The Instructions by Adam Levin
I said, All the Israelites and anyone who’s on the side of damage.
“What’s the side of damage?”
I don’t know yet, I said, but the people on the side of damage don’t know it either, so it’s okay I don’t know.
“Even better,” he said. “Click click click.” He took Edison by the scruff and held him over his face. Edison liked it. He kept trying to mark the wrist of Flowers, who said in a kitty-cat voice, “How a bunch of autobiography gonna be scripture?”
I said, If I interpret or demonstrate law, or if I become an important leader, like the messiah, or—
Flowers dropped Edison then, on the floor, and burst out laughing. When Flowers bursts out laughing, it is so booming that after you see it, it is hard to describe anyone else’s sudden laughter as bursting out without feeling like a liar.
Once he caught his breath, he said, “That’s amazing, man. You just out-loftied ‘I wanna write scripture.’ For fact, you just out-loftied anything anyone’s ever said to me straightfaced. The messiah!”
I said if, I said. And that’s only one of the—
“Hell no on ‘if’ and ‘one the ways’,” Flowers said. “I say chuck the ‘if’ and pick the loftiest way. I hope you the messiah. Same time, I think you best not harp on about being the messiah too—”
I wouldn’t, I said.
“Let me finish. You don’t want to harp on about it too early in this scripture you gonna write, cause that could discredit you, being that it’s so lofty, but same time, unless you gonna hold onto you book until after you’re famous for saving the world, it’s not the kinda thing you should avoid mentioning altogether. It’s something you’re gonna have to explain at some point. You know, like, leak it in slowly while you’re hooking everyone, and then blast! That’s first of all.
“Second, you should re-examine you people’s scriptures. They all got plots. They got dramatic arcs. Thus far, you don’t. And they don’t read Obi-Wan style, neither. That’s the most important thing for you to learn right now—nothing good reads Obi-Wan style. I thought you knew that—that Story of Stories, Obi-Wan couldn’t hack that, that piece was on—but maybe you got lucky, or maybe you forgot. Anyway, that’s why I played you the rhyme from the song. So as to give you the context needed to understand what I’m asking you when I ask you what’s you motherfucker.”
My motherfucker, I repeated dumbly.
He said, “So far we got rabbis, me, June, Nakamook, and Israelites for you niggas. And then the ign’ant niggas the ones on the side of damage don’t know what it mean. You got more than enough logic and theory, we both know that, but what is you motherfucker? Like you motherfucking vernacular? You goin’ get heard, you gotta signify, right?”
Flowers was always right.
I said, Bancer.
He said, “Bancer’s good. What else?”
I said, Pennygun? Chomsky? Snat? Dumont? Hyperscoot, blinker action, bookrocket?
He said, “Good. Use those.”
I said, What about firmament?
“Why firmament?”
I said, Not firmament, but the word in Hebrew that gets translated into firmament.
“A word that means firmament?”
I said, It doesn’t mean firmament.
“What’s it mean?” Flowers said.
I said, No one knows. I said, In Torah the translation says, ‘God split the firmament into land and sea,’ but rabbis argue about what that means, so I’m thinking firmament is motherfucker for rabbis. Unless—wait—do the rabbis need a motherfucker, you’re saying, or just the people on the side of damage?
“Need it or don’t, no way a motherfucker for rabbis could hurt,” Flowers said.
I said, But if I signify Scholar and I signify I Am In Love and I signify The Side of Damage—if I signify all those things, it’ll be too confusing.
“Could be,” Flowers said. “But you can explain a little, and then the plot should make sense of the rest. That’s what all the best plots do, man—they bring together disparate elements, linguistic and otherwise. You web-search ‘brings together disparate elements,’ you gonna land a thousand pages of gushy book reviews.”
I said, My life has no plot.
He said, “Sure you life got plot. Especially if you’re the messiah, right? Being the messiah’s you conceit. As it were.”
I said, I’m not the messiah, though.
Flowers said, “But you say you might become the messiah, right?”
I said, Yes.
He said, “So pretend you know you’ll become the messiah—If you become the messiah, then you’ll always have been the messiah, right?”
I don’t know, I said.
“What you mean you don’t know?”
I explained about potential messiahs. Flowers got bored and spaced out. When I finished, he said, “Do better you write it out and show me. Know, though, that a boy who might or might not be the messiah—that’s no less interesting to me than a boy who’s the for-sure messiah. Maybe it’s even better. I know that because I like you a hell of a lot, and I ain’t sure you the messiah. Now I’m gonna have at this Jedi scripture of yours with my red pen, see what’s there to salvage. You want an ice-cream pop or something? I picked some up—they in the freezer if you want them.” He took my pages off the music stand and rolled them into a cylinder. Then he headed toward his desk, tapping the cylinder on his thigh.
I tried to break my fingers with the forces of diametrical opposition. The knuckles popped but nothing broke.
I said to Flowers, I’m starting over.
He said, “Starting over what?”
The scripture, I said.
Flowers said, “You given me, like, two hundred pages last couple months.”
Doesn’t matter, I said.
Flowers said, “If you can scrap that many pages, then I suppose you must scrap that many pages.”
I’m starting over tonight, I said. You want an ice cream? I’m getting one.
Flowers said, “Nah, man. I had one already.”
I’d been taught to never eat ice cream alone. I’d lived by that rule, and it had served me well, or at least it hadn’t harmed me; I’d never eaten ice cream without enjoying it. I buttoned back up and left for the Metra.
I searched my school record when I got on the train. No document by Headmaster Unger was in there. His signature appeared on a few official forms—e.g., an enrollment one one which he’d entered “ben-Judah” as my middle name; an expulsion one wherein a box beside the phrase FOR REASONS OTHER THAN THOSE LISTED ABOVE was checked, and beneath the box, on the two lines provided, were scrawled the words “unacceptable violence: student assaulted his headmaster (myself, the signatory, Headmaster Rabbi Lional Unger, M.Ed.) with a stapling implement”—but there was nothing that he’d authored all by himself, let alone an account of what preceded my flying stapler attack. Apart from what I’d already found in the Office while Principal Brodsky talked about math, there wasn’t much in my record I could use in my scripture. Rather, there was, but all of it was stuff that I’d written myself—detention assignments, a copy of Ulpan, an essay for English called “9-1-1 Is a Joke”—and as with everything else I’d ever written or read, I had all those writings memorized anyway.
I tried to decide whether to read Rabbi Salt’s letter to Brodsky or Call-Me’s Assessment, but then I remembered I had in-school suspension the next day, and if I saved them to read in ISS, then ISS almost became worth looking forward to. Plus I was tired.
I leaned on the window and fell asleep for a minute. I woke up more tired, and hungry, too.
In Evanston, I got a large coffee and a slice at this place called Pizza by the Davis Street station. I bolted the slice and brought the coffee to the el stop.
On the platform, I saw Emmanuel Liebman. He was staring at the sky and rocking heel to toe. A wobbly plank beneath him kept squeaking. The noise made the people under the heatlamp act nervous. One guy smoothed his mustache three times in a row. Another worked h
I sat in a patch of rock salt by the mapstand, holding my cigarette like a French guy to hide it. I couldn’t decide if I should say hello.
I knew that I wanted to. Along with Esther and Rabbi Salt, Emmanuel had been my favorite person at Schechter, and I hadn’t seen him since the day I got kicked out of Northside. He was taller and had some whiskers, very thin ones, but was easy to recognize from far away since his head was shaped like a mallet.
If you were a Cohain, having a mallet-shaped head would automatically bar you from becoming the Cohain Gadol, which translates to “the Big Cohain,” which means the high priest of the Temple, the one who’d get to speak Hashem’s true name once a year on Yom Kippur when we still had a temple. Some scholars think that Judah Maccabee—not my father, but the hero of Chanukah who led the rebellion against the Greeks to briefly take back the second Temple in the second century B.C.E.—was mallet-headed, and that that is why he was called Maccabee, because maccabee means hammer, or mallet. I don’t know why a mallet-head barred you from high-priesthood. Emmanuel was hugely smart and kind, despite his mallet-head, and I think that Judah Maccabee probably was, too, but maybe only because he had the same name as my father and the same-shaped head as my loyal friend, Emmanuel.
When the woman with the nostrils leapt from the bench, the smoothing guys leaned forward. She put her foot down on the wobbly plank, and the squeak got zeroed and they stopped their smoothing.
Emmanuel did a slow revolution, blinking his eyes like he’d just left a trance. He double-taked on seeing me, then chinned the air in the direction of the stairwell. I followed him there at a ten-pace distance.
“I’m sorry, Rabbi,” he said. “I thought I saw my mom’s friend Susanah on the other side of the tracks, and I didn’t want her to see me talking to—I’m probably just jumpy. My grandfather—Schechter’s closed today—service day for the teachers—I came up to visit him. We watched an awful documentary. Sabra and Shatila and Ariel Sharon. Not very cheering. Not very easy to come away from undistracted, unjumpy. But then look who’s here.” He clapped both my shoulders. “I was almost starting to think you were imprisoned in a juvenile hall,” he said. “Of all the rumors I’ve heard about you since the schoolyear started—death, flight to Israel, employment by the Mossad—the imprisonment one’s been the most popular. I’ve pooh-poohed it from the get-go, but then, last week, I looked at the last email you sent, the one called “Last Word.” I looked at the sent-date, and did some arithmetic, and realized it had been five months since we’d heard from you. I thought how five months is a lot longer than we were counting on, and when you consider all the strife in the Land of Israel in the last five months… I began to wonder if the rumors might be true. I began to think to myself, ‘Many of our tzadiks do end up imprisoned,’ but even then I would think, ‘not often while in middle school.’ So what are you doing in Evanston? And what are you doing with my collar?”
Even if it is said kiddingly, it is such a nice thing to be called a tzadik that I never knew how to act when someone called me it, so I’d started straightening Emmanuel’s collar with my free hand because that way I could make a face like I was concentrating and not look at his eyes.
He touched my cup and said, “Did you just eat at that pizza place Pizza? With the swastika guy?”
Emmanuel was referring to a guy called Mongo who sometimes worked behind the counter at Pizza. Mongo had a swastika on each of his wrists, but it wasn’t how it seemed. Mongo was Indian—you could tell by his accent. He wasn’t a Nazi. The tattoos were religious.
Mongo’s Indian, I said.
Emmanuel said, “That’s what I used to think: he’s Indian, the swastika means something else. But even if it does mean something else, he’s cruel about it. My grandfather took me there over the summer,” he said, “to Pizza. We were thirsty and we knew they had soda in cans. And my grandfather asked the guy, ‘What are these tattoos for? What do they mean?’—he was trying to understand. And the guy said, ‘I owe you no explanation.’ So we left without getting any cans of soda because even though it was true he didn’t have to explain anything he didn’t want to explain, so what? If he was nice, he would explain. If he was nice, he’d understand he was making an old man uncomfortable, that the old man was only trying to get comfortable, and that all it would take is a couple words to make the old man comfortable. Because what? It’s my grandfather’s fault the Nazis stole this guy’s religious symbol? What if some old guy from Mississippi came into Pizza in a Confederate flag bandanna and said to Mongo, ‘You coloreds are wonderful’? Do you think Mongo would say to himself, ‘It’s okay he says coloreds because he’s saying he likes me and coloreds used to mean something different when this guy was young, and all his bandanna stands for is Southern pride?’ Do you think Mongo would be thrilled about serving this guy pizza? I think Mongo would pore Borax into the cheese of such a guy’s pizza, but then you have my grandfather, who all he wants is Mongo to say, ‘Swastikas used to mean something different,’ and he’ll be happy to talk to Mongo, and Mongo won’t explain? What kind of name is Mongo, anyway? You sure it’s Indian?”
Loose slats on the tracks clunked and the whine of metal rubbing metal bounced between the stairwell walls. “You getting on this train with me or what?” said Emmanuel.
We ran up the stairs and got on. I was going to ask him if maybe his grandfather didn’t ask Mongo about the swastika as nicely as it seemed like he had; if it was possible that, with his voice, Emmanuel’s grandfather made the question sound like an accusation, like when someone says, “Are you a Jew?” but then there was this homeless guy with no thumbs. Not even nubs where the thumbs would have been. Two smoothnesses. He stuck out his hands and said, “I was born this way.”
I gave him a dollar and he took it with his pointer and swearfinger, then turned to Emmanuel, who gave him another dollar.
The guy blessed us and walked off.
Emmanuel said to me, “Why’d you have us give away our fathers’ dollars?” He said it in Hebrew, and that is the language the conversation continued in.
I said, That man was cursed with thumblessness.
Emmanuel said, “By Whom, though?” = “His thumblessness is the will of Hashem.”
I said, So maybe the thumblessness was a blessing. Maybe that man’s homelessness was not caused by his thumblessness—maybe he’s homeless for some reason we don’t know, and Hashem granted him thumblessness so more people like us would give him dollars.
Emmanuel said, “Is that different than saying the Shoah may have been a blessing for us because, without it, the West might not have backed Israel in 1948?”
The train stopped. I was in the seat to the left of Emmanuel and two men in yarmulkes got onto our car through the door to his right, then went to the right so we didn’t see their faces and couldn’t tell if they knew us.
Emmanuel tried to make himself invisible with slouching and it didn’t work, so I switched to the seat to Emmanuel’s right and became as wide and tall as I could. Emmanuel nodded = “Thank you,” and once he’d relaxed a little, I said to him, It is not much different to say those two things. But I think you answered your original question with your new one. I said, Should not the West have helped Israel in 1948 regardless of the Shoah? Is the Land of Israel not rightfully ours? Should we, when we see a man without a home, not help him survive as best as we’re able, regardless of whether or not he is somehow crippled? Is life not rightfully his?
The men in yarmulkes leaned at the sound of my academic Hebrew. I didn’t see it happen, but I felt it on my back, their attention, and Emmanuel ducked his head even lower than it had already been ducked.
“Fair enough,” he whispered, “but then there’s the how of it. There’s giving fish away, and teaching the skill of fishing, and we have all heard it said that not only is it better to teach the skill of fishing to the
I said, Who do you know that thinks that way? Who would rather rely on someone else’s help? Would that not be a kind of sickness in itself? And even if everyone was sick that way, I said, does that mean that if we can’t teach them to fish, whether because we don’t know how to fish ourselves or because we don’t have time, we should let them starve? I do not know how to give a homeless, thumbless man a home or thumbs, let alone how to teach him to get a home or thumbs, so if he believes a dollar can help him, and I don’t believe a dollar will hurt him, should I not give a dollar?
Said Emmanuel, “I see your point, Rabbi, but I have walked with you many times—I think of these times often, and miss them, and wish, even now, as I sit beside you on this train, they were not so impossible to reclaim with regularity—so many times, Rabbi, I have walked with you past homeless people to whom we did not give away our fathers’ dollars. And so I can’t help but to wonder: Why did we walk past them? Because they had thumbs? Might they not have been crippled in ways we couldn’t see or understand? And were they not, either way, homeless?”
I chugged my coffee, leaving only one sip. I liked to drink the last sip while I stepped off the train, then victory-spike it into the garbage barrel at the station = I am finished with this part of the day!
I said, I don’t know why we walked past them.
Emmanuel said, “Maybe because there are so many homeless, and so few dollars, we save the dollars to give to those who need them the most?”
I said, I don’t know that we save.
Emmanuel said, “Maybe we save the dollars to give to those who will use them best?”
I said, I don’t know why we save them, if we save them.
“And how do we know who needs them most or will use them the best?” said Emmanuel. “There is no law about it. There is no law that says it is worse to be thumbless than alcoholic, or, for that matter, better to be sober and homeless than drunken and homeless. How do we know what to do?”