Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Cass extends his grid to test out his calculations:

It is cogent. It is elegant. He has to admit he thinks it pretty damn near brilliant.

The Seltzer Equilibrium, he decides. Now he has an equilibrium to call his own.

There was no doubt among the seven students that something new and momentous was gathering itself around Jonas Elijah Klapper. His interests were precipitously veering away from literature and into theology, and a paradox shift of untold proportions was working its way out. The intensity of the cerebration going on before their eyes was both exalting and humbling. The ovoid seminar table was like the sacred circle that used to be drawn around the inspired poet-prophet to make a safe place for his wracking genius. His sentences emerged with the profundity, sententiousness, and obscurity of Gideon’s favorite poets, so that Gideon might have said that Jonas Elijah Klapper had become a crucible for poetry, only he knew, as they all knew, that something even beyond poetry was being spilled. His invocations of the thing beyond genius amazed them all, including Jonas Elijah Klapper, who sometimes sat back blinking his eyes in wonder over words he had heard himself speak.

They were scheduled to meet from four until six-thirty on Wednesdays, but time ceased to behave conventionally once the seminar was under way. One week Jonas went on for four and a half hours without a break. Then there was the week in which he had abruptly gotten up and left after barely twenty minutes had elapsed.

Nothing surprised them anymore. They felt, at times, as if they themselves were careening toward the Sublime. The Subliminal and the Self had dropped out of the picture.

The syllabus had dropped out as well, and the seven of them never knew which books they ought to have read, only that the number was formidable, even for Gideon Raven, who was struggling with the rest of them to keep up with this thunderklap-in-the-making, as well as having his own undergraduate classes to prepare, not to speak (really, Cass wished that he didn’t) of the continuing problems he had in his marriage.

At the top of the list of the books on Jonas Elijah Klapper’s mind was the Zohar , also known as The Book of Splendor , as well as the Yetzirah , also known as The Book of Formation , both of them fundamental texts in Kabbala, or Cabala, or Qabalah, which last was now Jonas’s preferred spelling, upon which, indeed, he would need henceforth to be insistent, because it was his informed suspicion that the alternative orthographic representations preserve far more sinister distortions. “Kabbala” was the spelling preferred by “Pharisaic normative Judaism,” the mainstream Judaism of conventional rabbis, about which Jonas Elijah harbored harsh reservations; “Cabala” was the spelling adopted by the Christian Cabalists, who, beginning sometime around the twelfth century, spuriously argued that Romanism had assumed full ownership of Jewish esotericism.

“The Christian spelling can most likely be traced to the influential gri-moire Opus Mago-Cabalisticum , which was authored by the Bavarian alchemist and theosophical thinker Georg von Welling, and appeared in 1735. Both variations are distortions of the Hebrew

– nota bene, the single beth , the letter qoph , not kaph -which orthographic distortions are not unrelated to the distortions that had been imposed on the ancient proto-Hebraic Gnosis, the Tree of Life, in which all the great religions, from Zoroastrianism to Tantric Hinduism to the New Age of the redwood-hot-tub crowd, have their roots, just as the Tree of Life itself has its roots in the grounding of all existence, which is the pure negativity of absolute unity, referred to sometimes as LO , the Hebrew for ‘no’ or ‘not,’ as in the Detzniyutha, The Book of That Which Is Concealed , which begins, and I quote: ‘The Book of That Which Is Concealed is the book of the balancing in weight. Until LO existed as weight, LO existed as seeing Face-to-Face. And the Earth was nullified. And the Crowns of the Primordial Kings were found as LO. Until the Head, desired by all desires, formed and communicated the Garments of Splendor. That weight arises from the place which is LO Him. Those who exist as LO are weighed in YH. In His body exists the weight. LO unites, and LO begins. In YH have they ascended, who LO are, and are, and will be.’”

They were all scrambling to get English-translation copies of The Book of Splendor , and The Book of Formations , and The Book of That Which Is Concealed , since Professor Klapper had never sent his reading list to the campus bookstore. It was Gideon who went and found The Book of Splendor in the stacks, the only one of the books yet translated, and put it on reserve in Lipschitz so that they would all have access to it.

Another event that seemed to herald great-things-in-the-making was Professor Klapper’s exchanging his office for the adjacent one of Mar-jorie Cutter, his secretary. Marjorie was now occupying the large and sunny corner office, with its thick carpets and sectional sofa, and Professor Klapper was squeezed into quarters that duplicated more than ever the office he had left behind at Columbia. His students half expected to look out the window and see the traffic of Amsterdam Avenue creeping below.

Zackary Kreiser had suggested that Professor Klapper’s retreat to a confined space might signify his symbolic return to the womb while he was in the process of gestating some immense new idea. But Miriam Chan had shot down Zack’s suggestion, since it would entail that Jonas Elijah Klapper was the gestatee rather than the gestator.

Cass had defended Zack’s intuition, remembering Klapper’s words to the Valdener Rebbe that the Qabalist cosmic vessels, shattered in the birthing of the world, are to be thought of as representing the womb of the Cosmic Feminine Presence. Cass had left out the story of how he had happened to hear Professor Klapper speaking on the subject of gynecologico-cosmogony, but he convinced them that the Qabalist account of the shevirah , the violent bursting of the vessels that brought forth the flawed world, was not irrelevant to Jonas Elijah Klapper’s seeking the narrowed space of Marge’s former office.

The seven had done the moving and rearranging for the professor. They had just been able to squeeze Klapper’s huge desk into his new office, but there wasn’t space for much more, only his own green-cushioned chair and a flimsy metal folding chair that he kept folded up near his desk but could, if he wished, set up for a visitor, which he had done when Cass came by this afternoon to discuss the next phase of his independent study on faith. They were supposed to meet every Tuesday afternoon, but the last two Tuesdays, Cass had found the door closed and his knock had drawn no response. The first week, he went to the next office over to ask Marge whether she knew when Professor Klapper would be back.

Marge had been in the navy after high school and seemed to Cass still to have a military no-nonsense-ship about her. She could hold her own with the professors, including Jonas Elijah Klapper, who didn’t scare her, even when he got grouchy. “I think it’s just his blood sugar that gets low, and I keep a bunch of those butterscotch candies that he loves on my desk and just hold them out to him when he gets cranky and he calms down,” she’d tell the other secretaries. But she had a soft spot for some of the students, and Cass was her favorite, as good a kid as she had ever met outside the military.