Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Cass had nevertheless loved his bubbe. He couldn’t help himself. She used to sing a special song about a rooster, “Cookooreekoo,” just for him. She had spoken in a special cooing voice, just for him, her oldest grandson, whom she called Chaim, his Hebrew name.

“Oy, such a boychik, so shoen” -which means “beautiful”-“so klig” - which means “smart,” though it tore up her heart that he was being brought up like a vilda chaya , a wild animal.

Deb always blamed inbreeding for her mother’s personality disorder. Deb blamed inbreeding for a great deal. Deb-who was originally Devo-rah Gittel Sheiner-came from a family that belonged to a sect of Ha-sidim, the Valdeners, who had originated in a town called Valden, in Hungary. Almost all the Hasidic sects are named after the towns where their first Grand Rabbi, the founder of his dynastic lineage, had originated, or where he had established his rabbinical court. So there are the Satmars, from Szatmárnémeti, Hungary (now Satu Mare, Romania), the Lubavitchers from Lubavitch, Lithuania, the Breslovers, from Breslov, Ukraine, and at least a dozen sects still surviving from the dozens more there had been before the Second World War. And all of them are crystallized around a charismatic Rebbe, the term that means “my rabbi,” with the position of Rebbe passed down through family lines, from father to son or to another male relative, though occasionally there are controversies, splits, factions. Only the Breslovers never saw fit to have any Rebbe but their first, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: a mysterious figure with messianic aspirations, known for his collection of allegorical tales, and himself the great-grandson of the eighteenth century’s founder of Hasidism itself, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name.

The current Rebbe of the Valdeners, Rav Bezalel Sheiner, also claimed a lineage that could be traced back to the Ba’al Shem Tov. Deb was related, on both her maternal and paternal sides, to the Valdener rabbinic dynasty, though according to her that was nothing to brag about. Valdeners tend to marry each other, so just about everybody was related to everybody.

“And then they wonder about the genetic diseases.”

Cass’s father, Ben Seltzer, had also come from a fairly observant family, but it was standard modern Orthodox, so Deb’s family was exotic to him, too. Both Deb and Ben had wandered far from the religiosity they had each been born into, but Deb had had to travel a lot farther to get to where they were, the non-kosher and non-Sabbath-observing house in which Cass and Jesse had been raised. After Jesse’s Bar Mitzvah, his parents had let their membership in the synagogue lapse.

The Valdeners lived in a self-contained village, tucked into the folds near the rocky Palisades edging the Hudson River. It wasn’t a gated community, but it might as well have been. Nobody but Valdeners lived in New Walden, except for a few sons-in-law and daughters-in-law who had come over from some other Hasidic sect.

The other sects lived in urban areas-in Jerusalem, or Montreal, or Brooklyn-always in some well-defined section. In Brooklyn it was in Williamsburg and Boro Park, where the Valdeners, too, had settled when they had first come to America. The previous Valdener Rebbe, Reb Yisroel Sheiner, who in the 1930s had shepherded some portion of his flock out of Europe and into safety in the nick of time, had decided in the 1950s, that Brooklyn, too, was getting tzu heiss -too hot-what with the increasing crime rate and the deteriorating relations between the Hasidim and the blacks and Puerto Ricans, not to speak of the high rents that made it difficult for the large Valdener families-average number of children, 6.9-to afford decent housing. The Rebbe had quietly, so as not, God forbid, to raise the fears of the Gentile farmers in the area, purchased a large chicken farm not far from where Rip Van Winkle had snored, and built a self-contained shtetl, the first village in New York State to be completely governed by a religious authority, with the town’s mayor being none other than the Grand Rabbi himself, and the aldermen his closest disciples.

The village was to have been called New Valden, but through a county clerk’s typing error it had been Americanized to New Walden. The Valdeners had no idea that the spelling mistake brought them into nominal intimacy with the ghost of Henry David Thoreau, sounding the chord of American transcendentalism-visionary, romantic, self-reliantly impractical. The Valdeners knew from Thoreau like they knew from clam chowder.

Cass had only visited New Walden a few times, since his mother hated the village and would go unusually quiet for days before a visit. It was a strange place, where he and Jesse were made to feel outlandish because they didn’t dress in short black pants and large black felt hats, didn’t have long side curls and speak the language of the place, which was Yiddish. Cass remembered some little boy, maybe a cousin-there were throngs of them, many of them with Cass’s and Jesse’s red hair-laughing with scorn when they were introduced, some kid named Shloimy or Moishy or Yankel finding the name “Cass” hilarious.

Even though his mother went strange around her, Cass had loved his widowed bubbe. Another thing that was hard to ignore was that his bubbe didn’t treat Jesse as nicely as she treated him. It wasn’t even clear that Bubbe knew Jesse’s name. She called him “little boy.” If Jesse came over and tried to climb onto her lap-a space freely offered to Cass-Bubbe would push him away.

“Feh, here he is again. The second tog” -day-“of yom tov” -a holiday- “always schlepping after the first. Why don’t you go find your mommy, little boy, and let your older brother enjoy in peace a little?”

Jesse was so shocked by Bubbe’s behavior that he would go off without a word of protest, an unusual response for Cass’s brother, who could fly off the handle if Cass or his mother or father failed to read his mind concerning something he wanted. Cass always saved for Jesse at least half the babka that Bubbe gave him, even though she would impress upon him that she had made the delicious yeast cake for him “special,” as if she had foreseen he might want to share it with the little boy, his brother.

He wasn’t allowed to taste the babka, or anything else, until he had made the right blessing, the bracha . If he ever forgot, which he rarely did, his bubbe would purse her lips and say, “Feh! Like an animal, a vilda chaya , he’s being brought up. A shanda fur da Yidden.” A disgrace for the Jews.

His bubbe had taught him all the brachas that had to be made before eating. There was one for fruit, but another one specifically for grapes, and one for vegetables and one for bread and one that was for a grab bag of things. And, of course, there was a bracha for baked goods, mazoynos , including Bubbe’s babka. Bubbe would quiz him closely every time he visited. It wasn’t as straightforward as just knowing the general types, since foods could be mixtures, and some of the categories trumped the others. The bracha also depended on how much of something there was and also whether something had been done to the food to make it change its type: the apples in apple juice didn’t count as fruit. It was complicated. What if there were raisins in the babka that Bubbe had baked for her little Hasid, her little pious one? Should Chaim make the bracha for the baked good or for the fruit? (The baked good!) And what about cereal? If it was corn flakes, then you have to make the one for vegetables, haadama , for things that grow in the ground. But it if was Cheerios, then you said mazoynos .