Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

All four of the children stared at her with concentrated seriousness, even the youngest, as if they were trying to interpret her words. Perhaps their English wasn’t very good.

Roz was not sentimental when it came to children. She found the standardized cuteness of kids about as inspiring as the standardized intelligence of grown-ups. She’d never been the kind of girl who spent much time with kids. She hadn’t babysat, and she hadn’t taken summer jobs as a camp counselor. Children had always left her cold until she studied the Onuma kids as part of her field research. She found most of them to be pains in the neck, though she’d grown fond of a few of them, particularly one, whom she had nicknamed Tsetse, and who was such a creative liar that even the elders admired him.

“Still, I think it must be lovely to be four like the four of you.”

“We have more,” said the little boy.

This time the older sister gave her brother a warning look that needed no interpretation.

Just then, a tall, thin woman came into the room. She was in a dun-colored dress and thick flesh-colored stockings, and the same clunky style of shoes as the girls. She was wearing a matching dun-colored wig. Her face lit up when she saw the children. Actually, it was the little boy she directed her glow to, and she cooed at him in Yiddish, apparently telling him to come to her.

He got up and walked over to her, and she took his hand and brought it to her lips lovingly. Was this the mother? She didn’t look like the children, certainly not like the enchanting little boy. And she didn’t spare a glance for the girls.

She asked the little boy something, and he answered “Ya” and turned back to Roz.

“I have to go now. I’m going to see my tata,” he said to her. She surmised that this meant “daddy.”

“Is your tata the Rebbe?” she asked.

The children, even the little boy, looked down at the floor in response, and the dun-colored woman sharply asked Roz, whom she hadn’t deigned to notice before, “Who you?”

“I’m here to see the Rebbe.” Roz extravagantly rolled the r of “Rebbe,” which was both fun and, she thought, helpful in convincing them of her respectful attitude. “I had an appointment to see him at four o’clock. I drove in from Boston with my two friends.”

“Yes, they’re mit da Rebbe now. If you want, come.”

Holding the little boy’s hand-the sisters were left behind, never glanced at-the woman led the way down a corridor into a little antechamber, where she knocked at a door. A bearded man poked his head out, took a look at the boy, and opened the door for him. Roz slipped in behind the child. The man quickly looked at her sideways and then closed the door behind her.

They were in a book-lined study, with a large desk behind which was sitting a pudgy man in a shiny black coat and a beard in the white, flowing model they stick on soldiers of the Salvation Army around Christmastime, and one superlative fur hat. There were two full-bearded subordinates standing guard behind him, and seated in front of the desk, cozy as could be, were Cass and Klapper. The seated man in the headdress could only be the tribal chief, and, judging by his circumference, the choicest matzo balls went to him. (The Valdeners, from what Roz had seen of them, were a pale, malnourished lot.) The Rebbe took no notice of Roz’s entrance-nobody did-but he smiled broadly when he saw the boy, and he gestured for him to come. The boy went straight over to the chief-perhaps tata meant “grandpa” rather than “papa”-and was lifted up onto the ample royal lap.

“My son,” he said to Cass and Klapper. “Your sisters brought you, tateleh?”

“Ya, Tata.”

“How many sisters do you have, tateleh?” Roz asked, even though it had been impressed on her that the rules of female modesty required her to render herself as close to nonexistent as possible.

The boy stared at her, wide-eyed. It wasn’t the endearment that had startled him: it was her question.

“Don’t you know, sweetie? Don’t you know how to count?”

“He knows to count,” the Rebbe said forcefully, “Believe me, miss, that he knows how to do!”

Klapper turned back to where Roz was standing against the wall, gave her a glance, and then turned back.

“There is an ancient prohibition against the counting of people, which we learn from the account of the sin of King David recorded in both Samuel and 1 Chronicles. King David ordered his lieutenants to count the men of fighting age and displeased God with his action, and God began to smite Israel. David repented of his sin and asked for God’s forgiveness and was given his choice of punishments, either three years of famine, three months of being vanquished by enemies, or three days of ‘the sword of the Lord,’ which would consist of a deadly plague that would sweep through the land. David chose the latter, and a great many of Israel fell dead.”

Klapper might have been answering Roz, but his response was directed to the Valdener Rebbe, and it had impressed him.

“That’s some good head you’ve got on your shoulders, Rav Klapper! No wonder you’re an Extreme Distinguished Professor! That’s a first-class Gemara kop , a head for Talmudic study. Do you have scholars in your family perhaps, rabbinical scholars?”

“I’ve always assumed I must. It is more than possible to be of a plebeian family with no discernible learning and still have towering Talmudists and Kabbalists in one’s lineage, whose erudition one carries in one’s genetic memory.”

Leave it to the Klap, Roz thought, to mangle the math and science in the most self-aggrandizing way possible. Everyone is guaranteed to find famous people in his family tree, since the number of ancestors explodes the farther back you go. Every Jew is going to find some legendary rabbi, every Wasp is going to find some aristocrat. Throw in intermarriage and the Jew will find an aristocrat and the Wasp a Talmudic sage. And could even the Klap believe that erudition was transmitted in one’s genetic memory?

Suddenly the boy piped up from his father’s lap.

“The number of my sisters is special.”

“Of course it is,” said Roz in that sudsy voice some women get when they talk to children, though it was a surprise to Cass-and to Roz-that she was one of those women. “Your sisters are special.”

“Ask him what he means,” said the Rebbe. “Tell our guests what you mean, tateleh.”

“If you put my sisters in a group, then there’s no way to make equal groups of them.”

All three visitors stared at the boy. The Rebbe was stroking his beard and smiling.

“Go on,” he said to Cass and Klapper. “Ask him what he means.”

“If I have a group of six things, could I make equal groups out of it?” Cass decided to ask, seeing that Jonas Elijah Klapper was sitting there impassively, and Roz was supposed to keep all manifestations of herself to a minimum.

“Yes, two ways. You could make two groups with three things, or you could make three groups with two things.” He had a way of gesturing with his hands, very Hasidic.

“What about six groups with one thing?” Roz asked.

The child looked at her and laughed. He seemed to think she’d made an uproarious joke.

“You can always do that!”

“You’re right,” said Roz. She didn’t know much developmental psychology, but having the concept of a prime number seemed pretty advanced for a child this age. It was touching to see the Grand Rabbi’s face, irradiated with love. Mystic shmystic, this guy was a proud papa.

“Do you know what we call the kind of numbers that you can’t make any equal groups out of?” she asked him. “We call them prime numbers.”