36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  “Luckshen” is the Yiddish word for noodles, and it was the first time Cass didn’t find Roz’s laughter irresistible.

  X

  The Argument from the Purer Self

  Cass can’t believe his eyes as he makes the right onto the drive leading up onto Frankfurter’s hilltop campus. The overnight thaw has brought out the protesters, many of them pushing their luck in baggy shorts and flip-flops. If the fragrance in the air intoxicates Cass, the students are even more susceptible. The atmosphere of exulting giddiness is all over campus.

  There are tables with flyers, and kids with armbands holding up hand-lettered signs. It looks like the era of be-ins and walkouts, which Cass had been a bit too young to experience firsthand. In those days, too, springlike weather always enhanced the chances for student activism. Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February?

  Cass drives up the hill and passes the Ida and Howard Lowenstern Dorm, which, he notices, has paint-splattered banners hanging from some of the windows. One, in Hebrew, reads “!, Go Maccabees!”

  Cass flashes back to Roz’s hand-held sign yesterday, “Maccabees = Taliban.” Talk about taking on a sacred historical mythology! The Maccabees are the heroes of the Hanukkah story, the stirring tale told to Diaspora Jewish kids so they don’t feel so deprived missing out on Christmas. “Maccabiah” is the name given to countless color wars in Jewish summer camps and day schools, not to speak of the Olympic-type international sporting event held every four years in the state of Israel. “Maccabees = Taliban” are fighting words!

  The Maccabees were the Jewish liberation army that had fought against the Hellenistic Seleucid Dynasty of Antiochus IV in the second century B.C., a dynasty that had brought a Hellenized lifestyle to Palestine, including Greek philosophy, art, worship of the body, and a pantheon of raunchy gods.

  At the center of the ancient revolt had been a family of the priestly caste, the father, Mattathias, a rural religious leader with five sons. The entire armed resistance movement, the uniquely successful one in Jewish history until 1948, had taken on the name Maccabee. The word’s origin is a matter of scholarly dispute. Some thought it might be an acronym taken from the words of the Torah verse “Mi kamocha ba’elim Adonoi”: “Who is like unto you among the gods, O Lord!”—the battle cry of those anti-Greek Judaeans, and the slogan painted in blue on a bedroom sheet hanging between two windows of the Sophie and Hyman Dorfman Dormitory.

  There’s another sheet hanging almost directly under that one: “Toya !” It takes Cass a few moments to figure it out: “Toga Party!”

  Cass parks in the lot closest to the Katzenbaum Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center and walks across campus to the Nussbaum Administration Building. The campus has an air of festivity about it. Cass had never given it any thought before now, but the so-called Greek system does have elements harking back to ancient Greece, with its worship of physical beauty and athleticism, even the higher calling of Dionysian madness. The Greeks had loved their secret societies, too, not to speak of initiation rites.

  Now that Cass considers it, Roz’s equation of the Maccabees with the Taliban isn’t entirely off the mark. The Maccabees, in opposing Hellenism, were opposing cosmopolitanism. They were religious fundamentalists who might well have sympathized with the Taliban’s dynamiting of the Buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan, classics of Indo-Greek art that the religious purists decreed must go, since they had once been used as idols. Religious purity is at the heart of the Maccabee story, too, as symbolized by the central miracle of the Hanukkah story. When the Jews, having vanquished their enemies after three years of fighting, went to rededicate their holy temple, destroying the Greek statues and inscriptions, they sought some “undefiled” oil to light the lamp known as the N’er Tamid, the eternal light. They found enough for only one night, but it burned for eight days, which was just the time needed to purify a new batch, which is why Hanukkah is celebrated with a candelabra, the menorah, for eight days.

  As a psychologist of religion, Cass has given much thought to the longing for spiritual purity, its source in the primitive emotion of disgust.

  Disgust is so fundamental that it’s one of the six universal facial expressions (happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, disgust), all of them manifested on a baby’s face during the first few months of its life. The best theory is that disgust is a response evolved to protect the body from harmful ingestants, such as putrefying substances—often odious-smelling to us—as well as substances that are prime carriers of disease, like bodily excreta and parasitic insects and worms.

  The primitive emotion was adapted, by an almost metaphorical extension, to help out in solving the problems that are inherent in being a large-brained social animal. Other people can potentially harm us and so are perceived as potential defilers, and their practices or values are viewed as contaminated. And they—sometimes judged as individuals, and sometimes in swarming aggregate—can become elicitors of disgust. This went hand in hand with the evolution of the sense of our selves as immaterial souls distinct from our bodies—a purer self avoiding contamination by ever-more metaphorical defilers. So disgust is also triggered by upsetting reminders of our own embodiment—for example, contact with the decay of death, or with deviating sexual practices (so often described as animalistic), or with violations of the envelope of our bodies.

  So many of the taboos of the various religions can be traced back to the psychology of disgust, and to the antithetical notion, staking out the opposite neurobiological pole to the disgust response, of spiritual purity: the self’s removal from all of the disgusting aspects of the world.

  Cass thinks he sees the guy from yesterday, the protest-of-one that Roz had spotted at the side of the road. He’s no longer in his parka with his hood up, as he had been yesterday, and Cass sees that he’s wearing a yarmulke. He’s also no longer alone—there are three similarly head-geared young men with him, as well as two girls in ankle-length jean skirts, standing behind a table and giving out leaflets. The sign that’s draped over the table repeats his slogan of yesterday: “Nais gadol haya sham,” “A great miracle happened there.” The miracle of the oil. The beaker of purity.

  The Maccabees had cleared the holy temple of the defilement of alien values, of all signs of the pagan Greeks with their glorification of the human body as a thing of beauty. As Cass’s bubbe would have said, “Feh!”

  “Feh,” Cass suddenly realizes, is an expression of central significance in understanding the etiology of religion. “Feh” says a lot.

  In the president’s office there is a subdued air, or at least Bunny Bernstein, the president’s executive secretary, seems subdued. Bunny is usually a happy lark of a person, but she’s looking pinched today, the Botoxed space between her brows straining toward a frown.

  It occurs to Cass that this brouhaha must have been brewing even yesterday and was the reason for Shimmy’s having to skip their meeting. Bunny had apologized for Shimmy’s absence, telling Cass that they couldn’t be sure, but it looked as if there might be an unexpected event that the president had to make sure about.

  “Ah,” Cass had said, smiling, “unexpected events are always the hardest to make sure about.”

  “Isn’t that the truth,” Bunny had returned, her smile as wide as it could be in her largely immobilized face.

  Cass knows—everybody knows these sorts of things at Frankfurter, where personal privacy is about as easy to maintain as among the Onuma—that Bunny is one of Deedee Baumzer’s oldest friends, her sorority sister from Gamma Gamma Gamma, and over the years—perhaps because they frequent the same plastic surgeon—the two have come to look like honest-to-God sisters.

  Now that Cass has been on The Daily Show, Bunny always greets him with “Hey, Cass, have they invited you on
The Colbert Report yet?” But since she had just asked him that yesterday, she only asks him if she can get him some coffee as she shows him to a seat in the president’s well-appointed waiting room.

  Shimmy doesn’t keep Cass waiting more than three minutes, an unusual courtesy toward a faculty member. Even Bunny looks taken aback.

  As usual, Shimmy is dressed in an elegant suit that seems too tight in the shoulders and legs. Shimmy is a former Israeli paratrooper, and though the constant fêting of potential donors has thickened him around his middle, he still gives the impression that it’s pure muscle that’s bulging the suit. The suggestion of brute force he projects is almost as useful to him as his polished self-deprecatory charm, the paratrooper instincts he keeps out of sight until they’re required.

  As powerful as his image is, it never occludes Deedee’s. References to “Shimmy” are almost reflexively followed by “and Deedee,” and there is a sophomoric joke on campus that is not confined to the undergraduates:

  Question: You think Shimmy has been anyplace interesting recently?

  Response: Yes indeedee!

  Deedee is bodacious, blonde, and buxom, her teeth capped and her breasts implanted to perfection—the last a birthday present she gave herself when she turned forty. Her accent is the charming lilt of her native Texas. If she goes overboard in her armor-heavy jewelry, her manner is always gossamer-winged. Some had worried, when Shimmy was announced as the new president of Frankfurter eight years ago, that Deedee’s background might not altogether suit her to Frankfurter’s campus, but Shimmy and Deedee have worked together splendidly as Frankfurter’s first couple, and the fund-raising campaign has enjoyed unprecedented success.

  “Cass, Cass,” Shimmy greets him now, shaking his hand solemnly. This gesture, like the facial expression that accompanies it, is highly formal for Shimmy Baumzer, and Cass worries whether he’s going to be roughed up for his intention of defecting. Cass knows that Shimmy knows there’s no way he’s not going to accept Harvard’s offer. He’s not going to finesse Harvard’s offer into a sweeter situation here at Frankfurter, and he’s all but certain that Shimmy understands.

  Still, protocol requires that Shimmy flex those muscles underneath the bulging suit. He probably thinks that Cass would be insulted if he were to do anything less. Cass wishes that this entire procedure could have been dispatched by way of e-mail.

  “Hold all calls,” Shimmy commands Bunny.

  Shimmy’s accent, a harsh gurgle in the back of his throat, subtracts from the sense of elegance he projects. He ushers Cass into his huge beige office. There’s a table already laid out with a linen tablecloth, china plates, crystal goblets. Domes of steel are keeping the food warm.

  “I thought we’d have our lunch in here instead of going to the Faculty Club.”

  “That’s fine,” says Cass. “Perfect.”

  The whole outer wall of Shimmy’s ground-floor office is glass, looking out on the Plotnik Quad. Shimmy goes to the window and stands quietly, his arms awkwardly behind him, as if manacled in cuffs.

  “You saw the situation we have out there?” He casts his eyes at Cass. It’s extraordinary, but their color seems to have changed. They’re no longer those cold marbles of blue, but have muddied into brown and are rimmed with shadows that make them appear bruised. His jaw looks slacker, too, and there seems to be more room in the shoulders of his suit.

  Cass nods at Shimmy’s question.

  “So what do you think?” Shimmy asks lugubriously.

  “I can’t imagine it’s anything to take too seriously.”

  “No?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. The kids are just having a good time. It’s a beautiful day, and they’re using this as an excuse to play outside.”

  “They were playing outside, too, in May of 1970, when they broke down the door of this very building and occupied the president’s office for three weeks. They smoked his Havanas, and then wrote a letter to the Weedham Town Crier claiming that he was a secret Castro supporter.”

  “With all due respect, Shimmy, I don’t think today’s protests have attained quite that level of seriousness. This is hardly the Vietnam War that they’re protesting.”

  “Larry Summers thought he had tsuris? Believe me, I have bigger tsuris.”

  Shimmy lets the venetian blind fall with a clatter, blocking out the sunlight that had been streaming in. He indicates a seat at the table for Cass and then sits down himself. Bunny appears as if by telepathy and soundlessly removes the domes from the serving platters. There’s poached salmon, asparagus, wild rice. The wine is chilled and white and from the Golan Heights. Shimmy indicates that Cass should begin, though he himself just stares gloomily at the salmon on the serving plate.

  “It’s a volatile situation. A powder box. A tinder keg. It can get ugly fast.”

  “I don’t know, Shimmy. I just walked across the campus, and I didn’t pick up anything ugly. If anything, it’s impressive that the kids are putting the issue into some sort of historical context. You can look at it as a triumph of our educational policies.”

  Shimmy’s reaction is baffling. At nineteen, he’d been among the legendary paratroopers who had made their way into the Jordanian-held section of East Jerusalem in 1967 and had fought their way to the Wailing Wall. In 1973, Shimmy had led a battalion of soldiers across the Suez Canal and established a bridgehead that had allowed the Israelis to push on toward Cairo. And in 1976, he had helped plan the daring raid (it was always called “a daring raid”) at Entebbe in Uganda that freed one hundred hostages from a hijacked jetliner that had been on its way to Israel. What were a few frolicking students to a warrior like Shimmy Baumzer?

  Still, Cass is feeling increasingly uneasy about Shimmy’s distress. The president’s face seems gaunter, and an elegiac line in his upper lip is emerging. His accent no longer sounds incongruous. Instead, it’s the custom-tailored suit that seems the anomaly.

  “Deedee feels strongly about bringing the Greek system to Frankfurter. What can I say? Deedee feels strongly.”

  Cass nods. If Shimmy doesn’t know what to say, then he, Cass, certainly doesn’t know what to say either.

  “I’m being squeezed. Do you know what I’m saying, my friend? Squeezed between a hard place and a firing squad. I can talk to you like this. You’re an ally.”

  Cass nods.

  “You know, we have in common a good mutual friend. Mona Ganz.”

  Again, Cass nods. The truth is, he and Mona are no longer as close as they used to be. There’s been a cooling off since Lucinda and he have been together. Mona’s attitude toward Lucinda hasn’t softened. It’s one of those mysteries that Cass is content to leave unsolved.

  “I wouldn’t say that Mona has ever been indiscreet. Such a mindful friend would always be mindful of the loyalties of friendship. But from the little she’s told me, I think you understand the situation I’ve got here.”

  Now, what’s that supposed to mean? Better not to think about Mona’s exact words.

  “Do I think, my friend, that Frankfurter needs fraternities and sororities in order to be a real college, like, say, the University of Texas? Not necessarily.”

  Shimmy sighs, while raising his two hands, the palms open and upward, and his shoulders rising in a shrug: the eternal gesture of the existential resignation of the Yid.

  “To have first-rate faculty, faculty that can hold its own against any in the world, including in snooty Cambridge, Massachusetts, that has been my dream, waking, sleeping, day come, day go, morning, night, and noon. Nobody is going to set up tables and hand out flyers demanding that the administration explain itself if we are trying to make here a first-class faculty, with the Jew in the crown—no, what’s the expression? the jewel in the crown, the internationally celebrated author of The Illusion of the Varieties of Religion, a book which, I am not embarrassed to say, I quote at every opportunity, such an impression it has personally made on my way of thinking. And now, when I am squeezed—I know you’ll understand me, wit
h someone like you I don’t have to spell it out—with my own visions for Frankfurter on one side and other considerations on the other, what do I learn but that the jewel is in danger of being snatched up by the grasping hands of Harvard University? What’s the matter, they don’t have enough big shots there, they have to try to take away the little that we have?”

  The transformation that has come over Shimmy is extraordinary. He looks fragile, vulnerable, like someone whose childhood was spent dodging Cossacks in Poland rather than picking oranges and carrying an Uzi in a kibbutz outside of Jerusalem.

  “So tell me, my friend, what do I have to do to keep you from going over to those shmendriks up the river?”

  XI

  The Argument from Transcendental Signifiers

  The large suite of offices assigned to the Department of Faith, Literature, and Values had been part of Frankfurter’s enticement package to Jonas Elijah Klapper and were intended to be used for the international scholars he was authorized to invite with the generous discretionary funds the university had provided him. Jonas had used these offices for storage rooms, having Miriam Chan file the massive amounts of written matter that he had accumulated over the years. Jonas had saved everything for posterity, an inestimable boon for the future generations of scholars who would study him. His Nachlass reached all the way back to the wide-ruled machberet, the notebook in which he had formed his first Hebrew letters.

  Miriam was a methodical and efficient young woman, but the task was daunting, especially since Professor Klapper tended to snatch whatever she was about to file out of her hands, so that he could peruse it and share the background with her, such as the fact that when he arrived as a first-grader at P.S. 2 on Henry Street, on the Lower East Side (named the Meyer London School, after one of the founders of the Socialist Party of America and the first elected socialist congressman: there had followed a digression), he knew how to read, although nobody had taught him, certainly not his mother, who remained a stranger to the English language.