36 Arguments for the Existence of God (20 page)

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, with 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?”

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.

“How I came by the knowledge remains to this day shrouded in mystery,” he whispered to Miriam.

Also mysterious was how everything about his cramped Columbia office had been preserved, right down to the spiky plant on the windowsill,
which had been dead for years. The very arrangement of the clutter on Professor Klapper’s desk was duplicated, with space cleared for the photograph of his mother in its ornate silver frame. The wooden-slatted chair into which he was poured was either an exact replica of what he’d had at Columbia or had been transported along with the desiccated crown of thorns.

There were times when a student, sequestered with the professor, would encounter him in a rare mood of confidentiality, as if Jonas Elijah Klapper were suddenly made aware of the loneliness of his loftiness, grown weary of the constant burden of delivering himself ex cathedra. The realization would leave him eager to talk as others do, personally and intimately. The identity of the student was inconsequential. One simply had to be there when the mood struck, and today was Cass’s lucky day.

“I am not a preterist—that is, one whose chief interest and delight are in the past. As must anyone who regards with seriousness the es-chatological idea that scaffolds the strata of the greater metaphysics, I point my face resolutely toward the future. And yet the past—I speak here of the personal past—has a power over the present. The past haunts the present with the taunt of what is gone. As Tennyson so irrefutably put it, ‘And Time, a maniac scattering dust, / And Life, a Fury slinging flame.’”

The last line was whispered in a voice so tremulous and faint that Cass wasn’t certain whether the last word was “flame” or “fame.”

Cass was here, by appointment, to plot the course of his study for the next few years. Professor Klapper was insistent that his graduate students not be required to take any of their courses in other Frankfurter departments. Indeed, he strongly warned against it. But since he was the solitary professor in the Department of Faith, Literature, and Values, and since he taught only one seminar a semester, the professor’s position had presented the dean of graduate students with a technical problem—to wit, how are the students in this department to fulfill the course requirements for the Ph.D.? The problem for now related only to Cass Seltzer, since the other Klapper students had long ago fulfilled their course requirements. The plan arrived at was that there would be an extensive
syllabus, still to be constructed, that would cover all the best that had been written regarding faith, literature, and values. Cass had already embarked on faith. Professor Klapper had assigned him
The Book of Mormon
by Joseph Smith. Cass had no idea why.

But today the snow was falling on the campus outside and making all seem hushed and transformed, eerily reminding one, as in the distortions of dreams, of something that turns out to be simply itself; and Jonas Elijah Klapper had forgotten all about matters of syllabi. He was in a reminiscent frame of mind, full of mourning for all the lost paradises, which are, as Proust has so indispensably reminded us, the only paradises that there are.

It was a Friday, and the haunting taunt was of the many years of congenial Fridays that Jonas Elijah Klapper had passed among the select society that would meet in the hidden mews near Washington Square Park, behind the heavy green door of NYU’s Deutsches Haus. This was where the elected members of the New York Institute of the Humanities attended talks by the crème de la creamy New York intelligentsia, preceded by greasy food and even greasier gossip. How he had loved to dish with Susan Sontag.

“Did you know that she was born Susan Rosenblatt?” Jonas Elijah Klapper had confided, mashing his chin down toward his chest, so that his jowls fanned out like an Elizabethan ruff. “Yes, Susan Rosenblatt,” he continued. “‘Sontag’ was the name of her mother’s second husband. She did not like the new dad on the scene, but even at the tender age of twelve she was exquisitely attuned to the tyrannical demands of literary ambition.”

Cass nodded.

“Which brings to mind another fearless female riding bareback on the bucking beast of ambition, the estimable Laura Reichenthal. Oh, do not look so stricken, Mr. Seltzer! I do not expect you to be familiar with
that
name. However, I would be very much surprised to learn that you’d not heard of Laura Riding”—Cass hadn’t—“the poetess paramour of the superior poet Robert Graves, and enmeshed in the conception of his authentically brilliant
White Goddess
, in which he wrote these words, which I quote from Appendix B: ‘Do I think that poets are literally inspired
by the White Goddess? That is an improper question. What would you think should I ask you if, in your opinion, the Hebrew prophets were literally inspired by God? Whether God is a metaphor or a fact cannot be reasonably argued. Let us likewise be discreet on the subject of the Goddess,’ a subtle point which has not, alas, been influential. Well, let us be discreet, too, regarding the physical description of the Goddess, ‘a lovely slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowanberries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair.’ That hooked-nose damsel is Laura Reichenthal, whose first marriage was to a man named, I believe, Gottschalk, which hardly suited, and she simply plucked the name ‘Riding’ from thin air, though I suspect there was metaphor behind it.”

As far as Cass could tell, Professor Klapper was saying that a poet named Laura Reichenthal had changed her name to Laura Riding.

“I adduce one more example to bring it up to the magic three of poetic enchantment: the sad-eyed bon vivant and haut wit of the fabled Algonquin Round Table of the New York literary scene of several decades past. I refer, of course, to Dorothy Parker, who was born Dorothy Rothschild, no relation in the least to the banking-and-finance dynasty, which established branches across Europe and was ennobled by both the Austrians and the British. Dorothy’s family were sans ‘von.’ She married a stockbroker named Edwin Pond Parker II and kept him on for barely two years, explaining that she had married him to escape her name.”

There was no escaping the suggestion that Professor Klapper’s chosen subject, for the moment, seemed to be name-changing.

“It is not ethnicity per se, you understand,” Professor Klapper said, as if reading Cass’s mind. “Consider, for example, the writer, both original and soporific, Gertrude Stein. Hers is a name that requires no more. It is, in its own way, perfect, as is that of the mustachioed Alice B. Toklas. But this is not always so, and there is no shame in availing oneself of remedial renaming. If a motion-picture hussy, whose vocabulary ceased developing long before her bosom, can avail herself of cognominal improvements, why not we who are the very stuff of words? That avatar of self that bears the full weight of one’s reputation, that transcendental signifier
by which one sallies forth into the world even when one’s self is not present, is none other than one’s name. Would you permit me to be rather more direct?”

Cass nodded.

“Your name.”

“My name?”

“Yes, I wonder if it isn’t too … effervescent.”

“Effervescent?”

“Indeed. I have to confess that I myself had a good chuckle when I first came upon it on the class roster.”

Something odd was happening to Jonas Elijah Klapper’s face. His muscles were seizing up in violent spasms, his contorted cheeks were stained with tears. Cass became frightened until the sounds escaping from his everted mouth revealed that Jonas Elijah Klapper was laughing.

“Oh, I
am
sorry! I have a wicked sense of humor! But you do catch the gist of what it is I am saying? If even I cannot contain my merriment at your fizzing appellation, then what can we expect of others? Have you considered, Mr. Seltzer, the possibility of adapting it?”

“No.” Cass didn’t know what his precise emotion was, but he could feel the fire under his skin.

“I submit you think upon it. You might, for example, take Cass as your last name.”

“Then what would my first name be?”

“Do you have, perchance, a Hebrew name?”

“Chaim.”

Jonas Elijah Klapper opened his eyes very wide.

“Were you aware of its meaning?”

“Life, isn’t it?”

“‘Lives.’ Its gematria value is thirty-six, which is twice eighteen, which is the gematriac value for ‘life.’ Thirty-six is of a hiddenness that sustains existence.”

Cass knew that the letters in the Hebrew word
chai
, meaning “life,” could also be read as the number eighteen, which is why Jews often write Bar Mitzvah gift checks in multiples of eighteen. But beyond that
he didn’t know what Professor Klapper was talking about. He would ask Gideon.

“And yet, for all that, ‘Chaim Cass’ is not quite right. What, might I ask, was your mother’s maiden name?”

“Sheiner.”

“Better, but not much.”

Klapper leaned back into his slatted chair. It had a thick green cushion on it. Cass stole a glance at the photograph of the professor’s mother, who had been named, Cass now had every reason to believe, Hannah Klepfish.

“I have it!” Klapper announced. Was his adviser about to baptize him? “I know where it was that I’ve heard that name Sheiner before. The name of Sheiner is ablaze with majestic luster. It is the dynastic name of the Chief Rabbi of the Valdener Hasidim, a small sect whose leader can trace his lineage back to the inflamed visionary who channeled the Kabbalism of Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century lion of esoteric Judaism also known as the Arizal, into a more accessible populist venue, and who became the founder of the single most important religious revision in Judaism, by which I mean Hasidism. Hasidism grew into a mass reaction against the abuses of the Pharisaic normative tradition. There are a plurality of Ha-sidic sects, each led by its own charismatic Grand Rabbi—or Rebbe, as he is wont to be called. I refer, of course, to Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the holy Ba’al Shem Tov or Master of the Good Name, also abbreviated into the appellation the Besht, back to whom all Hasidic sects trace themselves. The Ba’al Shem Tov’s past is shrouded in legend, as befits a legendary figure of his proportions, but he was most likely born in 1700, and in the small Ukrainian village of Okop. He was an orphan, who dressed and comported himself like an ignorant peasant while he went off to the forests to commune with cosmic forces. Nobody guessed his singular holiness. He finally revealed himself to the world when he was thirty-six. Had you any idea?”

Of which aspect of the preceding sequence was his adviser asking had he any idea? Cass opted for the concrete.

“Well, yes. My mother was born into a Valdener family. She’s related to the Valdener Rebbe. I used to visit New Walden as a child.”

Jonas Elijah Klapper shot forward in his chair so that he was half hanging
off it. His facial expressions sometimes mimicked a silent-film actor. At this moment, you could almost hear Cecil B. DeMille shouting through his horn, “Show us amazement!”

“So, then, you, too, can trace your lineage back to the holy Ba’al Shem Tov?”

“Well, yes, I guess I can. I never really thought about it.”