The Instructions by Adam Levin
My father, cross-hatching a half-eaten new-potato with his fork, said, “Asner’s.”
“Asner’s!” said Yuval. “Asner’s exactly! Every night, nearly—it’s ten, ten-thirty, your husband says to me, ‘Yuvy, I’m going blind here! Want a walk?’ and of course I would agree, and Asner’s we’d go to, and sometimes, if feeling particularly charitable, we’d invite Rolly Bar-Sheshet, and sometimes, if Rolly was feeling particularly less like a snivelling little shmendrick than usual, he’d come along with us—what ever happened to Rolly?”
My father made his lips fat and waved away the question with all his fingers.
I knew what happened to Rolly, though. Rolly Bar-Sheshet was the cantor at the Fairfield Street Synagogue, which is where I go because my parents won’t attend shul and it’s close enough to our house that I can walk there by myself. Rolly trilled a lot during the mourner’s Kadish, and I did not like it so much, but his son Amit was nice. Still, I didn’t want Yuval to stop telling stories, so I stayed quiet.
“Rolly-olly, Rolly-polly,” said Yuval. “What I was saying is that after Asner’s, we’d walk some more, usually through the cemetery, drinking our sodas, talking about everything boys will talk about. We’d talk about you, Tamar, what your name would be and what Yehudah hoped you’d be like when he met you, and you, too, Gurion—he knew his firstborn would be a son. Sometimes the time would slip away, and it would be midnight, twelve-thirty in the morning, and you know what we’d do then? If it was midnight, twelve-thirty in the morning?”
“Litberg’s!” shouted his eldest daughter. She’d heard it before.
“Litberg’s, my Sara! It’s true,” said Yuval. “We’d walk up Devon to Litberg’s bagel factory. All night long they were making bagels inside, taking them from ovens, dunking dough in vats. We’d wait near the backdoor, and this man—Morris Nussberg was his name, you see what I can remember?—Morris Nussberg would eventually come outside for a cigarette, a cardboard boat on his head to guard against the falling-out of hairs, and we’d offer him a light, and we’d chat a little about this or that, about bagels, making them, the necessity of the boiling process and so on. He’d tell us, ‘Buy stock in garlic. It’s the new poppyseed,’ or ‘Litberg’s nagging again about the egg bagels are too orange for the goyim—says to lower the yolk content or Lenders will bury us by ’87.’ Soon enough, this Morris Nussberg finishes smoking, takes his leave, and returns with what? The freshest bagels ever. For Yehuda and I. The freshest. Ever. Delicious! And there we’d be, under the moonlight, thinking about you, and you, and you and you and you,” Yuval said, gesturing with two hands at all the children around the table, knocking over an empty glass, shrugging at it, leaving it, “and you and you. Except you, as I recall, were going to be called Dovid,” he said to me. Then, to my father: “Whatever happened to calling him Dovid?”
“You’re asking the wrong person,” said my father.
“This has always been your husband’s second-favorite answer,” Yuval said to my mom, “tied with ‘It’s not something I’d like to talk about, Yuvy,’ both of which, as you probably know, run all too distant behind the number-one favorite answer: the half-bored/half-murderous glare on the shrugged-up shoulders which at school we’d call ‘The Morton’ for the way it transformed into man-size salt pillars whomsoever would dare to look directly upon it.”
I didn’t yet know if I liked Yuval. He was crazy and funny, but my father acted different around him. His laugh had more edges than it usually did, and when he laughed it there, at the Seder, his head went side-to-side, like to say, “Here we go again” instead of the up-and-down nod that I was used to, which always looked like, “Go on, please, go on.” The laugh he laughed at the stories of Yuval seemed angry, and although my father is often angry, his usual anger is wild and unmuddled; it looks like nothing other than anger. He’ll yell or slam the door, and sometimes he’ll grit his teeth and go to his office. I’d never before then seen him laugh with anger, though, only with joy or sadness. So when Yuval first started describing how my father had been when they were young, what he said seemed false, except once I noticed the new way my father was laughing, it seemed not only like it had been true when my father was younger, but that it still was true—it seemed like my father had become the person you’d have expected if all you knew of him were the stories of his boyhood as told by Yuval. It seemed, in short, like he’d become a “father.” And it is true that I write “father” a lot to refer to him, but I usually think of my father as “Dad” or “Aba.” And that is why I didn’t know if I liked Yuval, because of how he was making my dad seem like someone I should think of as “father.”
But then Yuval said, “Tell us, Judah. Tell us how David becomes lioncub all of a sudden.”
And my father, who had been holding my mom’s hand under the table, did a very Dad thing: he raised her hand high and kissed it loudly on the wrist, on the side where the blood pulses.
“David was not an option,” said my mother. “My parents had passed away before I became pregnant, and we were going to name the baby Beth, after Bathsheba, my mother; or Michael, after Malchizedek, who was my father.
“As you know,” she said, “Judah had, a few years earlier, stopped practicing. No more shul and no more tefilin in the morning. Saturday became his day to read briefs. And all of this was fine with me—I had stopped practicing a few years before him, and my observance had never been so extensive to begin with, so it was irrelevant to me—he was a Jew either way and I loved him. What you might not know, however, is that my husband, in the absence of the many daily rituals he had for so long been accustomed to performing, became wildly superstitious. Constitutional Law, though it might have satisfied his Gemmaric leanings, failed to challenge him in the way that the more mystical aspects of—“
“Okay, Jung,” said my father, “why not just tell the story?”
“I am telling the story,” my mother said.
“This is a woman,” said my father to Yuval, “who out one side of her mouth whispers hoarsely about mysticism and the meaning to be found within the shapes of birthmarks, and out the other calls herself a behaviorist.”
My mother said, “Easy as a child breathes a wish at a dandelion, my love, is exactly how hard it would be for me to tear your limbs from their sockets.”
“Sure,” said my father. “Beat me up later, then, and be poetic about it, too. Toughguy. Sabra. Weirdo. Just get to the dream, already. You’re gonna put Yuval to sleep.”
“She’s not—” said Yuval.
“No one asked you,” said my father.
Yuval winked at me. Then my father winked at me. Then my mother. I’ve never been able to wink.
My mom said, “I cannot leave out the nails, Judah.”
“Sure, okay,” said my father. “The nails. It’s better a pregnant woman doesn’t step on nail clippings, yes? Because nails are the last remnants of the etcetera, etcetera… and they can cause an etcera…Yuval knows about the nails, so just let’s get on with it.”
“He talks,” said my mother, “as if this had not all come from him.”
There are arguments about the importance of nail-clippings. Some people say that they are supposed to be treated with reverence, that you are supposed to bury them. Others say they’re like gooze and earwax and you can just throw them away. I don’t know of anyone who actually buries their nail-clippings, though many will throw them into some fire instead of the garbage. Some people don’t even throw them in the garbage, though. They stick them between couch cushions or bite them off and flick them like snots, and some even spit them on the floor. Those are the people, I think, who should be taught that a nail-clipping can still an unborn baby. Hopefully the teaching would frighten those people, because it’s gross what they do, especially the spitting ones.
The belief that pregnant women will miscarry if they step barefoot on nail-clippings comes from two stories whose meanings too easily echo into noise. The first takes place on the night of the sixth day, whi
The facts of the second story contradict those of the first one, but I like the second one better. This second story has it that Adam and Eve were born into the world covered head-to-toe in a clear, hard, protective enamel, but that as soon as they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, a pinhole in the enamel developed at the center of each of their backs. As they grew older, their enamel-holes got larger: dime- to penny- to nickel- to quarter-size, and then CDs and personal pizzas and phonograph records, and then the holes wrapped around to the front and continued to grow. It was by watching the progress of the enamel’s disappearance that Adam and Eve judged how much time they had left to live. They probably believed that they would die as soon as the enamel was entirely gone—that would make sense. That is not what happened, though. They died when the enamel had receded to the middle of the top of the first joints of the fingers and the toes. I don’t know if that makes Hashem more or less merciful than if he’d killed them when they were expecting it, but it’s a very interesting quandary, I think, worthy of commentary and debate. It is not, however, germane to the story at hand.
What’s germane is that in the first story, nails prove to be gifts given by Hashem to Adam and Eve to protect their sanity in the night, outside the Garden. In the second story, the enamel’s recession lets Adam and Eve know that protection from death is fleeting. So in the first story, the gift is a consolation to Adam and Eve for being outside of the Garden; and in the second, the enamel’s progressive erasure marks their growing distance from the Garden, their growing proximity to a state of no protection.
So without Eden, death approaches, which is scary; but without the approach of death, there would be no way to long for Eden. The only people who don’t know this are unborn babies. Unborn babies only know the womb, which is a kind of Eden. The womb is a membrane that protects unborn babies, as Eden was a membrane that protected Adam and Eve; and nails, though membranes of a practical kind, are also, more importantly, the physical representation of the knowledge of membranes.
Before they had knowledge of good and bad—which is to say before they had knowledge of protection, knowledge of membranes—Adam and Eve, having been born adults into the womb of Eden, nonetheless knew there was such a thing as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, and they made the choice to eat from it. It is a choice every baby makes when it leaves the womb. Inside the womb, though, there is nothing like the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, so the unborn baby is unaware of the presence of choice.
Unless—according to the belief currently under examination—the mother, barefooted, steps on a nail-clipping. If that happens, the knowledge that there is choice, that there is a choice to learn about membranes, as well as the knowledge of membranes itself, somehow gets learned by the unborn baby all at once, which is too much for the unborn baby to understand, and it dies before it was ever truly alive.
The problem with this belief is that it is derived from a confusion of the representational with the actual. What nails represent (Hashem’s protection against death, the existence of choice, etc.) becomes confused with what nails actually do (protect the toe- and finger-tips, allow for clawing, etc). To insist that fingernails are choices or actual protection against death, would be like insisting that when the stars and stripes go up in flames, America does too.
“However,” might argue a scholar, “when a man sets fire to an American flag, certain Americans get angry or ‘inflamed.’ Therefore, to dismiss the belief that clippings still babies on the grounds that the power of nails is only symbolic would be cheap of Gurion ben-Judah.” And that scholar would be correct. The symbolic or representational can affect the actual. Obviously.
But we are still stuck with the fact that when the nail-clipping is stepped on, it doesn’t enter the mother’s body. I.e., if it doesn’t enter the mother’s body, how can it get into the womb for the baby to give it witness and thereby affect the baby with its symbolic power the way a burning flag will a zealous patriot? It can’t. Not physically.
Yet one might argue that the clipping could get there in another, non-physical but nonetheless actual way: one might point out that to become inflamed a zealous patriot may only require knowledge that someone, somewhere, is burning his country’s flag.
And one would then go on to argue that a mother feeds knowledge into her womb, as well as processed nutrients, and that the knowledge of a nail-clipping having come into contact with the sole of her foot is enough to still the baby. If this were the case, though, the mother would have to be aware that she has stepped on a clipping—but that is not part of the superstition. According to the superstition, the mother need only step on a clipping to still her baby.
And so the only argument left to support the superstition would be that the sole of the mother’s foot has, itself, not only the capacity to acquire knowledge without the mother being aware that knowledge has been acquired, but the capacity to transmit the knowledge to the baby via non-physical means without the mother being aware that the knowledge has been transmitted.
Which is untenable.
It is untenable not because a person’s body can’t know things that the person herself is unaware of—the body can know things that the person herself is unaware of (e.g., I couldn’t begin to count the number of times I’ve found myself scratching itches that I hadn’t known were itching me til I found myself scratching them). The argument that the nerves in the sole of her foot are capable of “knowing” and thereby transmitting what they “know” about fingernails/membranes/choice into a mother’s womb without the mother’s awareness is an untenable argument because if we allowed for such an argument, then all bodyparts should be subject to the relevant superstition regarding nail clippings. For if foot-soles can have and transmit such knowledge, should not pregnant mothers then fear touching nail-clippings with their hands as well? Should they not fear seeing fingernails? Why should a footsole communicate more to an unborn baby than a fingertip or an eye? It couldn’t, it shouldn’t, and it doesn’t.
And even if it could and should, it didn’t. I am proof of that. Unless you go with my mother’s interpretation, which we will arrive at shortly.
“…So one night,” she told Yuval, “late into my third trimester, I am sitting on top of the couch in the living room, looking at the fireplace, relaxing, when Gurion starts to flop and to punch, and suddenly nature calls me, urgently, screaming. Judah is in the bathroom, clipping his nails over some newspaper that he is planning to crumple into a ball when he is finished in order to trap the clippings within the folds of the ball, and then to throw the whole package into the fire—I mean he is crazy, Yuval: it is a beautiful June evening, seventy degrees outdoors, and this crazy guy has to turn the apartment’s thermostat to sixty-one because he has a fire going in the fireplace, just so that he can burn his nail clippings. Around your eyes, Yuval, I see a question forming. Is it the same question I had? I am sure it is—so ask.”
“Why not just cut your nails outside, Judah?” Yuval said. “Why the fire in the summer? What’s that? What were you thinking?”
“Outside,” said my father, “I may have gotten distracted. It was beautiful outside, like my wife just told you. So if I sit there, on the stoop, cutting my nails, relishing the breeze, then what? I’ll tell you: plip, a clipping falls onto the stoop, but I’m thinking about my childhood, and so I look at the cracks in that nice piece of sidewalk where Yuval and I once hopscotched til the sun went down, and I look at that patch of asphalt where once we drew a four-square court, and oh that smell that comes off Devon when the wind is strong, and ho
Yuval did laugh his face off, and that was when I noticed his tie-clip, and also decided I liked him. “And but why the stoop?” gasped Yuval through his laughter. “No one said anything about the stoop. What about some playground somewhere to do the clipping? Some field? The beach? I just said outside. Why not the backy—”