The Instructions by Adam Levin
Then again, it is within the very same utterance of His plans for Sodom that Hashem reiterates His pledge to give Avraham a son with Sarah—more than a son, in fact. “Shall I conceal from Avraham what I do,” Hashem begins, “now that Avraham is surely to become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by him?” At which a scholar would expect Avraham to feel—if not in addition to joyous or weak or exhausted, then in place of those feelings—safe, protected; certainly not indignant.
Yet Avraham, once Hashem is through speaking, once the plans for Sodom have been laid out before him (“Because the outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah has become great, and because their sin has been very grave,” Hashem has just finished saying, “I will descend and see: If they act in accordance with its outcry which has come to Me—then destruction! And if not, I will know.”), Avraham does the most dangerous thing imaginable. He lashes out at the guarantor of his safety, raises his voice to challenge his protector. He yells at God.
“What if there should be fifty righteous people in the midst of Sodom?” says Avraham. “Would You still stamp it out rather than spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people within it? It would be sacrilege to You to do such a thing, to bring death upon the righteous along with the wicked. It would be sacrilege to You! Shall the judge of all the earth not do justice?”
And Hashem not only listens to Avraham—this brown old man shouting accusations in the desert, this defiant creation waving his fist—but attempts to appease him. And this makes a scholar wonder—or at least it should make a scholar wonder—if coming to Hashem full of rage is not sometimes (on those occasions when the scholar faces injustice, for example) a better idea than coming to Him full of praise. “If I find fifty righteous people in Sodom,” says Hashem, “I will spare the city on their account.”
And Avraham, though no longer as indignant, is nonetheless unappeased. “What if there are five fewer?” he says. “What if there are forty-five righteous people in Sodom?”
And Hashem says that for forty-five, he’ll spare the city. And Avraham continues to bargain. From forty-five to forty, forty to thirty, thirty to twenty, and then, says Avraham, “Let not my Lord be annoyed and I will speak but this once: What if ten should be found there?”
And Hashem says, “I will not destroy on account of the ten.”
The next line closes the chapter: “Hashem departed when He had finished speaking to Avraham, and Avraham returned to his place.”
When He had finished speaking: not when Avraham had finished speaking to Him; not when they had finished speaking to one another. “When He had finished speaking to Avraham” = “Avraham was not finished speaking.”
So what would Avraham have said, had Hashem not departed just then? It should be as obvious to scholars as it was to Hashem.
He would have said, “Five righteous men?” And if Hashem tried to appease him, he would have said, “Three righteous men?” And if Hashem agreed to three, he would have said, “And one?”
There are some scholars who will disagree with these assertions. Some scholars will argue that there is no way of knowing if I am right or wrong, no way to know if Avraham was as settled on the number ten as was Hashem. Some may even argue that the phrase prefacing Avraham’s last spoken sally of the argument, a phrase which, to me, reads as nothing more than an act of formal self-effacement that one who has just finished yelling indignantly at the Creator of the Universe would, on calming down a little bit, think wise to employ—some scholars might argue that “Let my Lord not be annoyed and I will speak but this once” indicates that Avraham had no intention of continuing to bargain. And those scholars would have a point, just not a very significant one.
Whether or not Avraham was finished speaking, whether or not he ultimately did come to terms with Hashem, the last line of Genesis 18 contains the most significant aspect of the conversation that gets overlooked by scholars: the revelation of Hashem’s (if not also Avraham’s) final stance on collateral damage. Namely: that some collateral damage is acceptable.
And how much is some? How much collateral damage? At first, it seems easy to calculate: 9 parts per the population of Sodom. And scholars do have a rough idea of that population—between 600 and 1200. But then, on second thought, neither Avraham nor Hashem would speak of children as being righteous or wicked (until one comes of age, one’s behavior is attributed to one’s parents), so scholars must subtract the number of Sodomite males under the age of thirteen and Sodomite females under the age of twelve from the denominator. Scholars don’t know this number, but can assume, conservatively (in terms of allowable collateral damage), that the percentage of children in Sodom was equivalent to the percentage of children in Jordan today ≈ 40%, which is relatively low for that region.
So the denominator (the estimated population of Sodom minus 40% of itself) is somewhere between 360 and 720. The acceptable proportion of collateral damage, then, is somewhere between 9 parts per 360 and 9 parts per 720. Reduced to their greatest common denominators, these proportions become, respectively, 1 part per 40 and 1 part per 80.
In other words: If a scholar were to approach the issue of collateral damage as conservatively as possible, that scholar would conclude that to kill 1 righteous person in the course of killing 79 or more wicked ones is acceptable to Hashem. If, on the other hand, a scholar were to approach the issue of collateral damage as liberally as possible, that scholar would conclude that to kill 1 righteous person in the course of killing 39 or more wicked ones is acceptable to Hashem.
In either case, to say “Hashem treats the righteous with mercy” is omissive.
Hashem treats the righteous with mercy when it is cost-efficient.
His standards of cost-efficiency are the ones by which Israelites must strive to live. Therefore even those who play the numbers as loosely as possible cannot justify bringing a proportion of collateral damage that is greater than 2.5% of the total damage brought. When death is the unit by which damage is measured (as seen above), these calculations are simple enough. When injury is the unit of measurement, however, it is a bit more complicated. How many righteous noses, for example, may be collaterally broken in the course of smashing 39 wicked femurs? Certainly more than one—a broken nose is little more than a flesh wound compared to a broken leg—but how many? And what is the acceptable ratio of crushed and righteous strong-side wrists to crushed and wicked weak-side ones? It is true that without the use of his left hand, David could not have sawn past the neckbone of Goliath of Gath, and so could not have hoisted high the massive head, but without the use of his right, he would never have even felled the giant.
Patrick Drucker was in critical. A coma, the radio was saying. A broken back. Six ribs snapped. One punctured lung.
My father had some bruises. Maybe some torn ligaments. Was his damage ≤ 2.5% of the total damage brought? I think it was—even if his ligaments were torn and Drucker didn’t die.
And so, assuming Drucker was wicked, my father’s damage was acceptable in the eyes of Hashem.
And so I found myself at odds with Hashem.
And not just Him.
Flowers turned off NPR and said, “Talk to me, man. You gotta talk.”
We were heading south on Sheridan in his old Volvo wagon. According to my dad, Sheridan was known as the second most beautiful road anywhere. It wound a lot, often sharply, and that kept you from driving too fast and missing it. For miles you could see Lake Michigan between the gaps of the tree-shaded mansions. The white one with the Spanish-tiled roof was supposedly built by Capone. A few miles farther, the road widened to four lanes and the B’hai temple appeared in the distance. In all the world, there were only seven B’hai temples. The one in Haifa was known for its garden.
“You need to talk, Gurion.”
I don’t feel like talking.
The first most beautiful road anywhere was said to be in Monte Carlo. I could never remember what it was called, but my mom had driven it, and she
Flowers said, “You spooking me out.”
Heebie-jeebies, I told him.
“Oh, I see. We jokin’ around. You break my remote, quote some Lenny Bruce, stare out the window twenty minutes so salty you jaw muscles bout to tear through you cheeks, then make some silly wordplay with some racial slurs and now it’s all better. That something, man. Least it might be. I don’t think I believe you, though. I think you bottlin up. I think you gettin heavy.”
We passed Capone’s, then the B’Hai—a dome set atop a pair of stacked hexagons, all stone and white.
Flowers blew air through his lips, pulled a folded paper square from his jacket, dropped it in my lap. “Not a single redmark,” he said. “And it ain’t cause I didn’t read it.”
I unfolded it. “There is love,” it said. “There was always love, and there will be more love, always. Were there ever to be less love, we would all be at war and Your angels would learn suffering.”
I tore it seven ways.
Flowers said, “Why you do that?”
It’s nonsense, I said.
“You the one called it scripture.”
That was a mistake, I said. It’s just fiction.
He didn’t like that.
“Just fiction. You believed it well enough yesterday. Maybe what you sayin right now is just fiction. Maybe you actin a little fictional.”
Fiction is lies, I said. I said, I have no use for lies.
He liked that even less.
“So why you tell me you don’t feel like talkin?” he said.
I don’t, I said.
“No,” he said. “You don’t feel like talkin to me. That different than you don’t feel like talkin. And what you said was, ‘I don’t feel like talkin.’”
I was being polite.
“Feedin me some maggoty-ass apple and callin it protein-enriched what you doin—polite’s evasive, man.”
I just saw my dad get trampled on television. I don’t feel like talking to you about it.
“It ain’t cause you saw you dad get trampled you ain’t feel like talkin.”
Why are you picking on me?
“Pickin on you—shit. What am I, some sadsack principal? I don’t like the reason you ain’t feel like talkin to me. You someone else, it be different. Might say to myself, ‘He into some stoic, Hemingway yang.’ That ain’t you, though—you nothing like stoic. You a little boy don’t shut the fuck up less he hidin something. And that what you doin. You leavin some vital information by the wayside. I pay attention to what you say. I pay attention to you scriptures, be they disavowed or not. I pay more attention than anyone else who reads them, if there even is anyone else, but that don’t matter to you cause who the fuck am I, right? A Gentile. You friend, sure, but just some goy. No kinda person to talk to about the people you want to read you work most—people who couldn’t care less what you have to say. And they the ones put you dad in the hospital. And they the ones—”
Stop treating my paradox like it’s irony, I said. It’s not that simple.
“Retreat to the abstract—that’s good. Paradox versus irony: discuss.”
I know who hurt my dad, I said, and I’m not retreating from that, I’m trying to figure out how to approach—
“Go on,” said Flowers. “Whizkid youself into total fucken anguish and confusion.”
Let me out of the car, I said.
“You cry all you want. I’m takin you to you folks.” He dropped his handkerchief in my lap.
I threw it back at him.
“Too common a mistake in this world,” he said. “Thinkin’ ingratitude a form of pride. What it get you but some crusty sleeves?”
We’re not friends anymore, I said. Let me out of the car.
He said, “The one ain’t up to you any more than the other, Gurion.”
Again he dropped the handkerchief in my lap. This time I used it. But let that not confuse any scholars. My tears, as usual, were well beside the point.
As we approached my stoop, the scrape of jostled pebbles sounded from the shadows beside the steps and there were whispers. We ascendend the stairway and I unlocked the door. Flowers went inside.
“You comin?” he said.
I’d already jumped the railing. A boy was crumpling beneath me.
Flowers said my name.
The boy hit the ground on his stomach, me atop him, and I dug my knuckles between his shoulderblades and then knee-hopped on his kidneys and he was still. I began to turn him over—I would deliver him his blindness with my bare hands—but I heard another vandal behind me.
I donkeykicked.
Though one of my heels connected, nothing buckled or squished = I’d missed both his knees and sack. I leapt off the still kid to finish the kicked one. That was when Flowers flipped the stooplight on and someone said, “Please.” It was the second kid who said it.
The second kid was Emmanuel Liebman. He was sitting in the pebbles, leaning on my house, clutching his thigh. The still one was Shai Bar-Sholem, another boy who I’d been in Torah Study with at Schechter. Two more—Samuel Diamond and a Satmar I didn’t recognize—were helping Shai to his feet.
“Why—?” said Emmanuel.
Why? I said.
I grabbed his face. I would dig my thumbs into the corners of his orbits and pull. Why are you bombing my house? I would pop his sockets. Why did you lie to me? And while his eyes swung from gory strands near his peyes—“Rabbi,” he was saying, “Rabbi!”—I would carve matching tunnels in his mallet-shaped brain.
I thought.
But all I was doing was pressing the heels of my palms against his jaws. And not even that hard.
When Flowers pulled me into his bearhug, I barely struggled. “Hell you doing?” he said.
“Unhand him, sir,” said Samuel, before us now.
“Pardon me?” Flowers said.
Samuel lifted 37 from the spot on the ground where Flowers had dropped it. He gripped it like a bat and stepped behind us.
“Please let go of the Rabbi, sir,” said Emmanuel, the reflection of the stooplight’s bulb a white square in the bell of his drawn pennygun. “We don’t want to hurt you.”
And of Shai Bar-Sholem, the Satmar asked, “This is the tzadik?”
“That’s him,” said Shai.
And now the Satmar drew his weapon and, training it on Flowers, said, “Am I holding it right, Rabbi Gurion?”
“Had we known about your vandals,” said Emmanuel Liebman, once I’d finished apologizing and given him an icepack, “we would have hidden behind your house.” He sat on the floor in front of me, leaning against my dresser, the Satmar and Samuel Diamond flanking him. On the other side of the room, Shai Bar-Sholem stood stooped at my window and held his kidneys.
Flowers had left. Having spent no small amount of energy squinting to reconcile the bruised scholars’ testimonies of our friendship with the very battery that had bruised them—“He’s our teacher, sir,” had said Shai; “We trust this bit of violence, if anything other than an unfortunate mishap, must certainly be some kind of valuable lesson,” Emmanuel had added—he eventually became placated enough (or maybe just weirded out enough) to suggest we all eat some dinner, then ordered us Pizza Pnina, which, though glat kosher, and therefore suitable for the scholars to ingest, wouldn’t deliver south of Devon. And then he left us there on the stoop, gladly it seemed—chuckling as soon as he flipped his phone closed, and continuing all the way to his car—to go pick it up, along with some paper plates.
“At the very least,” said Emmanuel, pressing down on the icepack, “we should have thought to come out from the shadows in a more timely fashion—after these horrible things that happened to your father, we should have guessed you’d be jumpy.”
“I can’t even imagine,” said the Satmar. “A broken neck is bad enough. To have it broken by trampling protesters, though—much less Jewish—”
“Don’t remind him,” said Samuel Diamond.
The Satmar covered h
“What’s wrong with you, Weiss?” snapped Shai Bar-Sholem. He winced, clutched his kidneys.
I chinned the air from him to the heating pad I’d set on my bed = Lay down already.
He said, “Your sheets, Rabbi—I’m all muddy.”
I said, I made you all muddy.
“That’s true,” he said, and laid down.
The Satmar’s mouth was still covered. He reminded me of Eliyahu a little.
I said to him, What is your first name, Weiss?
“Solly,” said Solly Weiss the Satmar, from behind his hand.
It’s okay, Solly Weiss, I said. My father’s neck’s not broken. You must have heard an early report—they inflate those for drama. He might have torn some ligaments in his knee is all.
Is all? I thought. Maybe, I thought.
“Baruch Hashem,” said the scholars.
But I wasn’t willing to join them. It was certainly good that my father hadn’t suffered greater damage, but that didn’t mean it was a blessing, or that I should thank Hashem. If anything that fails to be worse than it is is a blessing, then no one would say anything but baruch Hashem, for everything could be worse, and so everything would be a blessing. We would all be angels, one-legged and faceless, seething with endless, hopeless praise. Desormie desormiated all the girls in spandex, but he never raped them; I should say baruch Hashem? Eliyahu’s family was murdered, but, baruch Hashem, they weren’t tortured first? The Shoah—as many Israelites had remained as were destroyed—baruch Hashem?
That they—the three who I knew—had ever been my friends at all, though, let alone that they’d remained my friends after I’d attacked two of them: that was certainly a blessing, and for that blessing I might have thought to echo their baruch Hashem, but I was distracted by Solly, who continued to suffer from Shai’s unnecessary, however well-intended, shaming; he was sniffling, and I saw his eyes had begun to well, golden swirls in the blue iris of the nearer one magnifying.
I removed the sap from my pocket and held it out to him, said, Look what I got today.