“Why?” He swirled the golden liquid in his glass. “Why. Because the love of my life died at the age of twenty-seven in a ward where the orderlies left the trays at the door because they wouldn’t come in. I held his hand because the nurses wouldn’t, and a chaplain stood in the hallway—wouldn’t cross the threshold, mind you, might catch the judgment of God—and told me my friend was reaping what he’d sown. When you experience the tyranny of the word of God, when you want something so badly you can’t breathe that your supposed God says he will kill you for, then you can talk to me. Not before that.”

His outward calm had become something simmering red and my anger puffed into smoke. I refilled my glass. Threw it back. The kitchen spun around me with the age-old turnings of the universe.

After dropping my numb body back into the couch, I said, “When the Bible speaks about heresy, it says, ‘Don’t stray after your hearts.’ Not your minds, your hearts. It’s in Numbers.”

“A Bible lesson, now?” He made to look at his wrist though there was no watch there.

“It’s something my teacher once taught me. The reason we are told not to stray after our hearts is that our hearts are what lead us, astray or otherwise. Our minds only follow. We go on and on with our arguments like we’re just reasoning through a logic puzzle, but it’s all just about what we want. That’s why atheists look at the world and can’t see God anywhere and believers look at the same world and see Him everywhere. ‘Want is the disavowed arrow around which we paint the circle of our beliefs.’ I read that somewhere. The question is not what do you believe. The question is what do you want.”

My voice faded away as I thought about all the things Rabbi Marcus had said to me over the years about stars and snowflakes and miracles that had all made sense but didn’t quite fit, like a rain-warped window frame. It looks right, but then you try to close it and it sticks and you can’t push it all the way down, and then you can’t push it back up. Rabbi Marcus would say these things, and it wasn’t complicated logic or arguments. It just didn’t work when I tried to see the world the way he did.

The professor cleared his throat, and then murmured, “So what do you want Michael Fireworker?”

Peace. “What . . . do you want?”

“A place on the Rockettes.”

“Seriously.”

He shrugged. “You’re the one who said it was the most important question.”

“Isn’t it?”

“It seems nonsensical to me,” he said, rolling his shoulder as if to let go a heavy bag. “Or at best arbitrary. Unless the question your rabbis are telling you to ask is not what do you want but what should you want. And there is a right and a wrong answer they have predetermined for that. Otherwise, I don’t think we need to look beyond Maslow.”

“I think there is something beyond Maslow.”

“Please. Enlighten me.”

“I think, well, I think what the rabbis of blessed memory would say is, when we stop taking things for granted, when we stop treating everything good in our lives like it’s only what we deserve, and not even as much as it ought to be, and start appreciating the blessings we have, then the idea of being grateful to God becomes like a general starting point. Despite whatever fears we may have about the uncertain future. That is the hand of God some see. And those who don’t spend their lives looking everywhere but in the right place for that something that never stops tickling the back of their souls.”