The Instructions by Adam Levin
Up in my room, I read ten of the scholars’ emails, each equally and sufficiently representative of the rest (I’ve since examined all 365). Some of the emails mentioned Emmanuel’s email—the one where he told them that he and the other three would contact me in order to find out for everyone if contacting me was transgressive. The authors of these emails explained that despite their initial willingness to do nothing til after Emmanuel reported on my ruling, they’d since reasoned that contact, at least as it seemed to be defined by my “New Scripture” email, was a two-way street, and that therefore to write to me was not, in itself, a form of contact—not unless I chose to read what they’d written—and that if contacting me did turn out to be transgressive, they reasoned, then I wouldn’t read what they’d written, for I was the last teacher in the world who’d ever lead them to transgression, and so there was no danger in writing to me. Other emails didn’t mention Emmanuel’s. Apart from that, any variance among them was little more than grammatical. They were all signed “your student,” they all wished a speedy recovery for my father, they all contained blessings on “this red-haired girl you love,” and every single one requested further instructions.
I was in the middle of the tenth when my parents came home. I didn’t click any more envelope icons, but I didn’t rush to the door either. I didn’t want the conversation I’d have with my father to be compromised by his good manners—Flowers was still reading in our living room, waiting to give them the babysitting report.
I shut off my light and looked out the window, and a couple minutes later the Volvo tweeted. Flowers got in and I headed for the stairway.
Distracted by Emmanuel’s close reading of my teachings, then tempted by my overloading inbox, I hadn’t, as I’d planned to, bolstered myself with focused recollections of the courthouse-steps imagery, but it turned out that would’ve been unnecessary anyway.
Halfway down the stairs, I could hear them in the kitchen; my father saying I was probably asleep, my mother that she’d promised to wake me if I was. The scrape of metal against flint. I stealthed to where the wall became banister, leaned long and downward and watched them through the bars.
My father’s damaged leg lay across two chairs, swollen and braced in elastic. My mother reached over the table, stole the cigarette from his lips.
He reached for the pack in his jacket.
“Do not have conniptions,” she told him. “I only wanted one puff.”
“No, have it,” he said. He shook out a fresh one.
“You say this like you are being generous, but in fact—”
“Not now, baby,” he said.
“‘Not. Now. Baby,’” she said. “Should I feel offended or charmed? It is hard to say, no?” She dragged and the cigarette crackled, but she kept it there in her mouthcorner. “On the first hand, it is a kind of brush-off: he does not want to hear the affectionate small jab I was about to make regarding his mood. On the second hand, he calls me ‘baby’ which is sweet, but on the third hand, it is precisely because ‘baby’ is sweet and he is using it to brush me off that saying to me ‘baby’ is a little condescending. Do I decide that he is sweet for painting with honey the brushoff, or cruel for pretending to me that a brush-off is honey?”
Here, a chunk of ash fell off the end of her cigarette, exploding on impact with the placemat. She might have paused because she noticed or she might have noticed because she paused. It was impossible to tell, but now she addressed herself to the ashes, and my father didn’t notice—he just kept looking at his lap.
“Let us assume that I truly love him, this Judah Maccabee, and that I call it honey on a brush-off. Say that I can even empathize with his need to exercise a brush-off, that I understand he has had a trying day and needs to enjoy an uninterrupted cigarette in its entirety before he can feel human again. The question then becomes: How do I get across to him that despite all of that, he is not the only one who has had a trying day, that I have also had a trying day, and that if I empathize it is at least partly because I need someone to do the same for me? How do I get it across?”
She blew the ashes into the cup of her hand.
“Do I drop the lit cigarette down the back of his shirt and then become alarmed? Do I just thank him for the cigarette and continue to smoke it while I fetch him an icepack from the freezer?” She was at the freezer now, the icepack in her hand; noticing its softness, she gave it dirty looks. “Do I attempt to return the lit cigarette to his lips? Maybe continue to soliloquize until he reacts, until he tells me how sexy my accent still is to him, or until he tells me in a prideful, almost fatherly way how little my accent inflects my speech anymore? Maybe he will pay me the compliment I want to hear but he will mean the opposite and I will know it. Maybe it is only a sentimental kind of love we have now, a warm thing, but not fiery. Maybe he knows I want him to tell me how sexy my accent still is and he tells me, or maybe he knows and so he tells me the opposite, to tease me, for teasing is more youthful, less porch-swinging, a more convincing denial. Teasing is fierier.” She set the icepack on his knee, said, “Is this a word? Fierier? It should be. That is not the point. What is the point? Maybe it is all a put-on, is the point. This teasing. Maybe this teasing is all a put-on, a clever double-feign arranged, however lovingly, to confirm that he—”
“This icepack isn’t very cold,” said my father. I couldn’t see his face.
“He broods!” she said, “and she continues to speak. What does this make her? What else but a twit? Is not a twit one who twitters? And what is it called in the American language when a foreign wife ceaselessly banters into the ear of a husband who is brooding cross-armed with a burning cigarette in his fingers? What is it called, Judah? What, if not twittering?”
“Baby, come—”
She kissed him on the cheek and he dropped his cigarette and grabbed her wrist and she giggled a syllable.
They started making out.
All the other times I’d come across them making out in the kitchen, I’d snuck away quietly. This time I smacked the wall, because who were they trying to kid?
My mom, still kissing, opened her eyes.
“A spy,” she said.
Again I smacked the wall. A couple of the scabs from the remote control opened on impact and the blood left dots.
“Boychic—” my dad said.
Why didn’t you set those people on fire?
“Not even a hug first?” he said.
I came down the stairs. I could see his crutches leaning on the fridge.
Why didn’t you? I said.
“Even if I could still—”
Did you try? I said.
“Gurion!” my mother snapped.
My dad set his hand on her arm. He said to me, “I hurt my knee a little, Gurion. I bumped my head. Men should die for that? I fell and they left me alone.”
Before they left you alone, they were coming for you and you didn’t—
“They were coming for Patrick Drucker.”
You were in their way, and you didn’t know what they would do. You could not have known.
“And?”
And what? You should have stopped them.
“I should have killed them, you’re saying.”
They might have done the same to you.
“I fell and they left me alone.”
You didn’t know they would, though.
“And I didn’t know they wouldn’t. To pre-emptively—”
They didn’t leave your client alone, I said.
“My client?” he said. “You would expect me to— What can you possibly think of me, Gurion? Do you think we’re that different?”
Who?
“You and I.”
I don’t understand you.
“Nor I you. Patrick Drucker is a Nazi in a cheap suit. You would expect me to kill Jews—murder Jews—to protect a Nazi?”
I sat where I’d stood. I sat on the floor, not knowing how to answer. Because that was, actually, what I’d have expected of him. It hadn?
I said, They trampled you anyway ≠ “But those Israelites you wouldn’t kill to save a Nazi trampled you and so you should have killed them.” I wasn’t arguing at all, only lamenting, but judging by my mother’s response, it must have sounded like arguing.
She said, “Yes they did, Gurion. And Jews every one of them. They ran right over him. They did not give a fuck about your father, or you, or your mother.” Who was leaning at me now, my mother, yelling these words.
“Baby,” said my dad.
“No.” my mother said. “He is in the wrong, Judah, and it is not cute. It is not smart. Now is not the time to speak softly. You are terribly wrong to say such things to your father, Gurion. You are being heartless and reckless and abominably stupid. I do not know who you ate dinner with tonight. I do not know with whom you ate dinner while your aba and I were at the hospital because Flowers did not seem to catch their names, but all of their heads, he said, were covered, and so I assume these were boys you went to Schechter with. Yes? Boys you call your friends? Are they still your friends, Gurion?”
They’re my friends, I said, but—
“But nothing. Who do you think it was at the courthouse? Whose blood, Gurion? Whose cousins and uncles? Whose older brothers? Whose Jewish fucking parents?”
I know, I said.
“You know, yet you are friends with them? After what their parents did to your father—and never mind what has been done to you—after what their parents did to your father, you call them your friends?”
They can’t be held—
“They cannot be held to account for the crimes of their parents?” she said. “Is that what the fuck you were going to say?”
Yes, I said.
“Are you sure you want to say that? Are you sure it is true? Are you sure they cannot be held to account? Because if they cannot be held to account, Gurion, I do not understand why you would have them suffer. I do not understand, if they cannot be held to account, why you would have your father turn your friends into orphans.”
I wouldn’t, I said.
“No?”
No, I said.
“No but what?” she said.
No but nothing, I said. I said, I was wrong. You’re right. I was saying stupid things, Ema. I was doing everything you said I was doing.
“Are you lying to me?”
No.
“Are you still angry?”
Not at Aba, I said.
“Are you still angry at me?”
No, I said.
“So enough yelling,” she said.
I’d never watched myself cry, so I didn’t know, but I thought I must be one of those people who smiles before he cries, because my mom sat next to me on the floor and did stuff to my hair while my dad kept reassuring me that everything would be alright, and I wasn’t crying at all. I was smiling so hard my face hurt.
An entire night and then some would pass before I’d learn about the Gurionic War, weeks on top of that before I’d start writing The Instructions. By the time I left the kitchen, though, I already knew the first of the blessings of both of them, and it was the first thing I wrote when I got to my room.
There is damage. There was always damage and there will be more damage, but not always. Were there always to be more damage, damage would be an aspect of perfection. We would all be angels, one-legged and faceless, seething with endless, hopeless praise.
Bless Adonai for making us better than angels. Blessed is Adonai for making us human.
I saved the file, hit PRINT, and was about to get a fresh address from which to send email to the scholars when I noticed how late it was, and that June hadn’t called. I worried she wouldn’t, so I called her.
“Are you still in love with me?” she said.
More than ever, I said.
“Because of what I told you?”
No.
“In spite of it?”
Regardless of it.
“You always say the right thing,” she said. “You should write me a book.”
I said, Tomorrow I want you to bring your gun to school.
She said, “I always bring my gun to school. I love you.” Then she hung up.
Two minutes later I had my new address, and ten after that I’d written the “Sudden Holiday” email. Still, I spent an hour hesitating before I sent it. Not because of what I’d written—I liked what I had written. If it was possible, as Emmanuel had argued, that the messiah needed to be proclaimed the messiah before he could do those things the messiah was supposed to do; and if it was good to declare you were in love prior to the moment just before you died (and I was beginning to think it was more than good; I was beginning to think it was necessary, beginning to suspect it could not be true without the declaration = starting to believe that before you could actually be in love, you needed to say you were in love); if Adonai’s hand could be forced with words, then there was no reason why a holiday, let alone a potential holiday that was acknowledged as such, couldn’t or shouldn’t be announced in advance of the events it might commemorate.
What made me hesitate was the new address. Whether or not I should use it. I already had an address the scholars’ parents hadn’t blocked, and Ben Brodsky was well beyond need of my protection. If anyone did end up figuring out how I originally got hold of that Kalisch email (it wouldn’t be that hard; Ben’s penchant for password-cracking had been notorious), what difference would it make? Yes, a kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid, but not when the kid being told on is, himself, dead. Ben’s death had done to Ben what death always did to dead kids: Ben’s death had all but sainted him. The revelation that he’d hacked Unger’s mailbox—whether Brodsky’s, Emmanuel’s, Rabbi Salt’s, or anyone else’s—wouldn’t sully his memory, but enliven it, fondly reminding the rememberers of the extra-bright sparkle in Ben Brodsky’s eyes they might or might not have actually witnessed, let alone appreciated, while he was alive.
And I wasn’t ashamed that I’d forwarded Kalisch’s email to those listservs, either, much less incapable of describing why I’d done so. In fact, I did describe it. At one point during the course of my hour-long hesitation, I became convinced enough that I should come clean that I wrote half an alternate version of “Sudd
…I forwarded Kalisch’s email because I wanted the elders of Israelite communities outside Chicago to learn of the persecution I was suffering at the hands of our headmasters. I believed that if the elders knew of it, they would stop it. I believed, scholars, that they would stand up for me and convince your parents to embrace our friendship. I believed we would again be allowed to study Torah together.
It was my mistake to expect such help: an honest mistake, but mine nonetheless. The Israelites of Chicago, especially those other headmasters to whom Kalisch originally addressed the email—they were the ones who should have stepped in to help us. To go outside of our community for help, even if only into the wider Israelite community; that is always a mistake. I know that now more than ever.
I stopped writing there, unsure of how to begin the next paragraph. Certainly the scholars would want to know why I took so long to tell them what I’d done, and that would have to be the next thing I addressed. And maybe they would accept what I told them. Maybe they would accept that I had to protect Ben. And maybe they would allow that, although Ben had been dead since July—that although it had been four months since last he’d required my protection—no opportunity or need to let them know I was [email protected] had arisen in the last four months, and maybe they wouldn’t hold against me my silence during those months. Maybe they wouldn’t question any of it. Maybe they would just assume that I had done what was right at the time. Or that I hadn’t done what was wrong. Maybe they would believe that I had done what seemed proper in my eyes, and maybe that what was proper in my eyes, despite its failure, was proper nonetheless. Or maybe not.
But even if they didn’t feel the slightest bit betrayed, and even if they saw that my reasons for forwarding Kalisch’s email were good, they would see that my doing so had been a mistake. How could they avoid seeing that? I said so outright, and there was no way to avoid saying so outright, not without lying. Not without blaming people who weren’t deserving of blame. It really wasn’t the fault of those elders outside the community that they’d failed to step in to help me. People don’t step in to help you, not from outside. That’s just not the way the world works. And overall, that’s probably a good thing. They didn’t know me, those elders. They didn’t know Kalisch or Unger. All they knew was that Kalisch and Unger were headmasters of Israelite schools, were pedigreed, authorized by the Israelites of Chicago to exert certain powers. And maybe they’d heard of my dad, probably they’d heard of my dad, and certainly whatever they’d heard wouldn’t have been good. Why would wise Israelites step in to help a stranger, the son of a reputed self-hating Jew whose own schoolmasters had called him dangerous, had called him detrimental to the Israelites? They wouldn’t. And they shouldn’t be expected to. To insist otherwise might have been convenient for me, but it would have been a lie, and I wasn’t going to start lying to the scholars. So what, then? So I made a mistake back in June. It was a forgivable mistake, and taking as long as I’d taken to admit to it—that was forgivable too. But if I could make one mistake here, I could make another there. And it was easy to understand how they might see it that way, the scholars. They might think, “Gurion made a mistake in June. How do we know he’s not making a mistake in November?” And then they might not do what I wanted them to do.