The Instructions by Adam Levin
And I saw it was better they be misled by me than not led by me. Nothing was worth the risk of failing to protect my father.
I could send them an email from FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL some other time.
Sent: November 16, 2006, 11:51 PM Central-Standard Time
Subject: SUDDEN HOLIDAY
To: [email protected]
CC: NEW SCHECHTER LIST, NORTHSIDE HEBREW DAY LIST
Scholars,
If we are just, then tomorrow a new holiday will arise. I believe we are just, and so I am canceling school for all of those Israelites who wish to observe. Services will be held in the field across the street from Aptakisic Junior High School, in the valley between the two hills. Directions to get there from Schechter are attached.
This news comes late, I know. Most of you are in bed already. Most of those in bed won’t check email before school tomorrow. But for those of you who Hashem has chosen to receive this email, I suggest He chose you for a reason. And though I have cancelled school, there is no reason for you to think that showing up early at Hebrew Day or Schechter to wait covertly near the entrance and spread the news to our brothers would be a bad idea. In fact, if we are just, then to do so would be a mitzvah.
Lastly: There may be a toll to pay. As this potential holiday creeps closer, I am less and less certain about what exactly it will celebrate, and I see it would be irresponsible, even criminal, to leave out mention of a toll’s possibility. What’s curious, scholars, or maybe not so curious at all, is that despite not knowing if there will be a toll to pay, I do know what that toll will be, should we have to pay it: a dollar per scholar, delivered in parts. From a distance.
I pray that we are just.
If we are just, then tomorrow a new holiday will arise.
Rabbi Gurion
___________________
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18
COMMENTARY ON COMMENTARIES
“S
o far, Tanach aside, The Instructions has predominately been concerned with things that general readers, and even most scholars, were not aware of prior to reading The Instructions. The majority of the exceptions haven’t required any correction: the previously published texts** have appeared as they were written; the differing opinions of editorialists—those of academia and mass-media both—have been enough at odds as to mutually nullify one another’s authority; the facts of the War and my earlier childhood have, for the most part, been reported accurately by the press. In cases where facts have been made up, misinterpreted, or warped by proximity to the agendas of those presenting them,*** the lies and warpage and misunderstandings have been easy enough for me to correct in passing by simply telling the story of the Side of Damage and the Gurionic War as I experienced them, free of nearly all reference to what was to come.
At this point in the story, however, owing to the motives that I’ve since been erroneously ascribed for having written “Sudden Holiday”—motives universally ascribed to me, by my supporters as well as my detractors—I have to look forward, however briefly, in order to correct you all directly, friends and enemies alike.
In case the reader is scratching his head, unaware of the misconstrued motives to which I am referring—whether because he has been living in the wilderness between the end of 2006 and the present, or, more likely, because the present in which he is reading this is far enough ahead of the present in which I am writing it that The Instructions has become hegemonic, and the miscontruances thereby forgotten—he’ll just have to take my word that I am justified in temporarily (as temporarily as possible) breaking the mostly old-timey flow of the narrative here, in Book 18 in C.E. 2013, and push on like a good soldier, a good scholar.
The rest of you are certainly aware that “Sudden Holiday” has been regularly cited as material evidence that I, Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, had been plotting since at least the night prior to that YouTube-crashing geologic razzle-dazzle which far too many people (one would be too many) have taken to calling “The 11/17 Miracle,” to execute what is currently known by my supporters as “The Damage Proper” and by my detractors as “The Gurionic War.”
Once and for all, friends, and once and for all, enemies: While I do accept full responsibility for bringing the Damage Proper, I did not plan the Damage Proper until minutes prior to the Damage Proper. Furthermore, I had no idea that there would be a Damage Proper. No one did. Not even Eliyahu. Not until I planned it. How could we have?
Yes, it is true that the recurring themes of Main Man’s ramblings contained what might now be construed as the stuff of prophecy; that had we understood his words to be prophetic, we might have better predicted what would happen on Friday. But—with the exception of Eliyahu—we did not understand his words that way, I least of all. Or no moreso, I should say, than I understood my vision during the Electric Chair wager or my dream of the Tower of Restraint (to be described shortly) to be prophetic. I will not deny that these three phenomena seemed to me to be possessed of insight, nor that I trusted and eventually acted upon those perceived insights to a certain degree. However, because they could all, as well, be mundanely explained—i.e., “Williams Cocktail Party Syndrome leads its sufferers to engage in a novel kind of verbal behavior characterized, for the most part, by ‘mash-ups’ of previously overheard statements”**** to explain the utterances of Main Man, who split his time outside the Cage between Pentecostal Mass and marathon sessions of network television, and fell asleep at night listening to mixes Vincie’d burned him; an oxygen-deprived brain to account for the Electric Chair vision; a combination of latently understood evidence and my not-so-latent desire to salvage my friendship with Nakamook to account for the Tower of Restraint dream—I did not take it for granted that Adonai was trying to tell me anything.
Seven skinny cows cannibalizing seven fat ones as dreamed by a man who’d never dealt with cattle: that, with its crystal-clear one-to-one relationship between the symbols and what they corresponded to—and without anything extra, without spilling a single drop—that is what I believed a prophecy was supposed to look like.
Though wholly beloved, Main Man was retarded, and, as with no few other famously compelling lies—e.g., beautiful girls can’t get dates, powerful men father weak sons, terrorists are the new freedom fighters, enmity breeds respect, no one hates the Jews more than the Jews, etc.—the lie that being retarded inherently makes a person closer to Adonai only seems true because it describes an irony. So even though, on reflection, Main Man’s weird utterances seem to have been obliquely prophetic—and maybe they were—there was no good reason to believe they were prophetic at the time.
“But what about Vincie Portite?” ask both the haters and scholars alike. “What about what he said to you on Thursday’s intramural bus?”
What Vincie Portite said to me on Thursday’s intramural bus was that he, Eliyahu, and the rest of the Side believed, to varying degrees and for nebulous reasons, that something big was to happen soon; whether as soon as Friday or not, no one but Eliyahu seemed to be certain at all, and even he, as he has himself since testified, “was somewhat less than reliable due to [his] overwhelming state of verklemptness” when he told Vincie, “There will be no Monday.” Furthermore, the “something big” that Vincie and the rest of them believed was soon to happen, was described to me as “the destruction of the Arrangement.”
Now, it is true that when Vincie described it, I quickly came to believe he was correct. I quickly came to believe that “the destruction of the Arrangement” was imminent. I knew it to be true the way I knew Adonai was real and I was in love with June, and I will not deny that. However, what this phrase meant to me—“the destruction of the Arrangement”—was hardly comparable to what ended up happening on Friday. I imagined we might arrive at a means of action that would cause Botha to quit his job, or Floyd to be humiliated, or Desormie to never desormiate again. I thought certain deserving basketballers might receive some come-uppance, and that maybe, if
But “Sudden Holiday”: If I hadn’t already planned the Damage Proper, then why, in the email, did I tell the scholars to bring their weapons to Aptakisic? Why did I tell them to come to Aptakisic at all? Could I not have met with them in my backyard after Havdallah on Saturday, as so many of them had already been planning?
I had them bring their weapons for the reason I stated in the email. If there was to be a holiday, I didn’t know what the holiday would celebrate. I didn’t even know if “celebrate” was the right verb. Some holidays, like Yom Ha-Shoah, only commemorate. Some, like Simcha Torah, do both. Yom Kippur does neither—it’s a day of atonement. What I knew was I would deliver my scripture to the scholars. Maybe the holiday would celebrate the deliverance; maybe, if I was somehow wrong to deliver scripture, the holiday would mournfully commemorate the folly of my having done so. Maybe the deliverance would lead to something else that the holiday would celebrate or commemorate. Maybe what it led to would be military, for no calendar, let alone the Israelite calendar, is short on military holidays. And again, maybe there would be no holiday. If there were going to be a holiday, though, and if that holiday were going to be military, I wanted to do all I could to make sure it was more like Chanukah or Yom Yerushalayim than the Fasts of Tammuz or Tevet. I wanted to be sure that victory for the scholars was at least possible. So I told them to come heavy.
And as for why Aptakisic instead of my backyard: I was finished with stealth. It was time to get caught, witnessed. I wanted to incite as bold-faced a brand of defiance as I could. For a scholar to leave his home after Havdallah was not uncommon, so it was possible, even likely, that if the scholars came to my house after Havdallah, many of their parents would not find out—let alone all at the same time—where the scholars had gone. The absence of two-hundred-plus scholars from a few Israelite schools, however, could not help but get noticed. Calls would be made. Panic would ensue. Furthermore, for the scholars to compound the forbidden act of contacting me with that of ditching school—which they would have to do to get to Aptakisic on time—would attest to my being in possession of a much larger influence over them than would their merely coming over to my house.
The greater the demonstration of my influence, the more the scholars’ parents would fear me, and I wanted as many of them to fear me as possible, and I wanted them to fear me as deeply as possible. I wanted them to dread evermore what I might, if crossed, do with their sons. Since they had not thought once, let alone twice, then let them think a thousand times, I thought, of what I might be capable if again harm came to my father.
I expect that many scholars, even those with the best of intentions, will, at first, attempt to resist this commentary on commentaries. Since the Damage Proper, well-meaning factions have been culting up my personality, and although I’m flattered by the intent behind this culting, efforts to render me and my actions perennially good and cohesive lead—at least in some cases—not only to Orwellian doubletalk (“the people’s prince,” “peacemaking warrior,” etc.), but also bad scholarship, a kind that permits and even sometimes encourages lazy, unrigorous interpretations of the as-yet-quite-young Gurionic oral tradition, wherein I’m put forth as everything to everyone, and all at the same time. Which is bad enough. And it will be even worse if this lack of rigor establishes itself as a habit, for such a habit will certainly have undermined—will certainly be undermining—the study and interpretation of this, The Instructions.
Nothing, scholars, nothing in all the world is good because I say it is good. Nothing is right because I say it is right. What I say is good is good for the reasons I cite. What I say is right is right for those reasons. If you don’t understand the reasons, you will one day—if you study—but you can’t just take my word on what is right and good and expect that to suffice. If you could do that, I would never have mentioned my reasons.
And when I say something is bad or when I say that something I did was wrong or foolish, or when I say that something excellent that you want to ascribe to me is not something I am responsible for, or that something you call a miracle was the opposite of a miracle, then, as inconvenient as it may seem at first to believe it, the proper response is not “Gurion is too humble to admit that he was good all along, too humble to admit he was right all along,” or “He is too humble to admit that he made a miracle happen, too humble to call it a miracle.” I am not humble, much less am I what the well-meaning doubletalkers among you have taken to calling “a humble egotist.” There is no such thing as a humble egotist. And for that matter, I’m not a “peacemaking warrior,” either; I’m a scholar and a soldier. There is no paradox there, no euphemism, no contradiction. I’m both. And so should you be.
If you want to resist this commentary on commentaries, scholars, it’s because the notion I’m attacking—the notion that I’d had the Damage Proper elaborately planned well in advance of the opening sally—strikes you as appealing. Maybe it strikes you as appealing because it suggests that I am a gifted general, or a talented forseer, maybe because it’s the easiest explanation to imagine. I don’t know exactly why the notion appeals to you. However, I do know why it appeals to the Arrangement. It is in their best interests that you resist this commentary on commentaries; it is in their best interests to spread the claim that I planned the Damage Proper well in advance of when I actually did. The implications of the truth are bad for the Arrangement because the implications of the truth are good for us. In denying the truth, in spreading lies, the Arrangement protects the Arrangement.
The fact that I only planned the Damage Proper minutes before we executed it means that you are each a much greater threat than you know. It means that despite all the early-detection procedures and other “safeguards” that have, since the Damage Proper, been put in place by various houses of the Arrangement—and manifold they are, these “safeguards,” well designed to foil days and weeks of planning, as well—future war campaigns could be just as successful as the first one. They can be just as successful as long as they are undertaken as suddenly and spontaneously as the first one.
Damage, damage, and damage, the end.
19
WE
Friday, November 17, 2006
12:13 a.m.–10:41 a.m.
A
nd there was night, and all through the night I kept waking from the same dream. In the valley of the two-hill field stood a tower of restraint. Slokum held Nakamook in the air like Slokum had held me during the false alarm, except Nakamook’s arms weren’t pinned to his chest. Instead, they held a second Slokum, and the second Slokum held me, and I a second Nakamook, and that second Nakamook a second me:
The tower swayed. To keep from falling, we had to continually redistribute our weight. It took a lot of concentration at first, but soon I got the hang of it and noticed there was clapping. There’d been clapping all along, but my earlids had been blocking it, pushing it into the background. I looked around to see where the sound came from and saw it was Patrick Drucker. He stood before the tower, applauding.
There were two things wrong with him. The first was his pants. It was windy in the field, but the pants lay perfect on his
Soon clouds parted and the sun shone and both his nose and the apex of his left knee’s pant-crease glinted. The glint was identical and I knew both were plastic: the face and the pants. Then I saw his eyes did not look like eyes, but television snow. I saw that he was not Patrick Drucker. He was an angel in a Patrick Drucker mask, standing behind a legs-shaped podium, applauding.