Adam Levin - The Instructions

I said, He would have lost, but it would not have been shameful.

“It might not have been as shameful,” said Eliyahu, “but it would have been at least a little bit shameful, and he would be damaged.”

I said, I’m sure Benji had his reasons for doing what he did. What was Aleph’s real name?

“If I knew, I wouldn’t call him Aleph.”

I said, He must have done something wrong to Benji.

“When?” said Eliyahu. “In daycare? Benji himself said they hadn’t spoken in all the years they’d gone to school together… Say he had wronged Benji in daycare — it was a long time ago. Why not let it go?”

I said, Maybe Aleph did wrong him in daycare, and Benji was unable to do anything about it at the time. The million different answers to ‘Why not let it go?’ have just as many good ones among them as the million you can get from ‘Why should I let it go?’ And look, Eliyahu, I know this place is weird, and the people in it — this school is not a member of the Associated Talmud Torahs Network. But you should trust Benji, and the reason you should trust Benji is that he is loyal to everyone who has ever shown him loyalty. He can’t help it. He is loyal to me, and so he’s loyal to you, so he wouldn’t mislead you about something like whether or not I’m in the Office for ISS.

“But he did mislead me, Gurion. You weren’t here before.”

He told you I was here because he knew I had ISS today, I said. I said, He told you what he thought was true, and not because he was crazy or carried away, but because it should have been true, what he told you. I said, There was no reason for him to believe it wasn’t true.

“He threatened me,” said Eliyahu. “He told me to stop looking at him in fear, or else—”

That was not a threat, I said. It was a warning.

“I hear this phrase in gangster movies,” said Eliyahu, “cowboy movies, television reruns about oil barons and men who own vineyards — I have never understood its meaning.”

I said, A boy makes a threat when he wants to damage you. The threat itself is a minor form of damage — it makes your snat trickle. When a boy gives you a warning, though, it’s because he doesn’t want to damage you.

“What is snat?” said Eliyahu. “It sounds like something sticky and unpleasant.”

Brodsky’s door opened.

I said, I’ll give you something I wrote about it.

“Eliyahu,” said Brodsky, “you cannot talk to students who are in ISS.”

Eliyahu didn’t even look at Brodsky, though. He started speaking Hebrew to my mother. “You are Gurion’s mother,” he said, “I can tell.”

This is Eliyahu, I said to my mom.

She touched his cheek with the bottom of her hand and said, “Eliyahu? I am glad to meet you, Eliyahu.”

“Thank you,” he said. Then he looked at his feet. Then he went to lunch.

My mother bent as if to kiss me, and she whispered in my ear, “Eliyahu is an orphan. You—”

How do you know that? I whispered back.

Into my other ear she whispered, “Do not be thick. I know the face of an orphan when I see one. Protect him. He loves you. So do I. Now act like I have told you that we must have a long talk when you come home from school.” Then she stood up straight.

A long talk about what? I said.

She made her voice weary and said, “We will discuss it at home, Gurion,” and, with her back still to Brodsky, she winked.

I thought: My mother is not carried away or crazy, but some third thing — she is something else.

It’s true that Philip Roth wasn’t good for the Jews, but it bothered me that other Jews ever said so. It bothered me not only because he was as good for the Jews as any Jew of his generation could have hoped to have been, but because they— Roth’s accusers — were also bad for the Jews, and for the most part worse than Roth, who was always trying to protect them from themselves, which is what they believed themselves to be doing by accusing Roth of being bad for the Jews. I knew it wasn’t really their fault, though — not most of them, anyway — nor his for that matter: Jews couldn’t help trying to protect themselves from themselves any moreso than they could have helped being bad for the Jews. That is a lot of what made them Jews. And that is why it wasn’t good to be Jews. And that is why I’ve been good for the Jews: because I’ve been the end of the Jews (except, of course, for the fictional Jews: Zuckerman and Glick, Stern and Kravitz and Golk, Shylock, Gimpel, Tevye, and Flesh, each Paley-made granny and sister and aunt, Kosinski’s boy and all his Ruthenians — Jews forever the lot, and baruch Hashem: fiction needs Jews). All Israelites know this now. Even Philip Roth. Especially him.

But he didn’t used to. Not when he wrote My Life as a Man ; not til after the so-called “11/17 Miracle.” In that he was no different than most of the rest of you.

I, on the other hand, had known all my life — or at least since age three, when I’d first read Torah — that I was never a Jew, but always an Israelite, and that all of us were. Therefore I knew, whether there in the Office on 11/15 or anywhere else on any day prior, that I could not have been so very much like Roth, no matter what my mother might have thought; no matter what she might have thought that I thought.

My mom thought I thought I was like Philip Roth, and because she thought I thought myself like Philip Roth, she assumed I’d be willing to take a lesson from Roth. That’s why she gave me My Life as a Man .

(Briefly, for scholars unfamiliar with the book: My Life as a Man contains three distinct parts. The first two are short stories about a fictional Jewish writer called Zuckerman ********who marries a crazy, lying shiksa who ruins his life and then kills herself. The Zuckerman stories are written by another fictional Jewish writer called Tarnopol, and the third part of the book is the novel-length autobiography of Tarnopol, who marries a crazy, lying shiksa. After ruining his life, she kills herself.)

The lesson I was supposed to take was this: I shouldn’t marry a shiksa.

But that wasn’t the lesson of the book at all — there was no lesson; books with lessons are not good books; My Life as a Man was a good book (a great book) — nor was June a shiksa, let alone a crazy, lying shiksa; and Tarnopol marries the crazy, lying shiksa in the book not because he loves her as I loved June, but because she lies to him about being pregnant.

To be clear, scholars, my mother was as lucid and concise a thinker as just about anyone I’d ever heard of. Among radical behaviorists, her renown as an innovator was spreading before she’d even finished grad school. Whenever she started to think about her son, though, her thoughts, like so many moms’, got seriously disorganized.

Thus, while she knew Roth’s book contained no lesson concerning shiksas (she had to have known; she was too smart not to), she wished it did, and she gave it to me thinking something along the lines of, “Gurion will see the lesson that I wish Roth was teaching him, and Gurion will come away from that wished-for lesson no longer wanting to marry June.” And that didn’t make sense. It wouldn’t have even made sense if My Life as a Man did contain her wished-for lesson. = While she took me seriously enough to believe that I loved and would marry June because I’d said so, she not only didn’t believe it when I’d said June was Israelite, but she believed that a book by Philip Roth would have the power to fall me out of love with June. How could you believe your son was in love with a girl and at the same time believe a novel could make him stop loving her? Muddledly is how, and only muddledly.