36 Arguments for the Existence of God (32 page)

From his tier he could look down on the
tish
, where now he could discern the Rebbe—a lone spot of color in the vastness of black. The Rebbe was resplendent in his unique
kaputa
—a
tish bekeshe
—blue velvet shot through with gleaming gold, and his
shtreimel
may not have exceeded all others—the one on the head of the Hasid next to him rivaled it in luxuriance—but the gold from the
kaputa
emanated outward with a quickening glow, so that everything about the Rebbe seemed more vibrant. The Rebbe’s chair, too, was magnificently regal, a throne of elaborately carved wood the soft brown of a pecan and upholstered in red velvet.

The black-clad men around the
tish
held hands and swayed, the Rebbe bisecting the ring so that both sides swayed inward toward him. The Hasid sitting to the right of the Rebbe, the one with the rivaling
shtreimel
, was as eerily familiar to Cass as the haunting song that he was singing. Like the
niggun
, Cass knew that Hasid with an immediacy and intimacy that defied explanation.

No, it didn’t defy explanation. There in the seat of honor beside the Rebbe was Jonas Elijah Klapper.

The singing changed to a different melody, slower and sadder, and the Rebbe’s eyes were closed. He gestured expansively, shrugging his shoulders, his palms facing upward and then downward, then pointing an index finger out toward the Hasidim, and then upward into the heavens, as the tune slid out of its mournful key and ascended into a soaring, ecstatic scale, bursting the constraints of mere sound, and the rows and rows of Valdeners were jumping, like one large organism they rose upward and returned to earth in perfect unity, it was a rapturous intermingling of melody and movement, the heat in the room, the density of all the people, only driving the exultation further in its ascent, and Jonas Elijah Klapper, too, had his eyes closed, there beside the Rebbe swaying, and his own shoulders also doing a dance of little shrugs and rolls, and his lips moving as if he knew the words, as maybe he did, the capacious repository that was his mind would continually astonish, two visionaries, side by side, emanations of the extraordinary, so that even when the singing subsided, and the room stopped bubbling with ecstatic men, and
they quieted on a single sustained note and took their seats in unison, as if by unvoiced command, the silenced melody still hung in the air as the Rebbe began to speak.

He was speaking in Yiddish, loud enough so that each syllable could be heard by the Valdeners up in the rafters, in the very last tiers, and Cass was pressed not only by the men on either side of him but from behind as well, the Hasid behind him placing his hand on Cass’s shoulder, leaning forward, so that Cass, too, leaned forward, placing his hand on the Hasid in front of him, the entire room of Valdeners were fused into one and pressing down toward the
tish
, where the Rebbe spoke his words that were somehow so penetrating in their pronunciation that Cass, who knew only a few words of Yinglish, felt that he could somehow understand what the Rebbe was saying, and the longer the Rebbe talked, sometimes slapping his hand on the
tish
for emphasis, the more it seemed to Cass that he was getting it, until he was seamlessly understanding everything, but only, he realized a few seconds later, because the Rebbe had switched to English.

He was speaking of the week’s Torah portion, which spoke of the strange fire, the alien and foreign fire—
aysh zarah
—that Nadab and Avihu, the two sons of Aharon the High Priest, brought into the Holy Tabernacle, the Mishkan, that the Hebrews carried with them as they wandered the desert, and on which the presence of
der Aybishde
, the Eternal, rested in a cloud of glory. Aharon was the first of the descending line of High Priests, and he was the brother of Moses the Lawgiver, Moshe Rabenu, Moses our Rabbi, our Teacher. Nadab and Avihu were High Priests as well, since the priesthood is hereditary, passed down from father to son until this very day, and Nadab and Avihu went with their father into the Mishkan. The Torah tells us, “Each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and in it laid the incense. And they offered before Him a strange fire,
aysh zarah.”
And fire came down from above, and, in a flash, consumed them, before their father’s eyes.

“The Torah tells, ‘And Aharon was speechless.’ His silence was not only of words but of all reaction. Not a single tear crossed his cheek. Not a groan or a wail escaped his lips. Was he speechless from horror? From grief? Maybe from self-protection, afraid to cross a line when, at that moment,
the Judgment from On High had descended? Or was Aharon’s the silence of an understanding that has answered its own question? Had the High Priest, wearing his vestments of purity, wrapped himself in the purity of his understanding? And what could a grieving father of two princes like Nadab and Avihu understand that would silence him? They stood beside him in their holy service, and—in an instant—snatched! What could have kept him from crying out after them?

“Hear, then, what the holy Arizal said of the sons of Aharon! In the last
dr’ash
that the Arizal gave before his death in the sacred city of S’fat, the Arizal spoke of Nadab and Avihu. The Arizal compared them to the fawns of the gazelle. Just as the gazelle, as it is written in the Zohar, requires the serpent’s bite in order to give birth, so Nadab and Avihu were
korbanim
, sacrifices, to hasten the coming of Moshiach.

“The gazelle is the Shechinah, the indwelling Presence; the snake is the snake; the child being born is, if the moment is right, the Moshiach of the line of David, but otherwise just another Moshiach of the line of Joseph, doomed himself and not yet capable of returning Israel from its exile.

“The strange fire,
aysh zarah
, was not
avodah zarah
, not idol worship! Not at all! Do not make the mistake of thinking that,
chas ve-shalom
, heaven forbid, Aharon’s sons, Moshe Rabenu’s own nephews, succumbed to idolatry!

“The strange fire was the redemptive fire that leaps out to purify the world, consuming the innocent only to return them back again into the holy service, as it will always be, the
gilgul
turning round and round until the redemption of our days, may it be in our lifetime, Amen.”

A thunderous “Amen” answered the Rebbe’s own.

The Rebbe switched back to Yiddish now, and Cass found that his knowledge of Yiddish was really as limited as he’d remembered. He didn’t understand another word. Still, he enjoyed listening to the Rebbe’s words, watching the expressions on his face and the dance of his hands.

When the Rebbe stopped speaking, a little commotion started up beside him—not on Professor Klapper’s side but on the other side. Cass hadn’t noticed the tiny figure of a child sitting there, who now was being lifted up onto the
tish
, placed beside gigantic bowls of apples and oranges.

Unlike all the other unmarried males, he was wearing a fur hat, smaller than those of the grown men but still enormous on his tiny head, and he was wearing a shiny little
kaputa
of pale blue.

It was a strange sight, the child standing on the table. In his little
shtreimel
, he resembled an oversize mushroom displayed beside the fruit. The disturbing thought of child sacrifice came to Cass’s mind. He knew that the idea had been, from the earliest days, anathema to the Hebrews. The prophets had ranted about the child sacrifices of the neighboring tribes. They had denounced as abominations the pagan practice of burning children at altars to the cruel gods of Baal and Baal-zebub. But there was also that horrific story of the binding of Isaac to set off a chain of unwanted associations, of the father, Abraham, rising early in the morning to heed Yahweh’s terrible command to offer his son as a burnt offering on a mountaintop. Like Aharon the High Priest, Abraham, too, hadn’t cried out in protest or grief, but wordlessly prepared for the sacrifice.

“I give my
dr’ash
in the honor of the visitor, Rav Klapper,” the child announced in his chimelike voice, and the black sea of men drew in toward the tiny figure standing poised on the foam. Cass could feel the irresistible undertow straining toward him, the prodigious child and future Rebbe, whose lineage of chosenness traced back all the way to the holy Ba’al Shem Tov.

“The beauty of the
maloychim
comes down on us. The
maloychim
are above. But also they are here, everywhere, in everything.” He patted the air down in front of him, and then he turned his hands over and gestured with them in the classic Hasidic gesture of explanation. “As they are, it must be.

“The
maloychim
are in everything. They are even in some of the
maloychim!”
And now he smiled, and all the Valdeners smiled. “They are there, side by side, and above and below and in the center.

“Here at the
tish
, we are sitting, and the
maloych
36,
lamed vav
, also sits, and in
lamed vav
is sitting 2,
beys
, 2 times, and that 2 times 2 is sitting 3 times,
gimel
, and that 2 times 2 times 3 is sitting 3 times. There in the
maloych, lamed vav
, the maloychim
beys
and
gimel
are sitting at a
tish
. Their
tish
sits here with us at our
tish!

“But there are differences between the
maloychim. Beys
and
gimel
are
not like
lamed vav. Beys
and
gimel
are more simple and more beautiful. You look and look, and each is one
maloych
. In them there are no other
maloychim
sitting above and below and to the side. These are the prime
maloychim
. They are in all the other
maloychim
, and they are in them exactly so. As they are, it must be.”

And again he paused to let the Valdeners admire the sight before him.

“Rav Klapper asks: How many prime
maloychim
are there? How long does this go on?” He cast his smile on the honored guest who stared back at him.
“Ayn sof!
Without end! Just as, with all the
maloychim
, there are always more, so it is also with the prime
maloychim
. Not one of them is the biggest. How long do they go on? Forever!
L’olam va-ed!
The prime angels are singing their own
niggun
, and they are singing that they are always more!”

He looked around at the room full of his father’s followers, whose faces told him that they were as joyous to hear this
niggun
as he was to sing it for them.

“Here is how they are singing. This is their
niggun
. Find the biggest prime
maloych
. Call it Acharon, for the last, and stand him at the end of a line, with all the prime
maloychim
that came before him. Here is 2 and 3 and 5 and 7 and 11 and 13 and 17 and 19 and 23 and 29 and 31 and 37 and 41 and 43 and on and on, all of the prime
maloychim
up until Acharon, the last. Do to them like this. Take 2 three times and then take that number five times, and then take that number seven times, and then take that number eleven times, and if the Cambridger Rebbe asks me how long this goes on, he knows what I will say: take it each time by another, the next in line, all the way up to the last and biggest of the prime
maloychim
, Acharon. And then …” He threw his arms out and up into the air, a little Valdener in ecstasy. “Add one more to Acharon! That is a new
maloych
. His name is Acharay Acharon, the One Who Comes After the Last. And Acharay Acharon can’t be! You see! If there is Acharon, there is Acharay Acharon, and it can’t be, so there is no last,
l’olam va-ed!”

He stood stock-still, an extraordinary expression on his face, entranced with what he was seeing. The look was replicated around the
tish
, up and down the bleachers, all motions stilled, snuffing the last blink and breath.

His father broke the silence with a question:

“Do you know the
niggun
of the prime
maloychim?
Can you sing it?”

“That was the
niggun
, Tata. I tried to sing it.”

“A beautiful
niggun
. But now sing us one of yours,
tateleh.”

The child began to sing. The dense room pressed itself forward, trying to get as close as possible, even if they didn’t outwardly move, the lines of invisible force drawing them down to the foamy rectangle on which the Rebbe’s small son floated. His singing was beautiful, as could have been guessed from his speaking voice, and his pitch was perfect. He raised his little hands and gestured like his father, turning his palms up and then over. The Valdeners let him sing the pretty melody through once, and then, when he began it again, they joined in.

Ever since the Ba’al Shem Tov, the master of the Good Name, rebelled against the intellectualized strain of Judaism prevailing in his day, the Hasidim have cultivated a worship of the divine that is experiential, sensual, ecstatic. This is why they dance. This is why they sing. But the Valdeners of New Walden possessed a path to ecstasy that was theirs alone, and it was obvious on every face up and down the tiers. The Rebbe’s son was their ecstasy. They understood little of his words, but the melody they could understand, and they knew that they were in the presence of the divine. Their arms were linked again as they swayed, and many had tears overrunning their eyes, trickling down faces as enraptured as Azarya’s own face had been, a few moments ago, while he was contemplating the beautiful proof that there is no largest prime number.

He hadn’t bothered to go through the last steps of the proof. He had taken them far enough and pointed and expected that they all would see the wondrous thing that he was seeing.

Assume that there is a largest prime number. Give it a name, as Azarya had. Call it P. And now take all the prime numbers that precede P and multiply them together, just as Azarya had said: 2 times 3 times 5 times 7 … times P. Take that product and add 1 to it. Call that new number Q. Is Q a prime or not? Since P has been assumed to be the largest prime number and Q comes after P, Q can’t be a prime. But then Q must be divisible by a prime number, because all non-prime numbers, or composites, are divisible by a prime. As Azarya had seen, composite numbers are all the products of primes. So there must be, at least, one prime number
that is a perfect divisor of Q. None of the prime numbers less than Q can be a divisor of Q, because 1 had been added to the product of all of them in order to construct Q. So there has to be a prime number larger than P to be Q’s divisor, which contradicts the statement that P is the largest prime number. And so there cannot be a largest prime number.