36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [29]

Cass had nevertheless loved his bubbe. He couldn’t help himself. She used to sing a special song about a rooster, “Cookooreekoo,” just for him. She had spoken in a special cooing voice, just for him, her oldest grandson, whom she called Chaim, his Hebrew name.

“Oy, such a boychik, so shoen”-which means “beautiful”-“so klig”- which means “smart,” though it tore up her heart that he was being brought up like a vilda chaya, a wild animal.

Deb always blamed inbreeding for her mother’s personality disorder. Deb blamed inbreeding for a great deal. Deb-who was originally Devo-rah Gittel Sheiner-came from a family that belonged to a sect of Ha-sidim, the Valdeners, who had originated in a town called Valden, in Hungary. Almost all the Hasidic sects are named after the towns where their first Grand Rabbi, the founder of his dynastic lineage, had originated, or where he had established his rabbinical court. So there are the Satmars, from Szatmárnémeti, Hungary (now Satu Mare, Romania), the Lubavitchers from Lubavitch, Lithuania, the Breslovers, from Breslov, Ukraine, and at least a dozen sects still surviving from the dozens more there had been before the Second World War. And all of them are crystallized around a charismatic Rebbe, the term that means “my rabbi,” with the position of Rebbe passed down through family lines, from father to son or to another male relative, though occasionally there are controversies, splits, factions. Only the Breslovers never saw fit to have any Rebbe but their first, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: a mysterious figure with messianic aspirations, known for his collection of allegorical tales, and himself the great-grandson of the eighteenth century’s founder of Hasidism itself, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Ba’al Shem Tov, the Master of the Good Name.

The current Rebbe of the Valdeners, Rav Bezalel Sheiner, also claimed a lineage that could be traced back to the Ba’al Shem Tov. Deb was related, on both her maternal and paternal sides, to the Valdener rabbinic dynasty, though according to her that was nothing to brag about. Valdeners tend to marry each other, so just about everybody was related to everybody.

“And then they wonder about the genetic diseases.”

Cass’s father, Ben Seltzer, had also come from a fairly observant family, but it was standard modern Orthodox, so Deb’s family was exotic to him, too. Both Deb and Ben had wandered far from the religiosity they had each been born into, but Deb had had to travel a lot farther to get to where they were, the non-kosher and non-Sabbath-observing house in which Cass and Jesse had been raised. After Jesse’s Bar Mitzvah, his parents had let their membership in the synagogue lapse.

The Valdeners lived in a self-contained village, tucked into the folds near the rocky Palisades edging the Hudson River. It wasn’t a gated community, but it might as well have been. Nobody but Valdeners lived in New Walden, except for a few sons-in-law and daughters-in-law who had come over from some other Hasidic sect.

The other sects lived in urban areas-in Jerusalem, or Montreal, or Brooklyn-always in some well-defined section. In Brooklyn it was in Williamsburg and Boro Park, where the Valdeners, too, had settled when they had first come to America. The previous Valdener Rebbe, Reb Yisroel Sheiner, who in the 1930s had shepherded some portion of his flock out of Europe and into safety in the nick of time, had decided in the 1950s, that Brooklyn, too, was getting tzu heiss-too hot-what with the increasing crime rate and the deteriorating relations between the Hasidim and the blacks and Puerto Ricans, not to speak of the high rents that made it difficult for the large Valdener families-average number of children, 6.9-to afford decent housing. The Rebbe had quietly, so as not, God forbid, to raise the fears of the Gentile farmers in the area, purchased a large chicken farm not far from where Rip Van Winkle had snored, and built a self-contained shtetl, the first village in New York State to be completely governed by a religious authority, with the town’s mayor being none other than the Grand Rabbi himself, and the aldermen his closest disciples.

The village was to have been called New Valden, but through a county clerk’s typing error it had been Americanized to New Walden. The Valdeners had no idea that the spelling mistake brought them into nominal intimacy with the ghost of Henry David Thoreau, sounding the chord of American transcendentalism-visionary, romantic, self-reliantly impractical. The Valdeners knew from Thoreau like they knew from clam chowder.

Cass had only visited New Walden a few times, since his mother hated the village and would go unusually quiet for days before a visit. It was a strange place, where he and Jesse were made to feel outlandish because they didn’t dress in short black pants and large black felt hats, didn’t have long side curls and speak the language of the place, which was Yiddish. Cass remembered some little boy, maybe a cousin-there were throngs of them, many of them with Cass’s and Jesse’s red hair-laughing with scorn when they were introduced, some kid named Shloimy or Moishy or Yankel finding the name “Cass” hilarious.