36 Arguments for the Existence of God (28 page)

Marge had been in the navy after high school and seemed to Cass still to have a military no-nonsense-ship about her. She could hold her own with the professors, including Jonas Elijah Klapper, who didn’t scare her, even when he got grouchy. “I think it’s just his blood sugar that gets low, and I keep a bunch of those butterscotch candies that he loves on my desk and just hold them out to him when he gets cranky and he calms down,” she’d tell the other secretaries. But she had a soft spot for some of the students, and Cass was her favorite, as good a kid as she had ever met outside the military.

“Isn’t he there?”

He shook his head. She picked up the phone and dialed the professor, letting it ring for a while.

“He might have stepped out to the gents’,” she’d said. “Why don’t you wait here a bit.”

But it was quite a bit more than a bit, since Cass had asked her if that adorable little blonde girl with the wide grin that showed the missing tooth was her daughter, and learned that it was Krista, her daughter Kim-berly’s daughter, and then he was shown more photos—it was like looking at a depressing time-lapse sequence go from bright-eyed, pigtailed Krista, to slack-jawed, slatternly Kimberly, to slit-eyed, triple-chinned Marjorie—and heard how Marge had had to take them in, Krista and Kimberly and Kimberly’s good-for-nothing layabout husband (Cass didn’t learn his name, though he did learn his brand of beer), and build on to the back of her house so that they wouldn’t be out on the street, and now she didn’t know when she would be able to retire, though it was all worth it for Krista, who was the sunshine of her life. After about forty-five minutes, Cass asked whether he should try Professor Klapper’s door again, since he was expected there, and Marge let him go, but not before forcing him to take a handful of butterscotch candies.

Cass hadn’t checked with Marge the next week, when Professor Klapper hadn’t answered Cass’s knock again, but the week after that, Cass had found the office door open, the professor sitting at his desk and reading. Professor Klapper had looked up startled at Cass’s knock, peering at
him intently over his bifocals before telling him where he might find the chair, which Cass, after a moment of hesitation, interpreted as an invitation to sit.

“That Moses Maimonides would be highly esteemed within normative Judaism was by no means a foregone conclusion,” Professor Klapper had launched in, even before Cass had finished unfolding the metal chair. “Maimonides, after all, was the rabbi who performed the mixed marriage between the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover and Yahweh. Be that as it may, Maimonides has been pronounced kosher, gathered, as it were, into the folds of the four-fringed garment. Maimonides lived in trying times— indeed, when have great men not? He was a physician who ministered to no less a personage than the Sultan Saladin, and his prescription for the Jewish soul was a large pill of Thirteen Principles that he said all Jews must swallow if they are to merit entrance in the world to come. I myself have always queried whether belief could be prescribed—take thirteen and call me in the morning—but, then, I am by nature querulous.

“The twelfth principle concerns the Messiah, in whose coming we are adjured to believe: ‘He who doubts or diminishes the greatness of the Messiah is a denier in all the Torah.’ And yet he forbids one to think on the time when he shall come: ‘You should not calculate times for him to come, or look in the verses of the scriptures to see when he should come.’ And where does that leave us?”

Cass was well aware by now that these questions were not intended to be answered, but the slim possibility that this one could be the exception, and the professor was awaiting a response, was always enough to set up a raucous commotion in his chest.

“We must believe that he will come but never believe that he
is
come. There is no Messiah but an uncome Messiah. Is it not extraordinary?”

Cass nodded.

“At the heart of the cold Aristotelian rabbi’s exegesis, the bloodred blossom of antinomian chiasmus. And can you not help but compare it with the observation of the poet who might have been giving voice to his Jewish ancestry when he proclaimed that the only paradise is paradise lost?”

Cass was pretty sure that Professor Klapper was talking about Proust here; but was Marcel Proust Jewish?

“But my concern here is not with Proust per se, and it is only the striking
parallelism that has brought me to Proust, raised a Roman Catholic, though born of a Jewess”–ah!—“and though Marcel was as devoted a son as any Jewish mother could have desired, who, in renouncing the hell’s fire of sexual passion, implied that the only authentic love is for the woman who gave one the gift of one’s life, the gift of one’s genius”— Klapper paused here several long moments, his trembling eye focused on the silver-framed picture on his desk—“yet, though he was a model Jewish son, he was
not
a self-identifying Jew and was unfamiliar with any of the canonical Jewish texts, though of course one cannot be certain, the presence of knowledge being easier to ascertain than its absence. And yet who would deny that Proust’s pronouncement is a temporal transposition of the Maimonidean position that the only Messiah is an uncome Messiah?”

Klapper settled an inquisitorial stare upon Cass, and this time he really seemed to be wanting an answer, and what could be offered in answer to his last question other than “Nobody?”

“Reb Chaim!” Professor Klapper cried out, and Cass’s heart heaved so hard his shirt collar might have perceptibly moved.

“It all reminds me of a Hasidic tale, in the tradition of wisdom storytelling which you, Reb Chaim, with your exalted lineage, will be able to appreciate on multitudinous strata. An innkeeper and his wife are awakened in the middle of the night by the heartrending sobs of one of the guests. He goes to investigate, entering the room of sobbing and finding there a simple Jew, barefoot and dressed like a peasant, sitting on the cold wooden floor and weeping. There is nothing about him to betray the fact that he is a renowned Hasidic master, traveling incognito in order to see the state of the world. Each night at midnight, he climbs out of bed and mourns the destruction of the Holy Temple and the scattered nation of Israel. ‘Why the tumult, my good man?’ inquires the distressed innkeeper. ‘What calamity has befallen you?’ ‘I cry over our Diaspora and the suffering it has wrought, and I beseech the Almighty to send the Messiah, who will restore the kingdom and return us to the Holy Land.’”

Klapper rocked his upper body back and forth as he spoke the master’s words, impersonating the motions of Orthodox Jews in prayer, and the thick layer of posh that usually overlaid his pronunciation was temporarily removed, leaving bare the cadence of the Tillie E. Orlofsky projects
on East Broadway, itself an echo of the singsong cadence of Eastern Europe.

“The innkeeper is relieved. ‘Is that it? You’d had me worried! I thought maybe my wife’s beet borscht had, God forbid, been off. Just try to keep your holy wailing down so that you don’t disturb the other guests.’ The good man goes back to his bedroom and explains the situation to his wife. Five minutes later, he’s back at the master’s door. ‘My wife sent me to ask you whether, when the Messiah comes and restores us to the kingdom of Israel, we will be allowed to take our chickens with us.’ The master is taken aback by the question. ‘Chickens? As far as I’m aware, it doesn’t say anything about chickens. You might have to leave your chickens here when the Messiah comes.’ ‘I’ll tell my wife.’ Five minutes later, there’s another knock on the door. ‘My wife requests that you please not pray anymore for the Messiah to come. We are doing fine here and would prefer to stay with our chickens.’ The master is confounded by this reaction. ‘What do you mean, you are doing fine? Don’t you know how precarious our exile is? At any moment the Cossacks could arrive and take your chickens, your wife, all your money, and even your life! Are we not better off in our Promised Land?’ The Rebbe’s words make sense to the innkeeper, but he still has to inform his wife. Five minutes later, another knock. ‘My wife requests that you pray for the Messiah to come and take the Cossacks to the Land of Israel—so we can stay here with our chickens.’”

Klapper’s face was completely deadpan as he finished the tale, and Cass, who was certain the story was supposed to be as funny as he found it, was uncertain whether Jonas Elijah Klapper agreed. The uncertainty choked the laughter somewhere around his epiglottis, but not before a smile briefly fanned out.

“You smile, Reb Chaim. And, indeed, there is a comical element, brought to bear by the risibility of the word ‘chickens.’ Retell the tale with the substitution of ‘cattle’ for ‘chickens’ and the humor will substantially diminish. The wife’s poultry-centric worldview signifies the untenability of the Maimonidean position. The presence of ‘chickens’ is a shrewd evocation of the absurd, similar in ploy to the koans of Zen Buddhism, which, I presume, make you smile as well.”

Cass nodded.

“The absurd is here employed as a means to incite the Messianic exigency, kept alive in Judaism only by the subversive counter-modality of Hasidism, against the establishment effort to contain the destabilizing energies of Messianism. I here but follow the explication of the preeminent secular authority on Qabalah, Yehuda Ickel, who maintains that the Qabalist embrace of the insurrectionist ideal of the non-tarrying Messiah was the deepest point of conflict with the mainstream rabbis, who would have us believe wholeheartedly in a Messiah so long as he is not here! The true Hasid believes that if his own Rebbe is not the Messiah— or Moshiach, as he is called in Hebrew, and which literally means ‘the anointed one’—then maybe his brother-in-law’s Rebbe is Moshiach.”

Again, there was that inquisitorial stare, demanding at the very least a question.

“So Hasidim all believe their own Rebbe is the Messiah?”

“The point I am making, Reb Chaim, is that for the Hasid the Messiah will not present a rupturing of history, with the ordinary giving way before the extraordinary. For the Hasid, the ordinary is already brimming with the extraordinary, or, to put it in plainer terms, the extraordinary is immanent within the ordinary as the ordinary is immanent within the extraordinary, and the role of the Messiah, who is a man both more ordinary and more extraordinary than all others, is to reveal the divine depths of the extraordinary-cum-ordinary. As shall become, I trust, manifest to you on our next voyage to New Walden—which, I am sure you concur, ought to occur on the holy Sabbath day, so that we can experience the Valdener Hasidim in their full glory, from sundown to sundown. I leave the practical arrangements to you. I request only that this time the Rastafarian not accompany us.”

Since Roz was in the Amazon for several weeks with Absalom Garibaldi, Professor Klapper’s request that she not come along with them on this second trip to New Walden was easily met.

Professor Klapper had instructed Cass to pick him up at his house at noon, sharp. Cass had been so nervous about getting lost or hitting traffic or encountering any contingency that might make him late that he had gotten to the house on Berkeley Place at eleven-twenty and parked the car in front, happy to lean back and wait out the forty minutes in the rented Lincoln Continental. Cass had made certain to reserve the same car, since Professor Klapper had remarked on its roominess and solid feel, once Rox had been safely restrained in the back. The sidewalk leading to the front porch was poetic with daffodils. Could Jonas Elijah Klapper himself have had them planted, in homage, perhaps, to Wordsworth’s jocund company? But then one of Klapper’s students would have been made to ply the spade. They were always called upon to take over the tasks the professor knew better than to request of the naval verteran, Marjorie Cutter. The daffodils must have come with the house.

He hadn’t been there for more than five minutes before the front door opened and a towering figure stepped forth, and all the world went reeling, the thirty-odd areas of the primate brain devoted to interpreting visual input—especially the circuits that neuroscientists call the “What” system—struggling to apprehend what it was that Cass was seeing, and while they were struggling, Cass heard background laughter that was in-furiatingly familiar, though he couldn’t quite identify it—no, wait a minute, that was Roz’s laughter that his overworking brain was imagining as the reaction to what it still couldn’t assemble into an image that could cohere with the web of his beliefs, starting with his belief that he
wasn’t given to visual hallucinations in the brightness of nearly noon on a perfect spring day, the crowd of daffodils nodding on a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that looked so unmistakably like a street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, except for the phantasm manifesting itself in gleaming black leather boots into which the bottoms of its pants were tucked, which was enfolded into a capacious iridescent black satin caftan, which was ornamented with a jet-black velvet strip of paisleys and curlicues, tied with a wide and long satin sash encircling it right under its belly, and a snow-white dress shirt, buttoned to the top, emerging above the collar of the caftan to choke the monumental neck that supported a head swathed in a halo of the dimensions of those golden auras that encircle Jesus and the saints in Quattrocento paintings, only this nimbus was made of dead animals and was lodged more firmly and lower down on the pate of the author of twenty-eight books and the object of literary reverence the world over with the exception of Great Britain.