in great sweeping arcs in time to the powerful surge of their song, though now Cass could see that the four banks of tiers splayed outward and upward from a pure white platform, and that lining its perimeter were evenly spaced artifacts, ceremonial perhaps, and wavering ripples of glossy air drifted over and blurred the white rectangle, the mirage of scorching summer days, so that Cass had to peer a little longer before he could make out that the ceremonial objects were just regular plates and glasses and silverware, and now he saw it wasn’t a platform but a table, and the foam was a linen tablecloth, and those were men seated round the table, each aligned with a plate of food.

  The tish! Of course! This was the famous tish! Cass had a better view of it now, pulled onto a tier by a stranger’s hand—though for all he knew the man could be a cousin, since those payess had red highlights. His arm was linked into that of the next Valdener, who was linked with the next, and he felt himself assimilated into the row and so into the room and so into the mystique of fellowship, and slipped, too, into the powerful hold of the male voices fused into a strength that was somehow also delicate, carrying the haunting melody, the niggun, that was like large hands gently carrying a fragile being, and the melody was haunting Cass not only because of the depth of its beauty but also because of its eerie familiarity, Cass knew it immediately, intimately, like a newborn knowing the voice of his mother, and he softly began to sing with the others.

  From his tier he could look down on the tish, where now he could discern the Rebbe—a lone spot of color in the vastness of black. The Rebbe was resplendent in his unique kaputa—a tish bekeshe—blue velvet shot through with gleaming gold, and his shtreimel may not have exceeded all others—the one on the head of the Hasid next to him rivaled it in luxuriance—but the gold from the kaputa emanated outward with a quickening glow, so that everything about the Rebbe seemed more vibrant. The Rebbe’s chair, too, was magnificently regal, a throne of elaborately carved wood the soft brown of a pecan and upholstered in red velvet.

  The black-clad men around the tish held hands and swayed, the Rebbe bisecting the ring so that both sides swayed inward toward him. The Hasid sitting to the right of the Rebbe, the one with the rivaling shtreimel, was as eerily familiar to Cass as the haunting song that he was singing. Like the niggun, Cass knew that Hasid with an immediacy and intimacy that defied explanation.

  No, it didn’t defy explanation. There in the seat of honor beside the Rebbe was Jonas Elijah Klapper.

  The singing changed to a different melody, slower and sadder, and the Rebbe’s eyes were closed. He gestured expansively, shrugging his shoulders, his palms facing upward and then downward, then pointing an index finger out toward the Hasidim, and then upward into the heavens, as the tune slid out of its mournful key and ascended into a soaring, ecstatic scale, bursting the constraints of mere sound, and the rows and rows of Valdeners were jumping, like one large organism they rose upward and returned to earth in perfect unity, it was a rapturous intermingling of melody and movement, the heat in the room, the density of all the people, only driving the exultation further in its ascent, and Jonas Elijah Klapper, too, had his eyes closed, there beside the Rebbe swaying, and his own shoulders also doing a dance of little shrugs and rolls, and his lips moving as if he knew the words, as maybe he did, the capacious repository that was his mind would continually astoni
sh, two visionaries, side by side, emanations of the extraordinary, so that even when the singing subsided, and the room stopped bubbling with ecstatic men, and they quieted on a single sustained note and took their seats in unison, as if by unvoiced command, the silenced melody still hung in the air as the Rebbe began to speak.

  He was speaking in Yiddish, loud enough so that each syllable could be heard by the Valdeners up in the rafters, in the very last tiers, and Cass was pressed not only by the men on either side of him but from behind as well, the Hasid behind him placing his hand on Cass’s shoulder, leaning forward, so that Cass, too, leaned forward, placing his hand on the Hasid in front of him, the entire room of Valdeners were fused into one and pressing down toward the tish, where the Rebbe spoke his words that were somehow so penetrating in their pronunciation that Cass, who knew only a few words of Yinglish, felt that he could somehow understand what the Rebbe was saying, and the longer the Rebbe talked, sometimes slapping his hand on the tish for emphasis, the more it seemed to Cass that he was getting it, until he was seamlessly understanding everything, but only, he realized a few seconds later, because the Rebbe had switched to English.

  He was speaking of the week’s Torah portion, which spoke of the strange fire, the alien and foreign fire—aysh zarah—that Nadab and Avihu, the two sons of Aharon the High Priest, brought into the Holy Tabernacle, the Mishkan, that the Hebrews carried with them as they wandered the desert, and on which the presence of der Aybishde, the Eternal, rested in a cloud of glory. Aharon was the first of the descending line of High Priests, and he was the brother of Moses the Lawgiver, Moshe Rabenu, Moses our Rabbi, our Teacher. Nadab and Avihu were High Priests as well, since the priesthood is hereditary, passed down from father to son until this very day, and Nadab and Avihu went with their father into the Mishkan. The Torah tells us, “Each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and in it laid the incense. And they offered before Him a strange fire, aysh zarah.” And fire came down from above, and, in a flash, consumed them, before their father’s eyes.