The Instructions by Adam Levin
On Gurion’s first day at Solomon Schechter—he was a kinder-gartner, five years old, and without any capacity to read Hebrew—he approached me in the hallway and said, “Because you are the principal of Judaic Studies, I would like to ask you about the importance of truth.” He spoke that way when he was small, like a boy with maybe a governess, surely a summer villa somewhere coastal in western Europe. Now he speaks differently—with character.
In any case, “Truth is very important,” I told him.
He said, “I know. Except sometimes it is less important than it is at other times and this is what I want to ask you about. The matter, however, is a private one.”
“The matter!” I thought. “So that’s how it is!” Queen’s English or not, I was confident he would tell me about having stolen something, or hurt somebody, only to ask if he should be honest about it, and then I’d tell him yes, be honest.
That is not what happened.
In my office, he sat cross-legged in the chair on the other side of my desk and said, “My mother has a colleague with a baby named Isaac. We went there yesterday, to Isaac’s house, for a barbecue. We ate steak because I like steak and the steak that afternoon was delicious. After the steak, while our fathers smoked cigarettes, our mothers cleared the table and brought out bowls of ice cream. Isaac was laying on a blanket in the grass next to the table and, in the middle of my first bite of ice cream, a glinting in my eye came from his direction and I turned and saw that he held a steak knife. It must have fallen off the table when our moms cleared the dishes. It might have been my steak knife, it might have been anyone’s—I don’t think it matters. But I saw this baby, Isaac, holding this very sharp knife, playing with it. He was making the sun reflect itself onto his chest and his belly—he was wearing only a diaper—and it was very beautiful to Isaac, how the sun was being reflected, the way he could bend his wrist to push the sun around his body or turn it off or change the size of it and how it would multiply in number when he caught it on more than one tooth of the serration at once. And probably the knife felt to him differently than anything he’d ever held before because I know Isaac’s parents would never let him play with dangerous metal things, and so it was very sad to me that it was a knife since he could accidentally stab himself in the eye or cut himself on the hand or the belly or stab himself in any of those places with it, or cut his forehead, or even if he just pricked himself a little bit and then dropped the knife, or dropped the knife on himself, pricking himself, it would be harmful… I jumped off my bench and snatched the knife away. I did it very quickly. All those thoughts I said I was thinking about the reflections on his belly and how he could hurt himself, I remember thinking them, but it seems impossible because they take so much time to say, and it was really as soon as I saw the knife in his hands that I took it from him. Isaac has big eyes, even for a baby, and they became even bigger when I took the knife. And then he started crying. And I said to his dad—because it happened so fast that no one could make out what exactly the situation was and maybe it looked like I made him cry on purpose—I said, ‘He had a knife and I saved him,’ and then my father, who was sitting next to me, picked up his ice-cream teaspoon, reached around me, and handed it down to Isaac, who grabbed it and stopped crying immediately. Which is what I should have done—the teaspoon. My father is smart. He tricked the baby. The baby thought the spoon was the knife. The spoon was smooth and metal and it could reflect the sun onto his belly. And I know that was the right thing to do, to trick the baby.
“And it is not that what I did was bad. What I did was very good. It is very good in a left-handed way to take a knife from a baby, because babies can be harmed by knives they’re playing with, so it is a very clear kind of justice to take a knife away from a baby, only: there is very little love in taking the knife away. And I do love Isaac—he’s a very funny baby…but even if I didn’t love him, even if he were someone else’s baby who I didn’t know and didn’t love, I would’ve taken the knife away. So it really had nothing to do with love, what I did. The spoon, though, giving him it, that is out of love, unless it’s just to make him stop crying because the crying annoys you, but like I said, in the best circumstances I would’ve given him the spoon myself, before he even noticed the knife was missing from his hand, and he would never have started crying or even felt like crying. So here is where the question of the importance of truth comes up. The right thing to do is to balance justice and love, and giving Isaac the spoon after taking the knife away is one of the most balanced actions that I can imagine—but you end up tricking the baby when you do that. The spoon is not the knife. And you can say that the baby didn’t know the knife was a knife to begin with and so there’s no trick, but that’s cheap—because it was a knife to begin with and tricks are always about what the mark doesn’t know. So you’re tricking the baby, and if you say you’re not tricking the baby you’re tricking yourself. There’s no way to get around it. And tricks are dishonest and there’s no way to get around that. And tricking the baby is the right thing to do, and there’s no way to get around that. So truth is, and therefore must be, less important than some other things. And there are the obvious ones, like life, like if someone I don’t like very much puts a gun to my head and says, ‘I will kill you if you don’t say that you love me,’ I have to say I love them, but that is easy to figure out. It is worth lying to save a life. But why is it worth lying to Isaac about a knife that’s already been taken from him? Maybe you say to save him pain or injury, but so then how much pain and how much injury? Because what if it’s an adult? Is it different for adults? They can take a little more pain than a baby, maybe? What if it’s an older kid? I’m an older kid, and if I found out you lied to me to save me some pain, I would trust you less and things would fall apart between us. At least I think that’s how it is. I’m five and I am sure there are things that I don’t know about: exceptions. But either way, since yesterday, whenever I think about Isaac the baby, I start thinking about Isaac, the father of Jacob. How when Isaac is blind and dying, Jacob glues the goat fur to his chest and pretends he’s Esau, who’s hairy, so Isaac will give him the blessing that is Esau’s birthright. Jacob tricks his own father! But it is definitely the right thing to do. It has to be. Esau was mean. He secretly sold his birthright to Isaac for a bowl of soup years earlier, and then, when the time came, he tried to get the blessing anyway. And if Jacob didn’t trick Isaac, we probably wouldn’t even be here, there’d be no Israelites! And then on top of it, I read a commentary that said that Isaac knew he was being tricked. It said that he wanted to give Jacob the blessing and that he was only pretending to be tricked. But if Isaac was only pretending, then who was he pretending for? Because it seems to me like if he was pretending, he was pretending for H-shem. Like he was tricking H-shem! And that H-shem let Himself be tricked! It’s very confusing to me and what I’m asking you is what other things, specifically, are more important than truth? And also why? And is it possible to trick G-d? And if it’s possible to trick G-d, does that mean it is okay to trick G-d?”
Stuttering, I asked Gurion to come back later, to let me think about his questions, the answers to the simpler of which, to my mind at least, have to do with the tension between the abstract nature of truth and the fact that truth actually functions, physically, and in variable ways no less, such that one of the truths about the knife is that it was a vehicle of the sun’s reflection, as was the spoon, and that what the baby became upset about, when Gurion took his knife, was the loss of his sun-reflecting vehicle. And so what soothed the baby was the acquisition of a new sun-reflecting vehicle: the knife was not, for the baby, ever functioning as a piercing or sawing instrument (thank G-d!), and the spoon was not, for the baby, ever functioning as a scooping instrument (or as a knife), and so there is no good reason to believe that the baby was tricked. There is no good reason to believe, as Gurion believed, that the baby believed the spoon was the knife. Knifeness or spoonness (to us distinguished, respectively, by the properties “ab
The story of Jacob and Esau, however, is more complicated. (And you’ll please forgive me for going on like this, Leonard; I realize I must sound more like a blowhard proud father than a concerned teacher, here, but it is so important to me that when you put down this letter, you understand the kind of talent of which Gurion is in possession, and I feel that the best way to help you understand is to detail what he has done for me. I.e., if even I, an adult, a lifelong Torah scholar, can be inspired by this boy—the kindergartner version—to re-examine fundamental notions about Torah, just imagine what he, five years later, can do for other children. I tell you he makes them better. Not merely smarter—though he certainly does that—but more decent. Kinder. More reflective. Of our children, he makes mensches. This is not a boy you lock away in a room. This is a boy to whom you introduce everyone.)
On one hand, Esau’s birthright was voluntarily forfeited by Esau for the bowl of soup our star student mentioned, indicating that it was not his, was never his (What kind of son trades his birthright for a bowl of soup? Not the kind who is deserving of a patriarch’s birthright, I can tell you!), and so one might say that Isaac, rather than being tricked by Jacob into giving Jacob Esau’s blessing, had actually been tricked earlier, by his sons’ birth-order, into thinking the birthright ever belonged to Esau: Jacob’s trick could then be understood as a correction. Even so, Jacob deliberately misleads Isaac, via the goat-fur, into believing he’s Esau. And although a number of scholars suggest that Isaac knew Jacob was pretending, that Isaac was colluding in his own trickery, that Isaac was thereby not tricked, the fact of some kind of truth being undermined cannot be dispelled: Even though we can all agree that the trick of the goat-fur served a higher truth (i.e., the birthright rightly belonged to Jacob), and even though (rather, even if—for we don’t all agree on this part) we can agree that Isaac was not actually tricked by the trick, we cannot deny that a trick is being played. But if not a trick played on Isaac, then on whom? For whose benefit or detriment this trick? The reader’s? Of course not. Though possibly an unreliable narrator (more on that in a moment), Torah’s is not an unreliable author—He’s G-d. And there’s no need to trick Esau, who sold the birthright and isn’t present anyway. As for Rebecca: we know for sure by the scripture that she has colluded with Jacob, orchestrated the whole goat-fur bit. So whom does that leave to trick? Rather: So Whom does that leave? H-shem? Yes. At least: Maybe. And this is not to say that G-d, for even a second, would have believed that Jacob was Esau, but that maybe G-d believed that Isaac believed Jacob was Esau, when that was not necessarily the case. And if G-d believed such a thing, despite its being untrue (which it may or not be), it would suggest—as many other portions of scripture do—that G-d has only limited access to the minds of men, if any at all. We know He cares greatly about what is “in our hearts”—that is plainly stated throughout scripture—but we do not know how it is that he learns what is in our hearts. Though we surely cannot hide what we do from Him, it may be the case that we can hide what we think from Him, and even what we think of Him. This may be why we are commanded to engage in so many rituals, why we are taught to pray aloud, never silently. It may be that H-shem, because he cannot access thoughts that we don’t express in words or deeds, cannot completely understand Torah—a book about men that He, Himself, wrote—without our interpretation, without scholars or sagacious little boys to talk about it within His omnipresent earshot, to write about it so that He may read about it. It may be that Jacob and Isaac colluded to trick G-d, who loved them both, and that because He loved them He wrote of them so that we may read of them, because it is only by our reading of them and writing of them and speaking of them that He may come to understand them. And Gurion’s capacity, as a five-year-old boy, to be haunted by certain of these possibilities, was shocking to me. And his ability to think scripturally in his assessment of everyday events was shocking to me, and that he could describe the sun on the belly of a baby at a barbecue as gorgeously as he had. And when, after I dismissed him, he said to me, “I’m sorry if I’m being very complicated. I’d ask my father these questions, but he doesn’t like to talk to me about Judaism. He’ll do it, but I can tell he doesn’t like to. He quit it before I was born. He was supposed to be a great rabbi and kabbalist”—when he said that, I was shocked, too, for I knew his father to be Judah Maccabee, Esq., and all I’d known of the man was exactly what everyone else knows: that he defends the rights of Nazis to hold parades in the streets of Jewish suburbs. A complicated person, Judah Maccabee.
And so when Gurion left my office, I rushed to write down everything he said to me, as best as I could remember. You see, Leonard, he is a born tzadik, this boy, such a quick one, and it was apparent even then.
This letter is running long, and still I’ve not addressed your signal concern, so I won’t, as much as I’m tempted to, go into detail about my ensuing series of awestruck and often—unfortunately—fumbling scholarly endeavors with Gurion, other than to say that, until the very end of his fourth-grade year, the only thing he seemed to like as much as learning was teaching. And in all of Schechter, there was not a boy or girl who did not profit by or enjoy being taught by him. And yes, this led to some talk among the children at our school of Gurion’s being more than a genius (genius an epithet that no few of our students—some, like Gurion, deservingly; and others, of course, not—have had hurled at them by their loved ones); some talk of his being Moshiach. And yes, there were a few teachers here who were made uncomfortable by this kind of talk, and yes, there was one in particular who maybe did not like Gurion so much to begin with, and true, that one happened to have quite a high professional standing (the highest), and maybe that person acted unprofessionally one day, and surely he provoked an outburst of a violent nature from the quick tzadik in question, and possibly that outburst was not appropriate, and but then likely it was.
What I know for sure is that Gurion had not once acted violently toward others in our school until the day he was forced to leave; had not once in the five years he spent in my classroom offered any encouragement to those who, if you’ll excuse the pun, lionized him; and had but once (in his third-grade year) lost his temper in my presence, which was apparently the result of his remarkably sensitive cranium coming into sudden contact with the underside of an oak table while he retrieved a pencil that he’d accidentally, it seemed, swept to the floor with his fiercely animated hands, hands he’d been using, with perfect pedagogical intent, to punctuate his learned commentary on the flawed nature of angels (one-legged, soulless) and the origin of the lisp of Moses (a hot coal the infant brought to his own lips in Pharaoh’s court, if you don’t know the Midrash). (Later, I asked Gurion why he even bothered to pick the pencil up in the middle of his lecture—it had been going so strongly when he dropped it—and he told me that Simon Rothschild, a new boy at school who was sitting at the far end of the study table, was wearing on his face a look of envy and annoyance, and Gurion knew that if he wanted Simon to pay attention, a gesture of endearing clumsiness would be required to win him over. “So I knocked the pencil under the table,” Gurion said, “but Simon didn’t see. So I got under the table to get the pencil, to show him that I knocked it down there. But then when I banged my head getting it, that was an accident, and I got very angry because I don’t like it when my head is touched, and so when I came up from under the table, I was thinking: Simon made me bang my head. That is why I spun and knocked the chalk-trough
And furthermore, as you might or might not have noticed by way of his permanent record, Gurion did not, after leaving Schechter, engage in any violence at Northside Hebrew Day School. He is not some loose canon. He wrote those instructions after having witnessed an act of antisemitic violence outside of the Fairfield Street Synagogue, where he used to attend services (without his parents, by the way—their home is secular). If you followed the newspapers last Spring, then what you read was that a group of local Muslim teenagers, claiming to have been inspired by the current Intifada, threw stones at a group of Hasidic congregants on a Saturday and that no one was critically injured. What you did not read was that those congregants who did not duck back inside the synagogue for cover froze where they stood, and that the rabbi, a good man (I know him a little), came forward, apparently in an effort to reason with the stone-throwers, and managed to utter one word, “Please,” before receiving for his trouble a block of jagged concrete in his mouth.
Gurion was one of those who had frozen, and he told me that by the time it occurred to him to chase the fleeing boys, they were already too far ahead of him; that he ran after them fruitlessly, catching sight of them through gaps in backyard fences, turning numerous corners, and ducking into various alleys and gangways, until he became sick from exertion, and that it was not until he stopped running that he realized that no one was behind him, that he was the only one who had tried to catch them. This upset Gurion greatly, and when he returned to the synagogue, he was reprimanded by the rebbetsen for having endangered himself. He told me that, as he received his reprimand, a group of boys gathered behind the rebbetsen and that what he saw on their faces was not the remnant of fear and shock that he would have expected, but rather regret, and that he knew that what they regretted was that they had not helped him chase down the stone-throwers. And he also told me that the rebbetsen was right—that he had endangered himself—and that he should not have endangered himself. He told me that what he should have done was picked up a brick of his own, “or something with better range,” he said, and convinced the others to do the same, and to follow him. Unreasonable? Maybe. Maybe not. Not so very unreasonable, in any case. As Gurion put it: “We’re taught not to bow down before idols or men. You teach us that. Torah teaches that. We’re taught that it’s better to die than to bow, but isn’t it better yet to do neither? When someone comes at you and says, ‘Bow or die,’ isn’t it better to lay him out? And I know what you’ll say, Rabbi Salt, I know: You’ll say there’s a difference between ducking a blow and bowing down, that there’s no sin at all in ducking a blow. But that’s only true to a certain extent. To duck a direct blow is only to duck—I’ll give you that—but to duck a blow that has yet to be launched, let alone a blow that only might be coming, which is to say nothing of ducking in hopes of averting a blow’s being launched to begin with—that, Rabbi Salt, is to bow, is it not? It is. Of course. That’s exactly what it is. And I say this: It’s better to shoot. It’s better to shoot til you no longer have to, to shoot til those people who’d have you bow down duck to avert the launch of your blows.”