“To tell you the truth, Professor Klapper, I’m not exactly sure.”
“I am, I believe, your dissertation adviser?”
There was no need to answer.
“I venture to assert that I have located in this matter a topic that will not only satisfy the requirement of Faith-you have, I may remind you, to attain competence, under my supervision and to my satisfaction, in the areas of Faith, Literature, and Values-but might very well provide you with a topic for your dissertation for the degree of Philosophiae Doctor. You shall embark by first confronting the intriguing mystery of the kugel, both noodle and potato, although the sages favor potato. The potato stands for Yesod, which can be translated as Foundation, and is one of the ten Sephirot, the emanations of the revealed God radiated throughout the created physical world. Beyond the ten Sephirot is where the Ayn Sof lurks. Yesod is the channel through which the emanation Tiferet- another of the ten Sephirot and to be translated as Beauty, Glory-strives to unite with the Shechinah, which is God’s indwelling Immanence and which shares the cosmic exile that must be redeemed through the processes of ongoing history.”
He took a pause, perusing the face before him to see whether he could safely assume his meaning had been received. Satisfied, he continued.
“Nothing, Reb Chaim, is as it seems. The homeliest object or act can be of cosmic proportions. That which is common, undignified, vulgar- proste in Yiddish, which I submit to you is related to the ancient Greek prostychos-a potato or the fleishig eier floating among the shining globules in a mother’s chicken soup-is, when contemplated by the singular Self, numinous. Mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The Qabalist masters were able to divine that the potato symbolized Yesod, but how they did so I am not yet sure.”
There followed another protracted stare that lasted long enough for Cass to wonder whether the session had been concluded. It had not.
“I have made progress regarding other mysteries of the kugel. Kugel means, in both German and Yiddish, a circle, and the fact that the dish is called by this name, even when it is made in a square or rectangular pan, as my own mother most often prepared it, indicates we are dealing with the sacred nature of the circle. A kugel is always made with generous amounts of oil, which recalls the ritual of unction. ‘Messiah,’ or ‘Moshiach,’ literally means the Anointed One. In the Shabbes kugel one consumes and makes flesh the essence of the Qabalist message, that the created world is striving to repair the brokenness of the scattered shards, to unite the ten emanations, the Foundation acting to conjoin Beauty and Glory with the indwelling Immanence, so that the Anointed One will complete the sacred circle and repair the world.
“And yet one question of the kugel still remains: why the potato rather than the luckshen? I am vehemently disinclined to believe that, in identifying the potato with Yesod, the masters were resorting to its being a root vegetable. The potato’s significance is surely derived anagogically, and yet I have exhausted every numerical combination and rewording of which I could think, and have also dipped into the alternative methods of assigning numerical values to the letters, to no avail. There is a manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford that lists more than seventy different systems of gematria, and it might become necessary-indeed, I cannot see how it could fail to become necessary-for your research to take you there. According to one alternative system, for example, the value 1 is assigned to the first letter of the alphabet, aleph, but instead of counting the second one, beys, as 2, beys is given 1 plus 2-in other words, 3-and gimel is given 1 plus 2 plus 3, and so on, which is enough to drive one mad. To add to the complexity, the Qabalists often mixed and matched the systems, so that a word that is gematricized under one method can be held as equal to a word gematricized under another. A method of this sort must lie behind the potato’s enshrinement. I bestow upon you, Reb Chaim, a quest.”
Without having to unseat himself, Jonas retrieved six books from around his office, all of them in Yiddish, and handed them to Cass, pointedly indicating the door-he pointed-and sending the scholar on his way.
XXII The Argument from Fraught Distance
to: GR613@gmail.com
from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu
date: Feb. 28 2008 10:08 p.m.
subject: a friend in need
I seem to have committed myself to debating Felix Fidley, the Nobel laureate. Resolved: God exists. Guess which side I’m on. Not only did I commit, but I then promptly forgot all about it. Can you call me? Can I call you? I know it’s a little early in the night for you, but I’d much appreciate if we could talk tactics. Roz has been trying to tell me that there’s nothing Fidley can put over on me, that I should just use my Appendix as my cheat sheet, but I’m not so sure. Fidley could use my Appendix as *his* cheat sheet. I’ve made it easy for him. He knows all my moves.
One more thing I forgot to mention. The debate is tomorrow, so I need, if it’s at all possible, to speak to you tonight. It’s at Harvard, being sponsored by the Agnostic Chaplaincy, and I’m not making this up just to get you to call me. According to Roz, the whole campus is plastered with posters about this thing. I know how busy you are, but the fate of all freethinkers hangs in the balance.
XXIII The Argument from the Disenchantment of the World
Roz had been delayed in returning from the Amazon, and when she came back she had been transformed. There were no more dreadlocks. She was deeply tanned and on first glance looked hale and hearty. But a second glance revealed that all was not right. She looked pale beneath the tan. There was something drawn and almost haggard in her noble face.
“Did you lose weight?” Cass asked when she answered the door of her apartment. She had just gotten back that day. She had been incommunicado while she was with the Onuma, and the only word that Cass had gotten from her was a quick phone call from the airport in Miami saying she was on her way home.
“Lose weight? I don’t know.”
It didn’t take her long-in fact, only till the next sentence-to tell Cass of her real losses. Tragedy had swept through the immune-depressed Onuma, a mortal outbreak of measles. The children had been particularly hard hit, including-and here her eyes overwhelmed with tears- Tsetse. Roz was in mourning.
She sat cross-legged across from cross-legged Cass in her apartment, which she always joked had been bugged by her landlords, the Wilde man and his wife, to keep tabs on their oestrous offspring, and she pulled out the few pictures she had taken on her previous trips of Tsetse, smiling with a mischief so delighted with itself you could all but hear the guffaws.
“And look at this one. This is him offering me a taste from the jar of peanut butter he had stolen out of my hut.”
Tsetse, with a solemn look, was holding out a piece of leaf dabbed with brown, to a Roz doubled-up with laughter.
“That’s why I stayed on longer. Absalom was trying desperately to get vaccine sent in, by way of the missionaries, and then he and I went from village to village vaccinating. But it was too late for many of them, most of all the children.” She broke down and sobbed.
“Okay,” she finally said. “That’s it for me, at least for now. I’ve got lots more stories, but I don’t have the heart for them now. Tell me what’s been going on with you. Anything new?”