Adam Levin - The Instructions

The concept of swears was, at that time, also foreign to me.

“You can’t say the eff-word.”

What’s the eff-word?

“The word you just said.” “You called us effers.”

I didn’t call you effers. I called you fuckers. You’re all fuckers, I said. You’re fuckers because you’re not honorable slapslappers and you’re fuckers because of how you make fun of my name, which is a good, strong name my parents gave me, you fuckers.

“That’s a bad word!” they said, and half of them went to the other side of the playground.

The fuck are they scared of? I said.

That is when I first noticed Emmanuel Liebman and Samuel Diamond. They were laughing, and even though I wasn’t laughing, it seemed like they were laughing with me somehow, and that gave me a good, brotherly feeling, so I decided I liked them.

“The eff-word, Gurion ben-Judah,” said Simon Katz, “is the word in the question you just asked that begins with the letter f. It’s a swear .”

No it’s not, I said.

Even though I didn’t know what exactly a swear was, I could of course tell by the context that a swear was bad, and so I knew the word fuck could not be a swear because it was a word my mom used to say a lot. To an Israeli, who has grown up cursing in Arabic, “fuck” seems like fiddlesticks , “fucker” like meanie . How could it be otherwise? When you curse in Arabic at the rock that has stubbed your toe, what you say to the rock is Coos em ach . Coos em ach = Your mother’s cunt. If someone pisses you off a little, and you don’t want to say something too vile, you tell them they’re the offspring of ten thousand donkeys and a whore. I didn’t understand all of that at the time, nor would I til that afternoon, when after Headmaster Unger heard about my saying the word, he yelled and called my parents, and we had a talk, and my mom decided to stop saying fuck so much and so did I. All I knew right then, on the playground, was that my mom said fuck and fucker when she was mad or annoyed, and so it wasn’t, at least to me, a bad word any more than the word bad was a bad word.

It’s not a swear, I said.

“It is,” said Simon.

So what the fuck is a swear then?

“It’s a word bad people say.”

I said, Take it back.

“I can’t take back facts, Gurion ben-Judah.”

I said, Take it back now, you pussing leprosy from between the scabrous vaginal lips of a discount vestigially-tailed prostitute for whom any one of your sixty-seven possible syphilitic fathers were either stupid or crazy enough to pay nearly twice her value for at eighteen cents, fuck.

“Whoa.”

Woe unto you, you filthy crevice-sniffing—

But Simon Katz — a nice boy — was already walking away.

I started choking up because of how everyone I’d met hated me for doing nothing other — at least as far as I could tell — than playing unimpeachable slapslap and defending my family. I had not had much contact with other kids my age, but I’d always assumed that people who I wanted to be friends with would like me. I sat down in pebbles and took deep breaths, and the sting behind my eyes softened before any tears fell.

Soon, Emmanuel and Samuel sat down beside me and said their names. Samuel told me about simple slapslap, and how it made the two of them angry. Emmanuel seemed more disappointed than angry, and he told me that Simon Katz, though nice, was not very bright; that he believed swears were words that bad people said because his mother, knowing that Simon was so nice and therefore wouldn’t want to be a bad person, had told him so. Then he told me what swears were. “They are words that a large group of people agree are forbidden, and so they are good, for if Adonai’s true name were the only forbidden word, then, other than lying, the only way to rebel by speaking would be to break the Law handed down to us by Adonai, either by saying his true name or taking his lesser ones in vain, and since people must rebel by speaking — it is part of being a person, yes? I know you know that — it is better if they have something other than Adonai’s Law to rebel against. It is better for them to have the option to rebel against the rules of man, which are all, ultimately, imperfect.”

Since they’d sat down with me, Samuel had been whipping pebbles at the bigtoy, Emmanuel absently hoisting fistfuls to shoulder-level and spilling them one- and two-at-a-time into a small pile in the middle of us. When Emmanuel was through speaking, I back-handed one of the spilling pebbles so that it struck one of the whipped ones in mid-air and the ricochet was audible. CLACKSH.

I liked for things to ricochet, but as soon as I’d backhanded that pebble, I worried Emmanuel and Samuel would think I was a show-off. I’d never worried about being a show-off before. I didn’t even know the word “show-off,” but I knew the idea from Torah: Moses wasn’t allowed into Israel because he’d acted like a show-off in the Sinai, during the second water-from-the-rock miracle. The stakes were not that high here, and I had performed no miracle, just an impressive feat of timing and aim, but I had, at least partly, performed the feat to impress them with my timing and aim, when I could have just as easily done it for better reasons: to let them hear a new sound or witness the rare and pretty physics of a missile striking a missile.

They didn’t treat me like a show-off, though. They kept doing what they’d been doing with the pebbles, totally straight-faced. I thought maybe they hadn’t seen, but after Samuel had whipped a couple or three more, he said, “Can you do it again?”

I said, Maybe.

“Try.”

So I did it again. CLACKSH.

They stopped monkeying with the pebbles and slapped me on the back.

Can we be best friends? I said. I really liked them. I said, I think we should be best friends. We all prefer to play slapslap correctly and judging by what I’ve seen this morning, here on the playground, I believe a love of real slapslap is a deeply meaningful affinity to share; the kind of affinity from which friendships of great longevity have the opportunity, if not the impetus, to grow.

Samuel said the beginning of a “Yes,” but Emmanuel cut him off. “Are you a scholar?” he said.

Are you? I said.

“Yes,” they said.

“But that doesn’t make you one,” said Emmanuel. He said, “You have to worry about what things mean. Especially things in Torah.”

I do, I said.

“Like what?” said Emmanuel. He wasn’t acting mistrustful, just cautious.

You know when Jacob tricks Isaac on his deathbed? I said.

“What about it?”

First of all, I don’t think he really tricks him.

Emmanuel said, “A number of great rabbis would agree with you” = “You are not impressing me with originality.”

I said, But I think maybe Adonai gets tricked. By Isaac, though, not Jacob.

“That is a very compelling statement. What would make you say such a thing?”

“He’ll have to explain some other time,” Samuel said. “First bell’s about to ring.”

I’ll explain at recess, I said. I said, But what you asked me was to tell you what I am worried about, which I can do very quickly: I am worried that if Isaac did trick Adonai, then not only would it seem to indicate that Adonai can be tricked, but that maybe He should be tricked sometimes, and I am worried because I don’t know how to trick Him.

“Listen,” said Emmanuel. “You explain this to us after school. At recess, I want you to find Rabbi Salt, the principal of Judaic Studies. He is a very smart man. He teaches second-, fourth-, sixth-, and eighth-grade Torah Study. We’re in fourth-grade Torah Study, Samuel and I, instead of third-, because Rabbi Salt was our teacher last year and he double-promoted us. You need to go see him at recess and get promoted out of kindergarten Torah Study because it’s Rabbi Unger, the headmaster, who is a fool, who teaches kindergarten Torah Study, and you will learn nothing from him but foolishness. I am certain that if you search him out, Rabbi Salt will promote you, at least to second-grade Torah Study, and in the meantime, Samuel and I have Torah Study right after lunch, and we’ll try to convince him to promote you twice again so you can study with us.”