Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Shimmy’s reaction is baffling. At nineteen, he’d been among the legendary paratroopers who had made their way into the Jordanian-held section of East Jerusalem in 1967 and had fought their way to the Wailing Wall. In 1973, Shimmy had led a battalion of soldiers across the Suez Canal and established a bridgehead that had allowed the Israelis to push on toward Cairo. And in 1976, he had helped plan the daring raid (it was always called “a daring raid”) at Entebbe in Uganda that freed one hundred hostages from a hijacked jetliner that had been on its way to Israel. What were a few frolicking students to a warrior like Shimmy Baumzer?

Still, Cass is feeling increasingly uneasy about Shimmy’s distress. The president’s face seems gaunter, and an elegiac line in his upper lip is emerging. His accent no longer sounds incongruous. Instead, it’s the custom-tailored suit that seems the anomaly.

“Deedee feels strongly about bringing the Greek system to Frankfurter. What can I say? Deedee feels strongly.”

Cass nods. If Shimmy doesn’t know what to say, then he, Cass, certainly doesn’t know what to say either.

“I’m being squeezed. Do you know what I’m saying, my friend? Squeezed between a hard place and a firing squad. I can talk to you like this. You’re an ally.”

Cass nods.

“You know, we have in common a good mutual friend. Mona Ganz.”

Again, Cass nods. The truth is, he and Mona are no longer as close as they used to be. There’s been a cooling off since Lucinda and he have been together. Mona’s attitude toward Lucinda hasn’t softened. It’s one of those mysteries that Cass is content to leave unsolved.

“I wouldn’t say that Mona has ever been indiscreet. Such a mindful friend would always be mindful of the loyalties of friendship. But from the little she’s told me, I think you understand the situation I’ve got here.”

Now, what’s that supposed to mean? Better not to think about Mona’s exact words.

“Do I think, my friend, that Frankfurter needs fraternities and sororities in order to be a real college, like, say, the University of Texas? Not necessarily.”

Shimmy sighs, while raising his two hands, the palms open and upward, and his shoulders rising in a shrug: the eternal gesture of the existential resignation of the Yid.

“To have first-rate faculty, faculty that can hold its own against any in the world, including in snooty Cambridge, Massachusetts, that has been my dream, waking, sleeping, day come, day go, morning, night, and noon. Nobody is going to set up tables and hand out flyers demanding that the administration explain itself if we are trying to make here a first-class faculty, with the Jew in the crown-no, what’s the expression? the jewel in the crown, the internationally celebrated author of The Illusion of the Varieties of Religion , a book which, I am not embarrassed to say, I quote at every opportunity, such an impression it has personally made on my way of thinking. And now, when I am squeezed-I know you’ll understand me, with someone like you I don’t have to spell it out-with my own visions for Frankfurter on one side and other considerations on the other, what do I learn but that the jewel is in danger of being snatched up by the grasping hands of Harvard University? What’s the matter, they don’t have enough big shots there, they have to try to take away the little that we have?”

The transformation that has come over Shimmy is extraordinary. He looks fragile, vulnerable, like someone whose childhood was spent dodging Cossacks in Poland rather than picking oranges and carrying an Uzi in a kibbutz outside of Jerusalem.

“So tell me, my friend, what do I have to do to keep you from going over to those shmendriks up the river?”

The large suite of offices assigned to the Department of Faith, Literature, and Values had been part of Frankfurter’s enticement package to Jonas Elijah Klapper and were intended to be used for the international scholars he was authorized to invite with the generous discretionary funds the university had provided him. Jonas had used these offices for storage rooms, having Miriam Chan file the massive amounts of written matter that he had accumulated over the years. Jonas had saved everything for posterity, an inestimable boon for the future generations of scholars who would study him. His Nachlass reached all the way back to the wide-ruled machberet , the notebook in which he had formed his first Hebrew letters.

Miriam was a methodical and efficient young woman, but the task was daunting, especially since Professor Klapper tended to snatch whatever she was about to file out of her hands, so that he could peruse it and share the background with her, such as the fact that when he arrived as a first-grader at P.S. 2 on Henry Street, on the Lower East Side (named the Meyer London School, after one of the founders of the Socialist Party of America and the first elected socialist congressman: there had followed a digression), he knew how to read, although nobody had taught him, certainly not his mother, who remained a stranger to the English language.

“How I came by the knowledge remains to this day shrouded in mystery,” he whispered to Miriam.

Also mysterious was how everything about his cramped Columbia office had been preserved, right down to the spiky plant on the windowsill, which had been dead for years. The very arrangement of the clutter on Professor Klapper’s desk was duplicated, with space cleared for the photograph of his mother in its ornate silver frame. The wooden-slatted chair into which he was poured was either an exact replica of what he’d had at Columbia or had been transported along with the desiccated crown of thorns.

There were times when a student, sequestered with the professor, would encounter him in a rare mood of confidentiality, as if Jonas Elijah Klapper were suddenly made aware of the loneliness of his loftiness, grown weary of the constant burden of delivering himself ex cathedra. The realization would leave him eager to talk as others do, personally and intimately. The identity of the student was inconsequential. One simply had to be there when the mood struck, and today was Cass’s lucky day.

“I am not a preterist-that is, one whose chief interest and delight are in the past. As must anyone who regards with seriousness the es-chatological idea that scaffolds the strata of the greater metaphysics, I point my face resolutely toward the future. And yet the past-I speak here of the personal past-has a power over the present. The past haunts the present with the taunt of what is gone. As Tennyson so irrefutably put it, ‘And Time, a maniac scattering dust, / And Life, a Fury slinging flame.’”

The last line was whispered in a voice so tremulous and faint that Cass wasn’t certain whether the last word was “flame” or “fame.”

Cass was here, by appointment, to plot the course of his study for the next few years. Professor Klapper was insistent that his graduate students not be required to take any of their courses in other Frankfurter departments. Indeed, he strongly warned against it. But since he was the solitary professor in the Department of Faith, Literature, and Values, and since he taught only one seminar a semester, the professor’s position had presented the dean of graduate students with a technical problem-to wit, how are the students in this department to fulfill the course requirements for the Ph.D.? The problem for now related only to Cass Seltzer, since the other Klapper students had long ago fulfilled their course requirements. The plan arrived at was that there would be an extensive syllabus, still to be constructed, that would cover all the best that had been written regarding faith, literature, and values. Cass had already embarked on faith. Professor Klapper had assigned him The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith. Cass had no idea why.