Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

But today the snow was falling on the campus outside and making all seem hushed and transformed, eerily reminding one, as in the distortions of dreams, of something that turns out to be simply itself; and Jonas Elijah Klapper had forgotten all about matters of syllabi. He was in a reminiscent frame of mind, full of mourning for all the lost paradises, which are, as Proust has so indispensably reminded us, the only paradises that there are.

It was a Friday, and the haunting taunt was of the many years of congenial Fridays that Jonas Elijah Klapper had passed among the select society that would meet in the hidden mews near Washington Square Park, behind the heavy green door of NYU’s Deutsches Haus. This was where the elected members of the New York Institute of the Humanities attended talks by the crème de la creamy New York intelligentsia, preceded by greasy food and even greasier gossip. How he had loved to dish with Susan Sontag.

“Did you know that she was born Susan Rosenblatt?” Jonas Elijah Klapper had confided, mashing his chin down toward his chest, so that his jowls fanned out like an Elizabethan ruff. “Yes, Susan Rosenblatt,” he continued. “‘Sontag’ was the name of her mother’s second husband. She did not like the new dad on the scene, but even at the tender age of twelve she was exquisitely attuned to the tyrannical demands of literary ambition.”

Cass nodded.

“Which brings to mind another fearless female riding bareback on the bucking beast of ambition, the estimable Laura Reichenthal. Oh, do not look so stricken, Mr. Seltzer! I do not expect you to be familiar with that name. However, I would be very much surprised to learn that you’d not heard of Laura Riding”-Cass hadn’t-“the poetess paramour of the superior poet Robert Graves, and enmeshed in the conception of his authentically brilliant White Goddess , in which he wrote these words, which I quote from Appendix B: ‘Do I think that poets are literally inspired by the White Goddess? That is an improper question. What would you think should I ask you if, in your opinion, the Hebrew prophets were literally inspired by God? Whether God is a metaphor or a fact cannot be reasonably argued. Let us likewise be discreet on the subject of the Goddess,’ a subtle point which has not, alas, been influential. Well, let us be discreet, too, regarding the physical description of the Goddess, ‘a lovely slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowanberries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair.’ That hooked-nose damsel is Laura Reichenthal, whose first marriage was to a man named, I believe, Gottschalk, which hardly suited, and she simply plucked the name ‘Riding’ from thin air, though I suspect there was metaphor behind it.”

As far as Cass could tell, Professor Klapper was saying that a poet named Laura Reichenthal had changed her name to Laura Riding.

“I adduce one more example to bring it up to the magic three of poetic enchantment: the sad-eyed bon vivant and haut wit of the fabled Algonquin Round Table of the New York literary scene of several decades past. I refer, of course, to Dorothy Parker, who was born Dorothy Rothschild, no relation in the least to the banking-and-finance dynasty, which established branches across Europe and was ennobled by both the Austrians and the British. Dorothy’s family were sans ‘von.’ She married a stockbroker named Edwin Pond Parker II and kept him on for barely two years, explaining that she had married him to escape her name.”

There was no escaping the suggestion that Professor Klapper’s chosen subject, for the moment, seemed to be name-changing.

“It is not ethnicity per se, you understand,” Professor Klapper said, as if reading Cass’s mind. “Consider, for example, the writer, both original and soporific, Gertrude Stein. Hers is a name that requires no more. It is, in its own way, perfect, as is that of the mustachioed Alice B. Toklas. But this is not always so, and there is no shame in availing oneself of remedial renaming. If a motion-picture hussy, whose vocabulary ceased developing long before her bosom, can avail herself of cognominal improvements, why not we who are the very stuff of words? That avatar of self that bears the full weight of one’s reputation, that transcendental signifier by which one sallies forth into the world even when one’s self is not present, is none other than one’s name. Would you permit me to be rather more direct?”

Cass nodded.

“Your name.”

“My name?”

“Yes, I wonder if it isn’t too… effervescent.”

“Effervescent?”

“Indeed. I have to confess that I myself had a good chuckle when I first came upon it on the class roster.”

Something odd was happening to Jonas Elijah Klapper’s face. His muscles were seizing up in violent spasms, his contorted cheeks were stained with tears. Cass became frightened until the sounds escaping from his everted mouth revealed that Jonas Elijah Klapper was laughing.

“Oh, I am sorry! I have a wicked sense of humor! But you do catch the gist of what it is I am saying? If even I cannot contain my merriment at your fizzing appellation, then what can we expect of others? Have you considered, Mr. Seltzer, the possibility of adapting it?”

“No.” Cass didn’t know what his precise emotion was, but he could feel the fire under his skin.

“I submit you think upon it. You might, for example, take Cass as your last name.”

“Then what would my first name be?”

“Do you have, perchance, a Hebrew name?”

“Chaim.”

Jonas Elijah Klapper opened his eyes very wide.

“Were you aware of its meaning?”

“Life, isn’t it?”

“‘Lives.’ Its gematria value is thirty-six, which is twice eighteen, which is the gematriac value for ‘life.’ Thirty-six is of a hiddenness that sustains existence.”

Cass knew that the letters in the Hebrew word chai , meaning “life,” could also be read as the number eighteen, which is why Jews often write Bar Mitzvah gift checks in multiples of eighteen. But beyond that he didn’t know what Professor Klapper was talking about. He would ask Gideon.

“And yet, for all that, ‘Chaim Cass’ is not quite right. What, might I ask, was your mother’s maiden name?”

“Sheiner.”

“Better, but not much.”

Klapper leaned back into his slatted chair. It had a thick green cushion on it. Cass stole a glance at the photograph of the professor’s mother, who had been named, Cass now had every reason to believe, Hannah Klepfish.

“I have it!” Klapper announced. Was his adviser about to baptize him? “I know where it was that I’ve heard that name Sheiner before. The name of Sheiner is ablaze with majestic luster. It is the dynastic name of the Chief Rabbi of the Valdener Hasidim, a small sect whose leader can trace his lineage back to the inflamed visionary who channeled the Kabbalism of Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century lion of esoteric Judaism also known as the Arizal, into a more accessible populist venue, and who became the founder of the single most important religious revision in Judaism, by which I mean Hasidism. Hasidism grew into a mass reaction against the abuses of the Pharisaic normative tradition. There are a plurality of Ha-sidic sects, each led by its own charismatic Grand Rabbi-or Rebbe, as he is wont to be called. I refer, of course, to Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the holy Ba’al Shem Tov or Master of the Good Name, also abbreviated into the appellation the Besht, back to whom all Hasidic sects trace themselves. The Ba’al Shem Tov’s past is shrouded in legend, as befits a legendary figure of his proportions, but he was most likely born in 1700, and in the small Ukrainian village of Okop. He was an orphan, who dressed and comported himself like an ignorant peasant while he went off to the forests to commune with cosmic forces. Nobody guessed his singular holiness. He finally revealed himself to the world when he was thirty-six. Had you any idea?”