36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  And it came to pass in that house of judgment, amidst the humiliation heaped upon them, that the decree had come down. As they were being shown out—Jonas, six years old, supporting his prostrated mother—an ancient rabbi, hardly taller than little Jonas, had placed his opened palms atop the child’s head, and had shouted out, in the voice of the prophet, “Hoy, hat der kleiner ein moah godol uneshomo niflo’o!”—“Oh, the little one has such a great brain and a wondrous soul.”

  In an instant, the woman and her son had gone from being cast down to lifted aloft. Hannah Klepfish was the mother of a child of whom prophecies were foretold.

  The prophecy had unfolded on a day of jubilation when the letter of acceptance from Columbia University arrived at the Tillie E. Orlofsky projects on East Broadway. His blessed mother had danced—yes, whirled around like a Jewish maenad—on the faded but spotless kitchen linoleum. In her faded blue flannel bathrobe and her terry-cloth slippers, the cream she skimmed off from the top of the bottled milk smeared onto her face as a moisturizer, she had kicked up her legs in some jig she must have learned as a young girl back in Kishinev, Bessarabia. A simple woman who had never mastered the English language, who had had to ask Jonas to write his own “Please excuse my son’s absence” notes to his elementary-school teachers, Hannah Klepfish held the acceptance letter in her right hand and offered a corner to Jonas, so that they had danced together like a bride and groom in a Jewish wedding, only not with a white handkerchief dangling between them but with the paper embossed with the blue shield and the Latin words In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen—“In Thy light shall we see light.”

  She had lived to see her Jonas’s light spread throughout the world. He had become a professor at the great institution. Framed book jackets in every language papered the walls of her little apartment from floor to ceiling. He had never tainted her joy by disclosing the treachery of Great Britain.

  Also never mentioned were the mortifications closer to home that Jonas underwent. As the decades passed, Columbia University had shown itself increasingly unworthy, finally assuming the proportions of perfidy in its failure to recognize the singularity of his achievements.

  He had detested his colleagues. Oh, he had suffered, suffered, most especially when one of his mortal enemies, a most fearsome creature by the name of Harriet Horn (specialties: post-colonialism, gender and cultural studies), assumed the chair and proceeded to advocate positions for which no possible rationale could exist other than delivering hot irons to the exposed soul of Jonas Elijah Klapper. After every contentious department meeting, as he hurried away before anyone could detain him in chitchat, he would chant to himself a scrumptiously suitable verse adapted from the prophet Jeremiah:

  Oh, my suffering, my suffering!

  How I writhe!

  Oh, the walls of my heart!

  My heart moans within me,

  I cannot be silent;

  For I hear the blare of horns,

  Alarms of war.

  Disaster overtakes disaster,

  For all the land has been ravaged….

  In a moment, my tents have been ravaged.

  How long must I see [no] standards

  And hear the blare of horns?

  He had naughtily inserted the word “no” before “standards,” and taken what comfort he might, an epicerastic to temper the acrimony of the humors (cf. epikerastikos, Galen).

  He understood the nature of his trials: Where he trod, cosmic tremblings reverberated. Wherever he stood in the disputed terrain—whether it concerned syllabus reforms or the hiring of the latest imposter arrayed in foppish theory—that place became an arena for the hot conflict between heaven and hell engineered with a view toward universal issues. He had put his sufferings in their context, and he had endured.

  But at Frankfurter University he required no such quaffs from balance-restoring epicerastics. Aside from a generous salary, sabbaticals, and territory—an entire floor of office space—they offered him the best of all possible relations with his colleagues—which is to say, none at all. None! ! No Harriet Horns to barge in red in the face, brandishing a copy of The Collected Works of Transvestite Balladeers and bellowing about dead white males. Jonas could—he would!—pack his syllabi with nothing but dead white males! He need never attend another departmental faculty meeting again, not unless he called one—and then, being the sole faculty member, he could boycott! Frankfurter’s terms made him want to break out into a dance, into a wild Slavic kazachoc. Inside, he was dancing, squatting down and kicking out a right leg, a left, a right!

  To top it off, Frankfurter University had offered a taxonomic penthouse they would construct for his sole habitation. “Distinguished Professor,” the highest honor that was accorded a faculty member, was deemed incommensurate with Jonas Elijah Klapper’s stature. The title that was to be Jonas’s, and Jonas’s alone, in perpetuity, was Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values. If only that paragon of selfless maternality, who had been pitifully chained to the classification of an agu-nah, a deserted wife, had lived to see the change in academic nomenclature necessitated by her Jonas. And the signs and wonders had come pouring.

  And now another.

  The week after Roz’s emotional return from the Amazon, Cass went for his Tuesday meeting and found Marjorie Cutter sitting in the small office where Cass had expected to find the professor. Her face, normally stolid, was churned up with the agitated eagerness of a bystander at a fatal accident, and she placed her index finger vertically against her mouth, forming the crucifix of silence, and motioned for Cass to stay put. The door of the next office was closed, but Cass, following Marge’s urgent facial signals, listened, and an irate voice could be heard leaking through the wall.

  Cass couldn’t share in Marge’s fevered excitement about a confrontation of soap-opera proportions happening in real life and within hearing. On the contrary, he felt his innards clenching. For a few minutes, while the voices remained muffled, it was conceivable that there was nobody but Jonas Elijah Klapper in the next office, either talking on the phone or having a psychotic breakdown, but the raised voices soon partitioned into two.

  And suddenly there he was. He stood at the threshold, staring unseeingly, or so it seemed to Cass, his features distorted in that silent-film shriek of horror that recalled to Cass a moment he would just as soon have forgotten, when Klapper’s wrath over “Dover Beach” had nearly annihilated Cass. Professor Klapper pushed past Cass, who tried to retract himself, and elbowed Marge to reach for his briefcase on the floor near the desk. He said not a word and turned away to flee, but not before Cass had caught sight of the wild gleam of triumph snaking its way across his face.

  While Cass and Marge remained frozen like hands on a clock in a blackout, another apparition materialized at the threshold.

  The dean of the faculty, often accused of being a bloodless prig, was giving the lie to the accusation. Browning Crisp’s face was an apoplectic shade of red. He, too, stared unseeingly, or so it seemed to Cass, for several long moments.

  “That is the most impossible man on the face of the earth!” he finally announced, which was as out of character as the pounding blood in his face, since Browning was the soul of decorum, and it was hardly decorous for someone at a certain rank, in this case a dean, to address those at a lower rank, in this case a secretary and a graduate student, regarding a personage above them, in this case a professor, not to speak of an Extreme Distinguished Professor.

  “Professor Klapper?” ventured Marge in a small voice, hoping to push the dean to a few more indiscretions.

  “Indeed!”

  “You look like you’ve been given a terrible time,” Marge urged gently.

  “Well,” Crisp said, collecting himself, “I daresay I’ll recover.”

  The dean had gone to the Extreme Distinguished Professor to discuss his giving up some of his building space—he was using most of it for storage anyway—because it would be needed for the new brain and cognitive scienc
es center. Klapper had stared him down with the most intimidating of his glowers.

  “I shall not relinquish a cubit!”

  With his entreaty to Klapper’s sense of collegiality rebuffed, the dean reminded Jonas that the space belonged to the university. Brain science and cognitive science were dynamic and expanding fields. To stay in the first rank, Frankfurter had to allow them to grow. Harriet and Manny Katzenbaum had generously donated the funds for renovation if the university could come up with the available space. It was Browning’s responsibility as dean to allocate space according to the greater good of the university. Jonas’s underused offices were the logical option for the time being.

  Perhaps it was the word “logical” that had touched off the ensuing tirade. Klapper had insulted Browning Crisp up and down the canon, accusing him of being an academic apparatchik of the noetic nomenklatura, a moral Quisling who was reneging on the covenant of trust and who would be reduced, if he were remembered at all, to an ignominious footnote in the history of Jonas Elijah Klapper.

  At this point, Browning Crisp lost his own temper and wielded his decanal power. There was no more negotiation: some of Jonas’s space would be taken away. Klapper told him that in that case he would resign. It may have been said in the heat of the moment, but Browning Crisp was going to hold him to it.

  Jonas had shown, under the circumstances, the restraint of a saint. The insult was historic. They were proposing not only to reduce his square footage but to bestow the stolen property on his sworn enemies. These were the illiterate mob intending to trample out intellectual and spiritual life as Jonas Elijah Klapper had known and shaped it, the light-spun span of all the faith, literature, and values of the ages. This brain and cognitive sciences center represented the worst of scientism, for it had set its sights on the study of Man. “Go, wond’rous creature! mount where Science guides, / Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; / Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, / Correct old time, and regulate the Sun”—but keep your filthy fingers off the study of Man! This was but a small share of his thoughts on the matter that he had seen fit to impart to the odious dean of faculty.

  The ex–Extreme Distinguished Professor hadn’t gotten in touch with any of his graduate students, nor had anyone from the administration. At the designated time, the seven of them were assembled round the seminar table, awaiting the Sublime, the Subliminal, and the Self.

  Vague rumors had reached them, but they were uncertain of everything. It fell to Cass to tell them quietly of the scene that he had witnessed, and they received the news in wounded silence. The few desultory speculations concerned where he might go next, and they along with him.

  “He could go anywhere.”

  “Not Great Britain.”

  “Well, of course, not there.”

  “He could always go back to Columbia. I’m sure Columbia would be thrilled to have him back.”

  “It would be good to go back to New York.”

  “Who knows where it will be? We could end up almost anywhere in the world.”

  “It’s kind of exciting. Disorienting but exciting.”

  “You have to expect the unexpected with Jonas.”

  They sat there for the full two and a half hours of the seminar, long after they had given up on Professor Klapper’s appearing, feeling that it would be disloyal to leave before the allotted time was over. When Cass left them, they were heading as one toward the View from Nowhere.

  XXVI

  The Argument from Chosen Individuals

  Cass had decided against informing Klapper of his change of plans. He would go and speak to the dean of graduate students. His hope was that some other Frankfurter department would accept him. He had some ideas about what he wanted to study. But Cass received word from Klapper himself, a scrawled note left in his box summoning him.

  Cass wasn’t sure in which of the two offices he’d find him. The door to the smaller of them was ajar, and Klapper was sitting at his desk, calmly writing. He didn’t turn at the sound of Cass’s footstep, so Cass knocked on the open door, and the professor turned around in slow motion.

  “Ah, Reb Chaim. Take a seat.”

  Jonas Elijah Klapper was smiling, and Cass recalled that inexplicable gleam of triumph that had vied with righteous fury for control of the professor’s face, as if the screaming match with Browning Crisp was the realization of all that he could hope for.

  “So, Reb Chaim, here we are!”

  Cass nodded. Professor Klapper’s face looked almost glazed with well-being.

  “But not for long,” Klapper continued in response to Cass’s nod. “I shall soon be departing Frankfurter University. Indeed, I am going to a distant land. I shall be telling you where before too long. There are things I cannot yet say. I am enjoined to preserve the silence of the Dura Valley, or, to paraphrase the Valdener Rebbe, the silence of the Hudson Valley.”

  The creases in his pate that had been pressed into place by ceaseless cerebration were smoothed, the blued shadows that mottled his jowls and the half-circles beneath his eyes were lightened, his coloring, usually cement-gray, was roseate, and even the down slope of his eye seemed raised several degrees. Perhaps this was the face of beatitude.

  “The Valdener Rebbe, may his name be blessed, spoke to me in the allegorical mode, this being the only means by which certain things may be imparted, a threefold interpretation being customary. And so it was that the Rebbe spoke of the special-needs children in the community. These children are beloved of God and yet separated from Him through no fault of their own. They lack the means to find their way through the sacred paths of learning. I alone, the Rebbe said, of all the men whom he had ever met, had the connections to help these children.

  “‘The special-needs children of the community’ refers to the nation of Israel in exile, and the connections of which he spoke became clearer to me as he went on.

  “He spoke of a child, one child. ‘On such a child I never dreamt to rest my eyes.’”

  Klapper was a good mimic. Cass could hear the Rebbe’s voice lurking beind Klapper’s.

  “He called the child ‘my son,’ and as he spoke his eyes glistened with the purity of his tears. ‘Abraham despaired of a son, and then Isaac was born. Hannah, too, despaired of a son. She went with her husband to the temple at Shiloh and prayed with such ardor that Eli the priest thought she must be drunk or out of her mind and wanted to throw her out.’”

  And though Cass knew that Klapper’s eyes would move inexorably in the direction of the photograph, when they did he had to resist the urge to flee.

  “‘I, too, knew such despair.’” He was still speaking in the Rebbe’s voice. “‘And as it is written of the Arizal, the lion of S’fat, so it was with the child. The child grew and was weaned and was brought to school and learned more and faster than any child his own age, following in the footsteps of Isaac on the way to Moriah.’”

  Cass’s desire to flee had grown so urgent that he could feel it as a physical sensation spreading through his limbs.

  Klapper had now sunk into profound reflection, and Cass cautiously began to rise from the green metal chair.

  “Stay!” Klapper bellowed.

  Cass sat down swiftly.

  “I have alluded to the fact that I shall shortly be leaving these shores. It will not surprise you to learn that I shall be going to the holy city of S’fat, where my footsteps have always been pointed. In a manner of speaking, I am going into exile, at least for some years. I can take only one student with me. I have chosen you.”

  “Me?”

  “You seem surprised. I wonder why. Perhaps it is the humility of the true disciple.”

  “But what about the others? What about Gideon Raven? He’s been studying with you for almost thirteen years. He understands your ideas better than anyone.”

  “Gideon is a more-than-adequate student of my past. But you, Reb Chaim, shall be the student of my future. You have already had a taste of the bitterness of exile. I had a divina
tion concerning you, even before I knew who you were, and I tested you. You are aware of what I allude to?”

  “‘Dover Beach’?”

  Klapper’s smile was benedictory, and he nodded once.

  “I have too soft a heart and could not extend your trial too long. You see how nothing is as it seems? In a moment of abject humiliation, the loftiest of futures can be received. As Hannah and her son were lifted aloft, so, too, the tested student.”

  Even Roz was stunned when Cass related this conversation with Klapper.

  “S’fat? Where the hell is S’fat?”

  He had gone to her place on Francis Avenue, hoping to find her there. She answered the door in a purple towel, her hair dripping wet. She had gone for a late run and had just gotten out of the shower.

  “It’s in Israel. It’s where the Jewish mystics congregate. One of the hot spots.”

  He wished that she didn’t go running at night. She was fearless, and he loved that about her, but he also worried.

  “The Hot S’fat!” she said, laughing.

  It would be wonderful to take care of her. She was a woman, even if she was Suwäayaiwä, and he wanted to take care of her.

  “It’s not really funny.”

  She was beautiful and brilliant, strong and immensely kind.

  “It’s not?”

  And she loved with such force. She had loved Tsetse, and she loved Azarya, and she loved him, too. She loved Cass Seltzer.

  “He wants to take me along with him. Only me. None of the others. Not even Gideon. He’s abandoning them all.”

  As wild and unpredictable as she was, she was always on his side. That was and would always be predictable. And he was on hers. Even without always getting what her side was, he knew with certainty that he’d be on it, and she’d be on his.

  “What a shit. Still, you have to admit it’s all for the best.”

  What a thing it is in this world to have somebody always on your side.

  “I hope Gideon sees it that way. I worry that he’s about to become the most disappointed man in the world.”