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That night, Jacob did a bit of research and learned that Sam’s question had inspired volumes of thought over thousands of years, and that the most prevalent response was the kabbalistic notion of tzimtzum. Basically, God was everywhere, and as Sam surmised, when He wanted to create the world, there was nowhere to put it. So He made Himself smaller. Some refered to it as an act of contraction, others a concealment. Creation demanded self-erasure, and to Jacob, it was the most extreme humility, the purest generosity.

He tentatively put his hands on the casket and lowered his covered head. Jacob heard some of the words — he wanted to hear everything — but he couldn’t make out the meaning.

The whispering went on — past “Forgive me,” past “I forgive you.” What was he saying? Why did the Blochs find it so hard to talk to one another while alive? Why couldn’t Jacob lie in a casket long enough to hear his family’s unspeakable feelings, but then return to the world of the living with what he’d learned? All the words were for those who couldn’t respond to them.

I was never able to live like that, but our work finished a year later, when he had a fatal heart attack while jogging. I got a call from one of the therapists who had an office in the same suite. She invited me to come and talk about it, but I didn’t want to talk to her. I wanted to talk to him. I felt betrayed. He should have delivered the news of his death. And I should have delivered the news of my sadness to the kids. But just as his death precluded Dr. Silvers from sharing his death with me, my sadness kept my sadness from them.

They drove with the windows halfway down, Dan Carlin’s “Hardcore History: Blueprint for Armageddon II” blaring. In the context of an argument Carlin was making about the significance of World War I, he spoke about a concept called the Great Filter — the moment at which a civilization becomes capable of destroying itself. Many mark 1945, and the use of nuclear weapons, as humanity’s Great Filter. Carlin argued it was 1914, with the worldwide proliferation of mechanized warfare. He then digressed a bit, as was his genius, to Fermi’s paradox. During a lunch break at Los Alamos, in 1950, a handful of the world’s greatest physicists were joking about a recent spate of UFO sightings. Taking the matter ironically-seriously, they unfolded a paper napkin and tried to calculate the probability of intelligent life existing elsewhere. Assume there are 1024 stars in the observable universe — ten thousand stars for every grain of sand on Earth. Using the most conservative estimates, there are approximately one hundred billion billion Earth-like planets — one hundred for each grain of sand on Earth. If, after billions of years in existence, one percent of those developed life, and one percent of those developed intelligent life, there should be ten million billion intelligent civilizations in the universe — one hundred thousand just in our galaxy. Clearly we are not alone.

But then Enrico Fermi, the most celebrated and brilliant physicist at the table, spoke for the first time: “So where is everybody?” If they ought to be there, and they aren’t there, why aren’t they there? Clearly we are alone.

There are many responses to this paradox: that there’s plenty of intelligent life in the universe, just no way of knowing about it because we’re too far from one another for any messages to reach; that humans aren’t listening properly; that other life is too alien to recognize, or to recognize us; that everyone is listening and no one adequately transmitting. Each of these struck Jacob as unbearably poetic: we’re too far for messages to reach; we aren’t listening properly; no one is adequately transmitting. Then Carlin returned to the notion of the Great Filter. At a certain point, every civilization will become capable of destroying itself (on purpose, or by accident), and face a kind of pass/fail test — whether it is possible to have the ability to commit suicide, and not commit suicide.

When did Isaac reach his Great Filter? When did Israel? When did Jacob and Julia’s marriage? When did Jacob?