The Instructions by Adam Levin
On the ninth Monday, my mother couldn’t seem to get her cigarette lit. She flicked and flicked at her lighter, and no flame arose, and she bit her lip and glared at the lighter, as if trying to scare it into working. After a minute of glaring, she flicked some more, but still no flame arose and she bit her lip and tried more glaring.
It was only after my mother’s third failure to light her cigarette that my father—by now resigned almost to the point of total blindness by the “stupid” idea that he’d need to come up with the right thing to say before approaching her—felt a poke in his finger from the ballpoint in his pocket with which he’d stabbed himself while replacing the lighter he’d only just a few seconds earlier used on the cigarette presently stuck between his lips—a cigarette he hadn’t even realized he was smoking—and saw his moment. Lighter in hand, he leapt from his bench, raced across the street, stumbled on the curb.
My mother started laughing.
My father got his footing, glowed red through his beard. “You had better luck with matches,” he said to my mother. He held out his lighter.
My mother lit up—one flick—with her own.
“Understand, Gurion,” my mother once explained, “that most things between people do not work out according to plan, and so when they do, it can fill you with joy. I was not laughing at your father for stumbling. I was laughing because I had been waiting for weeks for him to approach me and—”
Why didn’t you approach him? I said.
“Because I did not want to. Men approach women all the time. That is how men are. If a man approaches a woman, she will only welcome him if she is interested in him. If a woman approaches a man, though, the man may become interested by the fact of the approach itself, and I did not want your father to ever wonder if it was because I approached him that he fell in love with me. I wanted for him to have no doubts. So you see, I was laughing because we had been noticing one another for eight weeks, and still he had not approached me, and it had been making me crazy since the Wednesday of the third week, at which time I saw he needed an impetus to approach, and I developed my plan. I decided to use a lighter for my cigarettes, thinking: If I use a lighter, my lighter can run out of fuel. If my lighter runs out of fuel, he can come across the street and offer to light my cigarette with his lighter.”
I said, I don’t get why you couldn’t just run out of matches, though.
She said, “If you use an opaque lighter, such as the one I was using, you cannot tell how much fuel it contains, and so it says little about you if you run out of fuel. On the other hand, it is stupid to run out of matches, Gurion. It is no hard problem to look in the box before you leave the house and count your matches. If you do not have enough matches, you take more matches or you buy more matches or you suffer your stupidity. I did not want to look stupid. Now, if during those first three weeks, I had not felt, from all the way across the street, a certain thrill pass through your father whenever I lit a cigarette, then I might have dropped my matches in a puddle, rendering them useless, but I suspected—and correctly, according to him—that the source of his thrill was the vision of grace that is witnessed in any person—let alone one who you are falling in love with—who can light a cigarette on the first try with a match in the wind. It always impressed me—that is why I learned to do it. To drop my matches in a puddle, though—that would be clumsy. And clumsiness, though it can at times be endearing, as it was when your father stumbled on the curb, can at other times, especially if the person who is clumsy has previously struck you as graceful, be very disappointing. In any case, ever since switching to the lighter, I had been waiting for it to run out of fuel. I never used a lighter habitually, and I assumed, for whatever reason, that they could not possibly last longer than two or three weeks. I assumed that after two or three weeks, it would be plausible for my lighter to run out of fuel at the shuttle-stop. Five weeks later though, it was still going, and on that ninth Monday, I saw how stupid I was being, how stupid your father had made me: The lighter did not need to actually run out of fuel. It only needed to seem as if the lighter had run out of fuel. Plausibility was not an issue. In a million years, your father would not suspect that I would go to all the lengths I had gone to in order to get him to come across the street. If my lighter seemed to run out of fuel, he would assume that it was a dud or an old lighter. And that is why, when he finally did come across the street, I lit my cigarette with my lighter—not to make him feel like a fool who had fallen for a trick, but rather because he had said, ‘You had better luck with matches,’ when in fact I had not. It was not matches that brought him across the street. It was matches that kept him on the bench.”
“I am Tamar,” she’d said to him, extending her hand. But by that point, even if he did hear her say it, it didn’t matter. No matter how strongly he’d been determined to defy Shneerson’s advice, and no matter how well he might have been able to harness that determination if he had heard her name the moment he first saw her, eight weeks of longing is too much longing to defy for the sake of defiance. It is a great blessing my parents fell in love at a distance.
Swallowing the last of his bagel, my dad sat on a stone bench for the relatives of seven dead people called Farber. “This may be the wrong cemetary,” he said. “Why don’t we take a little break.” He slapped the bench, and I sat. Wind moved clouds and the moon was suddenly huge. Silverflake in the marble of Shua (Beloved Son, 1963–1995) Farber’s gravemarker twinkled, and so did the tips of taller grassblades the gravekeeper’s mower had failed to chop.
“Spooked?” my dad said.
The moon doesn’t spook me, I said.
“You got quiet,” he said.
He was the one who got quiet, though.
The wind stopped.
I didn’t say anything. It wasn’t my turn yet.
My dad scraped a safety match against his side of the bench and had a cigarette lit before the sulfer finished crackling. He let the match burn for a few seconds, then flicked his wrist once to snuff the flame. When the tip quit glowing, he set the dead match between us. I picked it up and drew a line on my left palm with the black end. Then I clasped my hands and a line appeared on the right palm as well. I re-clasped with my thumbs switched and each of my palms had a slanty X in the center. Before I entered kindergarten, I used to go to the library with my mom some mornings, and she taught me the X-palm action so I wouldn’t get bored when I waited outside with her while she smoked. It took me almost a whole year to master. If you don’t make the first line thick enough, then the second line won’t be dark enough to cross the first line on the re-clasp; but if you press too hard when you draw the first line, the matchtip crumbles all at once, and you end up with no lines, let alone two X’s. My dad couldn’t perform the X-palm action. That is what he said. I never saw him try, though, and while I watched him smoke, I thought: Maybe he only pretends he can’t.
He pointed the cherry of his cigarette at my uneaten bagel, said, “Nu?”
You want me to give it to you? I said.
“Are you going to eat it?”
It’s chometz, I said.
“For you, maybe.”
And for you, I said.
“And so you won’t give it to me?”
I said, Do I have to?
“You don’t have to.”
I said, I’m not going to give it to you unless I have to.
“It would be a shame to waste a fresh bagel,” he said.
It would be a shame to eat chometz on Passover, I said. When you say it would be a shame to waste a bagel, but that I don’t have to do anything, but that you would like me to give you chometz to eat on Passover and I am trying to honor you because you’re my father, but that the way to honor you might be to help you break the law on Passover, it is impossible for me to figure out the right thing to do, and that is also a shame.
And that is when my dad started laughing at me. It was the same edgy laugh he’d laughed at the table, and I saw that Yuval wasn’t what made him laugh i
I said, I think you killed both of those men.
He stopped laughing.
I said, I think that is good.
“You think it’s good?” he said.
I said, It’s what I would have done, if I could have.
My father said, “The second man had no gun, Gurion. There were three of us and one of him.”
You did what you had to do to stop him, I said.
“And if I told you he caught fire only after he’d been laid out on the pavement by Rolly and Yuval?”
I said, If you set him on fire while he was near the girl, she would have caught on fire. It was smart of you to wait.
“And if I told you that I only spoke the sephirot once, when the first man held his gun on us?”
Why do you keep saying “if I told you,” Aba? Why are you talking like a lawyer to your son? You’re telling me what happened, this isn’t hypothetical, and I will not be confused by your ‘if I told you’s, and Ema won’t be able to confuse me later either. Two men were raping a girl and you killed them by speaking the sephirot once. That is what you’re telling me. Good. It is good. I’m telling you it’s good. And I’m telling you it’s even more miraculous than if you’d spoken the sephirot twice, because it means that you didn’t just make fire with words, and you didn’t just do it to two men with a single utterance, but the fire you made was a strategic kind of fire that waited to burn the second man until he was away from the girl.
“By the time the second man caught fire,” said my father, “he was subdued and defenseless. That is not strategic. There was no reason for him to die.”
He’d been raping that girl, I said.
“Who said it was rape?” my father said.
I said, Please stop lawyering me! This is the Talmud, Aba. Be earnest here.
He laughed the edgy laugh. “So how did you know then? I’m asking you.”
I said, Sara called it ‘struggling.’ She called it that because Yuval called it that when he told her the story. He would’ve called it ‘mugging’ if it was mugging and ‘murdering’ if it was murdering and ‘beating’ if it was beating, but he called it ‘struggling’ because he didn’t want to say ‘rape’ to his daughter. They were raping that girl, I said, and that makes them rapists. I said, They had to die.
“They raped, and so I should murder?”
It wasn’t murder, I said. It was killing.
“Enough with the eye for an eye business, Gurion. Even if that were a just system, rape does not end life, and so the life-taking was unjust, and so the life-taking was a murder.” In Hebrew, he said, “Why are you walking away from me?”
Over my shoulder, I answered him in Hebrew, and it was Hebrew we spoke for the rest of the conversation. I said, Am I the simple son? Why do you talk to me like I’m simple, like I need protection from truth?
“You’re eight years old,” he said. “You need protection from a lot.”
I can face down anything.
“It’s not about what you’re faced with,” said my father. “Believe it or not, even those without soldiers for mothers can be safe from that which attacks from the front: they can run, you see, or hide. The attacks you need protection from don’t come from the front. They creep up behind you.”
You mean like the story of how you killed those two men? I said. I said, That one seems to have creeped up in front of me. That one seems to have been hiding behind another story, which was hiding behind a third story, which was hiding behind a blind spot pretending to be no story at all.
“And now that the story is before you, you misunderstand it. You try to make it simple. You never should have heard it.”
You did not commit murder, I said. I said, You killed men who were better killed.
“They should have been jailed.”
No, I said. They should have been raped by angels, but angels don’t rape. And you couldn’t rape them because that would defile you and displease Hashem. Plus it’s gross. And to imprison a man is torture, and torture defiles the torturer as rape does the rapist. It would displease Hashem.
“You’re telling me murder pleases Him?”
I said, I’m talking about killing, not murder, please stop saying ‘murder,’ and no, I do not believe that killing ever pleases Him, but killing is necessary, and so killing fails to displease Him. At the very least, it does not displease Him as much as the rape or torture of a rapist would, and surely it displeases him less than a rapist who goes unpunished.
“That is not justice. To take someone’s life because you don’t know what else to do with him is not just, is not killing, is murder,” my father said. “Every tyrant throughout history has claimed—”
Don’t start with the reasoning of tyrants, please. Your tyrants are straw-men and I’m not a jury and I’m not a tyrant. A tyrant wants peace. He takes lives to make peace, for in peace he’s secure, and free to grow stronger without interference, free to take lives—to take lives by murder—without interference. So whatever brings peace, the tyrant calls justice. That doesn’t make it so. Justice is not for tyrants to define.
“No,” said my father, “just tyrannical gods.”
Hashem is not tyrannical.
“He made a world full of tyrants, a world short on justice.”
He made the only world we know.
“But how can you believe He is perfect, Gurion? How can you believe His Law is perfect? How can you call perfect an all-powerful being who makes a world where there is rape and there is murder? Will you tell me He works in mysterious ways? Have I raised a Christian child?”
Hashem is not perfect, I said, and I’ve never said He was perfect. I said, He is not all-powerful, either. I said, Only His Law is perfect. His Law and His intentions.
“Isn’t that blasphemy? You make Him sound like a person.”
I said, No person can make a universe, or destroy one; he can at best repair it, and at worst he can damage it. And when I say that Hashem is not all-powerful, I am not saying He isn’t more powerful than us—He is more powerful than us; He is the most powerful. And when I say He isn’t perfect, I am not saying He isn’t good—He is good. He is at least as good as we are. It is because He is good, and because He is so powerful, that He has the potential to become as perfect as His Law. He helped you, Aba. Why can’t you see that?
My dad pulled hard on his cigarette and I could not tell if smoke made him squint, or disappointment.
I said, If by speaking like Hashem you killed one man more than you meant to have killed, then why not understand that your failure was in what you meant to do, rather than in what you did? Why not decide that it was righteous to kill the second man? Why not that you are so righteous that even when you think you’ve made a mistake, you couldn’t have? Why not think that you can’t help but enact justice? Because that is what I think. I think you did right. I know it.
“You continue to miss the point,” my father told me. “The man who threatened us with the gun—I did what I could to stop him, but I should not have known how to stop him that way. Had I not known how to stop him that way, then I would have had to have found another way, and that other way would not have cost the rapist his life.”
If you didn’t know how to use the sephirot, you might have been shot dead, I said.
“Or I might not have, Gurion. There were three of us there, plus the girl. Would the gunman have shot all of us? Would he have shot even one of us, knowing that he would then have to shoot all of us? It is unlikely.”
You don’t know that, I said. I said, The potential—
“Our neighbors don’t like me, Gurion. They wish me ill. They vandalize our home because I defend the rights of those they despi
I said, That contradicts everything you said before about protection from sneak-attacks! And a loaded gun pointed at you by a criminal is far more threatening than a gun in a store that might get bought and loaded and walked over to your house and used on your son and you know it. I said, If the danger wasn’t real, you would not have done what you did.
“How can you know so much,” said my father, “and hear so much, and speak so pristinely, and meanwhile be so completely muddled, boychical? How is it that your loyalty enables you to justify everything your father does, but you go deaf when he’s speaking to you? I am telling you that what I did was wrong and you have to trust that I am correct, if for no other reason than I am your father and you are to honor me, and to honor me—I’m telling you—you have to be a mensch. You do not need to prove to me that you are a good son. I believe it, Gurion. You are a good son. And I am glad that you are a good son, but a good son is not necessarily a good human being. A good son is just a son who is loyal to his father, and loyalty is not in itself goodness, and a good father would never teach his son otherwise. I want you to understand that. If you want to honor me, you will allow that I was wrong to take that man’s life. You will call it a mistake, and after accepting it as a mistake, you will forgive me my mistake, rather than claiming it a victory. You will love me despite my mistake. You will cease to be my apologist and… Aye, Gurion, I’m sorry. I thought we were talking—I’m sorry, Gurion. I got a little carried away. Come on. Why are you crying on poor Michael Weinberg?”