Adam Levin - The Instructions

I said, I didn’t mean what I said, Aba.

He said, “I know you didn’t. You wanted to hurt me because I had hurt you. That is natural — to want to hurt what has hurt you is natural — but what hurt you, Gurion, is not that I said what I said. It is that what I said was accurate, and a large part of you knows it. A large part of you knows you are not the messiah.”

All of me knows I’m not the messiah, I said. I said, And all of me knows I might be. I am a Judite.

“If that’s the only criteria, then so might I be the messiah, and millions of others, but I don’t act as if I am just because I might be. Nor do the vast majority of them.”

Maybe you should, I said. I said, Maybe if you act like the messiah, you’ll become the messiah. Maybe that’s what the messiah needs to do.

“I don’t want to be the messiah, Gurion. I don’t even think I believe in the messiah. This is an absurd line of inquiry. We’re talking about you .”

I said, Well I didn’t do anything messianic, anyway. I don’t have to be the messiah to convert somebody. Moses wasn’t the messiah.

“You’re not Moses either, Gurion.”

I said, I know I’m not Moses. I just had this conversation with Rabbi Salt. You are in total agreement with the Blackhats, Aba. You have returned to the fold to unite with those you abandoned in an orgy of total dismissal of your son’s heartfelt words.

“Don’t be so dramatic,” said my father. “I’m not uniting with—”

I wasn’t being dramatic, I said. I said, I was being arch. Bitingly ironic.

My dad laughed = “I want everything to be right with us.”

I don’t have to be Moses, I said. I said, Israelites will read the scripture I’ll write — I’ll have authority like Moses.

“Are you still being bitingly ironic?”

I said, I’m being completely sincere.

“That’s a hard sentence to pull off without sounding a little ironic. If someone were listening, they might think you were making fun of your father.”

I’m not making fun of you, I said.

“Even that one — hard to take at face value after the ones just preceding it, no?”

He lit a new cigarette off the old one, set the old one on its filter, cherry-side-up on my desk so it could go out.

“Moses didn’t have authority just because he wrote Torah,” he said. “He also led the Jews out of bondage. God chose him to do both of those things, and writing the Torah was the second one, which is pretty significant, I’d think. And even if I’m wrong about that; even if his taking us from bondage was causally unrelated to his being chosen to write the Torah — even if God would have given the Torah to Moses regardless of what Moses did for us in Egypt and the Sinai — I think it’s pretty safe to assume no Jew would have listened to Moses if he hadn’t ended our slavery. I mean, would you? If he hadn’t led you from bondage? Would you have listened to him? I wouldn’t have. Why should I believe some dandy prince with a stutter should be the one to receive the word of God?”

I said, Torah is what tells you the story of the stuttering prince. And it’s the stuttering prince who wrote it down.

“The Torah’s important,” said my father. “It’s the most important thing the Jews have — I’m not saying it isn’t. I’m just saying that its author… Uch! This is all beside the point. It’s not even that you’re delusional — you are , but it’s not that; it’s the nature of your delusions. If you wanted to believe your girlfriend was a Jew and so you merely insisted that she was a Jew, that wouldn’t be so bad. But why you want those who have hurt you to think that she is a Jew—”

An Israelite, I said.

“Fine. An Israelite… what you call it doesn’t change anything. That it is important to you that she be known to them as an Israelite… that you feel the need to prove it, or anything else, to the same people who have expelled you from their schools, the same mamzers who have kept you from your friends, who have vandalized our home and threatened our family, who have rejected you at every opportunity… It doesn’t follow for you to want their approval. You were just telling me you wanted to blind one of them. Why do you want to blind someone who you want to accept you? Why do you want acceptance from someone who you wish blindness on? What does it matter if they think your girlfriend is an Israelite?”

I said, I am loyal to June, and—

“If you’re so loyal to June, what do you care if she converts or not? Why can’t you just love her regardless? When I married your mother, there were still a lot of Jews who did not consider her Jewish, and I—”

Those Jews were wrong, I said. They didn’t know the truth and you did and you married Ema without any hesitation because you loved her and you knew the truth. And I know you were defiant. I know all about you. You were defiant, and because you were defiant you married her without regard for what your community endorsed. But we aren’t talking about you, anyway, right? That is what you said a minute ago. We are talking about me. That is what you said. And I am not defiant, not like you were. I am loyal.

I said, I am loyal to the Israelites as well as to June and to Adonai and to you, Aba. I don’t care if June converts. Whether or not she converts, she is an Israelite and that is the truth. I said, I know it and June knows it and Adonai knows it. The Israelites don’t know it, though, and neither do you. So it would be disloyal of me not to convince you and them of the truth. I am obligated by loyalty to do so.

“You’re not going to convince anyone, though, ever. And what will happen when you realize that? I worry, Gurion. You’re not so good at disappointment. You get disappointed, you do rash things.”

I said, You say I won’t convince anyone because you believe it is true and you are loyal to your son, Aba. I said, You say it because I am your son, and you feel obligated to convince me of the truth. And you are obligated. And so you will always try to convince me of the truth. And you’re my father, and I’m loyal to you, and so I will always do the same for you. I know you understand that.

“So much fancytalk only to come to let’s agree to disagree?”

You’re making light of what I’m saying, I said.

“I’m trying to end this conversation on a nice note,” he said. “I’m trying to be the soft Yiddishe dad you admired in that Story of Stories . I’m trying not to be the angry father who killed rapists and made threats in the family room. I want you to be softer and more Yiddishe. I want you to be less angry.”

He’d said “killed” and not “murdered,” so I hugged him and kept my mouth shut. In time, I knew, he would come around.

There is love. There was always love, and there will be more love, forever. Were there ever to be less love, we would all be at war, and Your angels would learn suffering.

Alone in my room, I awakened my computer, then looked at what I’d written the day before, and I saw it wasn’t good. I liked the rhythm of the words, but that didn’t make them true. Though more war didn’t strike me as a particularly unlikely outcome of less love in the world, there was at least as good a case to be made for an outcome of less war. And to say that angels would learn suffering, ever — it was hard to figure out how that could be. Angels delighted in every aspect of Adonai’s creation of the world. That is what He’d made them to do. How could beings who delighted in everything suffer? It didn’t seem possible.

And these were the least of the paragraph’s problems.