36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  The crowd in front of the synagogue is thinning, and the young men in the Rebbe’s front yard are no longer singing, and Cass hurries on. In three minutes, he can see the ramshackle two-family house where Jesse is living.

  Cass is pretty sure his brother can afford better. He probably likes the shabbiness, because it exaggerates the discontinuity between his former life and this one. The front yard is littered with pastel plastic toys. The family that Jesse shares the two-family house with have the typical Ha-sidic brood. Cass wonders whether Jesse is going to find a Valdener girl and start having children himself. Their parents’ Volvo is parked in the unpaved driveway.

  “You made it!” Cass’s mother greets him, as he stoops and she stands on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek.

  “Of course I made it. Did you have any doubt?”

  “How long did the drive take?” his father asks, the same question with which he’s been greeting him ever since Cass got his license.

  Ben Seltzer used to be almost as tall as Cass himself, though he’s lost an inch or two. Cass’s mom is a bit less than average height, trim and athletic. She’s been a tennis player since her twenties, and she still looks like one in her late sixties. Her hair is gray now, and she wears it short and sensible, as she always has, except when Cass was very young, when her hair had flowed over her shoulders and down her back like a river of red. Jesse’s side locks and beard have emerged in the same vivid shade. Cass wonders whether he’ll ever stop having the urge to yank one of his brother’s payess to test whether they’re real. He has an image of Jesse detaching them every once in a while, taking time off from Valdenerism to connect with some model he’d dated in the past.

  Their mother had been philosophical about Jesse’s becoming a ba’al t’shuva, a penitent who returns to the fold.

  “If it will help quiet his troubled spirit, then how can I object? I’ve never understood him, and I don’t think you do either. Maybe, when it comes to your brother, Hillary was right. It takes a village.”

  “Over four hours,” Cass answers his father. “I hit rush-hour traffic coming over the Tappan Zee Bridge. And the winds are fierce. You could feel them slamming into the car.”

  “I know. We almost went airborne coming in from New Jersey.”

  “Where’s Jesse?”

  “He’s already left,” his father says. “It’s going to be a mob scene, according to him.”

  “It already is.”

  “Let’s get going, then. We were just waiting for you.”

  Ten minutes ago, Cass couldn’t get his car through, and now there are only a few stragglers on the streets. Cass’s mother obediently crosses to the froyen seit, without making a sarcastic comment.

  “Look at that,” Cass’s father says. “She must be growing out of her rebelliousness.”

  As they near the synagogue, Cass notices a thin young man in a long black wool coat and an elegant shtreimel on the women’s side, and then he looks again and it’s a tall young woman, and then he looks again and it’s Roz in her mink hat.

  “Roz!” he calls out.

  His mother hears him and goes up to her and says, “You’re not really Roz Margolis, are you?”

  “I am!”

  “My goodness. I’m Deb, Cass’s mother. I’ve been wanting to meet you for twenty years.”

  “Me, too! That’s how long I’ve been waiting to meet you!” And she throws her arms around Deb, and the two women hug.

  “Roz!” Cass calls over to her again.

  “It looks like Cass wants to talk to you.” Deb is laughing. “I’ll save you a seat in the women’s section. We’ll finally get acquainted. Mazel tov!”

  “Mazel tov!” Roz answers, and Cass tells his father to go on to the synagogue without him, and Cass and Roz leave their respective sides and meet in the middle of the road.

  “Mazel tov,” Roz says.

  “Mazel tov,” he answers her.

  “Look where we are.”

  “Look where we are,” he answers her.

  “Have you seen him yet?”

  “No, I just drove in. He got in touch with you?”

  “He sent me an e-mail. Believe it or not, he was worried about you. He wanted to make sure you acquitted yourself well with Fidley.”

  “He sent me an e-mail apologizing that he hadn’t been available.” He laughs. “Only Azarya would send an apology under the circumstances!”

  “Only Azarya,” she agrees.

  “How did it go for you in New York?”

  “It went great. I’ve got myself a book deal. Immortality Now! All I have to do is write it.”

  “So Auerbach has taken you under his wing.”

  “I should say so! He gave me the coat off his back.” She gestures downward. “The one I brought with me was a bit too flamboyant for New Walden.”

  “Ah, that explains it,” Cass says, smiling.

  “Explains what?”

  “I thought you were a young man flouting the rules of menner seit and froyen seit, especially with that shtreimel.”

  “I’ll accept the ‘young’ part.” She laughs. “Have you noticed?”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “We’re almost there. You’re not going to stop us.”

  “When have I ever wanted to stop you, even if I could?”

  “But will you come with me?”

  “It’s too early for me to say.”

  “We’re almost there,” she repeats.

  He looks at her closely.

  “Promise you’ll keep a few laugh lines.”

  “But will you come with me?” she asks him a second time.

  “Too soon to say,” he repeats.

  “I might get lonely living so long without you.”

  “You seem to have managed quite well for the past twenty years.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I’ve been trying to tell you that it’s our living that teaches us how to live. There’s a lot to learn. That’s why we need all the time we can get.”

  “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

  “What’s that from?”

  “The Catholic mystic Julian of Norwich.”

  “A world-famous atheist quoting a Catholic mystic in the middle of a Hasidic shtetl in twenty-first-century America. By the way, I thought you were magnificent in the debate.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that.”

  “Come on. You know it. I think you may even have convinced the Agnostic Chaplain.”

  “I thought that maybe you weren’t so pleased with my performance.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You didn’t say anything to me afterward. You were hanging back like a stranger.”

  Roz doesn’t say anything for a few moments, and then she changes the subject.

  “Why isn’t Lucinda here?”

  “I was waiting for you to ask me that. Lucinda left me.”

  “She left you? Since last week, she left you?”

  “She left me the night she came home. I picked her up from the airport, brought her home, and she left me.”

  Surprising them both, Cass laughs.

  “You’ve got to be leaving something out of the story.”

  “I picked her up from the airport, brought her home, showed her the offer from Harvard, and she left me.”

  Cass is still smiling, and Roz studies his face for several moments before speaking.

  “How are you?” is what she finally says.

  “Surprisingly well, to tell you the truth.”

  “Are you putting on a brave face for me?”

  “I’m not. I was devastated for seventy-two hours, and then I wasn’t. Do you want to hear my latest insights on the varieties of religious illusion?”

  “I always want to hear your insights.”

  “Romantic infatuation can be a form of religious delusion, too.”

  “Sweetie,” she says softly, “anyone who’s watched you with your women has k
nown that for years.”

  “Ah.”

  “You still believe in love, though, don’t you?”

  “As if it were a matter of belief,” he moans, and she moans softly in response, and takes his hand, and then, remembering where they are, lets it drop.

  There’s another long silence as they walk past the synagogue and then circle back.

  They’ve stopped walking, poised midway between the menner entrance and the froyen entrance to the Valdener synagogue, and the shadows and the shimmers of the day are rippling over their closely watched faces, and both of them say nothing.

  “I made a rational-actor matrix, figuring out whether it’s ever rational to say ‘I love you’ first,” Cass says after a while.

  “What’s the conclusion?”

  “It turns out not to be rational.”

  “That’s depressing.”

  “Only for rational actors.”

  “I still say your mate-selection module got knocked out of whack twenty years ago.”

  “And I say you’re right. I’m thinking of following my brother’s lead and yielding responsibility for my life to the Grand Rabbi. Maybe we Valdeners don’t have the instincts anymore for choosing our own mates. Maybe I should let the Valdener Rebbe pick one out for me.”

  “But he did. We promised to invite him to the hasana.”

  He laughs and places his large hand on her shtreimel and mashes it down.

  “Hey,” she says, “have a little respect! That’s mink on my head.”

  “I’d rather you were in a purple towel.”

  “That can be arranged.”

  They enter their gender-appropriate doors, and as soon as Cass is inside he hears the explosive euphoria of the thousands of rejoicers, singing and stamping, and he’s slammed hard by the sight of that vast room’s life, it sends him reeling and jostles his senses out of alignment, so that he can discern the spicy fragrance of the melody and the shifting colors of the emotions, and what does it feel like for Roz up there looking down, what is she making of the soulful wildness of the Valdeners?

  He’ll never find a seat and has no intention of trying, but if he stands here in the aisle he will have a sight line to the clearing in the middle of the room, and he might catch a glimpse of the grand event.

  A flushed man comes hurrying down the aisle and says to him, “Excuse me? You’re maybe Cass Seltzer?”

  “Yes, I’m Cass Seltzer.”

  “I’ve been looking! You don’t remember?”

  “I’m sorry.” The man is neither young nor old, and he has a sweet yeasty blandness that makes Cass think of his bubbe’s round babka.

  “I’m Berel! I’m Cousin Berel!”

  “Berel! Cousin Berel! How are you? How have you been?”

  “I’m well, baruch Ha-Shem!” Bless His Name. “Mazel tov, mazel tov!”

  “Mazel tov!”

  “Come, come. I have a seat in the front saved for you. The special friend.”

  Berel leads Cass down the narrow aisle between the crushed tiers to the front row of seats, probably occupied by dignitaries, though Cass doesn’t know one from another, but the beards and shtreimlach are impressive, and everybody is on his feet, singing and exulting.

  As Cass makes his way to his space, everyone he passes interrupts his singing to shout “Mazel tov!” into his face, and to wrap an arm around him or thump him on the back.

  Somewhere up there in the women’s gallery, hidden from sight, is Roz in her shtreimel, savoring the absurdities to their succulent cores, the wild-ness and pang that will always confound us; even if she gets her way and we live for centuries, still we’ll be confounded, as nobody in all the world knows better than the young man who is now standing quietly in the center of the room and smiling, dressed in a white satin kaputa streaked with gold, so that the singing rises to a crashing crescendo and the floor is heaving with the weight of frenzied exaltation, and they come and place the swathed infant in his outstretched arms.

  Somewhere in the women’s gallery is Tirza, the daughter of the Grand Rebbe of the Borshtchavers, a girl from Israel who was brought here to marry the Rebbe, a mating between two royal lines that’s brought joy to Hasidim around the world. This baby is their firstborn, destined to be the future Valdener Rebbe, delivered a week ago during a long and difficult labor, while Cass had been desperately trying to reach Azarya.

  It’s one of the traditions of the Valdeners, distinguishing them from other sects: the dance of the Rebbe with his firstborn son on the first Shabbes of his life.

  It had begun with the current Rebbe’s great-grandfather Rav Eliezer ben Rav Bezalel, the one known as ‘der shvagte Rebbe,’ the silent Rebbe. Perhaps Rav Eliezer had wanted to dance so that he wouldn’t be forced to speak. He was the one who composed this melody, sung only on the occasion of welcoming the future Rebbe into their midst.

  It’s surprising how well everybody seems to know the niggun, since it hasn’t been sung in twenty-six years. It seems to Cass that even he knows it as it’s being softly hummed, a sumptuous melody that’s an abrupt change in tone after the stampeding boisterousness.

  The melody is frothy white and streaked with gold and sung exactly as it had been sung when the current Rebbe was placed in his own father’s arms, and when his father had been placed in his father’s arms, and when his father had been placed in his father’s arms, in the little town in Hungary that the Valdeners refuse to forfeit to the flames and to forget-fulness.

  The Rebbe raises the child up to the heavens as his father had done before him, so that the Valdeners’ collective heart can soar as they behold their future, and the Valdeners lift as one with his upward motion until they seem to hover several inches from the floor.

  What does he think at this moment, what does he feel? Cass is certain he knows the Rebbe better than anyone else, and Cass has no idea. At the heart of Azarya Sheiner is the solitude that he had prophesied for himself when he was sixteen. The decision was made for him in the agony of a terrible moment, when he was far too young to have to decide. But he’s decided since then, and if he struggles still, then he struggles alone and he never lets on.

  To the Hasidim, their Rebbe is not a human like others, and Cass knows it is true of this Rebbe. Cass is awed by the grace with which the Rebbe accepts the responsibilities that come from his being loved by his Hasidim as much as they love existence itself, so that they batter him with the needs of their love every day of his life, from early morning until late at night. Only in the small, lonely hours does the Grand Rebbe let himself return to being Azarya, wandering among the abstractions, pursuing reason wherever it takes him, especially in the questions that his way of life might seem to answer but doesn’t at all. As Cass had once been astonished by a little boy’s genius, so he’s been astonished by the way in which that genius has been laid aside. It grieves him, and it moves him, and for Cass Seltzer, Azarya Sheiner will always stand at the place where our universe touches the extraordinary.

  Still, if to be human is to inhabit our contradictions, then who is more human than this young man? If to be human is to be unable to find a way of reconciling the necessary and the impossible, then who is more human than Rav Azarya Sheiner?

  And if the prodigious genius of Azarya Sheiner has never found the solution, then perhaps that is proof that no solution exists, that the most gifted among us is feeble in mind against the brutality of incomprehensibility that assaults us from all sides. And so we try, as best we can, to do justice to the tremendousness of our improbable existence. And so we live, as best we can, for ourselves, or who will live for us? And we live, as best we can, for others, otherwise what are we? And the Valdener Rebbe holds his son and dances.

  APPENDIX: 36 ARGUMENTS

  FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

  The Cosmological Argument

  The Ontological Argument

  The Argument from Design

  The Classical Teleological Argument

  The Argument from Irreducible Complexity

/>   The Argument from the Paucity of Benign Mutations

  The Argument from the Original Replicator

  The Argument from the Big Bang

  The Argument from the Fine-Tuning of Physical Constants

  The Argument from the Beauty of Physical Laws

  The Argument from Cosmic Coincidences

  The Argument from Personal Coincidences

  The Argument from Answered Prayers

  The Argument from a Wonderful Life

  The Argument from Miracles

  The Argument from the Hard Problem of Consciousness

  The Argument from the Improbable Self

  The Argument from Survival After Death

  The Argument from the Inconceivability of Personal Annihilation

  The Argument from Moral Truth

  The Argument from Altruism

  The Argument from Free Will

  The Argument from Personal Purpose

  The Argument from the Intolerability of Insignificance

  The Argument from the Consensus of Humanity

  The Argument from the Consensus of Mystics

  The Argument from Holy Books

  The Argument from Perfect Justice

  The Argument from Suffering

  The Argument from the Survival of the Jews

  The Argument from the Upward Curve of History

  The Argument from Prodigious Genius

  The Argument from Human Knowledge of Infinity

  The Argument from Mathematical Reality

  The Argument from Decision Theory (Pascal’s Wager)

  The Argument from Pragmatism (William James’s Leap of Faith)

  The Argument from the Unreasonableness of Reason

  The Argument from Sublimity