Adam Levin - The Instructions

Well if they don’t know who I am, I said, then exactly.

“Exactly what?” said Emmanuel.

I mean: you’re right, I said.

By then I was at my desk, waiting for my inbox to open. It was taking longer than usual.

“In any case, Rabbi,” said Emmanuel. “We still haven’t addressed the ambiguity about which I wrote you.”

The loading icon in the corner of my monitor — a tiny pair of animated thumbs — kept pausing mid-twiddle.

“About whether your offer was a one-time offer,” said Samuel.

My offer?

“The offer to receive your scripture,” said Shai.

“On one hand, you invite us to your school to receive your scripture,” said Emmanuel, “and you say that once it’s delivered, things might somehow change in such a way as to make disobeying our parents a form of honoring them — a big might to be sure, but a might nonetheless — and that after the scripture gets delivered, we’ll know if we can be in contact with you again.”

“But then,” said Samuel, “we didn’t get the invitation til after the time you wanted us to come meet you.”

“And so,” said Emmanuel, “it seemed to us that we might have blown our chance.”

“And not just us as in the us who are talking to you right now,” said Shai, “but a lot of the scholars you meant to CC, who, from five minutes after Emmanuel forwarded your email to them, were jamming his phonelines and inbox, offering very clear opinions on the ambiguity.”

The thumbs had grown still and become 2-D. I minimized the window, mazimized the window.

“Most of them don’t see an ambiguity is what Shai means.”

“That could have gone without saying, Samuel. Gurion knew exactly what I meant.”

“Enough out of you.”

“Most of the scholars think it’s one way or the other,” said Emmanuel. “Some say, ‘By having not gotten the invitation til it was too late, we blew our chance to be led by Gurion.’ And then the others say, ‘We did not blow our chance. We’ll visit him at his house on Saturday, after Havdallah, just like with his Ulpan , and he’ll deliver the new scripture as he delivered his Ulpan .’

“So while it seems to us, us here in this room that is, that there is certainly an ambiguity,” Emmanuel continued, “we are in the minority. And the ones who are ready to come over after Havdallah; they’ve already gotten carried away. ”

I clicked STOP, then RELOAD. My inbox flashed — just the frame — then disappeared, but now at least the thumbs twiddled rhythmically.

Carried away like how? I said.

“Like they’re already into the bobe-mayses,” said Emmanuel. “This girl you mentioned, for example — all you told us is she’s got red hair and you love her — but these scholars who are talking about visiting after Havdallah, they’re all convinced there’s some big story behind it, how you fell in love with her, and that it has to do with the new scripture. And granted, you mentioned her in the email, suggesting she’s got something to do with the scripture and with your contacting us, so it’s not unreasonable to assume there’s some kind of story, but the kind of stories these scholars are predicting — they’re not just stories, but parables or allegories about the diaspora and persecution or the diaspora and salvation or a coded set of further instructions, like a second Ulpan , wherein this girl you love is the Land of Israel or Torah or maybe Adonai Himself, and this Aptakisic the world or the United States or the whole of the Middle East, and this Cage the Canaanites or the Romans or the law of the land. And that’s not even the half of it.

“Silly, Rabbi, in our opinion — they were all silly, these assumptions being made; ungrounded speculations the lot of them, Samuel and Shai and I felt,” said Emmanuel. “And then: potentially dangerous, too. For despite all the excitement, despite how grateful we would all be to receive this scripture from you, let alone to be in contact again, despite how thrilling it would be to let ourselves get carried away like these other nutsos, it still wasn’t clear to us — the three of us, I mean — whether or not we would even get to receive this scripture, now that we’d missed the invitation. And if we aren’t to receive the scripture, if that invitation was a one-time offer, and if, as the invitation seemed to be stating, the righteousness of being in contact with you again had been contingent on our having received the scripture, then all these scholars who are certain we are to receive it anyway… If they were to come over here on Saturday evening, they would not only be transgressing against their parents, but against you as well. And so the three of us, plus Solly, we gathered by my computer and took it upon ourselves to ask you to clarify the ambiguity via email. Although asking for such a clarification was no doubt a form of contact, which might count as a transgression against you (and if so, then certainly a transgression against our parents), we figured it would be a much smaller transgression than contacting you via telephone, let alone in person, and we figured that if, in your response to our email, you stated that it was not okay to resume contact with you, that the invitation had been a one-time offer, we would tell all the other scholars what you said, thus preventing hundreds of transgressions this Saturday, by way of our four today. And so we sent an email to all the CC’d scholars that told them of our plan, and we wrote you our email, and were ready to wait for however long was necessary for you to respond. But no sooner had I hit the send button than, as I mentioned earlier, we saw the news about your father on television, at which point we decided, ‘You know what? Enough of this. Whatever else he may be, Gurion is an Israelite and a friend of ours, and if it is a transgression to comfort our Israelite friend in the wake of a personal tragedy, if to do so is to dishonor our parents, then so be it. Let us transgress. Let us bring them shame and wrath and endless shame.’ And then we were here, waiting in the shadows so as not to be detected by any passersby who might fink to our parents, and then you were pummeling Shai’s internal organs, and then you were kicking me in the legs, and now we’re in your bedroom, asking: Was the invitation a one-time offer? Will you deliver us the new scripture despite our failure to appear at the appointed time? Do you sanction this visit we’ve made to your house? If so, does that mean you will lead us? And lastly, who is she, this girl you love?”

Suddenly, my screen became a field of backlit blackness, and then it blipped and I was in. I had 248 new messages, every one of them titled “RE: FWD: NEW SCRIPTURE.”

The thumbs in the corner continued to twiddle.

Her name’s Eliza June Watermark, I said to the scholars.

And all of them leaned in, and none of them looked at me funny.

Flowers came back with the pizza in the middle of the story, so I told the rest of it in the kitchen, the rapt scholars pointing at slices and nodding at liter bottles, flicking their eyes in the direction of napkins and chinning at packets of parmesan and pepper flakes. They didn’t squint once — not when I told them I never loved Esther, or even when I described the conversion on the stage. With the exception of a couple whispered mazel tovs, no voice but my own was audible til I finished.

Then Emmanuel suggested a metaphorical kinship between June’s Gurion-independent invention of the pennygun and the desert monotheism Zipporah had practiced before she met Moses which was, itself, Emmanuel insisted, certainly akin to the righteousness of the matriarchs in the days before they met and wed the patriarchs.