36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  “The Torah tells, ‘And Aharon was speechless.’ His silence was not only of words but of all reaction. Not a single tear crossed his cheek. Not a groan or a wail escaped his lips. Was he speechless from horror? From grief? Maybe from self-protection, afraid to cross a line when, at that moment, the Judgment from On High had descended? Or was Aharon’s the silence of an understanding that has answered its own question? Had the High Priest, wearing his vestments of purity, wrapped himself in the purity of his understanding? And what could a grieving father of two princes like Nadab and Avihu understand that would silence him? They stood beside him in their holy service, and—in an instant—snatched! What could have kept him from crying out after them?

  “Hear, then, what the holy Arizal said of the sons of Aharon! In the last dr’ash that the Arizal gave before his death in the sacred city of S’fat, the Arizal spoke of Nadab and Avihu. The Arizal compared them to the fawns of the gazelle. Just as the gazelle, as it is written in the Zohar, requires the serpent’s bite in order to give birth, so Nadab and Avihu were korbanim, sacrifices, to hasten the coming of Moshiach.

  “The gazelle is the Shechinah, the indwelling Presence; the snake is the snake; the child being born is, if the moment is right, the Moshiach of the line of David, but otherwise just another Moshiach of the line of Joseph, doomed himself and not yet capable of returning Israel from its exile.

  “The strange fire, aysh zarah, was not avodah zarah, not idol worship! Not at all! Do not make the mistake of thinking that, chas ve-shalom, heaven forbid, Aharon’s sons, Moshe Rabenu’s own nephews, succumbed to idolatry!

  “The strange fire was the redemptive fire that leaps out to purify the world, consuming the innocent only to return them back again into the holy service, as it will always be, the gilgul turning round and round until the redemption of our days, may it be in our lifetime, Amen.”

  A thunderous “Amen” answered the Rebbe’s own.

  The Rebbe switched back to Yiddish now, and Cass found that his knowledge of Yiddish was really as limited as he’d remembered. He didn’t understand another word. Still, he enjoyed listening to the Rebbe’s words, watching the expressions on his face and the dance of his hands.

  When the Rebbe stopped speaking, a little commotion started up beside him—not on Professor Klapper’s side but on the other side. Cass hadn’t noticed the tiny figure of a child sitting there, who now was being lifted up onto the tish, placed beside gigantic bowls of apples and oranges.

  Unlike all the other unmarried males, he was wearing a fur hat, smaller than those of the grown men but still enormous on his tiny head, and he was wearing a shiny little kaputa of pale blue.

  It was a strange sight, the child standing on the table. In his little shtreimel, he resembled an oversize mushroom displayed beside the fruit. The disturbing thought of child sacrifice came to Cass’s mind. He knew that the idea had been, from the earliest days, anathema to the Hebrews. The prophets had ranted about the child sacrifices of the neighboring tribes. They had denounced as abominations the pagan practice of burning children at altars to the cruel gods of Baal and Baal-zebub. But there was also that horrific story of the binding of Isaac to set off a chain of unwanted associations, of the father, Abraham, rising early in the morning to heed Yahweh’s terrible command to offer his son as a burnt offering on a mountaintop. Like Aharon the High Priest, Abraham, too, hadn’t cried out in protest or grief, but wordlessly prepared for the sacrifice.

  “I give my dr’ash in the honor of the visitor, Rav Klapper,” the child announced in his chimelike voice, and the black sea of men drew in toward the tiny figure standing poised on the foam. Cass could feel the irresistible undertow straining toward him, the prodigious child and future Rebbe, whose lineage of chosenness traced back all the way to the holy Ba’al Shem Tov.

  “The beauty of the maloychim comes down on us. The maloychim are above. But also they are here, everywhere, in everything.” He patted the air down in front of him, and then he turned his hands over and gestured with them in the classic Hasidic gesture of explanation. “As they are, it must be.

  “The maloychim are in everything. They are even in some of the maloychim!” And now he smiled, and all the Valdeners smiled. “They are there, side by side, and above and below and in the center.

  “Here at the tish, we are sitting, and the maloych 36, lamed vav, also sits, and in lamed vav is sitting 2, beys, 2 times, and that 2 times 2 is sitting 3 times, gimel, and that 2 times 2 times 3 is sitting 3 times. There in the maloych, lamed vav, the maloychim beys and gimel are sitting at a tish. Their tish sits here with us at our tish!

  “But there are differences between the maloychim. Beys and gimel are not like lamed vav. Beys and gimel are more simple and more beautiful. You look and look, and each is one maloych. In them there are no other maloychim sitting above and below and to the side. These are the prime maloychim. They are in all the other maloychim, and they are in them exactly so. As they are, it must be.”

  And again he paused to let the Valdeners admire the sight before him.

  “Rav Klapper asks: How many prime maloychim are there? How long does this go on?” He cast his smile on the honored guest who stared back at him. “Ayn sof! Without end! Just as, with all the maloychim, there are always more, so it is also with the prime maloychim. Not one of them is the biggest. How long do they go on? Forever! L’olam va-ed! The prime angels are singing their own niggun, and they are singing that they are always more!”

  He looked around at the room full of his father’s followers, whose faces told him that they were as joyous to hear this niggun as he was to sing it for them.

  “Here is how they are singing. This is their niggun. Find the biggest prime maloych. Call it Acharon, for the last, and stand him at the end of a line, with all the prime maloychim that came before him. Here is 2 and 3 and 5 and 7 and 11 and 13 and 17 and 19 and 23 and 29 and 31 and 37 and 41 and 43 and on and on, all of the prime maloychim up until Acharon, the last. Do to them like this. Take 2 three times and then take that number five times, and then take that number seven times, and then take that number eleven times, and if the Cambridger Rebbe asks me how long this goes on, he knows what I will say: take it each time by another, the next in line, all the way up to the last and biggest of the prime maloychim, Acharon. And then …” He threw his arms out and up into the air, a little Valdener in ecstasy. “Add one more to Acharon! That is a new maloych. His name is Acharay Acharon, the One Who Comes After the Last. And Acharay Acharon can’t be! You see! If there is Acharon, there is Acharay Acharon, and it can’t be, so there is no last, l’olam va-ed!”

  He stood stock-still, an extraordinary expression on his face, entranced with what he was seeing. The look was replicated around the tish, up and down the bleachers, all motions stilled, snuffing the last blink and breath.

  His father broke the silence with a question:

  “Do you know the niggun of the prime maloychim? Can you sing it?”

  “That was the niggun, Tata. I tried to sing it.”

  “A beautiful niggun. But now sing us one of yours, tateleh.”

  The child began to sing. The dense room pressed itself forward, trying to get as close as possible, even if they didn’t outwardly move, the lines of invisible force drawing them down to the foamy rectangle on which the Rebbe’s small son floated. His singing was beautiful, as could have been guessed from his speaking voice, and his pitch was perfect. He raised his little hands and gestured like his father, turning his palms up and then over. The Valdeners let him sing the pretty melody through once, and then, when he began it again, they joined in.

  Ever since the Ba’al Shem Tov, the master of the Good Name, rebelled against the intellectualized strain of Judaism prevailing in his day, the Hasidim have cultivated a worship of the divine that is experiential, sensual, ecstatic. This is why they dance. This is why they sing. But the Valdeners of New Walden possessed a path to ecstasy that was theirs alone, and it was obvious on every face up and down
the tiers. The Rebbe’s son was their ecstasy. They understood little of his words, but the melody they could understand, and they knew that they were in the presence of the divine. Their arms were linked again as they swayed, and many had tears overrunning their eyes, trickling down faces as enraptured as Azarya’s own face had been, a few moments ago, while he was contemplating the beautiful proof that there is no largest prime number.

  He hadn’t bothered to go through the last steps of the proof. He had taken them far enough and pointed and expected that they all would see the wondrous thing that he was seeing.

  Assume that there is a largest prime number. Give it a name, as Azarya had. Call it P. And now take all the prime numbers that precede P and multiply them together, just as Azarya had said: 2 times 3 times 5 times 7 … times P. Take that product and add 1 to it. Call that new number Q. Is Q a prime or not? Since P has been assumed to be the largest prime number and Q comes after P, Q can’t be a prime. But then Q must be divisible by a prime number, because all non-prime numbers, or composites, are divisible by a prime. As Azarya had seen, composite numbers are all the products of primes. So there must be, at least, one prime number that is a perfect divisor of Q. None of the prime numbers less than Q can be a divisor of Q, because 1 had been added to the product of all of them in order to construct Q. So there has to be a prime number larger than P to be Q’s divisor, which contradicts the statement that P is the largest prime number. And so there cannot be a largest prime number.

  Cass recognized the proof from Men of Mathematics. It was Euclid who first discovered it, though his proof had been slightly different, more geometrical than Azarya’s. And the Alexandrian giant had not been six years old.

  The angels pour their beauty down on us, Azarya had said. They are above, yes, but also here, in everything. 36 descends from on high to sit at the Rebbe’s tish. It carries the beauty of its own composition, and of its invisible bonds with the immaculate others of its realm, transporting this beauty down to us to grace our humble table. As it is, so it must be, and that is the nature of the beauty. In every row, in every tier, in the whole assembled crush of Valdeners, carried on cantillated waves of explosive love, blasted with their gratitude for having been born Valdeners, there are numbers, and this very room, filled with so much shifting strangeness, which before had been an undifferentiated black and bubbling sea, and then had resolved into individual men, now yields its surface again so that Cass can glimpse the silent presence of Azarya’s angels conspiring with one another to bring about what is, because as it is, then so it must be, and this is the nature of the beauty.

  The room is reeling for Cass with Azarya’s angels, beating their furious wings of diaphanous flames, this is what it must be like for the child, what he must see out of those luminous blue eyes, only Cass knows that for Azarya there is infinitely more to be seen, even now, at six years old, and this is all the divine that we need, this is the strange fire that is worth almost anything, the angels within angels in their infinite and necessary configurations, a fleeting glimpse, let it last a little longer, let me savor this tiny bit tossed from the shirayim, the remains, of the infinite that is ayn sof, without end, emanations of the extraordinary that burst on us in rapture, and look how that small boy is laughing and clapping his hands, riding up on top of his adoring father’s shoulders, and Cass thinks that he can hear a child’s laughter rippling like water over the din.

  The melody continued. The Valdeners were deep into their ecstasy. They loved their Rebbe’s son, the Dauphin of New Walden, heir to the most royal of all lineages, necessary to the continuity that made their lives worth living, this small, laughing boy who was bouncing on his dancing father’s back, with the Valdeners kissing their prayer shawls and reaching them out to touch him as they do when the Torah scroll is paraded among them. The wonderful child was to them a proof more conclusive than Euclid’s of all that they believed. They couldn’t know who it was they were loving. But Cass knew, and his face was as wet with tears as any in the room, his trance as deep and ecstatic as that of any Hasid leaping into dance.

  XX

  The Argument from Tidings of Destruction

  Cass’s cup of tea has grown cold while he was speaking with Lucinda, and he is going back to the kitchen to put the kettle back on when the phone rings again.

  It’s Roz.

  “So how did it go down with Shimmy?”

  “Not so great. He’s pretty upset.”

  “Over your leaving?”

  “That, but also that whole fraternity-fracas thing you helped to stir up on Tuesday.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “There are posters, protesters, banners hung from the dorms, petitions. Shimmy called it a tinder keg, a powder box.”

  “The slim edge of the wedgie!”

  “Don’t laugh, Roz.” She’s laughing. “He made me feel so sorry for him that I promised him I’d think about what kind of retention package would tempt me to stay.”

  “Oh, Cass. He’s playing you for a shlemiel, using that Saturday Night Live sketch of a protest to guilt you into staying. What an ox-shit artist.”

  “Well, maybe. But Shimmy really did seem shaken.”

  “I can imagine. It’s Gamma Gamma Gamma, or he can just forget about his yes indeedee.” As an alum, Roz has kept abreast. She even knows the name of the expert doctor that Deedee and her sorority sister Bunny share.

  “His weak spot is that woman.”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  “I could feel his pain. He kept talking about being squeezed.”

  “That Southern belle of his can probably squeeze them like they were limes for mint juleps.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Oh, Cass! I’m sorry, but this is one beautiful hoot!” She breaks off a spell to demonstrate just how beautiful a hoot she thinks it is. She’s a bit breathless when she returns. “I guess I might have contributed some to this kankedort.”

  “Don’t start getting a swelled head.”

  “Did any of the kids use my motto?”

  “At least a dozen. I have to say, though, that the banner I liked the best was one that had “Toga Party!” written out in Greek letters. Tau, omicron, gamma, alpha, pi, alpha, rho, tau, iota!”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute, give me a moment to think.” He gives her a moment to think. “Okay, here’s what we do to end Shimmy’s Hanukkah Wars. Tell him to Hebraicize the Greeks! So, instead of some fraternity named Alpha Delta Kappa, make it Aleph Daleth Qooph!”

  He can’t help joining in her laughter. “Deedee’s Gamma Gamma Gamma could be Gimel Gimel Gimel.”

  “Instead of sororities and fraternities, they can call them sisterhoods and brotherhoods—like in a synagogue! It’s so ridiculous, it just might work!”

  “As Shimmy likes to say, ‘Stranger things have gone down the tubes.’”

  “But whether it works or not, you’re out of there! Stop letting the Shim-mys of the world work you over. Get it through your head, you’re a star. Speaking of which, I can’t wait for your big God debate tomorrow.”

  “What big God debate?”

  “The debate with Felix Fidley! I was over at Harvard today, and there are posters plastered all over the place! ‘Resolved: God Exists.’ You can’t have forgotten!”

  “But I did! Fuck! I totally forgot. Fuck!”

  “It’s upsetting when you curse, Cass. You’re the only person I know who only curses in extremis.”

  “Fuck, Roz. Fuck.”

  “Really upsetting.”

  It’s all coming back to him. Felix Fidley, a Nobel-laureate economist who has been taking his stand on a wide range of issues by publishing in the neoconservative magazine Provocation, has been challenging the so-called new atheists to debate him on the existence of God. He’d written to Cass with a mixture of arrogance and flattery:

  I’m having too easy a time with these debates. The reason is that some of the “new atheists” know something about one thing but very little about
other things. Twickenham, for instance, admits he knows nothing about science. Fitzroy seems to know little about anything else. You, on the other hand, with your extensive knowledge of religion, psychology, philosophy, science, and history, would present a more than worthy adversary. A Fidley-Seltzer debate would be a real highlight, entertaining but intellectually provocative.

  “What do you think of Felix Fidley?” he had asked Lucinda. They were in bed, Lucinda tucked neatly into the pockets of the comforter, reading.

  “Felix Fidley?” Lucinda looked up from A Proper English Murder. She’s addicted to mysteries. “He’s got a Nobel.”

  “Yes, but what do you think of him?”

  “He’s one of the most brilliant economists of the last twenty years. In fact, I co-authored a paper with him, ‘Mandelbaum Equilibria in Hostile Takeovers.’ Why?”

  “He wants to debate me.”

  “Really?” Lucinda marked her page with her bookmark and set A Proper English Murder down on her night table. “About what?”

  “The existence of God.”

  “I should have guessed!” She laughed. “Are you telling me Felix Fidley believes?”

  “Belligerently.”

  “How odd. He’s such a rationalist—University of Chicago and all. Are you sure?”

  It was touching how sincerely Lucinda believed in reason. It was difficult for her to get her mind around the fact that believers weren’t all high-school dropouts who used their fingers and toes to add and subtract.

  “For lots of people it’s become a matter of political coalitions more than anything having to do with theology. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If liberals are going in one direction in the religion-versus-reason debates, defending the theory of evolution and secular humanism, neocons feel they have to head off in the opposite direction. Or they think that it’s okay for people like them, who are thoroughly civilized, to question God’s existence, but that it would be moral anarchy if the teeming masses started to doubt God. I suspect that that’s what Fidley believes.”