Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

The Rebbe had spoken of the vision of the prophet Ezekiel-Yechezkel in Hebrew. “The King of Babylonia, Nebuchadnezzar, threw Chananya, Mishael, and Azarya into the fiery furnace, and at the same time the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Yechezkel, ‘Go and restore the dead in the valley of Dura.’ And those bones came and slapped Nebuchadnezzar in the face!

“There is no resurrection of the dead greater than this! Our valley of Dura is the Hudson Valley. Here stands Azarya, a Bar Mitzvah! Azarya the Rav lives! Azarya ha-Rav chai! Azarya the holy one lives! Azarya ha-kodesh chai! The gematria adds up to 719. And the gematria of the sentence describing how Yechezkel breathed life into the dry bones is also 719! Vatevo ba hem ha-ruach vi-yichiyu . And the breath came into them, and they lived!”

Cass and his mother’s Bar Mitzvah present to Azarya had been a subscription to Annals of Mathematics . Cass had consulted a mathematician at Frankfurter, Barry Fine, as to which mathematics journal to order. Barry had shown an interest in the story of the Hasidic boy with the unusual mathematical gifts, and he’d told Cass that if Azarya wanted he could write to him. Azarya did, and Barry and he were still corresponding. But at a certain point, Barry had suggested that Azarya needed a better mathematician than himself and had gotten in touch with Gabriel Sinai. Not only was Gabriel a legend, but he had also been a child prodigy, back in Augusta, Georgia. And he was also an Orthodox Jew, although with nothing like the insularity of the Valdeners. He’d become observant when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and, feeling lost on campus, had started eating his meals at the Harvard Hillel, liking the crowd he’d found there. Their lives were more ordered and restrained than the bacchanalia in his dorm, and he had felt comfortable. He liked that the religion was more about deed than creed. If you stopped eating Kraft cheese because you worried that the rennet from the stomach of an animal was the ingredient used to solidify the milk, you were a good Jew, whether you believed in God or not. Judaism was behaviorist. Carry out the behavior and the beliefs would take care of themselves. Or not. This seemed a sensible religion to Gabriel, a religion that freed you from having to waste brainpower on the mundane choices of your physical existence but didn’t bother you too much about your beliefs. And he continued to take his meals at the Harvard Hillel, which was as convenient as it was congenial, since at forty-one he still wasn’t married.

He had also found a certain solace in the idea of a day of rest. He liked to think that the 14.3 percent of the week in which he was conserving his mathematical activity might extend his productivity a few more years. Like many in his profession, Gabriel was sensitive about the premature senescence that hangs above the heads of mathematicians like the sword of Damocles. The Fields Medal, the highest accolade in mathematics, is restricted to mathematicians forty or younger, and many will tell you that’s because if a mathematician hasn’t produced remarkable work by then, then he is never going to do it. The medal isn’t given for a single result but for a body of work, which makes the age restriction all the more telling.

Gabriel had won his Fields Medal at the age of thirty-one, and among the theorems that had gotten him the math world’s equivalent of a Nobel was a result concerning prime numbers, which had fascinated him since his days as a prodigy. For centuries, mathematicians have tried to find patterns in the way the prime numbers are distributed among the whole numbers. Is there, in that infinite sequence of primes, a stretch that is as long as you like and in which the difference between each prime number and its successor in the stretch is always the same number n ? Mathematicians had long suspected there was, and Gabriel had proved a theorem that showed that their intuition was correct.

“Sinai wants Azarya to come to MIT to meet with him,” Cass’s mother continued. “He’s prepared to sponsor him, or whatever the term is, to get him into MIT, even though he doesn’t have any of the conventional qualifications.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Cass. “He got a perfect 1600 on his SATs.”

Cass’s mother had used her connections as a school psychologist to arrange for Azarya to take the standardized exams.

“True. Even though your old girlfriend Roz was worried when she met him that he’d never learn to read.”

“So what does Azarya think about Sinai’s plan?”

“He’s excited. He wants to come up as soon as possible.”

“He’s told his father?”

“You know Azarya.”

“So how’d the Rebbe take it?”

“That I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

There was a heavy silence on both ends.

“He’ll stay with us, of course.”

“Of course. But maybe you should check with Pascale.”

“I know it will be okay with her. She loves mathematicians. She grew up with them. And you know how kind she is.”

“I think you should check with her anyway.”

Cass found Pascale perfectly amenable when he told her. He explained that Azarya Sheiner was a sixteen-year-old prodigy, and that he would be spending a few days at MIT. “It will be better if he stays with us rather than at a hotel.”

“Why?”

“He’s a stranger in the world.”

“All mathematicians are strangers in the world.”

“He’s especially a stranger, even for a mathematician. He comes from an insular background, very religious.”

“Jewish?”

“Yes. In fact, he’s a distant cousin on my mother’s side.”

“I’ve never met a religious Jew. It will be interesting for me.”

“You’ll like him. He’s amazing.”

“Perhaps yes, perhaps no. It is annoying for one person to command another to like someone.”

“It was more of a prediction.”

“That is even more annoying.”

There was a flurry of telephone conversations between Cass and his mother. Azarya would take a New Walden Kosher bus to the Port Authority Terminal in New York, then a Greyhound to South Station in Boston. From there, the Red Line on the T would take him to Porter Square, and he could walk from there to Cass’s house. Cass would get back from Frankfurter as soon as possible, but Pascale would be there to let him in.

Unfortunately, Cass wasn’t able to leave his office as early as he’d planned, and on the drive home he worried about how Pascale and Azarya had interacted. They were both strangers in the world, which meant that they might hit it off fantastically, though also might not.

Cass drove back from Frankfurter fast, even through the speed traps that separated Weedham from Cambridge. It was true that Pascale was an extraordinarily kind person-he’d seen her hand over a sandwich she’d just bought at Au Bon Pain to a homeless man haranguing the passersby of Harvard Square-but the thick smoke of distractions in which she lived often obscured her vision of anything outside it, and sometimes her obliviousness could result in unintended rudeness. And she was right that a person couldn’t predict whom she’d like and whom she wouldn’t.

Pascale had taken an instant dislike to Roz when she had visited, to the extent that she had not sat down with them at the table when they ate, instead taking a tray with bread and cheese and fruit up to her study. Cass knew that Roz could come on strong and was an acquired taste, but he hadn’t understood what Roz had done that was so objectionable. Something must have passed between them that he hadn’t seen, and he suspected it must have been Roz’s fault. Were he to list Pascale’s attributes, he would put kindness first, even before her poetic passion and brilliance, her fierce and fragile beauty, that ethereality that was such a part of her essence that its scent emanated from her hair.