The Instructions by Adam Levin
So FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL is one of the other four of you.
I would gleefully go after all of you to be sure I got to the one, but your victim has asked that I refrain. Of Judah Maccabee—a profoundly talented attorney, in case you don’t watch the news—Gurion has commanded compliance with the same request. Though I spent all of today devising a number of highly public methods by which to avenge him, and though his father would wrap tort around your necks like phonecord where his mother would actual phonecord, the boy himself—who was on the first listserv to which FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL posted; who has spent these past couple days in tears at the thought of no longer being allowed to study Torah among his friends; and who, as the email circulates more and more widely through our community, is being denied access to more and more of these friends by their parents, who FEAR him now—when tonight, over dinner, we presented Gurion with the thousand possible ways in which we could ruin you, he declined all of them, saying, “What has been done to me is dirty, but no Israelite, no matter how corrupt, must ever be rendered unto the law of Caesar, much less the scrutiny of Canaanites. Apart from that, I love all of you, and will not have you sully yourselves in dirt that is mine to wash away. I will wash it away. I will wash it away truly.”
May he.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Avel Salt
Principal of Judaic Studies, Solomon Schechter School of Chicago
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Schloss
To: Avel Salt
Date: Thur, 8 June 2006 09:40 AM CST
Subject: Fwd: Important
Avel,
Is this not the same Gurion you’ve spoken so highly of? I hope not.
Best,
Michael
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: TorahScholars Listserv
To: Michael Schloss
Date: Thur, 8 June 2006 09:11 AM EST
Subject: Fwd: Important
I can’t see what this has to do with the TorahScholars listserv, but if one of you wants to post something, who is Tsvi to deny him?
—Tsvi
--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: EastCoastTzadiksListserv
To: TorahScholars Listserv
Date: Wed, 7 June 2006 10:27 PM EST
Subject: Fwd: Important
Friends,
Were the words “no little bit disturbing” for some reason unavailable this evening, I believe I would describe this Fwd as “very compelling.” Though I must also say I doubt its authenticity. Feel free to post on this topic.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL
To: EastCoastTzadiksListserv
Date: Wed, 7 June 2006 8:59 PM EST
Subject: Fwd: Important
Sent: June 7, 2006, 2:01 PM Central-Standard Time
Subject: Fwd: Important
From: [email protected] (Alan Kalisch, Northside Hebrew Day School)
To: [email protected] (Richard Feldman, Northbrook Hebrew Day School), [email protected] (Lionel Unger, Solomon Schechter School), [email protected] (Benjamin Weissman, The Goldstein School), [email protected] (Harold Nieman, Anshe Emet), [email protected] (Michael Kleinman, North-Suburban Solomon Schechter School)
Fellow Headmaster Rabbis:
Earlier today, one of our third-graders, Moshe Levin, was on his way to morning davening when a first-grader, David Kahn, stepped out of the doorway of a bathroom at the opposite end of the hallway and shot Moshe in the eye with a slingshot-type weapon that David and, I fear, no few others, refer to as a “pennygun.” It appears that the attack on Moshe was provoked yesterday afternoon, on the after-school bus, where Moshe and some other boys teased David—by all reports rather harshly—about his stutter. Moshe has suffered a bruised retina and much psychological trauma. The doctors tell us that the ocular injury should heal shortly, baruch H-shem, but it is impossible to know how long the psychic damage will linger.
After having met with David, I am entirely confident that he is repentant and will not repeat-offend. Nonetheless, the boy must be expelled from Northside. For David’s sake, justice would do well to be tempered with mercy here, but our no-tolerance policy against violence need be unequivocally enforced for the good of the school. If David should attempt to enroll in one of your schools at the start of next year, I urge you to keep that in mind. It is my hope that you would admit him as a second-grader—we are only three days away from the end of the academic year, and he is a good boy, a good student. He would come to you with my highest recommendations.
Of greater concern than the attack itself are the pennyguns. There is evidence which suggests that a number of boys at Jewish day schools throughout the Chicago area may be in possession of these weapons. This evidence comes in the form of a photocopied document, titled “Ulpan,” that we discovered during a search of David Kahn’s desk. A copy will be faxed to each of you. As you will soon see, the document not only offers instructions for how to build weapons, but instructions for how to teach others to build them. Most troublingly of all, “Ulpan” terminates in a call to arms in the name of the Jewish religion.
I am confident that desk- and locker-searches should do away with most of the weapons and copies of “Ulpan.” We are currently in the process of performing such searches at Northside. I would imagine that the students whose weapons are not discovered (and confiscated) will—upon witnessing the penalties (one-day suspensions) suffered by those students who are found to be in possession of the weapons—see the academic, if not the moral, liability in carrying pennyguns, and will proceed, of their own volition, to dispose of their weapons, as well as their copies of “Ulpan.”
Of greatest concern is the document’s author, Gurion Maccabee, a nine-year-old Northside sixth-grader who most of you know, if not personally, then by reputation. After his expulsion from the Solomon Schecter School, I admitted Gurion to Northside because I believe in mercy, in second chances. Our student body had, up until this point, profited by that belief. Now we suffer for it.
Students, as Headmaster Unger can attest to, follow Gurion. Many call him “Rabbi.” In class, they defer to him in all matters, whether secular or Judaic, and on the playground, they stand on line to speak to him. He is as intelligent and charismatic a boy as rumors would suggest, but he is equally as disturbed. When, earlier today, in conference, I asked Gurion why he felt the need to arm his fellow students, he said that his aim was to “help the Israelite children to protect themselves from the increasingly violent population of Canaanites for whom you (I, Rabbi Kalisch) would have us lay down.” He then made reference to the antisemitic violence that took place three Saturdays ago, outside of the Fairfield Street Synagogue after services, commenting that, “Sometimes a scholar must become a soldier.” When I pointed out to him that the teenagers who’d thrown the stones at the congregants had, within twenty-four hours of the attack, been taken into custody by the authorities, he said, “There’s no King in Israel.” When I let him know that he would be expelled from Northside, he told me, “There’s no King in Israel.” And when I told him that I would be sending a letter about him to the heads of all the Jewish parochial schools in and around Chicago, urging them to bar his enrollment, Gurion said, “There’s no King in Israel.” A short time later, while waiting in my office for his father to pick him up, he became visibly upset, and called me a “snivelling Sadducee.”
The boy’s mother—a mental-health professional, herself—has, since his enrollment at Northside, done everything she can to limit our social worker’s access to him, has taken him off his medication (if ever she administered it at all—this was being looked into), and refuses
In closing, I ask you to please forgive the informality of this group e-mail. If the information it contains did not require immediate dissemination, I would have taken the time to send individualized letters by post. Please feel free to contact me with any questions you might have. I will do my best to answer them.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Alan Kalisch,
Headmaster, Northside Hebrew Day School
PS: Janice and I will be hosting a 4th of July picnic at our family farm. The foals born there this spring (2 of them!) are not only healthy, but beautiful—just to see them walking, with all their horsey pride, is a treat—and we want to share our joy with others, as well as some kosher barbecue and traditional festivity (the fireworks, though nothing compared to those you’d see at Navy Pier, do rival the suburban), so if you’re willing to shlep the kids out to Galina, please do so; we have many guestrooms for those who’d like to stay overnight. RSVP to this email address.
The lights were on, but the gym was empty; third-period PE had swim-unit, too. The end-of-class tone was twenty minutes away, so they’d be at the pool for at least another ten, which gave me time to piss without risk of detection, and that’s what I did, though I only barely had to. I wanted no distractions when I fired on the clock.
In the language of industrial psychology researchers, the locker-room bathroom was a 2S-3U, which meant it housed a pair of stalls and three urinals. According to this study my mother once showed me—she thought it was funny—most guys entering 2S-3U’s go straight for the urinal farthest from the door, unless the urinal farthest from the door is occupied, in which case most go to the one that’s closest to the door so as not to stand next to a guy who is pissing, and if the only unoccupied urinal’s the middle one, not only do most guys go to one of the stalls, but even though all they’re doing is pissing, they stay for much longer than it takes to piss, engaging in what the authors of the study term “the phantom defecation stratagem” because they are embarrassed that they didn’t choose to go to the unoccupied urinal and they feel that they need to save face.
I’d never once phantomly defecated, myself, but my choices in bathrooms, apart from that, did used to be typical. After I’d read the study, however, I quit going to the urinal farthest from the door. Whenever I’d enter an empty 2S-3U, I’d head straightaway for the one in the middle. What that did was cause most guys who came in after me to go to a stall. More than most guys, really; nearly all guys. Say eight out of ten, and call the stat reliable— I pissed a lot. Every day of the week, I beat the good sage’s minimum, and usually I beat it by the end of dinner.
The Rambam (aka Maimonedes of Cordoba) said you had to piss at least ten times a day if you wanted to be a good sage. He also said you should keep your stomach in a constant state of near-diarrhea, which is not to be confused with a near-constant state of total diarrhea, which is the way of the stomachs of scoundrels worldwide. It is also important, according to the Rambam, to keep yourself clean. That is why I’d wash my hands every time. Even though doing so made people think you got some piss on your fingers. Rambam was a wiseman.
I finished up pissing and scrubbed with pink soap, dried my hands on my pants, and returned to the bright and empty gym, where my every step echoed and my breathing seemed loud. The clock was high on the western wall, ten feet over the basketball hoop, just a few inches below the scoreboard. It was masked by a box of metal rods with spaces between them too narrow for a golf ball, or even a marble, to get through. A coin, though, was thin. A coin could sneak.
Once, I got a couple pennies through the mask. All that they did was bounce off the glass, but pennies are smooth-edged, and that was the reason, apart from sheer mass, that I’d thought to try quarters. Quarters are rough-edged, and also they weigh more, and I thought that the glass might be like a man, and the edge of a penny like a bed of nails, whereas the one or two points on the edge of a quarter that would impact the glass were more like one nail that, if it was laid on, would enter the flesh.
I dropped a quarter into the balloon and stood at the top of the key. When I kneeled down to aim, it said 10:25 on the clock. I didn’t know if it could happen, but I wanted the clock to stop when I smashed it, and if it stopped, I thought it would be better—a better gift to June, in case she noticed such things—if it stopped at a time that was interesting. 10:25 was not so interesting. Though 2 x 5 = 10, it’s a cinch. And 10:26 did nothing when you played with it. So I decided to wait for 10:27, since 1+0+2+7 = 10.
While I waited for 10:27, I could only hear my breathing and I remembered June kissing me. Not just that she kissed me, but the way the kiss felt, on my skin, in my skull. I got a shiver. When it faded, I tried to get another but couldn’t. I’d worn out the memory, at least for the moment. If I thought too much about anything good, it would get less good, and everything good would begin to seem temporary. I did that the most with good songs. They’d stick in my head and go dull. And even when I’d hear one in my ears again, there were no surprises. I’d anticipate all the notes and the beats and the song would be ruined. So while it wasn’t any big deal that I wore out the memory of that one kiss, I was scared that if I kept remembering the kiss I could ruin future kisses, so instead I remembered June saying, “Don’t be sick, Gurion. I like you,” and I got another shiver and it was 10:27 and as soon as the shiver stopped I pinched the quarter through the balloon skin and pulled back on it. I was aiming for the most middle space of the mask, the one that had the 3 and the 9 between it.
I let fly and the quarter plinked the bottom of the rod beneath the twelve, then fell straight down onto the floor. It was bad that I missed, but good to discover that my pennygun could project quarters.
It was still 10:27. I dropped another quarter in the firing pouch. This time I aimed for the space with the 5 and the 7 between it because it seemed from the first shot that I had aimed too high. There were fourteen seconds left in the twenty-eighth minute of ten o’clock. When there were thirteen seconds left, I fired. I got a direct hit, right in the middle between the 3 and the 9. It made the noise tock, but nothing else happened. The glass didn’t fall down in pieces like I wanted. The clock didn’t stop. There weren’t even cracklines. Improbably, the quarter came to rest inside the mask; it lay flat on the centermost rod along the bottom.
I’d been wrong about quarters; they wouldn’t do the trick. I’d smashed windows with pennies, so I was surprised. It was 10:28 and 1+0+2+8= 11, so it wasn’t as good as 10:27, but it was better than nothing, and I just couldn’t wait for 10:36. Though the period wouldn’t end for sixteen more minutes, Desormie had to let class out extra early because the showers would bottleneck since even the dirty kids—even some of the shy ones—preferred to get warm and lather the stiff chlorine stink off their skin. If he stayed in his office while everyone showered, Desormie wouldn’t hear me, but he was just as likely to stand in the gym and admire the scoreboard. He did that sometimes.
I’d have to work quick.
Since the pennygun could fire quarters, I figured it could fire small wingnuts, too. The problem was I’d given all the wingnuts I’d brought that day to June and the principal. I ran to the bleachers to see if I could find one—no. The bleachers’ joints were fixed with welded-on hexnuts.
10:29, nearly 10:30.
I thought about shooting the rivet on my jeans-pocket that I used to call the grommet until my dad said it was a rivet, and then I thought about the bottom eyelet on my Chucks that was a grommet, but a specific shoe-kind that was better called an eyelet, but neither of those things was any heavier or pointier than a quarter, plus in order to get on
I opened the back door of the gym where there was an asphalt trail. Next to the trail was some mud with rocks in it. I kept my foot wedged between the door and jamb and searched for a rock that would fit in the gun. The effort got me H, but I found three in all, each irregularly shaped: one like a dog’s ear bending in kindness, another like Nevada, a third like some lips with a sore in the corner. I fired Nevada first, because it was the slimmest, and also the pointiest. Nevada got wedged between the bars of the mask. It was 10:31, almost 10:32. I felt all defeated. I felt like exploding. If the slimmest and pointiest of the three couldn’t penetrate… I let fly the dog’s ear without really aiming; I let fly from pique; I fired from the hip. The shot was way high. Not even close. It blew out the E of the HOME on the scoreboard. The E hit the floor in three sharp pieces. The bulb remained. HOME was now HOM.
Well, that was something. Wasn’t that something? I thought it was something, not much but something. As a tribute to the love that I’d fallen in with June, a broken scoreboard, so easy to engender it could be accidental, was totally worthless, but at least a broken scoreboard would upset Desormie, who if I didn’t have to worry about him coming out of his office to admire the schmuckface scoreboard to begin with, I’d have had another ten minutes to find a suitable projectile to fire at the clock.