Adam Levin - The Instructions

I showed him my pass and said, This is my sheep’s blood.

Jerry nodded. The nod dispatched me.

When I opened my locker, I blocked it with my body and fished my pennygun from the spy-pocket of my IDF fatigue jacket, which used to be my mom’s. The gun was a new design. Instead of making it with the sawed-off top of a regular-mouthed soda bottle, I sawed off a wide-mouthed soda bottle. Also, I reinforced the balloon-skin that covered the pouring hole in order to prevent any slippage or tearing the extra circumference might foment.

I was pretty sure the new gun could project quarters, but I couldn’t be certain because it was still a virgin. I’d only made it that morning, and the el-train was so late the schoolbus came thirty seconds after I got to the Frontier, where I would have otherwise conducted field tests while I waited. And that is why I hadn’t changed the name of it from pennygun to quartergun yet, because I didn’t want to risk disappointment. I figured I’d mostly use it for pennies anyway. Quarters cost more.

To get to the gym, I had to walk past the Deaf Sentinel again.

I held out my pass and held out a quarter and I said to him in Hebrew, I’m gonna break the glass on the gym clock, Sentinel. I said, I’m gonna use this currency to bring down the time-teller.

Jerry nodded.

Sent: June 9, 2006, 6:09 AM Central-Standard Time

Subject: RE: Fwd: Important

From: avelsalt@hotmail.com (Avel Salt, Solomon Schechter School)

To: Gurionforever@yahoo.com (me)

So maybe, for effect, I exaggerated a little. Good Shabbos.

--Original Message Follows--

From: Gurionforever@yahoo.com

To: avelsalt@hotmail.com

Subject: Re: Fwd: Important

Date: Fri, 9 June 2006 6:05 AM CST

Well, I didn’t cry THAT much, though. Good Shabbos.

--Original Message Follows--

From: avelsalt@hotmail.com

To: Gurionforever@yahoo.com

Subject: Re: Fwd: Important

Date: Fri, 9 June 2006 5:59 AM CST

I wrote only the truth.

--Original Message Follows--

From: Gurionforever@yahoo.com

To: avelsalt@hotmail.com

Subject: Re: Fwd: Important

Date: Fri, 9 June 2006 5:57 AM CST

Rabbi Salt,

I won’t change my mind, but thank you for writing so many nice things about me. I will not forget. And I’ll see you in a week.

Your Student,

Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee

--Original Message Follows--

From: avelsalt@hotmail.com

To: Gurionforever@yahoo.com

Subject: Re: Fwd: Important

Date: Fri, 9 June 2006 12:11 AM CST

Boychic,

Following is what I sent them. If you change your mind, I’ll post it on every listserv in the world.

In other news, I’m leaving town for a conference on Sunday morning, but I’ll make sure to be back for your party. 10 years old, kiddo! That’s a decade. That’s big.

Your Friend,

Avel

----- Forwarded message —----

From: Avel Salt

To: Alan Kalisch of Northside Hebrew Day School ,

Richard Feldman of Northbrook Hebrew Day School , Lionel Unger of Solomon Schechter School , Benjamin Weissman of The Goldstein School , Harold Nieman of Anshe Emet , Michael Kleinman of North-Suburban Solomon Schechter School

Date: Friday, 9 June 2006 12:03 AM Central-Standard Time

Subject: RE: Fwd: Important

Headmaster Rabbi Kalisch:

It is a shameful thing for a man, among colleagues, to slander a nine-year-old boy. It is doubly shameful when the man and his colleagues are teachers, and the boy the man’s student; triply shameful when the teachers are rabbis and the student a Jew. And it is infinitely shameful, Headmaster, it is infamously shameful, it is Herodianly repugnant when the result of a rabbi’s slander, let alone its very aim, is to prevent a Jewish student from properly studying Torah. But for you to have slandered Gurion Maccabee, a student already ten times the teacher you’ll ever be and ten-thousand times the scholar — that is unforgivable, beyond shame, beyond repugnance. It is a travesty.

I would like to see harm come to you, Rabbi, and this troubles my soul because I know you must be damaged, for only the damaged can act as you have acted, and the damaged need our mercy, not our contempt.

It is with mercy, then, however strained, that I advise you to put aside your goyische equestrianism in favor of studying dogs. If you study with any rigor, you will surely come across those, like you, who are damaged; and you’ll note these damaged dogs keep their heads down whenever they’re aware that you’re seeing them. Will you know why that is, Alan? why it is that a damaged dog keeps its head down when you watch it? why it lowers its eyes when it passes you on the street? A damaged dog lowers its eyes when it sees you coming, Alan, because it mistakes you for a man, and a damaged dog, unlike a broken-legged horse, knows of man’s capacity for mercy. A damaged dog lowers its eyes among men lest it provoke the mercy men exercise on damaged animals. Forget your horses, Kalisch. Horses can’t teach you what you need to learn.

The rest of you:

There’s at least one of you who isn’t wondering how the email in question got leaked. Being but a lowly, however tenured, principal of Judaic Studies, I don’t know how to find out which one. I do know that the email was sent to me by my friend Michael Schloss, who received it off a listserv whose manager is based in Jerusalem. As you will see below, the Fwd “originated” from FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL@hotmail.com and then passed through two other listservs before getting to Michael. Apparently, one of you possesses this FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL account and you cut-and-pasted the original to cover your tracks. I know it wasn’t Kalisch, for although a mamzer, it was clearly not his intention to commit a worldwide tarnishing-by-association of the names of the other boys mentioned (an assured outcome, that tarnishing, by the way, as well as its worldwideness, for how many Fwd’s must the email have been through by now? how many people on either of the listservs to which it has been posted?). As for you, Unger, you’re vindictive enough, true, and I’m sure you’re raucously celebrating the takedown of the nine-year-old in question, but you’re at once prideful and naked of anything that even resembles savvyness and I doubt you’d have thought to hide your identity.

So FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL is one of the other four of you.

I would gleefully go after all of you to be sure I got to the one, but your victim has asked that I refrain. Of Judah Maccabee — a profoundly talented attorney, in case you don’t watch the news — Gurion has commanded compliance with the same request. Though I spent all of today devising a number of highly public methods by which to avenge him, and though his father would wrap tort around your necks like phonecord where his mother would actual phonecord, the boy himself — who was on the first listserv to which FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL posted; who has spent these past couple days in tears at the thought of no longer being allowed to study Torah among his friends; and who, as the email circulates more and more widely through our community, is being denied access to more and more of these friends by their parents, who FEAR him now — when tonight, over dinner, we presented Gurion with the thousand possible ways in which we could ruin you, he declined all of them, saying, “What has been done to me is dirty, but no Israelite, no matter how corrupt, must ever be rendered unto the law of Caesar, much less the scrutiny of Canaanites. Apart from that, I love all of you, and will not have you sully yourselves in dirt that is mine to wash away. I will wash it away. I will wash it away truly.”