Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Roz had given a lot of work to figuring out the kinship relations of the various Onuma villages. Kinship was at the center of their social organization, determining the two most important aspects of their social relations-namely, which men they went to war with and which women they could marry. There were complicated incest prohibitions, as there would have to be in villages in which just about everybody was related to everybody else, though sometimes the men would do some fancy kinship reclassifying so that they could get women they wanted for themselves or their sons. This could lead to big fights between the reclassifier and others who had also wanted the women for themselves or their own sons.

Cass had told Roz about how his mother had blamed inbreeding- what anthropologists called endogamy-for a host of the Valdeners’ problems. Deb jokingly told her sons-only Cass wasn’t so sure whether it was a joke-to marry women from as far away from their own group as possible-what anthropologists call exogamy-to “dilute those concentrated Valdener genes.”

Finding the synagogue, and the Rebbe’s house, had solved one mystery. The streets of New Walden were emptied of men because all of them were here, dressed identically in long black wool coats and large-brimmed black felt hats. The young boys were wearing these hats, too. Almost all of the men had beards, and all of them, young and old, had magnificent side locks, shaped like corkscrews and reaching down to their shoulders. There were a lot of blonds and redheads. You could see it with the men, since they didn’t cover their hair the way women did.

Wait a minute. Hadn’t Cass told her that in this sect the women actually shaved off their hair right after their weddings, and that any hair you saw on their heads, peeking out from their kerchiefs, was a wig? That rated right up there on the bizarro scale with almost anything she’d seen among the Onuma. It made the large families the Hasidim produced a minor miracle. These men were bedding bald women.

The men, on the other hand, were splendidly coiffed. It had to take some doing to get their side locks to curl like that. Did they use rollers? There were dozens of men swarming in the streets outside the shul, and dozens more outside the Rebbe’s house, which was twice as large as any of the other houses, redbrick with black shutters.

She looked for a sign indicating the froyen seit . Any town that segregated the sidewalks was going to segregate the entrance to the Rebbe’s house. She didn’t see Cass or the Klap anywhere, and she wondered how she was going to get herself inside for the powwow with the Rebbe. She didn’t want to miss it. It was probably unsafe to approach any of the men to ask them for instructions. There were clearly female-contamination taboos in place here.

She walked down the paved driveway, keeping far to her right to avoid passing too close to the men, and was rewarded by the sight of two women standing outside a side door. She walked up to them and, before she opened her mouth, they pointed her to the open side door.

She walked a few steps in and saw an empty room to her right. She looked back at the women questioningly. “Gei, gei” -“Go, go”-the older woman urged, flicking her wrist in a motion bespeaking “be gone.” Roz turned back to the room. There were a few wooden slatted chairs, and no windows. It looked like a converted pantry. Was she just supposed to sit here and wait?

She walked back down the hall to the women at the door. One was about sixty and one was about eighteen, but they were dressed almost identically, with kerchiefs wrapping their heads as a diaper does a baby’s bottom, and a little fringe of synthetic bangs sticking out in front, looking as natural as the bristles from a plastic whisk broom.

“I’m supposed to see the Rebbe.”

“Yes,” the younger woman responded. “We showed you. There. There.”

“I came here with two friends. Menner . I think they’re already in with the Rebbe. Our appointment was for four o’clock. I drove all the way from Boston to see the Rebbe.”

“Yes. There. There. Froyen tsimmer.”

“I’d like to speak to the person in charge.”

Now the older woman stepped in.

“There.” She pointed back inside.

Roz went back inside. These gender taboos were inconvenient. She should have dressed up as a man, like Barbra Streisand in Yentl . Roz could be convincing. She had done it before. If someone didn’t come and get her soon, she’d just go and insert her big contaminated female self into that crowd of homeboys in the front yard. That ought to get their attention.

She should have stuck with the men. Klapper had written to the Rebbe on his professional stationery, embossed with his full title: “Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values, Frankfurter University, Weedham, Massachusetts.” Cass and the Klap were probably lounging like pashas on tufted settees, being served herring in cream sauce.

But they weren’t. They were sitting, like Roz, on wooden folding chairs, although the room they were in was larger and had windows, and there were quite a few other men, all Hasidim, waiting along with them. But the stationery must have done the trick, since they had hardly sat down before a Hasid came for them and ushered them into the Rebbe’s office.

It was a spacious room lined floor-to-ceiling with leather-bound Hebrew books. The Rebbe himself was sitting behind a large handsome desk flanked on either side by two middle-aged Hasidim, both wearing the black felt hats with the rounded tops Cass had seen on the other men. But the Rebbe was wearing a fur shtreimel , more streamlined than the one he’d be wearing on Shabbes, but still an impressive piece of pelt.

The Rebbe stood up and came around in front of his desk and held out his hand to Jonas Elijah Klapper.

“Extreme Distinguished Professor Klapper of Frankfurter University,” he said in clear English without an accent. “Welcome to New Walden.”

“I am honored, Grand Rebbe, that you have permitted me this private audience.”

“And you, Reb Chaim Yisroel Seltzer,” the Rebbe greeted Cass. “It is wonderful to see you again.” Cass was surprised to learn that the Rebbe remembered ever having seen him. Of course, the Rebbe had been at his bubbe’s funeral, but he had been such a lofty figure, surrounded by his courtiers. Cass had assumed he hadn’t noticed, and certainly not remembered, the one person who had cried. “Your bubbe, of sainted memory, could never stop singing your praises,” the Rebbe said to him now, which made Cass almost tear up again. Being in New Walden brought her back so vividly. He could recall the smell of her house, a special Hasidic-certified scouring powder that used to make his mother gag. “May her praises continue to intercede on your behalf from On High. How is your mother, Devorah Gittel?”

Cass’s mother had never clued him into the Rebbe’s unusual mind, since she never had any praise to spare for the Valdeners. The Rebbe’s remarkable recall for names was among the least of the wonders his Hasidim recounted. It was taken for granted that a Hasidic Rebbe would manifest extraordinary mental and spiritual attributes, since he was believed to inhabit a different spiritual plane, his soul garnering a greater share of the divine sparks that were, according to the Kabbalist cosmogony, scattered in the great metaphysical mishap that accompanied the creation of the world. The position was dynastic, passed down from father to eldest son-though, should the designated inheritor be deemed of unworthy spiritual or intellectual caliber, it could go to a younger son, or even another relative or a student.

Sometimes there could be feuds and factions, a War of the Rosens over succession. Such discord had never, thank God, rent the Valdeners. Though he had five older sisters, the current Valdener Rebbe was the eldest son, with three younger brothers. His intellectual sharpness and analytical skills had been apparent since childhood, though they manifested themselves with a zeal for matters more practical than mystical. The Valdener Rebbe would much prefer to discuss the requirements for New Walden’s sewer system and water supply than the Kabbalist Zohar, The Book of Splendor . He had committed to memory a whole directory of doctors and their specialties, so that, if any of his Hasidim came to him with a particular ailment, he knew where to send him or her. The Rebbe’s brilliance was often turned to the Talmudic complexities of attaining government subsidies-for housing, for health, for education-for the members of his community, the majority of whom lived below the poverty line, not surprisingly, since none were college-educated and they almost all had, thank God, large families.