Adam Levin - The Instructions

“I would have myself forwarded it last night if I knew who you were,” said Solly, “but I didn’t know who you were til after school today, when I stopped by Emmanuel’s to borrow his graphing calculator and happened to mention the strange email I received. He gave me your Ulpan then, and explained—”

Back up, I said. I don’t understand. I sent that email to all of you. I sent it to everyone at Northside and Schechter — and the Schechter list, at least, was totally updated from Rabbi Salt.

“Yes, Rabbi,” said Shai, “but email from your Gurionforever address is blocked by our parents, ever since the meeting.”

The meeting? I said.

“You don’t know about the meeting?” said Shai.

“I told you he didn’t know about the meeting,” Samuel said. “If he knew about the meeting, why would he have sent the email from Gurionforever?” To me, he said, “They had this meeting. At the J. Back in June. It wasn’t about blocking your email address, Rabbi — it was a planning session to do a fundraiser for Sudanese refugees. But. The meeting was right after everyone saw that email from the Northside Headmaster.”

“And right after you sent that ‘don’t call me I’ll call you’ one,” said Shai.

My parents never told me, I said.

“With all due respect, Rabbi, our parents don’t speak to yours, so…”

I know, I said, but Rabbi Salt speaks to them sometimes. And what’s more, he speaks to me , and he never told me either, I said. And Esther, I said. I said, Esther didn’t tell me, either.

“They probably wanted to save you some pain,” said Shai.

“They were probably trying to protect you,” Emmanuel said. “And if your parents knew, I’m sure they were, too. It wasn’t such a nice meeting.”

Samuel said, “Once they were finished talking about African genocide, they started talking about you and your dangerous influence and, long made short: in the course of the discussion, Sidney Beber’s tech-savvy mom, who my mom said is the one who originally told her and every other scholar’s mom north of the Mason-Dixon about these stupid Nojacks *—Beber said how easy it would be to block your email address, and everyone at the meeting thought that was a good idea.”

“A lot of them had seen the ‘don’t call me I’ll call you’ one, too, and got scared,” said Shai, “because the implication was you’d eventually get back in contact.”

“So then instructions got emailed to everyone for how to block email through all the different email clients, and these emailed instructions all listed Gurionforever specifically,” said Samuel.

“This egghead mump named Malinowitz even wrote some code called BanGurion.exe,” said Shai, “which was this small program for Windows users that you download and click it and it blocks Gurionforever just like that.”

Samuel said, “People forwarded the instructions with the code attached and posted them to listservs and so on — you know how word spreads. It’s pretty surprising, actually, that Solly’s parents didn’t get those emails.”

“I’m sure they did,” Solly said. “We were still in New York, though, in the middle of that feud, and my parents were probably receiving too much email about the alleged demagoguery of various New York — area Teitelbaums to be concerned with a supposedly false messiah from Chicago. Anyway, it turns out it was a blessing. If your address had been blocked by my parents, the email wouldn’t have ever gotten to me, and so it wouldn’t have gotten to anyone.”

I said, Why didn’t any scholars tell me my address was blocked, though?

Emmanuel said, “Please don’t be upset with us, Rabbi. I know I would have told you, but I thought you’d know, and I think everyone else thought the same, and that it didn’t really matter because how hard would it be for you to get a new address to send emails from? A new address — it’s free to get one. I have four, myself.”

“And plus you told us not to contact you in that ‘don’t call me I’ll call you’ one,” said Shai.

“Stop calling it that,” Samuel said. “It’s disrespectful. Call it by the title Gurion gave it.”

“I can’t remember the title.”

“‘Last Word.’ How hard is that to remember?”

“But my kidneys hurt, Samuel.”

I felt like I was in Romeo and Juliet , or maybe the Book of Esther. Happenstance and simple misunderstandings — piling up, convoluting, resolving. I felt like I was in a sitcom. Had I known that my email address was blocked, I’d have sent them ‘New Scripture’ from a different address, and had ‘New Scripture’ gotten to them at the time I’d sent it, they’d have all shown up at Aptakisic. Had they all shown up at Aptakisic, I wouldn’t’ve gotten back to the Cage for third, let alone been distracted enough to forget to sign my pass, in which case Botha would not have yelled at me, in which case Ben-Wa might not have snapped, in which case there wouldn’t have been a hyperscoot, and if there hadn’t been a hyperscoot, I wouldn’t know the Side of Damage was my army, and if Ben-Wa’d snapped anyway and there had been a hyperscoot and someone — say, Benji — told me about it but I hadn’t felt betrayed by the Israelite scholars, I might not have cared that the Side was my army, and either way I, not having seen the hyperscoot, wouldn’t have argued at lunch about what to call it, and there’d’ve been no contest about what to call it, and I’d’ve not scraped my elbow during the Electric Chair and then gotten sent to Nurse Clyde’s and met the Five, and I’d’ve not offended Benji, and he’d’ve not pulled the alarm, and I wouldn’t know the source of Eliyahu’s damage, and there’d’ve been no attack on Shlomo Cohen, no ‘Death to the Jew,’ no humiliation at the hands of Bam Slokum, no failure of Nakamook to step in and help me, none of the post-alarm hyperscoots either, no self-stabbed Benji, no call down to Brodsky’s, no giggling Botha, no transformed Eliyahu, and as for my father — actually, no. What had happened to my father would’ve happened the same, and my sorrow and my anger at what happened would have been the same, though maybe, had I known that the scholars were still on my side, I’d’ve been able to address it all differently somehow, been able to do better than smash a remote and alienate Flowers: I’d’ve felt less helpless, at least a little. And I felt less helpless, at least a little, though still more helpless than I wanted to feel.

To Emmanuel, I said: I don’t understand. How many listservs was this email-blocking email posted to?

“A lot,” Emmanuel said.

How could I have missed it? I said.

“You subscribe to a lot of community listservs?”

None, I said, but I subscribe to every scholarly listserv I know about.

“Those are different, though,” Emmanuel said. “Why would a post about blocking your address be on a scholarly listserv?”

Why wouldn’t it?

“It was not a very scholarly kind of post. I mean, yes, it had to do with you, our greatest scholar, but it didn’t actually say much about you, other than your email address. I mean, it didn’t say anything about your teachings or anything.”

They posted the one Kalisch wrote about me, I said.

“Someone sent that to those listservs, though,” Emmanuel said. He said, “I’m not saying a scholarly listserv wouldn’t have posted the email about blocking your address if someone had sent it in , but who’d send it in? I mean it’s pretty strange anyone sent that Kalisch one to those scholarly listservs — pretty inelegant, no? If whoever was out to damage you had half a brain, he’d have posted it straight to the community ones. The scholarly listservs are there to discuss scripture. You getting kicked out of a school — to anyone who doesn’t know who you are, at least — it’s not exactly a talmudic type concern, right?”