Now, as if under the command of a distant electromagnetism, the whole group joined together in song. Epstein, who had the urge to add his voice—not to sing so much as to yell out some disjointed, Tourette’s-like phrase into the volume—opened his mouth, but closed it again when he was shunted aside by the traffic still coming in from behind. When the song died back into scattered chanting, Klausner was drawn into conversation by a man even larger than he, with a beard as coarse and red as Esau’s.
Finding himself separated, Epstein let himself be pulled by the crowd in the opposite direction, past the shelves of gilded books and baskets of silk flowers. Caught in an eddy of black coats, he saw a huge, dark wooden chair with eagle’s talons at the bottom of its legs, attached to what looked like a cradle—oh, God, was that where they performed the circumcisions? The barbarism! Then he noticed an opening in the wall, and to get away from the chair, stepped down into a small, grotto-like room where some oily candles flickered. When his eyes adjusted to the dark, he saw that he wasn’t alone: a rheumy-eyed man was perched on a low stool. The musty air was heavy, tinged with the man’s body odor. A little brass plaque on the wall, which Epstein tried to make out in the gleam from the candles, commemorated this as the place where the famous Luria had come to pray five hundred years ago.
The shrunken man was groping his leg, offering him something. A wave of claustrophobia came over him. The breathable air seemed to be running out. A psalm, did he want to say a psalm? Was that what the man was asking? To ask for a blessing from the sage? In the old man’s lap was a package of cookies, and when Epstein refused the book of psalms, the man waved the package blindly, pushing it toward him. No, no, he didn’t want a cookie, either, and when the man continued to pull on his pants leg, Epstein reached down, tore off the arthritic claw, and fled.
Half an hour later, back at Gilgul, drops of sweat were forming again on Klausner’s brow. For the second time in a week, Epstein found himself seated at a table of Jews under the sway of the rabbi’s exertions. But unlike the audience of American Jewish leaders gathered vaguely, expensively, to rehearse their old positions, the students around this simple wooden table seemed alert and alive, open to miracles. Glancing avidly about, Epstein waited for the show to begin. In these elevations, under his own mystical roof, Klausner was even more in his element than he had been at the Plaza. And tonight Epstein was his guest of honor, and so it was especially for his sake that the rabbi’s sermon was designed—if design was the word, for the sentences seemed to roll from his mouth spontaneously. Rocking on the balls of his feet, he opened grandly:
“Tonight, we have in our company a man come down from King David!”
All heads turned to look. Epstein, who had come down from Edie and Sol, did not bother to correct him, the way one does not bother to correct a magician whom one has seen pull an extra card from his sleeve.
From the King of Israel, Klausner leaped to the Messiah, who it was said would come from the descendants of David. And from the Messiah, he leaped to the end of time. And from the end of time, he leaped to time’s beginning, to the withdrawal of God to make space for the finite world, for time can only exist in the absence of the eternal. And from the withdrawal of God’s divine light, the rabbi, blue eyes sparking with local candlelight, leaped to the empty space, whose spot of darkness held the potential for the world. And from the empty space that held the potential for the world, he leaped to the creation of the world, with its days and measures.
Like so, the tall, limber rabbi born in Cleveland, transplanted to the ancient land of the Bible, leaped like Jackie Joyner from the infinite to the finite. Epstein followed loosely. His thoughts were diffuse tonight, his focus fleeting. The words rolled through him, under the notes of an aria by Vivaldi whose steady heartbeat had been lodged in his head since he woke that morning at the Hilton.
“But the finite remembers the infinite,” Klausner said, holding up a long finger. “It still contains the will of infinity!”
The will of infinity, Epstein repeated to himself, weighing the phrase in his mind as one weighs a hammer to see if it is enough to drive the nail. But the words came apart on him and raised only dust.
“And so everything in this world longs to return there. To repair itself to infinity. This process of repair, this most beautiful of processes which we call tikkun, is the operating system of this world. Tikkun olam, the transformation of the world, which cannot happen without tikkun ha’nefesh, our own internal transformation. The moment we enter into Jewish thought, Jewish questioning, we enter into this process. Because what is a question but a voided space? A space that seeks to be filled again with its portion of infinity?”
Epstein glanced at his small, pale neighbor, whose pierced eyebrow was knitted in concentration. She was young—younger even than Maya—and solemn as an icon. She gave off the air of having survived a disaster. Would she know what to do with her portion of infinity when she finally got it? Studying the tattoos on her knuckles, Epstein wasn’t sure. He looked gloomily at his watch: still an hour and a half before the taxi was supposed to come for him. He thought of calling Maya, or checking in with Schloss, or reaching the director of development of the Israel Museum in the fragrant garden of her Jerusalem home, apologizing for disturbing her Friday-night meal, and announcing that he had decided to give her the $2 million to commission a monumental sculpture in his parents’ names. Something rusted, immovable, dwarfing, called, simply, Edie and Sol.