The Rebecca’s Arguments and the “persistence of kugel”

Past month I attended two readings by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein from her new book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction and now there is a retrospective review in the NY Times. I feel the swoon of the familiar identifiers and the sadness that only fragments of that universe could be shared, paradoxically not even with Rebecca herself, although her name should be properly spelled as Rebbe-ca. The review points out that “curiously, for a novel that asserts the irrelevance of God, the unifying thread that knots all the pieces together, however loosely, is Orthodox Judaism”.

On a snowy Brookline night Rebecca submerged herself into her hero, straddling with him the Weeks Bridge (the one connecting the new Harvard graduate dorms buildings) , while her now husband Steven Pinker watched helplessly. Rebecca is refreshingly, timelessly and agelessly hot. There is a style to her girlie hem and her flowing flare. There is also the separateness that transcends the mere “mind and body problem”.  I often wonder how is it possible to be so geographically close, yet so helplessly unhinged from the cultural home. I feel this with Rebbe-ca.

• From King James to James there is no one like James Kugel
• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and Steven Pinker at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts
• Rebecca Newberger Goldstein and 36 Ungodly Arguments

Tagged as: books, philosophy, rebecca newberger goldstein