Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“That’s not only the most extraordinary child I’ve ever met,” Roz said to Cass and Klapper as they walked back to the car in the quickly falling dusk, “I think that might be the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met.”

Klapper stopped walking and looked at Roz.

“I think he must be some sort of idiot savant. The Rebbe spoke feelingly of the problem with genetic disorders that they have. It’s the price of their marriage purity.”

“Idiot sa vant ! Are you kidding me, Jonas?” Cass winced at the many liberties Roz was taking. At least she didn’t call him “the Klap” to his face-not yet. “If that kid’s not a genius, then I’ll eat his father’s fur hat. Turn on the light, Cass.” They were in the Lincoln Continental now. “I want to see that drawing he made for me.”

Azarya had folded the sheet once in half. When she unfolded it, she saw a bunch of numbers written down, arranged in clumps that were somewhat triangular in shape, and that he’d written with different-colored crayons.

“Let’s see,” said Cass, and Roz held Azarya’s picture up so that both Cass and Klapper could inspect it.

“Perhaps it’s gematria,” Klapper said, showing a momentary interest.

“What’s gematria?” asked Roz.

“I’ll explain it to you as soon as Reb Chaim turns off the interior lights and turns on the heat. When I say my teeth are chattering I am not speaking figuratively. Gematria, from the same Greek roots that give us ‘geometry,’ is an ancient anagogic means of extracting the hidden meanings out of sacred texts, by assigning numerical values to letters and then computing the values of a word or phrase. The Greek isopsephy, the Muslim khisab al jumal are examples of similar techniques, but the most intricately and cannily developed is the gematria of the Kabbalists. Take my name, for instance, which is a rather fascinating one.”

“ ‘Klapper’?” Roz asked, and Cass felt a buzz of alarm. It would be catastrophic were the conversation to yield revelations of Klepfish.

“No, I refer to my given name, Jonas Elijah. In Hebrew, my name is Yonah Eliyahu, and if you take the gematria of my first name it adds up to thirty-five: yod is ten, vav is six, nun is fourteen, and heh is five. If you then add the first letter of my second name, aleph , you get thirty-six-or in Hebrew, lamed vav , which is a number with profound mystical significance. The Lamedvavniks are the thirty-six people of impregnable purity who live in every generation and for the sake of whom the world is not destroyed. Their identity is kept so secret that even they don’t know who they are. The name Yonah means, literally, ‘dove,’ but also can mean, paradoxically, ‘the Destroyer,’ as it also means ‘a Gift from God.’ And in Hebrew the name of Yonah, yod vav nun heh , is almost identical to the one and only true name of God, yod heh vav heh , or Yahweh, the Divine Tetra-gram. The only letter that distinguishes between the two is the letter nun , which is a letter known as the ‘winged messenger.’”

Boy, you never knew what Krap the Klap was going to throw at you. Roz almost had to admire him.

“Azarya’s drawing had a bunch of zeros in it. Does the zero mean anything in gematria?” she asked him.

“Nothing at all. I’m afraid that the child’s drawing has no Kabbalistic significance whatsoever. An indulged and, I’ve no doubt, much-tutored child has learned to write his numbers without having much grasp of what they mean and drew you a picture out of them.”

“I bet there’s more to it than that. That child is something wonderful.”

“There was indeed something wonderful back there, young lady, and it is unfortunate for you that it passed you by. You are the sort who, should she witness the Messiah walking on water, would be impressed that his socks had not shrunk.”

Cass marveled at how well Jonas Elijah Klapper kept his temper with Roz. He just hoped she wouldn’t push it. His hope was in vain.

“I’m just wondering. Did you follow what he was talking about?”

Cass winced, waiting for the onslaught. But Jonas Elijah Klapper’s response was astoundingly mild.

“Are you questioning whether I have the resources to keep pace with the Valdener Rebbe? Granted, he is a daringly speculative charismatic, but I hardly think we are mismatched.”

“I meant did you follow Azarya.”

“Azarya?”

“The Rebbe’s little son.”

“What I am failing to follow is you, young lady.”

“I’m wondering whether you were impressed when he started talking about numbers.”

“You think it had some Kabbalistic meaning?”

“I don’t know about Kabbalistic. But the child had figured out-and, according to his father, all by himself-the concept of prime numbers. He’d figured out squares and cubes. He’s six years old. That doesn’t impress you?”

“No doubt he’s an unusual child,” Jonas Elijah Klapper conceded. His forbearance toward Roz verged on the miraculous. “He is, after all, of the royal line going back to the Ba’al Shem Tov himself. But, no, I’m not impressed by the slide-rule mentality. I remain unimpressed with the mathematical arts in general. What are the so-called exact sciences but the failure of metaphor and metonymy? I’ve always experienced mathematics as a personal affront. It is a form of torture for the imaginatively gifted, the very totalitarianism of thought, one line being made to march strictly in step behind the other, all leading inexorably to a single undeviating conclusion. A proof out of Euclid recalls to my mind nothing so much as the troops goose-stepping before the Supreme Dictator. I have always delighted in my mind’s refusal to follow a single line of any mathematical explanation offered to me. Why should these exacting sciences exact anything from me? Or, as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man shrewdly argues, ‘Good God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if, for one reason or another, I don’t like these laws, including the “two times two is four?”’ Dostoevsky spurned the hegemaniacal logic, and I can do no less.”

They drove back to Boston in near silence, though Klapper had perked up a bit when they stopped at a McDonald’s on the Massachusetts Turnpike, where he had expatiated on the parallels between the junk food on American highways and the junk ideas on American campuses, launching into the ludicrosity of English professors who study the evacuations from the posterior of popular culture-for example, a colleague he had had at Columbia who analyzed the lyrics of a musical ensemble called the Sex Pistols. Professor Klapper managed to expound even while he put away two Quarter Pounders with Cheese, a large order of fries, and a cup of cola the size of a cocktail shaker. “The fried potatoes are superlative,” he said, his lips glistening.

They dropped Jonas Elijah Klapper off at his house in Cambridge, which was on an exclusive cul-de-sac pocketed behind the Episcopal Divinity School. The house was fronted by an iron gate and struck Cass as vaguely English. There was an old-fashioned lawn lamp shedding soft light on the ivy climbing the walls. He watched Jonas Elijah Klapper heavily mount the front stairs of his porch, unlock his front door, and disappear without a backward glance. He had sunk back into silence as soon as they had left McDonald’s, and Cass wondered whether it was because of distaste for Roz, or because his visit with the Rebbe had yielded a feast of insights upon which he was meditatively chewing. Or perhaps he had been lulled into the tranquillity of an infant by the large car’s effortless gliding through the darkness of night.