Adam Levin - The Instructions

Sent: June 7, 2006, 6:34 PM Central-Standard Time

Subject: RE: FWD: Headmaster Mamzer

From: 13brodsky13@hotmail.com (Ben Brodsky)

To: Gurionforever@yahoo.com (me)

Rabbi,

I will do everything exactly as you’ve asked, no more no less. And I want you to know that we all miss you at school. True, it is not as bad for me as it is for the littler kids, since I’m graduating anyway, and I was already prepared to not see you as often, but still it is suck.

Your Student,

Ben

--Original Message Follows--

From: Gurionforever@yahoo.com

To: 13Brodsky13@hotmail.com

Subject: Re: Fwd: Headmaster Mamzer

Date: Wed, 7 June 2006 6:07 PM CST

Ben,

Thank you. You’re a good friend and I wish we’d been able to hang out more when we were still in school together. I won’t say a word to anyone about the hacking, but it’s very important to me that you let all the Schechter scholars with pennyguns know that they should not bring their weapons to school tomorrow, or any copies they might be carrying of Ulpan. Tell them that I told you so, and no one should have any reason to suspect the hack. If they need a deeper explanation, though, tell them I heard there were desk- and locker-searches being conducted at Northside, and I fear the same thing will happen at Schechter. If they ask HOW I heard, tell them you don’t know, which isn’t a lie, not, at least, if you think about it hard enough. After all, I haven’t yet said whether this is the first I’ve heard of the the searches at Northside, and I’m not saying that now, so you don’t know if it is. All I’m saying now is thank you.

I will, myself, try calling as many students as I can, but a lot of them aren’t allowed to talk to me because of the thing with Unger and then also what happened at the Synagogue, so please do what I’ve asked.

It is no surprise to me that you are a great sniper.

Your Friend,

Gurion

--Original Message Follows--

From: 13Brodsky13@hotmail.com

To: Gurionforever@yahoo.com

Subject: Fwd: Headmaster Mamzer

Date: Wed, 7 June 2006 5:01 PM CST

Rabbi Gurion,

Remember how I told you they made me a SpEd at public school because I hacked into the faculty emails and got caught? And how you said that it’s no good to hack people’s emails, because emails are private, but then at the same time you were glad I did it because if I hadn’t done it then we wouldn’t have been able to study together since my parents wouldn’t have sent me to Schechter if I didn’t get turned into a SpEd at public school? You were right. It is wrong to hack faculty emails, but good that we got to study together. That is why I never told you about how I’ve been hacking faculty emails here, at Schechter. Because I didn’t want you to be disappointed, because it was only wrong, because nothing good came of it. And I am telling you about it now, not because anything GOOD has come of it, but because something I think you should know about has come of it. I was in Unger’s inbox and I read an email from your Headmaster Kalisch that was headered “Important” that said you got kicked out of Northside today, but then it also said a lot of other things that I thought you should know about. I almost forwarded it to myself, but then there would have been a sent receipt in Unger’s outbox, which would not be stealth at all, so instead I copied and pasted it into an email that I sent to myself, from myself, and that’s what I’m forwarding to you. I’ve told no one about this because no one can know that I hack faculty emails, and also I figured you should read it before others — I felt very weird reading it before you. So just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it. Also, I wanted to tell you that I was delivered your instructions Saturday night, and so was Itzy Wasserman, though in the backyards of different Israelites, and what I thought was funny is that we drew the same face on our targets — Unger’s! I like to shoot his eyes. I like to shoot them so much that I’ve gone through three targets already. Since yesterday, I’ve been able to nail him from thirty feet off, but it is most satisfying at twenty feet off, because even though twenty feet off doesn’t make me feel as snipery as thirty feet off, I still feel pretty snipery, and plus I can hear the cardboard tearing at twenty, if the wind doesn’t blow, while at thirty I can’t even hear the cardboard tearing at all, no matter what — just my breathing and the snap of the balloon — and the cardboard tearing is such a good sound.

Your Student,

Ben Brodsky

Miss Pinge was peeling a spotted banana. She held it close to her face to hear the hiss of the skin tearing. In the middle waiting-chair, where I fell in love with June, a thin kid wearing tzitzit and a black fedora was chewing on the ends of his peyes. I wanted to be dressed just like him, but couldn’t for another two years and seven months, when I would become a man. My father didn’t want me to dress like a Hasid, or even wear a keepah — he didn’t say these things, but it was easy to tell — and I had to honor him. Once I was a man, I would still have to honor him, but not at the cost of breaking the Law. My father used to be Hasidic himself, and that is why I thought for a second that I knew the kid in the middle waiting chair — it was from a picture in our family room. It’s a picture of my dad, at his bar-mitzvah, sitting on a stone bench in the sun outside the Kotel in Jerusalem. He’s not chewing on his peyes in the picture, but wind from the Al Aqsa side is blowing the left one against his lips, so it looks like he’s chewing it. I missed my father, even though I just talked to him on the phone. I wanted to have lunch with him. My old schools were much closer to my house, and sometimes he’d come by with my mom and take me out for lunch. The last time was my third — my second-to-last — day at Martin Luther King Middle School. My dad was working at home and my mom had a sudden cancellation, so they took me to Foxies in Skokie. We had cheese fries and root-beer from a glass bottle and my mom was going to let me skip the rest of the day but my dad said I couldn’t and he drove me back.

I tried to snap the leaf from Brodsky’s fan-tree in half and it folded. I didn’t want it anymore. What I couldn’t break was already broken. The thin kid was looking at it, so I set it on his knee. He said the H’Adama blessing. Then he put the leaf between his lips and bit a piece off the tip, chewed.

The kid said to me, “I am Eliyahu.” He swallowed some leaf and took another bite. “So that it shouldn’t turn brown,” he said. It sounded like a question and he nodded to the leftover piece = “The leaf agrees.” He held it just under his chin, like Miss Pinge and her banana. “You’re Jewish?” he said.

I’m an Israelite, I said. I said, Does that taste good?

“You say you’re an Israelite.” His hat was tipped to the right, but not rakishly. Rakishly has to be on purpose. He put the leaf to his lips, then took it away. “It tastes green,” he said. “I’m also an Israelite.” He bit the leaf and gave it another nod. “And so it seems we’re both Israelites,” he said.

I wasn’t crazy for the whole “I’m weird, don’t you want to know why?” bit he was working with that leaf, but I hadn’t ever heard of an Orthodox kid in a public junior high school, plus I liked the way he talked.

Miss Pinge drew a hole in the air with the banana. She said, “Eli’s a new student here. He’s originally from the Big Apple.”

“It’s Eliyahu, already,” said Eliyahu. “Eliyahu is the name my parents gave me. And it’s not the Big Apple. Even if it was, what a shmaltzy thing to call a place. Would you like I said Miss Pinge from the Windy City?” He talked like an old man. He said, “I’m Eliyahu of Brooklyn.”