“For example,” said Klausner, twisting around in his seat, which lacked the leg room of the pulpit, “God created Eve out of Adam’s rib. Why? Because first an empty space needed to be made in Adam to make room for the experience of another. Did you know that the meaning of Chava—Eve, in Hebrew—is ‘experience’?”
It was a rhetorical question, and Epstein, who was used to employing them himself, didn’t bother to answer.
“To create man, God had to remove Himself, and one could say that the defining feature of humanity is that lack. It’s a lack that haunts us because, being God’s creation, we contain a memory of the infinite, which fills us with longing. But the same lack is also what allows for free will. The act of breaking God’s command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge can be interpreted as a rejection of obedience in favor of free choice and the pursuit of autonomous knowledge. But of course it’s God who suggests the idea of eating from the Tree of Knowledge in the first place. God who plants the idea in Eve. And so it can also be read as God’s way of leading Adam and Eve to confront the vacated space within themselves—the space where God seems to be absent. In this way it is Eve, whose creation required a physical void in Adam, who also leads Adam to the discovery of the metaphysical void within him which he will forever mourn, even as he floods it with his freedom and will.”
It was in the story of Moses, too, Klausner went on. The one chosen to speak for his people must first have speech removed from him. He put a hot coal in his mouth as a child and burned his tongue and so was unable to speak, and it was this absence of speech that created the possibility of his being filled with God’s speech.
“This is why the rabbis tell us that a broken heart is more full than one that is content: because a broken heart has a vacancy, and the vacancy has the potential to be filled with the infinite.”
“What are you saying to me?” Epstein asked with a dry laugh. “That I’ve made myself susceptible?”
The plane began to shudder as it drifted into a pocket of turbulence, and Klausner’s attention was diverted to a frantic search for the straps of his seat belt. He had already confided his fear of flying to Epstein, who had watched him gulp down two pills chased with a glass of pineapple juice he’d finagled from the stewardess, even after she’d instructed him to return to his seat in Economy. Now he cupped his palms around his face and peered out at the dark sky again, as if the cause for instability could be spied there.
The danger passed, the stewardess came to shoo Klausner away with a white cloth for the tray table: dinner was being served, and he really had to go back to his seat. With his time almost up, Klausner quickly got down to business. As much as he would have liked to dedicate himself entirely to Gilgul, he told Epstein, much of his time these days was taken up by the organizing committee of a reunion for the descendants of King David, to be held next month in Jerusalem. It had never been done before. A thousand people were expected to attend! He’d meant to raise the subject at the Plaza, he said, but Epstein had left before he’d had the chance. Would he consider attending? It would be an honor if he’d agree. And might he consider joining the advisory board? It would only mean lending his name and a donation.
Ah, Epstein thought, so that was it. But if his thoughts were jaded, his heart was not, for at the mention of Jerusalem—Jerusalem, which somehow never appeared exhausted by its ancientness, by all its collected pain and heaps of paradox, its store of human mistake, but rather seemed to derive its majesty from it—he recalled the view of its ancient hills and felt his blood-thinned heart expand.
He told Klausner that he would think about it, though he did not really plan on thinking about it. He had a sudden urge to show the rabbi pictures of his children, in case he had given an inaccurate impression of himself with his tale of letting go, of giving away. His vibrant children and grandchildren, who were proof of his attachment to the world. One had to search to find the resemblance. Jonah, darker than his sisters, needed only a few hours of exposure to the sun to become swarthy. To become a Moroccan carpet seller, Epstein used to say. But their mother always said that he had the hair of a Greek god. Maya had the same dark hair, but all the melanin had been given out by the time she was conceived, and her skin was pale and burned easily. Lucie looked neither Moroccan nor Greek, nor even Jewish—she had about her a northern look, touched by the grace of snow and clarified by the cold. And yet there was something in the animation of their faces that was shared.
But the moment Epstein took out his phone to show the rabbi, he remembered that it was empty: all the thousands of photographs had gone with the Palestinian. Epstein thought again of the man in his coat, who by now must have arrived home to Ramallah or Nablus and hung it in the closet, to the surprise of his wife.
Having nothing to show, Epstein asked how Klausner had come to be invited to the meeting with Abbas at the Plaza, to which the rabbi answered that he was an old friend of Joseph Telushkin’s. But Epstein did not know any Telushkin. “Not a descendant,” Klausner said, but with a gleam in his eye, as if he were all too aware of the image he was playing to—the Jew who aspires to cliché, who, in his pious fight against extinction is willing to become a copy of a copy of a copy. Epstein had seen them all his life, the ones whose dark suits only highlight the fact that after so many mimeographs the ink has faded and blurred. But that was not the case with Klausner.