Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

The tish! Of course! This was the famous tish! Cass had a better view of it now, pulled onto a tier by a stranger’s hand-though for all he knew the man could be a cousin, since those payess had red highlights. His arm was linked into that of the next Valdener, who was linked with the next, and he felt himself assimilated into the row and so into the room and so into the mystique of fellowship, and slipped, too, into the powerful hold of the male voices fused into a strength that was somehow also delicate, carrying the haunting melody, the niggun , that was like large hands gently carrying a fragile being, and the melody was haunting Cass not only because of the depth of its beauty but also because of its eerie familiarity, Cass knew it immediately, intimately, like a newborn knowing the voice of his mother, and he softly began to sing with the others.

From his tier he could look down on the tish , where now he could discern the Rebbe-a lone spot of color in the vastness of black. The Rebbe was resplendent in his unique kaputa -a tish bekeshe -blue velvet shot through with gleaming gold, and his shtreimel may not have exceeded all others-the one on the head of the Hasid next to him rivaled it in luxuriance-but the gold from the kaputa emanated outward with a quickening glow, so that everything about the Rebbe seemed more vibrant. The Rebbe’s chair, too, was magnificently regal, a throne of elaborately carved wood the soft brown of a pecan and upholstered in red velvet.

The black-clad men around the tish held hands and swayed, the Rebbe bisecting the ring so that both sides swayed inward toward him. The Hasid sitting to the right of the Rebbe, the one with the rivaling shtreimel , was as eerily familiar to Cass as the haunting song that he was singing. Like the niggun , Cass knew that Hasid with an immediacy and intimacy that defied explanation.

No, it didn’t defy explanation. There in the seat of honor beside the Rebbe was Jonas Elijah Klapper.

The singing changed to a different melody, slower and sadder, and the Rebbe’s eyes were closed. He gestured expansively, shrugging his shoulders, his palms facing upward and then downward, then pointing an index finger out toward the Hasidim, and then upward into the heavens, as the tune slid out of its mournful key and ascended into a soaring, ecstatic scale, bursting the constraints of mere sound, and the rows and rows of Valdeners were jumping, like one large organism they rose upward and returned to earth in perfect unity, it was a rapturous intermingling of melody and movement, the heat in the room, the density of all the people, only driving the exultation further in its ascent, and Jonas Elijah Klapper, too, had his eyes closed, there beside the Rebbe swaying, and his own shoulders also doing a dance of little shrugs and rolls, and his lips moving as if he knew the words, as maybe he did, the capacious repository that was his mind would continually astonish, two visionaries, side by side, emanations of the extraordinary, so that even when the singing subsided, and the room stopped bubbling with ecstatic men, and they quieted on a single sustained note and took their seats in unison, as if by unvoiced command, the silenced melody still hung in the air as the Rebbe began to speak.

He was speaking in Yiddish, loud enough so that each syllable could be heard by the Valdeners up in the rafters, in the very last tiers, and Cass was pressed not only by the men on either side of him but from behind as well, the Hasid behind him placing his hand on Cass’s shoulder, leaning forward, so that Cass, too, leaned forward, placing his hand on the Hasid in front of him, the entire room of Valdeners were fused into one and pressing down toward the tish , where the Rebbe spoke his words that were somehow so penetrating in their pronunciation that Cass, who knew only a few words of Yinglish, felt that he could somehow understand what the Rebbe was saying, and the longer the Rebbe talked, sometimes slapping his hand on the tish for emphasis, the more it seemed to Cass that he was getting it, until he was seamlessly understanding everything, but only, he realized a few seconds later, because the Rebbe had switched to English.

He was speaking of the week’s Torah portion, which spoke of the strange fire, the alien and foreign fire- aysh zarah -that Nadab and Avihu, the two sons of Aharon the High Priest, brought into the Holy Tabernacle, the Mishkan, that the Hebrews carried with them as they wandered the desert, and on which the presence of der Aybishde , the Eternal, rested in a cloud of glory. Aharon was the first of the descending line of High Priests, and he was the brother of Moses the Lawgiver, Moshe Rabenu, Moses our Rabbi, our Teacher. Nadab and Avihu were High Priests as well, since the priesthood is hereditary, passed down from father to son until this very day, and Nadab and Avihu went with their father into the Mishkan. The Torah tells us, “Each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and in it laid the incense. And they offered before Him a strange fire, aysh zarah.” And fire came down from above, and, in a flash, consumed them, before their father’s eyes.

“The Torah tells, ‘And Aharon was speechless.’ His silence was not only of words but of all reaction. Not a single tear crossed his cheek. Not a groan or a wail escaped his lips. Was he speechless from horror? From grief? Maybe from self-protection, afraid to cross a line when, at that moment, the Judgment from On High had descended? Or was Aharon’s the silence of an understanding that has answered its own question? Had the High Priest, wearing his vestments of purity, wrapped himself in the purity of his understanding? And what could a grieving father of two princes like Nadab and Avihu understand that would silence him? They stood beside him in their holy service, and-in an instant-snatched! What could have kept him from crying out after them?

“Hear, then, what the holy Arizal said of the sons of Aharon! In the last dr’ash that the Arizal gave before his death in the sacred city of S’fat, the Arizal spoke of Nadab and Avihu. The Arizal compared them to the fawns of the gazelle. Just as the gazelle, as it is written in the Zohar, requires the serpent’s bite in order to give birth, so Nadab and Avihu were korbanim , sacrifices, to hasten the coming of Moshiach.

“The gazelle is the Shechinah, the indwelling Presence; the snake is the snake; the child being born is, if the moment is right, the Moshiach of the line of David, but otherwise just another Moshiach of the line of Joseph, doomed himself and not yet capable of returning Israel from its exile.

“The strange fire, aysh zarah , was not avodah zarah , not idol worship! Not at all! Do not make the mistake of thinking that, chas ve-shalom , heaven forbid, Aharon’s sons, Moshe Rabenu’s own nephews, succumbed to idolatry!

“The strange fire was the redemptive fire that leaps out to purify the world, consuming the innocent only to return them back again into the holy service, as it will always be, the gilgul turning round and round until the redemption of our days, may it be in our lifetime, Amen.”

A thunderous “Amen” answered the Rebbe’s own.

The Rebbe switched back to Yiddish now, and Cass found that his knowledge of Yiddish was really as limited as he’d remembered. He didn’t understand another word. Still, he enjoyed listening to the Rebbe’s words, watching the expressions on his face and the dance of his hands.

When the Rebbe stopped speaking, a little commotion started up beside him-not on Professor Klapper’s side but on the other side. Cass hadn’t noticed the tiny figure of a child sitting there, who now was being lifted up onto the tish , placed beside gigantic bowls of apples and oranges.