Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

The story was beautiful, but he still wasn’t going to accept that Roz had proved anything by presenting him with Aldous Huxley’s fiction.

“I never would have pegged you for the Jewish-mother type.”

“Me, a Jewish mother?” She cocked her head in a considering sort of way, as if she were trying on an outlandish outfit and finding it didn’t look bad. “How do you mean?”

“You’re letting your imagination run away with you.”

“Was Huxley letting his imagination run away with him when he imagined that child jumping out of a window when he wasn’t allowed to study his Euclid?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what he was doing. Letting the imagination run away is what fiction writers do. A piece of fiction doesn’t make predictions the way a scientific theory does. You can’t cite a fictional Guido to convince me of the danger to the non-fictional Azarya!”

“Spoken like a true pre-med!”

Pre-med or not, he felt something like Roz’s prickling rising up over his surface as he took in what the Rebbe’s son was telling him. Goosebumps are a legacy from our furry ancestors, who could contract the muscles around each hair follicle to fluff themselves up when they were frightened, making themselves look more formidable. Were our quadrumanous grandparents also capable of awe? Did their fur rise as the wind of the uncanny blew cold over them?

The child put up his left hand and waved in the same infantile way he had that first time that Cass and Roz had met him, opening and closing his fingers. Bye-bye.

Henoch lived in a black-and-white two-family house; it reminded Cass of a Linzer torte. Cass had first rung the bell of the wrong side. Henoch’s in-laws lived there, Yocheved’s parents, who were Israelis. Yocheved, who was already the mother of quite a few children-Cass knew better than to ask how many-was the oldest child of her parents, and there were, between the two families, a massive number of interlaced children, who seemed to mingle so inextricably he wondered if the parents always remembered who belonged to whom. Certainly Cass never got it straight. Several of Henoch and Yocheved’s children were older than the aunts and uncles they played with.

“It’s late,” Henoch greeted him. He had looked harried and impatient the first time Cass had met him, at the meeting between Professor Klapper and the Rebbe, so it wasn’t surprising to find him looking harried and impatient now. He was a tall man, with a bony and intelligent face, his narrowed eyes looking like they were scanning the world for the details he had to record and rectify. “I’m already on my way to shul. Licht benching is in less than fifteen minutes, and there is a tish tonight at the shul. You and your professor will see something special. Berel”-and here Henoch indicated one of the gaggle of children gathered in the vestibule, ready to walk with their father, or their brother-in-law, to the synagogue; blonds and redheads preponderated, the little girls in plain dresses, their hair tied primly back with bands, and the boys in suits- “bleibt du. Ven dein cuzin wert zein zugegrayt nem im zu dem shul.”

Berel stepped obediently from the crowd and nodded to Cass to follow him. Cass was going to sleep in a bedroom that was off the living room and was already jammed with two bunk beds and four small dressers. There was a cot set up in a corner for Cass, with sheets and towels neatly folded on top. Cass washed up hurriedly and changed into the dark-blue suit he was carrying in a plastic bag from the cleaners. His mother had bought it for him for a cousin’s wedding on his father’s side. She skipped all family gatherings on her own side.

He hurried downstairs to Berel, patiently waiting at his post, and they walked quickly to the shul. As they got in sight of the vast white ornamented warehouse of a synagogue, Cass saw the last of the stragglers, hurrying in that distinctive walk he’d noticed: leaning precipitously forward from the waist, the straight back almost parallel to the sidewalk, taking furiously fast strides. “Scurrying” was the verb that suggested itself, but it carried the taint of the Nazi propaganda that had been shown in his pre-Bar Mitzvah classes in Persnippity, the disturbing film that showed swarms of rats pouring out of a sewer segueing into Jews who looked like the Valdeners scurrying down mazelike European streets.

The sun had just disappeared, spraying the sky with a rosy gold that spread itself thickly onto the white turrets and tablet-shaped windows of the synagogue, so that the awkward architecture seemed, in the few moments of its illumination, almost as beautiful as the Valdeners themselves probably thought it was.

“Tonight ist der tish,” Berel spoke for the first time to Cass. He was around twelve or thirteen, a somewhat pudgy redhead, with freckles and a sweet and docile manner. Cass couldn’t tell what Berel thought of him, a cousin who looked so different from the other cousins, who might not even know what a tish is. Was he intrigued, bemused, pitying, indifferent?

“Yes,” said Cass to him now, and added, “I’ve always wanted to be at a tish,” to let Berel know that he knew what it was.

Tish is the Yiddish word for “table.” In Hasidism, tish refers to the Rebbe’s table, and, metonymically, to the public event of sharing a meal with the Rebbe, or in any case watching him and his family and closest associates consume a meal and then receiving the shirayim , or remains. The shirayim consists of small portions of food-of fruit or kugel, or a glass of wine-that are distributed from the hand of the Rebbe. It’s a peculiarly Hasidic custom. There’s nothing like it in mainstream Judaism, and it underscores one of the stickier arguing points that separate the two: the locating of the Rebbe on a different scale of being, as possessing both a soul and a body closer to the divine than that of other mortals. In mainstream Judaism, the position of intermediary between man and God is left conspicuously vacant. In Hasidism, it’s occupied, and the major qualification is heredity.

“I’ve never actually seen a tish,” his mom had told him. “It’s so important, the most intimate connection between the Rebbe and his Ha-sidim, that of course the Valdeners reserve it only for the men and boys. My bratty little cousins were taken, but I never even could get anybody to tell me what went on there. Except that my father once told me that, back in Hungary, the Hasidim would actually grab for the food on the Rebbe’s plate when he was done, scrambling belly-first over the tish top in a free-for-all for farfel.”

“Tish-tish.”

“My impression is that things are a bit more civilized now, with food given out instead of grabbed from the plate. But first it’s all passed through the hands of the Rebbe to get some of his holiness in it. It’s all part of the primitive folk biology mixed in with the dubious theology.” Deb Seltzer, the former Devoroh Sheiner of New Walden, delighted in describing the Valdeners in antiseptic, clinical terms. “The food that goes into a holy man must itself be holy, seeing how it’s going to become the Rebbe’s own flesh. It’s got sparks of the divine essence, which got misplaced in the great commotion that accompanied the creation of the world, little bits of God that got trapped inside matter the Rebbe tries to return to the heavens by ingesting-I kid you not. So the Rebbe shares his food, spreading the holiness around.”

“So luckshen are holy?”

“Well, not as holy as potato kugel. I bet there are tracts written on potato kugel.”

As soon as they entered the doors of the synagogue, Cass heard male voices massed together in the sumptuous folds of song. The strains of melody didn’t prepare Cass for the sensory assault as they now entered the vast room where the Hasidim were gathered for prayer. For the second time that day, the neuronal circuits of his “What” system were overloaded, transposing sights, sounds, smells, so that the melody struck his nostrils with spices he couldn’t identify, and he heard beneath it the contained roar of the vast boiling sea of black, which gradually individuated into discrete men, hundreds rising steeply to the rafters in tiered waves from the small cleared center, dazzlingly white, a rectangle of gentle foam floating in the blackened sea. It was the homogeneity of the Valdeners’ appearance and the synchronization of their motion that liquefied them, the individuating features smoothed away by the identical beards and the payess and kaputas and shtreimlach , undulating waves made up of Valdeners swaying in unison in great sweeping arcs in time to the powerful surge of their song, though now Cass could see that the four banks of tiers splayed outward and upward from a pure white platform, and that lining its perimeter were evenly spaced artifacts, ceremonial perhaps, and wavering ripples of glossy air drifted over and blurred the white rectangle, the mirage of scorching summer days, so that Cass had to peer a little longer before he could make out that the ceremonial objects were just regular plates and glasses and silverware, and now he saw it wasn’t a platform but a table, and the foam was a linen tablecloth, and those were men seated round the table, each aligned with a plate of food.