Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“I’m crazy about you,” she announced as they drank coffee in her kitchen. She’d made them some toast, too, and scrambled up a mess of eggs with butter and cumin.

“You sure you’re not just crazy?”

“Me? No, I’m the sanest person I’ve ever met. You’ll see when you get to know me better, Cass. I’m the sanest person you’ve ever met, too. We’re both sane. That’s what’s so crazy about us.”

“So I’m sane, too. How do you know?”

“Our type can always recognize each other. We’re like werewolves able to sniff each other out.”

They fell into couplehood with relative ease. The only topic, and it was hardly an insignificant one, on which Cass and Roz agreed to disagree was Jonas Elijah Klapper. Roz didn’t view the Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values in quite the same way as Cass did:

“What?” Roz bolted up in bed so abruptly that her womanly breasts bounced with a soft little plop.

Cass immediately regretted the words out of his mouth even as he heard them.

“What did you say he said to you?”

It was too late. He had told her the story of how he had gone, with an undergraduate’s fear and trembling, to the posted office hour of Columbia’s pre-eminent professor, the one who stood before his crowded undergraduate course without any notes, leaping from personal reminiscences to quoted stanzas to revelations of the ontological scaffolding that underlies genius, and that at the end of the two-hour private session the great man had murmured, “I sense the aura of election upon you.”

Cass had let the fire of Roz mix with the fire of Jonas Elijah Klapper, and, mixing his fires, he had transgressed.

“What did you say he said to you?” she repeated.

He closed his eyes and pronounced the words with which Jonas Elijah Klapper had anointed him.

Roz had burst into laughter, collapsing backward on the bed and writhing. When she finally found her voice, she rasped out, “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! But I thought you had said that he sensed the odor of luckshen on you-and, frankly, I don’t know which line is funnier!”

“Luckshen” is the Yiddish word for noodles, and it was the first time Cass didn’t find Roz’s laughter irresistible.

Cass can’t believe his eyes as he makes the right onto the drive leading up onto Frankfurter’s hilltop campus. The overnight thaw has brought out the protesters, many of them pushing their luck in baggy shorts and flip-flops. If the fragrance in the air intoxicates Cass, the students are even more susceptible. The atmosphere of exulting giddiness is all over campus.

There are tables with flyers, and kids with armbands holding up hand-lettered signs. It looks like the era of be-ins and walkouts, which Cass had been a bit too young to experience firsthand. In those days, too, springlike weather always enhanced the chances for student activism. Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February?

Cass drives up the hill and passes the Ida and Howard Lowenstern Dorm, which, he notices, has paint-splattered banners hanging from some of the windows. One, in Hebrew, reads “ !

, Go Maccabees!”

Cass flashes back to Roz’s hand-held sign yesterday, “Maccabees = Taliban.” Talk about taking on a sacred historical mythology! The Maccabees are the heroes of the Hanukkah story, the stirring tale told to Diaspora Jewish kids so they don’t feel so deprived missing out on Christmas. “Maccabiah” is the name given to countless color wars in Jewish summer camps and day schools, not to speak of the Olympic-type international sporting event held every four years in the state of Israel. “Maccabees = Taliban” are fighting words!

The Maccabees were the Jewish liberation army that had fought against the Hellenistic Seleucid Dynasty of Antiochus IV in the second century B.C., a dynasty that had brought a Hellenized lifestyle to Palestine, including Greek philosophy, art, worship of the body, and a pantheon of raunchy gods.

At the center of the ancient revolt had been a family of the priestly caste, the father, Mattathias, a rural religious leader with five sons. The entire armed resistance movement, the uniquely successful one in Jewish history until 1948, had taken on the name Maccabee. The word’s origin is a matter of scholarly dispute. Some thought it might be an acronym taken from the words of the Torah verse “Mi kamocha ba’elim Adonoi”: “Who is like unto you among the gods, O Lord!”-the battle cry of those anti-Greek Judaeans, and the slogan painted in blue on a bedroom sheet hanging between two windows of the Sophie and Hyman Dorfman Dormitory.

There’s another sheet hanging almost directly under that one: “Toya

!” It takes Cass a few moments to figure it out: “Toga Party!”

Cass parks in the lot closest to the Katzenbaum Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center and walks across campus to the Nussbaum Administration Building. The campus has an air of festivity about it. Cass had never given it any thought before now, but the so-called Greek system does have elements harking back to ancient Greece, with its worship of physical beauty and athleticism, even the higher calling of Dionysian madness. The Greeks had loved their secret societies, too, not to speak of initiation rites.

Now that Cass considers it, Roz’s equation of the Maccabees with the Taliban isn’t entirely off the mark. The Maccabees, in opposing Hellenism, were opposing cosmopolitanism. They were religious fundamentalists who might well have sympathized with the Taliban’s dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan, classics of Indo-Greek art that the religious purists decreed must go, since they had once been used as idols. Religious purity is at the heart of the Maccabee story, too, as symbolized by the central miracle of the Hanukkah story. When the Jews, having vanquished their enemies after three years of fighting, went to rededicate their holy temple, destroying the Greek statues and inscriptions, they sought some “undefiled” oil to light the lamp known as the N’er Tamid, the eternal light. They found enough for only one night, but it burned for eight days, which was just the time needed to purify a new batch, which is why Hanukkah is celebrated with a candelabra, the menorah, for eight days.

As a psychologist of religion, Cass has given much thought to the longing for spiritual purity, its source in the primitive emotion of disgust.

Disgust is so fundamental that it’s one of the six universal facial expressions (happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, disgust), all of them manifested on a baby’s face during the first few months of its life. The best theory is that disgust is a response evolved to protect the body from harmful ingestants, such as putrefying substances-often odious-smelling to us-as well as substances that are prime carriers of disease, like bodily excreta and parasitic insects and worms.

The primitive emotion was adapted, by an almost metaphorical extension, to help out in solving the problems that are inherent in being a large-brained social animal. Other people can potentially harm us and so are perceived as potential defilers, and their practices or values are viewed as contaminated. And they-sometimes judged as individuals, and sometimes in swarming aggregate-can become elicitors of disgust. This went hand in hand with the evolution of the sense of our selves as immaterial souls distinct from our bodies-a purer self avoiding contamination by ever-more metaphorical defilers. So disgust is also triggered by upsetting reminders of our own embodiment-for example, contact with the decay of death, or with deviating sexual practices (so often described as animalistic), or with violations of the envelope of our bodies.