Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“You. Only you.”

“It’s never only you. Not when your ’ben’s iterate back to the Ba’al Shem Tov.”

“But you also have a link to others. To Professor Sinai. And to his teacher and the teacher of the teacher, maybe going back to Gauss or Dedekind, or Euler or Archimedes. That’s also a long chain of links going back in time. And it has more to do with you, with who you really are, than your connection with the Ba’al Shem Tov, rigid designator or no.”

Azarya shrugged in a Hasidic way, his palms turned upward. “Maybe you’re right. Anyway, if nothing else, I have this week.”

“I think you’re being, if anything, too philosophical here. Rav Hillel said, ‘If I’m not for myself, then who will be for me?’”

“‘And if I’m only for myself, then what am I?’”

“‘And if not now, when?’”

“I know the formula, but I can’t see my way clear to the solution. I try out every permutation, and nothing comes out right. How can that be? How can there be no solution? The only thing I seem to be able to prove is that there is no solution. No matter how many different ways I attack it, that’s as far as I get. If I leave New Walden, I break the heart of every Valdener Hasid, a community that remade itself through the efforts of my grandfather, who did what he could to save a few, and it wasn’t enough, which is what he was crying out the hour that he died. He was calling out by name Valdeners that he had left behind. I break the heart of my father, whom I love more than anything in the world. So that has impossible consequences and can be ruled out. So I stay. But if I stay, then I have no more days like I did today. I live among people who love me more than they love themselves, who think I’m their messenger to der Abishda , who will grab someday for the shirayim on my plate, and I’ll never be able to share a single thought with them. I’ll live the life of my father, and of his father before him, and of all the fathers who lived only to repeat the lives of their fathers. Where’s the sense in that? How can one choose such a meaningless life? So I leave. And so it goes. Going to a university is necessary but impossible. Staying in New Walden is impossible but necessary.”

“Azarya, do you know what you are? Has anyone ever told you? Do you understand why a man like Gabriel Sinai is so eager to bring you to work with him?”

“You don’t need to tell me that I’m special. All my life, that’s all that I’ve heard. All my life, the community has kvelled at my every word.”

“But not for the right reasons, Azarya. Not because of who you are but because of your bloodline.”

“Not because of who I am.” He smiled ruefully. “I guess that’s the question. Who am I?” He shrugged. “When my designator is rigidly picking me out in other possible worlds, what’s it coming up with? What’s the part that can go and what’s the part that can’t?”

It was extraordinary how young Azarya could still look, when the clarity in his eyes was overtaken by a helpless wonder and his mouth quaked.

“You’re the boy who proved at six years old that there’s no largest prime number. I can’t imagine what you’ve proved since then. I can’t imagine what you could go on and prove. You talk about your responsibilities to the Valdeners. Don’t you have a responsibility to human understanding?”

“Believe me, human understanding will continue without Azarya Sheiner. The Valdeners are a different story.”

“But should they continue? It’s a harsh question, I know, harshly put.”

“Yes. Harsh.”

“But, Azarya, you don’t seem to shy away from questions. So answer this one for me: Why should the Valdeners continue with their superstitions and their insularity and their stubborn refusal to learn anything from outside? Why is that something to perpetuate?”

“I was hoping that maybe you could help me answer that. Because that is your specialty, psychology of religion, no?”

“No. This question is meant for you alone, Azarya.”

“As I’ve always feared,” he said softly.

“Let’s think about it together, then. Let’s say you leave and the community suffers for a while, then disintegrates and disperses to other Hasidic groups; maybe even-because of the trauma of your leaving-the members become assimilated into the modern world. Tell me what’s lost? A few fewer false beliefs knocking about in the world? The Valdeners end up being like my mother and me? Is that so bad?”

Azarya stared down at the table a while before he spoke.

“It’s tragic, a diminishment, when a people goes out of existence, a way of life, a culture, a language.” He spoke slowly, either from emotion or because he was thinking out his line of reasoning as he went. “But that’s not even the heart of it. No. The heart of it is the story of this people, my people, my Valdeners. You are who you are.” Cass saw with horror that Azarya’s eyes were welling. “Had my grandfather Rav Yisroel ben Rav Eliezer not fought with all his life to bring over as many Valdeners as he could in 1939, then there would be none living now, and even so he wept on his deathbed for the lives he hadn’t saved. That bloodline that every Valdener child can recite as easily as Shema Yisroel” - “Hear O Israel,” the iconic Jewish prayer-“would have ended in that burning shul if not for him. So how can I, Azarya ben Rav Bezalel ben Rav Yisroel ben Rav Eliezer, decide to be the executioner now? How can it be by my hand?”

He’s sixteen, Cass was thinking. Look at the quantities of agonized thought he’s poured into his paradox, and look at the living agony twisting itself out on his face right now, welling over in his eyes and making his upper lip tremble.

It was enough for one night, more than enough, and Cass said so. As they were getting up from the table, he couldn’t help putting his hand gently on Azarya’s shoulder, remembering, as he did so, how the Valdeners had kissed their prayer shawls and touched the child with them as if he were a living Torah as he was bounced around on his dancing father’s back.

“Azarya, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you so hard.”

“It’s for me wonderful to be able to share this with somebody. It’s a gift that you are taking my decision so seriously. Often I think maybe I’m taking it too seriously myself, that the world will go on whatever Azarya Sheiner decides to do. Still, a person takes his life seriously. A person has to live his life. Who else’s life is he supposed to live? Maybe together we’ll figure out how something that’s necessary but impossible can happen. We’ll collaborate on a solution.”

“It would be an honor to be your collaborator. And we’ll bring Professor Sinai on board, too, as a collaborator. Why don’t you bring him here tomorrow for dinner? I’ve still got piles of food from Tirza’s Batampte Kitchen. I’d like to meet the man whom Azarya Sheiner calls a gaon.”

Pascale was up in her study and Cass was in the kitchen, warming up the barbecued chicken and the potato kugel, when an excited Azarya arrived home with a burly man in heavy black-framed eyeglasses, his wavy black hair awkwardly mounding on random places of his head. He had the shy, uncomfortable grin that had probably not been revised since he was a child. He wore a green flannel shirt and an air of unkemptness, but it was hard for Cass to take him in because of a transformed Azarya beside him, holding three bunches of green-tissue-wrapped tulips in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other.

Before Cass had gotten a word out, Pascale came sashaying into the room, balanced on a spiky pair of red shoes that matched her lipstick. Her long black hair, the color of the rest of her outfit, was piled high on her head. She stopped cold at the sight of them.