So, when Jonas Elijah Klapper stated that the Grand Rabbi of the Valdener Hasidim was a religious genius on the order of Meister Eck-hart, Emanuel Swedenborg, and Nathan Benjamin ben Elisha ha-Levi Ghazzati (also known as “Nathan of Gaza” or “Nathan the Prophet”), it was quite a statement. Professor Klapper confided in Cass that the Valdener Grand Rabbi was among the most extraordinary men of his lifetime-and he had met all the extraordinary men of his lifetime, including the pre-eminent secular scholar of Qabalah, one of the few non-Americans granted membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Jonas had been initiated as a mere pup of thirty-eight), the Jerusalemite Yehuda Ickel.
Cass had liked the Valdener Rebbe quite a lot, almost in spite of himself, and certainly in spite of his mother. In fact, one of the Rebbe’s most endearing traits, at least to Cass, was the warmth he still harbored toward the former Devorah Sheiner. The Rebbe seemed to regard her with none of the severity with which she regarded him, though perhaps this was just part of his Socratic slyness. Still, listening to Professor Klapper’s assessment, he had to conclude that it was probably his own ignorance of Yiddish that had blocked him from seeing the full extent of the Rebbe’s extraordinariness, though he couldn’t dismiss the possibility that the blame lay in his intrinsic soul-shortage.
According to Professor Klapper, the Valdener Grand Rabbi was like the Palomar Observatory, which he had been compelled to visit with his fulsome hosts at the University of California at San Diego when he had been out there to deliver, soon after the publication of “my little book The Perversity of Persuasion,” the prestigious John Shade Lecture in Literature and Truth. They had organized quite the tour for him, in consequence of which he had immediately resolved never to accept another invitation from anywhere in the entire state of California, a ban he had, over the years, gradually widened until it included everything west of the Hudson. Jonas Elijah Klapper was ready to confess his vagueness on such details, since Sigmund Freud was as far as he would venture in the direction of the hard sciences, but he had carried away the impression that the contraption took the compass of the infinite cosmos. If that was so, then it was still as nothing compared with the observatory that was the Valdener Grand Rabbi.
“For it is the measure of the infinite soul that is taken by your inestimable relation, Reb Chaim.”
Everything the Valdener Rebbe said and did was both liminal and luminant. That is what Jonas Elijah Klapper might choose to call the graduate seminar next year:
“The Liminal, the Luminant, and the-”
The professor was brought up short by a rare aposiopesis. He looked over to his erstwhile student to see whether he might offer some help. The word that seditiously leaped into Cass’s mind was so inappropriate that Cass suspected Roz’s insidious sense of humor was infecting him again-long-distance, since she still hadn’t returned from the Amazon.
“Well, never mind that for now. We shall think of the apposite trinomial in time,” the professor was continuing.
The Valdener Sage had the capacity to speak the liminal words that transported the Self through the narrow threshold within the Self to enter into the hushed precinct where the Sublime sat on its throne of glory, an ecstatic knowledge that transformed the Self even as it revealed the Self, for it awoke within the Self the knowledge of what is immortal in the Self, not in the sense of duration, definable by time, but, rather, the Self that dwells, like the Place-or Ha-Makom, one of the monikers for YHVH- outside of time, the Self that cannot die because it was never born, begotten by no seed of man.
Professor Klapper had found everything relating to the Grand Rabbi fraught with hidden meanings, the humblest word or action setting off tremblings in the highest spheres, in what the Qabalists refer to as the Keter, the Crown of Being, the last gate behind which the Ayn Sof, That Without End, has withdrawn itself, coiled within the End of Thought.
“It is as the Valdener Rebbe himself masterfully put it: the Acharay Acharon, the One Who Comes After the Last.”
“That was Azarya.”
Cass couldn’t help himself. He had spoken before he had thought. “Azarya? Who is Azarya?”
“The Rebbe’s son. He was the one who spoke about the Acharay Acharon.”
Klapper widened his eye into his practiced glare but then, deciding upon leniency, waved Cass’s irrelevance away with a magisterial flourish of his hand.
“I am quite certain you are mistaken. The little boy sang a niggun, which I believe he had composed. Perhaps that is the source of your errancy. The child decidedly did not delve into the mysteries of the Ayn Sof. The suggestion is a preposterition.”
“Preposterition,” meaning “preposterous proposition,” was a neologism of his own coinage, and, employing it, he felt irked all over again by this presumptuous young person who was crowding his office and squandering his time. But then he recalled the young man’s lineage, the majestic luster that clung to his bloodline, manifesting itself in the very tint of his hair, and decided to forgive.
“The Valdener Rebbe has supplied some information that may yet prove to be surpassingly significant. It is as I suspected. To non-initiates it appears as if the denizens of New Walden have closed themselves off to the increments in human knowledge that have, it is commonly believed, proceeded pari passu with the so-called advancements in the sciences, which too often amount, I am forced to inform you, to no more than the merest scientism. Unlike the colossal confusions of pedantry in which I have been forced to collude-by which I mean a pedagogical cartel that could not begin to understand the meaning of the term ‘higher education,’ which misprision it manifests in its increasing insistence that every Tom, Dick, and Harry should misspend his youth, not to speak of his parents’ lucre, by parking his dullard head at an undergraduate institution for four years-the Valdeners recognize that not every Tevye, Dudel, and Hershel are meant to be introduced to subjects beyond their comprehension. The Rebbe, as an exalted master, does the learning for them and then transmits to each according to his capacity to receive. And of course his mastery extends to full command of the non-verbal lineaments of communication. There was no doubt in my mind that transmission at the profoundest level was taking place during the ritual of the shirayim. Each person who partook of the Rebbe’s food received a communiqué that was fashioned for his individual quiddity, the measure of which the Rebbe takes in ways that can only be divine.”
Cass was surprised to hear Professor Klapper’s impression of the shirayim. For his part, Cass had found the proceedings anything but edifying. It had not been quite as civilized as Cass’s mother had been led to believe. There had been a grab for the actual remains on the Rebbe’s plate, and it had seemed to Cass, though he could not be sure, that Frankfurter’s Extreme Distinguished Professor had gotten the better part of what was there. The Rebbe had then begun to pitch the apples and oranges from the great cut-glass chalices on the table, and as the fruit flew, so rose the Valdeners. They looked like the fans in Fenway Park when a long foul ball was hit into the grandstand. Hasidim had flung themselves onto the gigantic table, squirming forward on their bellies to get a piece of fruit that hadn’t made it into the tiers. There had also been pieces of potato kugel that the Rebbe had distributed with his bare hands. The pandemonium of the event-there was shouting and tussling, not to speak of food being flung-had ripped Cass entirely out of the rapture that had seized him while Azarya spoke. He had found nothing to inspire him in the shirayim.