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.
Cass recognized the proof from Men of Mathematics. It was Euclid who first discovered it, though his proof had been slightly different, more geometrical than Azarya’s. And the Alexandrian giant had not been six years old.
The angels pour their beauty down on us, Azarya had said. They are above, yes, but also here, in everything. 36 descends from on high to sit at the Rebbe’s tish. It carries the beauty of its own composition, and of its invisible bonds with the immaculate others of its realm, transporting this beauty down to us to grace our humble table. As it is, so it must be, and that is the nature of the beauty. In every row, in every tier, in the whole assembled crush of Valdeners, carried on cantillated waves of explosive love, blasted with their gratitude for having been born Valdeners, there are numbers, and this very room, filled with so much shifting strangeness, which before had been an undifferentiated black and bubbling sea, and then had resolved into individual men, now yields its surface again so that Cass can glimpse the silent presence of Azarya’s angels conspiring with one another to bring about what is, because as it is, then so it must be, and this is the nature of the beauty.
The room is reeling for Cass with Azarya’s angels, beating their furious wings of diaphanous flames, this is what it must be like for the child, what he must see out of those luminous blue eyes, only Cass knows that for Azarya there is infinitely more to be seen, even now, at six years old, and this is all the divine that we need, this is the strange fire that is worth almost anything, the angels within angels in their infinite and necessary configurations, a fleeting glimpse, let it last a little longer, let me savor this tiny bit tossed from the shirayim, the remains, of the infinite that is ayn sof, without end, emanations of the extraordinary that burst on us in rapture, and look how that small boy is laughing and clapping his hands, riding up on top of his adoring father’s shoulders, and Cass thinks that he can hear a child’s laughter rippling like water over the din.
The melody continued. The Valdeners were deep into their ecstasy. They loved their Rebbe’s son, the Dauphin of New Walden, heir to the most royal of all lineages, necessary to the continuity that made their lives worth living, this small, laughing boy who was bouncing on his dancing father’s back, with the Valdeners kissing their prayer shawls and reaching them out to touch him as they do when the Torah scroll is paraded among them. The wonderful child was to them a proof more conclusive than Euclid’s of all that they believed. They couldn’t know who it was they were loving. But Cass knew, and his face was as wet with tears as any in the room, his trance as deep and ecstatic as that of any Hasid leaping into dance.
XX The Argument from Tidings of Destruction
Cass’s cup of tea has grown cold while he was speaking with Lucinda, and he is going back to the kitchen to put the kettle back on when the phone rings again.
It’s Roz.
“So how did it go down with Shimmy?”
“Not so great. He’s pretty upset.”
“Over your leaving?”
“That, but also that whole fraternity-fracas thing you helped to stir up on Tuesday.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“There are posters, protesters, banners hung from the dorms, petitions. Shimmy called it a tinder keg, a powder box.”
“The slim edge of the wedgie!”
“Don’t laugh, Roz.” She’s laughing. “He made me feel so sorry for him that I promised him I’d think about what kind of retention package would tempt me to stay.”
“Oh, Cass. He’s playing you for a shlemiel, using that Saturday Night Live sketch of a protest to guilt you into staying. What an ox-shit artist.”