Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

Unlike all the other unmarried males, he was wearing a fur hat, smaller than those of the grown men but still enormous on his tiny head, and he was wearing a shiny little kaputa of pale blue.

It was a strange sight, the child standing on the table. In his little shtreimel , he resembled an oversize mushroom displayed beside the fruit. The disturbing thought of child sacrifice came to Cass’s mind. He knew that the idea had been, from the earliest days, anathema to the Hebrews. The prophets had ranted about the child sacrifices of the neighboring tribes. They had denounced as abominations the pagan practice of burning children at altars to the cruel gods of Baal and Baal-zebub. But there was also that horrific story of the binding of Isaac to set off a chain of unwanted associations, of the father, Abraham, rising early in the morning to heed Yahweh’s terrible command to offer his son as a burnt offering on a mountaintop. Like Aharon the High Priest, Abraham, too, hadn’t cried out in protest or grief, but wordlessly prepared for the sacrifice.

“I give my dr’ash in the honor of the visitor, Rav Klapper,” the child announced in his chimelike voice, and the black sea of men drew in toward the tiny figure standing poised on the foam. Cass could feel the irresistible undertow straining toward him, the prodigious child and future Rebbe, whose lineage of chosenness traced back all the way to the holy Ba’al Shem Tov.

“The beauty of the maloychim comes down on us. The maloychim are above. But also they are here, everywhere, in everything.” He patted the air down in front of him, and then he turned his hands over and gestured with them in the classic Hasidic gesture of explanation. “As they are, it must be.

“The maloychim are in everything. They are even in some of the maloychim!” And now he smiled, and all the Valdeners smiled. “They are there, side by side, and above and below and in the center.

“Here at the tish , we are sitting, and the maloych 36, lamed vav , also sits, and in lamed vav is sitting 2, beys , 2 times, and that 2 times 2 is sitting 3 times, gimel , and that 2 times 2 times 3 is sitting 3 times. There in the maloych, lamed vav , the maloychim beys and gimel are sitting at a tish . Their tish sits here with us at our tish!

“But there are differences between the maloychim. Beys and gimel are not like lamed vav. Beys and gimel are more simple and more beautiful. You look and look, and each is one maloych . In them there are no other maloychim sitting above and below and to the side. These are the prime maloychim . They are in all the other maloychim , and they are in them exactly so. As they are, it must be.”

And again he paused to let the Valdeners admire the sight before him.

“Rav Klapper asks: How many prime maloychim are there? How long does this go on?” He cast his smile on the honored guest who stared back at him. “Ayn sof! Without end! Just as, with all the maloychim , there are always more, so it is also with the prime maloychim . Not one of them is the biggest. How long do they go on? Forever! L’olam va-ed! The prime angels are singing their own niggun , and they are singing that they are always more!”

He looked around at the room full of his father’s followers, whose faces told him that they were as joyous to hear this niggun as he was to sing it for them.

“Here is how they are singing. This is their niggun . Find the biggest prime maloych . Call it Acharon, for the last, and stand him at the end of a line, with all the prime maloychim that came before him. Here is 2 and 3 and 5 and 7 and 11 and 13 and 17 and 19 and 23 and 29 and 31 and 37 and 41 and 43 and on and on, all of the prime maloychim up until Acharon, the last. Do to them like this. Take 2 three times and then take that number five times, and then take that number seven times, and then take that number eleven times, and if the Cambridger Rebbe asks me how long this goes on, he knows what I will say: take it each time by another, the next in line, all the way up to the last and biggest of the prime maloychim , Acharon. And then…” He threw his arms out and up into the air, a little Valdener in ecstasy. “Add one more to Acharon! That is a new maloych . His name is Acharay Acharon, the One Who Comes After the Last. And Acharay Acharon can’t be! You see! If there is Acharon, there is Acharay Acharon, and it can’t be, so there is no last, l’olam va-ed!”

He stood stock-still, an extraordinary expression on his face, entranced with what he was seeing. The look was replicated around the tish , up and down the bleachers, all motions stilled, snuffing the last blink and breath.

His father broke the silence with a question:

“Do you know the niggun of the prime maloychim? Can you sing it?”

“That was the niggun , Tata. I tried to sing it.”

“A beautiful niggun . But now sing us one of yours, tateleh.”

The child began to sing. The dense room pressed itself forward, trying to get as close as possible, even if they didn’t outwardly move, the lines of invisible force drawing them down to the foamy rectangle on which the Rebbe’s small son floated. His singing was beautiful, as could have been guessed from his speaking voice, and his pitch was perfect. He raised his little hands and gestured like his father, turning his palms up and then over. The Valdeners let him sing the pretty melody through once, and then, when he began it again, they joined in.

Ever since the Ba’al Shem Tov, the master of the Good Name, rebelled against the intellectualized strain of Judaism prevailing in his day, the Hasidim have cultivated a worship of the divine that is experiential, sensual, ecstatic. This is why they dance. This is why they sing. But the Valdeners of New Walden possessed a path to ecstasy that was theirs alone, and it was obvious on every face up and down the tiers. The Rebbe’s son was their ecstasy. They understood little of his words, but the melody they could understand, and they knew that they were in the presence of the divine. Their arms were linked again as they swayed, and many had tears overrunning their eyes, trickling down faces as enraptured as Azarya’s own face had been, a few moments ago, while he was contemplating the beautiful proof that there is no largest prime number.

He hadn’t bothered to go through the last steps of the proof. He had taken them far enough and pointed and expected that they all would see the wondrous thing that he was seeing.

Assume that there is a largest prime number. Give it a name, as Azarya had. Call it P. And now take all the prime numbers that precede P and multiply them together, just as Azarya had said: 2 times 3 times 5 times 7… times P. Take that product and add 1 to it. Call that new number Q. Is Q a prime or not? Since P has been assumed to be the largest prime number and Q comes after P, Q can’t be a prime. But then Q must be divisible by a prime number, because all non-prime numbers, or composites, are divisible by a prime. As Azarya had seen, composite numbers are all the products of primes. So there must be, at least, one prime number that is a perfect divisor of Q. None of the prime numbers less than Q can be a divisor of Q, because 1 had been added to the product of all of them in order to construct Q. So there has to be a prime number larger than P to be Q’s divisor, which contradicts the statement that P is the largest prime number. And so there cannot be a largest prime number.