The Instructions by Adam Levin
Then Emmanuel suggested a metaphorical kinship between June’s Gurion-independent invention of the pennygun and the desert monotheism Zipporah had practiced before she met Moses which was, itself, Emmanuel insisted, certainly akin to the righteousness of the matriarchs in the days before they met and wed the patriarchs.
Samuel wanted to know when they’d receive the new scripture.
Solly wondered whether June had friends, or maybe sisters.
Shai asked what they should tell the other scholars about visiting me after Havdallah, and then Samuel asked Shai how he could fail to notice I’d risen from my chair and shown them my back.
Samuel had me wrong, though. Their reaction to the story had been perfect, the reaction I’d’ve wanted most from anyone, and it made me feel artful—in describing the moments leading up to the conversion, I’d skipped all mention of mine and June’s birthmarks. So the reason I’d risen was to go to the sink, to scrub the makeup from my thumbs and reveal the yuds, not doubting for a second that my mom would understand. These were the last four brothers in the world who’d trample me.
Yet as they rose from their own chairs, apologizing for outstaying their welcome, expressing their gratitude for my “patience and hospitality in the midst of upsetting events” (Emmanuel), assuring me and each other that I’d answered enough of their questions for one day, “the longest day I’ve ever heard of outside Irish literature” (Samuel), I saw they were right—not right that I felt stretched or put out by their visit, but right that I’d already said enough.
One time, at the Frontier, Flowers and I watched this show about pets where a dog did the moonwalk when its owner held its elbows. It was so weird and funny it got all over the web. Within a couple days, someone CGI’d the owner out and gave the dog a hat it doffed with a diamond-studded paw. We agreed the doctored video wasn’t as funny as the original—it wasn’t really funny at all—except I didn’t get why til Flowers explained it. He said, “Gild the lily, the stem collapse.”
It was the right explanation. And if faith and trust worked anything like comedy, which I suspected they did—I suspected most good things did—then the reason I wanted to show the scholars the yuds could just as easily be a reason not to show them the yuds. That is: They already believed June was an Israelite, and they believed it because I told them she was. So while the revelation of my birthmarks, which aspired to hard evidence, might strengthen that belief, it might also insult their intelligence, damage their faith, and thereby endanger (structurally and otherwise) the integrity of the stem from which their trust blossomed.
I followed them out of the kitchen without a word or a gesture. It is true they were mistaken about outstaying their welcome—their visit made me feel much better, kept me from staring into my head at my falling father’s image, or at least from ceaselessly doing so—but it was, nonetheless, still time for them to go, time now to stare at that image excessively, to work myself up to interrogate my dad. I was angry at him, but not angry enough, and it was already 8:00, he’d have to come home soon. Plus, the later the scholars stayed, the more likely it got that they’d be interrogated. I knew they’d never fink on me or each other, but silence could get them grounded too, yet if I told them that, they’d only say grounding was a small price to pay, then attempt to stick around to prove that they meant it. Better if they thought they’d overstayed their welcome.
I have to make some decisions, I told them, but I’ll send word before Shabbos on what’s to come. Tell everyone we know to lay low til then.
All of them but Emmanuel were bundled. He’d gotten everything on except for his boots, then sat on the floor to attempt doomed contortions. Unable to reach past his knees, he rose and shed his entire wooly bulk—overcoat, pullover, hat, scarf, and gloves—then sat back down and pulled on the boots, the laces of which kept slipping from his fingers. The others, in the meantime, overheated. Shifting their weight from foot to foot, they tucked their toplips and extended their bottom ones to aim huffy air at their darkening foreheads.
“Go ahead,” Emmanuel told them.
“We’re fine,” said Samuel. “Just hurry.”
“No, really,” said Emmanuel, “I have to stop at the pharmacy anyway.”
“For what?” Shai said.
“You don’t ask for what when it’s the pharmacy,” said Samuel.
“Why not?” said Shai.
“Because maybe he’s got a fungus or the runs,” offered Solly.
“Do you have a fungus or the runs?” said Shai to Emmanuel.
“You don’t ask that, Shai,” said Samuel.
“I bet Solly’s right, though. Look how silent Emmanuel’s being suddenly. He’s almost as silent as Solly,” said Shai. “We’ve come to expect that from Solly, silence, but silence we don’t readily associate with Emmanuel. It might be he’s been suffering all along. Suffering in silence. An uncharacteristic silence indicative of a medical unpleasantness. We’re all among friends, though, and what’s a fungus among friends? Who hasn’t had the runs? I’ve had the runs, we’ve all had the runs. You know what it is that my dad calls the runs? It’s the trots, what he calls them. My dad calls the runs the trots.”
“My dad calls you ‘that shvontz with the gums,’ so let’s go already,” said Samuel.
“What’s wrong with my gums?”
“Nothing, you shvontz.”
“Then why’s your dad specify the gums if it’s nothing?”
“Specify. He doesn’t even know who you are.”
“But I see him all the time.”
“You’re not memorable, Shai.”
“What’s wrong with my gums?”
“I’m telling you I made it up.”
“Why, though? Why’d you say ‘with the gums’?”
“It was the first thing that came to mind.”
“But why was it the first thing that came to mind?”
“Probably I was looking at your gums.”
“What’s wrong with my gums, you look at them?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe you’re crazy, Samuel. Did you ever think of that? Maybe you can’t stop looking at my gums.”
“Now that you mention it, my eyes are drawn to them,” said Samuel. “What is it about them, I wonder, that draws my eyes?”
“Stop messing with me.”
“No,” said Samuel. “Before, I was messing with you. Now I’m thinking: you got a lot of gums. They’re…”
“What? No. You’re messing with me. No. What? They’re what?”
“Meaty.”
“Meaty?”
“You got a lot of gums, Shai.”
Shai looked to Solly. Solly looked away.
“What?” Shai said. “They’re meaty?”
I missed you guys, I said.
“We missed you, too,” said Shai.
“You know, you’re thick sometimes,” said Samuel. “The Rabbi already knows you missed him. That was his polite way of saying, ‘Go home.’”
“Well, I did miss him, though,” said Shai.
Emmanuel had yet to tie his second boot, and I saw that he was trying to linger. Samuel now saw too and, saying goodbye, he shouldered the others outside.
I pressed my spine against the doorframe, bracing to hear June’s conversion get questioned. Emmanuel put his hat on, took it off, stared at it. Maybe I’d overestimated my effect—my lily a sunflower, or even just a dandelion. He put the hat on again. Then he took it off again.
Nu? I said to him.
“This hiding,” he said. “That we’re supposed to ‘lay low.’ How you told us to tell the other scholars to ‘lay low’—it troubles me.”
I dropped to the floor beside him, pretended to give him a deadarm.
“What?” he said.
I thought you were gonna say something else, I said.
“Something having to do with June and your being in love with her and her so-called conversion, you thought.”
Yeah, I said.
“I mig
“Then,” he said, “if after presenting these premises, I felt you were still listening to me, I might have offered some preparatory commentary before arriving at the heart of the matter, like: ‘To fall in love, two people must meet somehow—fatefully, accidentally, or on purpose; doesn’t matter here—they must meet by way of their eyes, their ears, their scent, whatever. Maybe they have to do other things to fall in love, too—speak endearments, write letters, kiss, who knows?—but we are certain that before they fall in love, some type of observable phenomenon that qualifies as ‘meeting’ must take place. We know for a fact that no two people have ever fallen in love with each other without having met. To fall in love is to become in love. We all believe that is true. It is not controversial. Yet that there’s nothing anyone can do to become an Israelite—that’s not controversial either. As I already said, you are or you aren’t one, and we all believe that is true.’
“And after saying all that,” said Emmanuel, “I might have attempted to bring it all home like this: ‘So despite both truths, by nature, being immutable—once in love, forever in love; once an Israelite, always an Israelite—one truth is set in motion, at least partly, by human beings, and the other is set in motion solely by Adonai. And that is complicated enough. But now we move on to your theory of potential messiahs, which concerns itself with both types of immutable truth at once: Adonai creates a potential messiah, one per generation, and then that potential messiah becomes the actual messiah when human beings do or fail to do something or some set of things—who knows what exactly?—to set his potential in motion. So while the potential of a potential messiah is set in motion solely by Adonai, the actualization of that potential will be set in motion, at least partly, by human beings. Agreed?’—”
Agreed, I said.
“I was only asking the hypothetical Gurion, to whom I might have said all of this, but I’m glad you agree. The hypothetical one would have agreed as well. He would have agreed exactly as you have, and I would have gone on to say, ‘According to you, Gurion, we should not say that anyone is the messiah until he has had “victory undeniable”; until perfect justice is visited upon the world; until calling the messiah “messiah” is, for all intents and purposes, redundant. And that seems cautious, safe. And that is the appeal of your approach, for false messiahs haunt our history. We have followed them, and suffered greatly for it. But there are a pair of potential pitfalls to this safe approach, and these are major. The first one is this: faith becomes irrelevant. If we cannot call the messiah “messiah” til doing so is no more risky than calling a lemon sour, a goat smelly, or Natalie Portman a world-class knockout, what is the point of ever looking for the messiah? When he comes, we’ll know it, so why bother looking? What is the incentive for waiting or hoping? Why bother trying to bring him at all? He will be self-evident, and so the end of faith. And maybe you’d say, “That is the point, Emmanuel. We should not have faith because the messiah will come. We should have faith because faith is good, and part of faith is to believe that the messiah will come.” And maybe you’d be right. Maybe those scholars whose faith is bolstered by its own promise—the promise that faith’s objects, despite their current state of unfalsifiability, will one day become evident to everyone and in turn reward the scholars for their faith—maybe those scholars are lousy scholars. Selfish, self-centered would-be know-it-alls, driven by the desire to one day say to the faithless “I told you so” or the fear of having ever to hear that statement addressed to them. Maybe their faith is not a noble faith in what should be true, but a lower kind of faith in what they fear is so. And maybe that latter kind’s not faith at all. And so maybe most of us are faithless, impurely motivated, heartened only by our so-called faith’s promise of coming worldly empowerment. And yet surely some of us aren’t…
“‘But is it faith, Gurion, anyway, that will bring the messiah? It doesn’t seem like it to me. Acts of faith, maybe. But faith itself? When has faith itself ever served us? And how often has faith been used against people? For just as there are acts of faith, there are non-acts of faith, no? Most tyrants don’t get assassinated, let alone trampled to death by mobs to whom they’ve been unjust. Why not? Often because crooked or misled clerics urge faith and its non-acts on the faithful is why not. And that is what makes us different, no? That is why our religion is good. We are not taught to abide injustice through our faith; we are not taught to wait for Adonai to reach a hand down and save us. We are taught to faithfully destroy injustice; we are taught that to do so will force His hand. Taught that, at least, by you.
“‘And so in the end, what’s in a scholar’s heart should only matter to us inasmuch as how it leads him to act. In other words: what’s in a scholar’s heart doesn’t matter as long as he acts as if it’s faith. That said, if you teach us faith is irrelevant, Gurion, how can we know how to act? And why should we listen to you? Maybe you say, “I will tell you how to act, Emmanuel, and you should listen to me because I’m the strongest and wisest of all of us.” And that works if you become the messiah, Rabbi. Of course it does. And in that case, and only in that case, is the first potential pitfall successfully dodged.’
“And then I’d have gone on to discuss the second pitfall, which would take fewer words since, having gotten worked up, I’d probably abandon all subtlety and just form a string of rhetorical questions, like, ‘What if the thing we must do to set the messiah’s potential in motion is call him ‘messiah’? What if the words need to come first? What if it must be written before it can be done? What if he must be said to be before he can become? Is that not how the universe became, Gurion? Is it so crazy to think that the final chapter might end as began the first? So crazy to think we’ll create truth by speaking it? Why should that seem crazy? Because it would be perfect?’
“In any case, I decided that all went without saying,” said Emmanuel, “and had you not leaned forward at so acute an angle when first I began to say it, it would have remained unsaid, but you leaned forward, and I got going, so now that it’s said, what do you say?”
I’d become so engrossed in listening to him—somewhere in the middle of his remarks on the first pitfall, I got this highly familiar rush I couldn’t place just then—that when he asked that last question, it took me a second to realize it wasn’t the hypothetical Gurion who was supposed to answer, but me.
“Rabbi?” he said.
I think you’re the most talented scholar I know, I said.
“That’s good to hear. I think maybe when you spoke of this Eliyahu of Brooklyn, I became a little jealous, and I thought that was shallow of me, and wanted to prove—I don’t know. Let’s not get tender, shall we? What I was going to say, originally I mean, was that I’m troubled by this instruction to ‘lay low’ because I assume that ‘laying low’ mean
Yeah, I said, that’s what it means.
“But if telling them we’ve been here is not the right thing to do, then how can we be honoring them? That is: if we have, through our disobedience of them, honored them, then why should we be dishonest about it?”
Would it be dishonest if they didn’t ask where you were, and you didn’t tell them?
“No.”
Would it be dishonest, if they did ask, to tell them you’ve been with Samuel discussing Judaism?
“In a certain light: no. That is one of the things I’ve been doing, discussing Judaism with Samuel. However, that account would not exactly be forthcoming.”
Who says you always have to be forthcoming? I said.
Emmanuel squinted = “This sounds demagogic.”
I said, ‘Always’ as in ‘at all times.’ You weren’t originally gonna tell me you were jealous about Eliyahu, right?
“That’s true, but then I did tell you.”
Because the time was right, I said.
“Okay,” he said. “But when will the time be right to tell my parents we’re friends again?”
Not before I deliver my scripture, I said.
“So you’ll still deliver it.”
Yes.
“When?”
After I write it, I said.
“I thought you already wrote it.”
So did I, I said. But listen—are you still troubled?
“Not about laying low,” he said.
I said, Good enough. I said, Go home.
A genius of bundling, a worried mother’s wildest dream, Emmanuel covered his face to the eyes with his scarf like a ninja. Then he jumped from the top of our five-step back stoop, exploding a half-frozen puddle.