Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Klapper’s face was completely deadpan as he finished the tale, and Cass, who was certain the story was supposed to be as funny as he found it, was uncertain whether Jonas Elijah Klapper agreed. The uncertainty choked the laughter somewhere around his epiglottis, but not before a smile briefly fanned out.

“You smile, Reb Chaim. And, indeed, there is a comical element, brought to bear by the risibility of the word ‘chickens.’ Retell the tale with the substitution of ‘cattle’ for ‘chickens’ and the humor will substantially diminish. The wife’s poultry-centric worldview signifies the untenability of the Maimonidean position. The presence of ‘chickens’ is a shrewd evocation of the absurd, similar in ploy to the koans of Zen Buddhism, which, I presume, make you smile as well.”

Cass nodded.

“The absurd is here employed as a means to incite the Messianic exigency, kept alive in Judaism only by the subversive counter-modality of Hasidism, against the establishment effort to contain the destabilizing energies of Messianism. I here but follow the explication of the preeminent secular authority on Qabalah, Yehuda Ickel, who maintains that the Qabalist embrace of the insurrectionist ideal of the non-tarrying Messiah was the deepest point of conflict with the mainstream rabbis, who would have us believe wholeheartedly in a Messiah so long as he is not here! The true Hasid believes that if his own Rebbe is not the Messiah- or Moshiach, as he is called in Hebrew, and which literally means ‘the anointed one’-then maybe his brother-in-law’s Rebbe is Moshiach.”

Again, there was that inquisitorial stare, demanding at the very least a question.

“So Hasidim all believe their own Rebbe is the Messiah?”

“The point I am making, Reb Chaim, is that for the Hasid the Messiah will not present a rupturing of history, with the ordinary giving way before the extraordinary. For the Hasid, the ordinary is already brimming with the extraordinary, or, to put it in plainer terms, the extraordinary is immanent within the ordinary as the ordinary is immanent within the extraordinary, and the role of the Messiah, who is a man both more ordinary and more extraordinary than all others, is to reveal the divine depths of the extraordinary-cum-ordinary. As shall become, I trust, manifest to you on our next voyage to New Walden-which, I am sure you concur, ought to occur on the holy Sabbath day, so that we can experience the Valdener Hasidim in their full glory, from sundown to sundown. I leave the practical arrangements to you. I request only that this time the Rastafarian not accompany us.”

to: GR613@gmail.com

from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

date: Feb. 28 2008 5:15 a.m.

subject:

Are you awake?

to: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

from: GR613@gmail.com

date: Feb. 28 2008 5:16 a.m.

subject: re:

Yes.

to: GR613@gmail.com

from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

date: Feb. 28 2008 5:18 a.m.

subject: re: re:

Are you worried about the child?

to: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

from: GR613@gmail.com

date: Feb. 28 2008 5:21 a.m.

subject: re: re: re:

It’s hard not to worry.

to: GR613@gmail.com

from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

date: Feb. 28 2008 5:25 a.m.

subject: re: re: re: re:

I dream of having such worries.

to: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

from: GR613@gmail.com

date: Feb. 28 2008 5:28 a.m.

subject: re: re: re: re: re:

You’re right to dream of such worries. And to worry about such dreams.

Since Roz was in the Amazon for several weeks with Absalom Garibaldi, Professor Klapper’s request that she not come along with them on this second trip to New Walden was easily met.

Professor Klapper had instructed Cass to pick him up at his house at noon, sharp. Cass had been so nervous about getting lost or hitting traffic or encountering any contingency that might make him late that he had gotten to the house on Berkeley Place at eleven-twenty and parked the car in front, happy to lean back and wait out the forty minutes in the rented Lincoln Continental. Cass had made certain to reserve the same car, since Professor Klapper had remarked on its roominess and solid feel, once Rox had been safely restrained in the back. The sidewalk leading to the front porch was poetic with daffodils. Could Jonas Elijah Klapper himself have had them planted, in homage, perhaps, to Wordsworth’s jocund company? But then one of Klapper’s students would have been made to ply the spade. They were always called upon to take over the tasks the professor knew better than to request of the naval verteran, Marjorie Cutter. The daffodils must have come with the house.

He hadn’t been there for more than five minutes before the front door opened and a towering figure stepped forth, and all the world went reeling, the thirty-odd areas of the primate brain devoted to interpreting visual input-especially the circuits that neuroscientists call the “What” system-struggling to apprehend what it was that Cass was seeing, and while they were struggling, Cass heard background laughter that was in-furiatingly familiar, though he couldn’t quite identify it-no, wait a minute, that was Roz’s laughter that his overworking brain was imagining as the reaction to what it still couldn’t assemble into an image that could cohere with the web of his beliefs, starting with his belief that he wasn’t given to visual hallucinations in the brightness of nearly noon on a perfect spring day, the crowd of daffodils nodding on a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that looked so unmistakably like a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, except for the phantasm manifesting itself in gleaming black leather boots into which the bottoms of its pants were tucked, which was enfolded into a capacious iridescent black satin caftan, which was ornamented with a jet-black velvet strip of paisleys and curlicues, tied with a wide and long satin sash encircling it right under its belly, and a snow-white dress shirt, buttoned to the top, emerging above the collar of the caftan to choke the monumental neck that supported a head swathed in a halo of the dimensions of those golden auras that encircle Jesus and the saints in Quattrocento paintings, only this nimbus was made of dead animals and was lodged more firmly and lower down on the pate of the author of twenty-eight books and the object of literary reverence the world over with the exception of Great Britain.

Jonas Elijah Klapper was locking his front door, and the crashing surf of Roz’s laughter was swelling, so that Cass thought he should look away as Professor Klapper got himself down the stairs awkwardly-the boots hadn’t been broken in-but found that he could not, for all its risks, avert his gaze. He half expected the hat to disintegrate as Klapper approached, for the mad mirage to yield to what was actually there.

Klapper placed the small suitcase he was carrying down on the sidewalk and stood beside the passenger door, his hands dangling helplessly at his sides, and the homunculus in Cass’s head broke off her laughter briefly enough to demand, “Why the hell doesn’t he open the door?”- which was enough of a cue to make Cass jump to action, leaping out of the car to scurry around and open the door for Jonas Elijah Klapper and place the bag on the backseat, taking care to keep his eyes away from the professor’s face, lest he see that the solemn expression he expected was there. But he did take a quick, furtive glance from close range, just to dispel any lingering doubts that his brain had been playing tricks on him, as when he was a child, lying on his bunk bed under Jesse, and the bathrobe hanging on the door had become an intruder approaching the bed, and Cass had known to pretend to be asleep but was terrified that his little brother would wake up and start screaming and get them both killed.