Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“This was only an experiment, as you know. I’d been explicit, from the very start. You can’t deny that.”

“Of course not.”

“Look, Cass, I wish you well. No matter what I might think about the injustices of academia, I have been trained to accept facts as facts. It was only rational of you to take advantage of the current interest in religion and to work the contemporary traumas to your self-interest. You’ve done well for yourself, and I’m happy for you. But I don’t respect what you do, and the fact that you have now acquired more prestige than I have, when my work is so much more important, is not something I can tolerate. I can’t degrade myself by being regarded as your female companion, the pretty young woman at the inferior institution who will be patronized by the Harvard elite. To be with you is to have everything that is wrong with academia constantly rubbed in my face.”

She walks again to the bay window.

“Ah, the taxi’s here.”

Cass goes to pick up her suitcase.

“I’ll take it myself.”

“But you’re so tired. At least let me help you down.”

“I’m not tired anymore. Goodbye, Cass. I’ll call you about my things.”

She goes down the steps, and as he hears the front door close, he darkens the living room so that he can see her more clearly outside in the night.

The driver emerges from the cab, taking her suitcase and her computer bag, and Cass can see her halo of pale hair catching the gleam of the streetlight as she turns back and carefully fastens the latch: “Please close the gate, remember our children.” The taxi drives off, and Cass hears a keening wail, the counterpart of the laughter that had risen like vapor off of his joy, only this, he thinks, is the sound of solemn sorrow, until he realizes it’s the kettle boiling.

Cass drives into New Walden in the late afternoon of a wind-lashed day. The clouds are streaming across the sky, shadow and shimmer rippling over surfaces. It makes the ground look as if it’s in motion, as if it’s a carpet unfurling underfoot.

There’s still more than an hour until the sun goes down, but the Valdeners are already out en masse, dressed in their Shabbes finery, the sartorial and tonsorial splendor of the men in full display. The winds coming off the Hudson are playfully pulling on payess and kaputas , and married women are laughing almost audibly as they hold on to their wigs and hats, their high spirits verging on disregard for the rules of female modesty.

The Costco House of Worship, gargantuan as it is, has been outgrown, and there’s an additional warehouse of a synagogue constructed right behind it and the happy Hasidim are streaming in that direction. The streets are too clogged with walkers for Cass to drive on farther. He leaves his car not far from the parking lot where the mismatched buses are jammed, and continues on foot.

Everyone Cass passes gives him a smile and a hearty mazel tov , and he answers in-kind. Mazel tov literally means “good luck” but is the phrase pronounced on someone to whom something fortunate has happened. You say mazel tov to a Bar Mitzvah boy and his family, to someone who gets engaged or gets married or has a baby. Mazel tov is the all-purpose response to all the good things, big and small.

There are lots of out-of-towners visiting this Shabbes. Cass can tell by the garb of the men. It’s only the Valdeners who wear the knee-high black boots with their britches. Other sects wear long black stockings, with their black knickerbockers tucked in, and still others do the same only with white stockings, and still others let the bottoms of their pants extend over their socks. The Valdeners’ tradition of boots had derived from a compromise reached before a wedding, when the family of one side of the couple wore white stockings and the other side wore black.

The styles of kaputas and shtreimlach differ, too. Cass is hardly an expert at the semiotics of the sects, but he’s pretty sure there are a lot of Satmars, Belzers, and Bobovers. Even the Gerers are represented. There used to be a rift between the Valdeners and the Gerers, but this has been mended in recent years through the masterful diplomacy of the Valdener Rebbe.

The women and girls are less distinguishable. Cass thinks perhaps the other sects dress with a little more panache than the Valdeners, but this, too, takes a practiced eye, and when Cass is in New Walden he follows the mores and averts his eyes from females.

Cass is on his way to his brother’s house. It was when Jesse was, as they say, away, that he had found religion, or religion had found him. He had been visited by the Hasidim-not Valdeners but Lubavitchers, who have an outreach program for Jewish prisoners-and eventually he made his way back to New Walden, where he goes by his Hebrew name, Yeshiya.

Cass has to walk past the old Valdener synagogue to reach Jesse’s house, and the spectacle of masses of Hasidim converging as one has the convulsive effect on Cass it always does.

The likeness in attire is partially responsible. Cass may be able to pick out the subtle differences in hosiery between a Valdener and a Satmar, but the overall effect is of an undifferentiated mass of humankind, a category mistake that writhes with a life of its own, and Cass is never indifferent to it, no matter how well he understands the psychology behind his reactions.

The Friday-evening sun is descending behind those flitting clouds, and Cass is in a hurry to get to his brother’s house, but he pauses a moment in front of the Rebbe’s house to take in the scene, vibrating with kinetic men and boys rushing everywhere.

A little boy, blond and beautiful, about the age that Azarya had been when Cass had first met him, skips past him and lisps out a mazel tov in a shy soprano. The child’s face is flushed, his cheeks pomegranates of excitement. If Cass were to stop him and ask him what he was feeling, what would he say?

I’m happy, of course, he would say. I’m happy.

And if the little boy were to ask what he, Cass Seltzer, the atheist with a soul, is feeling, standing stock still in the middle of the commotion, what would he- say?

He’d say what he’s been saying all along. That his Appendix was only an appendix, and that it has little to do with the text; and that the text is written not out there but in here, in the emotions that are so fundamental that we spread them onto a world of our imagining, or onto a world of our making, so that we end up beholding a world that is lavished with our own disgust at the uncleanliness that pollutes us, and with our yearning for a mythical purity that remains untouched, and with our vertiginous bafflement at the self that is inviolably me and here and now, and with our desperate and incomplete sense of the inviolable selves of the others that we need so crucially, and with our fear of all that’s unknown out there and that can hurt us, and with our suspicion that almost everything out there will turn out to be unknown and able to hurt us.

The little boy has disappeared into the throng entering the synagogue. In Cass’s reverie, he’s still there, speaking in the voice of Azarya, peeking his head around a half-open door and shyly announcing that he can read English now, and in that voice he now asks him: and then what happens?

This is what happens, Cass answers him. All of this. The rituals of purification; and the laws of separation, with menner on one seit and froyen on the other. The communities that define themselves in distinction from others, and the hatred in those others who can burn them alive. The young people clashing over sensuality and piety, and the dreams of our bodies or our souls outwitting death. The longings for redemption and for redeemers, and our imbuing others with the perfection that escapes us. The elected circle of disciples, and the ordeals that try their faith, and the sinner born again as a Hasid, a pious man. The signs and the portents of the coming of the Messiah, and the descent into madness of the false messiahs. The forces of our soul that press us outward and dissolve the boundaries of the self and burst us open onto the world, so that all of existence feels the way New Walden feels to a Valdener, an intimate world that will embrace us in coherence and connection and purpose and love, and whose caring is no more open to doubt than is the Valdener Rebbe’s love for his own Valdeners.