The Instructions (8 page)

“This fighting,” said Brodsky. “What can I do to get you to stop fighting?”

Is my record in your cabinet?

Brodsky said, “Yes.”

I said, What’s in it?

He said, “Your detention assignments, the CASS’s, grade reports...”

I said, Does it have my documents from Schecter?

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Brodsky said, “Yes.”

I want to see it.

“It’s not for you to see.”

I said, I want to know what Rabbi Unger wrote.

Unger was the headmaster at Schecter. I wanted to know if he wrote down that I wasn’t the messiah. That’s what he told me the day he kicked me out of Schechter. That I was not the messiah. He yelled it at me. He did it in his office after I destroyed his lectern.

Rabbi Salt was sick that day, and Unger was substituting for him in Torah Study. Emmanuel Liebman asked Unger why carbon-dating said the Earth was billions of years old when the Torah said it was less than six thousand* and Unger said that time was different in the Torah, that a day wasn’t just a day. He said that a day in the Torah was a day according to God, and that God was eternal, so that a God-day was “infinitely longer than a people-day.” That didn’t make sense as an answer because no one knows how reliable carbon-dating is, is the answer. But also it just didn’t make sense because if a God-day was
infinitely
longer than a people-day, and the Torah was written according to God-time, then no amount of God-days would have passed because infinity doesn’t end. That’s what infinity means. I said so. Unger said, “Don’t be a smart aleck with the minutiae. You know what I meant, Gurion.” Unger was always calling the objects of my rigor
minutiae
. I said, Did you

* Though a seventh-grader at the time, Emmanuel (along with Samuel Diamond, also a seventh-grader) had been in Rabbi Salt’s eighth-grade Torah Study for nearly three years by then = they both had scholarly talent to burn, and Emmanuel almost definitely wouldn’t have asked such a basic question if he didn’t think the other students would benefit from hearing it addressed.

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mean that a God-day was just a lot longer than a people-day? He said, “That’s what I meant.” “How much longer?” said Emmanuel Liebman. “Much longer,” Unger said. “A thousand times longer?”

Emmanuel said. “More,” said Unger. “A hundred thousand times longer?” said Emmanuel. “Something like that,” said Unger. So a God-day lasts about a hundred thousand times as long as a people-day, I said. “Yes,” said Unger. So then Adam didn’t live to be nine hundred thirty, I said. I said, He lived to be ninety-three million.

“No,” said Unger. “You’re not listening,” he said. He said, “Adam was a man. When men are being written about, they are written about in people-time, not God-time.” I said, Okay. I was ready to drop it, too, but then Samuel Diamond said, “Why did all the people at the beginning of Genesis get to live for hundreds of years and then after that, they didn’t. Like David. Why did David only get to live to be seventy?” Unger said, “Actually, Adam
didn’t
live for nine hundred thirty years. Torah says that, but what it means is nine hundred thirty
months
.” So David only lived to be seventy months? I said. Even if that’s solar-months, it’s not even six years old, I said. “
David
is not discussed in the Torah,” said Unger.

“Prophets is not Torah,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”

Then Jacob, I said. I said, Torah says he lived a hundred and forty-seven years, so if a year is a solar month, then he fathered all twelve sons before he was thirteen, and if it’s a lunar month, then— “Years stop meaning months at a certain point,” said Rabbi Unger. It was an interruption. He interrupted me. I said, How do you know that? I said, I don’t think the stuff you’re telling us is accurate.

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Unger said, “Are you suggesting that I’m a liar, Gurion?” I
wasn’t
suggesting he was a liar. I was only suggesting he was mistaken.

But then, when he asked me if I was suggesting that he was a liar, I saw he’d been lying all along, intentionally making stuff up to save face. I couldn’t say that, though. If I said that, I’d be undermining the authority of the Torah Study teacher, which, at the time, seemed to = undermining Torah Study. I’d never done that before. I’d always loved Torah Study. Then again, I’d always had Rabbi Salt for Torah Study, and even though we’d argue, it was the good kind of argument—the kind where the arguers don’t argue to prove they are dominant, but rather to find out what is right. And it is true that Rabbi Unger was playing the role of Torah Study teacher badly, and it is true he should not have been lying, but all the other scholars always paid so much attention to what I did and so I didn’t want to demonstrate to them that it was good to undermine someone playing the role of the Torah Study teacher, because it hardly ever was. At the same time, I didn’t want to tell a lie. So I decided not to answer the question Unger asked. He asked what I was suggesting, and I didn’t say anything about what I was suggesting. Instead I said: I didn’t call you a liar.

And that was true. Slippery, but true. I didn’t
call
him anything.

And this is what he said: “Then you’re calling the word of God a pack of lies.” And when he said that—pack of lies—it was too much. He sounded like a senator in a movie, not a teacher—pack of lies. He sounded like that casuist Rabbi Bender in
The Conversion
of the Jews
by Philip Roth. And his beard was scattered. It was 75

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stringy. There were holes in it where I could see his skin. And he didn’t like me. He’d never liked me. He didn’t even like me in kindergarten. I stood up. Unger said, “We are here to study, not to defame.” I kicked my chair back into the wall. I said, You’re the one calling God a flip-flopper! “Go to my office and wait there,”

he told me. I didn’t go. I said to the students: Adam lived to be nine hundred thirty years old and David lived to be seventy. The Earth is just under six thousand. “But the carbon-dating,” Ben Brodsky said. Unger banged his fist on the table. I said, It measures the decomposition of radio-isotopes. The geologists measure what’s missing, and to do that they have to decide what was there to begin with based on rates and constants and constant rates of decomposition that no one can really know if those rates have always been constant, but that doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter that no one’s ever monitored a lump of carbon for a billion years to see if the constant holds, and it also doesn’t matter that no one’s even been around for that long, because all that matters is do you know what radio-isotopes are? “I don’t,” said Ben. “What are they?” he said. “Enough!” said Unger. I said, I have no idea what radio-isotopes are. I said, But neither does Rabbi Unger, so he’s scared of what they could be. He’s been studying Torah his whole life and he doesn’t understand how Torah works, yet he somehow thinks that scientists who study the Earth can understand how the Earth works. “Right now!” Unger shouted. “Out!” He stood up and I leaned away fast. When I leaned, my head banged the wall and I got dangerous. I knocked his lectern off the table. It fell up-76

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side-up, and before Unger got unshocked enough to grab me, I split the center of the lectern with a flying axe-chop. It’s a trick of the wrists my mother taught me—you twist them. It adds torque.

A couple students were crying by then, and Unger had me around the chest with his arm, and Emmanuel and Samuel told Unger to leave me alone, and so did Ben Brodsky, who wasn’t crying at all.

I yelled up into Unger’s ear: You’re scared of anything you don’t understand so you worship it. You kiss its ass! He dragged me into the hall and through the door of his office and said he was sick of this and he would kick me out. And I told him he wouldn’t.

And then he said, “You’re not the messiah.” And I told him that all my actions had served justice, and he yelled, “You are not the messiah!” He yelled it so loud that if there was an audience, the audience would have suspected dramatic irony. They would have suspected that Unger had run out of reasons to think I
wasn’t
the messiah, so all he could do was yell really loud that I wasn’t. Which is even more ironic because I obviously wasn’t the messiah. First of all, if I was the messiah, there’d be perfect justice throughout the world and the schmuck across from whose desk I was sitting wouldn’t hold a position of authority over me. Secondly, we’d both be in Israel. Thirdly, all the dead would have begun to rise out of the peak of the Mount of Olives, the most righteous first, and I’d be studying Torah with Moses, who’d want to hear what I thought, and probably Rashi and Maimonedes and Samuel and Ruth and Rabbi Akiva too. Those are just
some
of the reasons why it should have been obvious to anyone who was scholarly that I wasn’t the 77

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messiah. And I never said I was the messiah, either, and when other kids said it in front of me, I set them straight, and if they couldn’t be set straight, I’d distract them off the subject, usually with pratfalls, which I had a serious talent for. What I did say, after the third time Unger yelled “You are not the messiah!” was: I might be. And that was also true. Even though my father’s name was Judah Maccabee, and the original Judah Maccabee was a Cohain, we weren’t Cohains. My father’s grandfather was a Judite who changed his name when he got to America—in Russia, his name was Macarevich. We were Judites, my family, and it is for sure that the messiah will be a Judite, and Unger knew the messiah would be a Judite, and he also knew that he, himself, was a Cohain, which meant he was in the line of Moses’s brother Aron, and Aron, like Moses, was a Levite, and a Levite can’t be a Judite, so Unger couldn’t be the messiah, and I think this made him angry. Cohains are assigned custodianship of the Temple, and that’s an honorable thing to be assigned—but there’s no Temple. It takes the messiah to build the Temple. It takes a Judite. And it’s true that lots of Israelites—especially Cohains—didn’t like to hear that.

They didn’t like to hear that the Temple needed
building
. They liked to say the Temple would descend from the sky, but I never believed that, and neither did any number of other scholars, Maimonedes included. We did not believe the Temple would descend from the sky. So when I said to Unger what I was just about to say, and I used the word
you
, I did not mean
we
, and Unger knew that. What I said to him was this: You can’t build the Temple.

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And what Unger did was laugh at me, right in my face, and he told me, “The Temple will descend from the sky. No one will build it. That is the truth. But that’s well beside the point, isn’t it, Gurion? Because even if I’m wrong about that—even if the vast majority of the rabbinate is wrong and the Temple will after all be built by the messiah, Gurion—and who knows, right? it’s possible, I guess, that we’re all wrong about that—the one thing we know for sure, the one thing no one, not even anyone
in this
room
disagrees with, is that the messiah will be… what? He’ll be Jewish. The messiah will be a Jew. Do you understand? Do you understand what I’m expressing? To you? To Gurion Maccabee?

Do you understand what I’m telling you, Gurion? The messiah, Gurion, will be a Jew.” It was the all-time snakiest thing anyone had ever said to me. He was talking about my mother. I was half lost-tribe. You couldn’t see it in my skin unless you were trying, but my mother’s parents were from Ethiopia, and a few Ashkenazis still thought that meant I wasn’t an Israelite. Unger was the only one who’d ever said it to me, though. Right to my face. I grabbed the nearest thing on his desk and I flung it. I flung it at his head.

The nearest thing was a stapler. It opened in the air and caught him on the eye-corner. He shrieked. Blood streamed down onto his shoulder. That’s how I ended up at Northside Hebrew Day.

And when I got kicked out of Northside for teaching my brothers to protect themselves in the one way our Israelite schools refused to, I went to public school in Evanston. And when I got banned from the Evanston School System for protecting myself in the most 79

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basic way, I went to Aptakisic in Deerbrook Park. It was all connected, all the things that kept happening with me and schools, and I wanted to read what others wrote about it, then use what was relevant to give my scripture—
this
scripture—more context.

Context was the one thing I wished there was more of for Torah.

That isn’t to say I thought Torah less than perfect—I didn’t think that at all—but if, say, archaeologists somehow dug up parchments that were authored by Pharoah or any one of the twelve spies, let alone by Aron, Zipporah, or Jethro, and especially if those parchments were commentaries on the events in Torah in which their authors played a role, I would want to read them. I would want that so much.

Brodsky said, “I’ll make you a deal. If you promise to stop fighting, I’ll have Miss Pinge give you a copy of your file.”

Promising’s against the Law, I said. If I tell you I won’t fight anymore, that should be good enough.

“That
is
good enough,” he said. “You agree not to fight anymore?”

I said, No.

“You’re impossible!” he said. Now he was pissed at me.

I felt better and I egged him on. I said, My mom’ll get my record anyway.

“That’ll be up to her,” said Brodsky. He picked up the telephone and dialed. A few seconds later, he said, “I’d like to speak to Judah Maccabee…Yes, I’ll wait.”

Judah Maccabee was not my mother.

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NAMEL

PENNYGUN

ESS AREA NAMELESS AREA
b a l l o o n b a l l o o n b a l l o o n b a l l o o
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