Adam Levin - The Instructions

“Then,” he said, “if after presenting these premises, I felt you were still listening to me, I might have offered some preparatory commentary before arriving at the heart of the matter, like: ‘To fall in love, two people must meet somehow — fatefully, accidentally, or on purpose; doesn’t matter here — they must meet by way of their eyes, their ears, their scent, whatever. Maybe they have to do other things to fall in love, too — speak endearments, write letters, kiss, who knows? — but we are certain that before they fall in love, some type of observable phenomenon that qualifies as ‘meeting’ must take place . We know for a fact that no two people have ever fallen in love with each other without having met. To fall in love is to become in love. We all believe that is true. It is not controversial. Yet that there’s nothing anyone can do to become an Israelite — that’s not controversial either. As I already said, you are or you aren’t one, and we all believe that is true.’

“And after saying all that,” said Emmanuel, “I might have attempted to bring it all home like this: ‘So despite both truths, by nature, being immutable — once in love, forever in love; once an Israelite, always an Israelite — one truth is set in motion, at least partly, by human beings, and the other is set in motion solely by Adonai. And that is complicated enough. But now we move on to your theory of potential messiahs, which concerns itself with both types of immutable truth at once: Adonai creates a potential messiah, one per generation, and then that potential messiah becomes the actual messiah when human beings do or fail to do something or some set of things — who knows what exactly? — to set his potential in motion. So while the potential of a potential messiah is set in motion solely by Adonai, the actualization of that potential will be set in motion, at least partly, by human beings. Agreed?’—”

Agreed, I said.

“I was only asking the hypothetical Gurion, to whom I might have said all of this, but I’m glad you agree. The hypothetical one would have agreed as well. He would have agreed exactly as you have, and I would have gone on to say, ‘According to you, Gurion, we should not say that anyone is the messiah until he has had “victory undeniable”; until perfect justice is visited upon the world; until calling the messiah “messiah” is, for all intents and purposes, redundant. And that seems cautious, safe. And that is the appeal of your approach, for false messiahs haunt our history. We have followed them, and suffered greatly for it. But there are a pair of potential pitfalls to this safe approach, and these are major. The first one is this: faith becomes irrelevant. If we cannot call the messiah “messiah” til doing so is no more risky than calling a lemon sour, a goat smelly, or Natalie Portman a world-class knockout, what is the point of ever looking for the messiah? When he comes, we’ll know it, so why bother looking? What is the incentive for waiting or hoping? Why bother trying to bring him at all? He will be self-evident, and so the end of faith. And maybe you’d say, “That is the point, Emmanuel. We should not have faith because the messiah will come. We should have faith because faith is good, and part of faith is to believe that the messiah will come.” And maybe you’d be right. Maybe those scholars whose faith is bolstered by its own promise — the promise that faith’s objects, despite their current state of unfalsifiability, will one day become evident to everyone and in turn reward the scholars for their faith — maybe those scholars are lousy scholars. Selfish, self-centered would-be know-it-alls, driven by the desire to one day say to the faithless “I told you so” or the fear of having ever to hear that statement addressed to them. Maybe their faith is not a noble faith in what should be true , but a lower kind of faith in what they fear is so . And maybe that latter kind’s not faith at all. And so maybe most of us are faithless, impurely motivated, heartened only by our so-called faith’s promise of coming worldly empowerment. And yet surely some of us aren’t…

“‘But is it faith , Gurion, anyway, that will bring the messiah? It doesn’t seem like it to me. Acts of faith, maybe. But faith itself? When has faith itself ever served us? And how often has faith been used against people? For just as there are acts of faith, there are non-acts of faith, no? Most tyrants don’t get assassinated, let alone trampled to death by mobs to whom they’ve been unjust. Why not? Often because crooked or misled clerics urge faith and its non-acts on the faithful is why not. And that is what makes us different, no? That is why our religion is good. We are not taught to abide injustice through our faith; we are not taught to wait for Adonai to reach a hand down and save us. We are taught to faithfully destroy injustice; we are taught that to do so will force His hand. Taught that, at least, by you.

“‘And so in the end, what’s in a scholar’s heart should only matter to us inasmuch as how it leads him to act. In other words: what’s in a scholar’s heart doesn’t matter as long as he acts as if it’s faith. That said, if you teach us faith is irrelevant, Gurion, how can we know how to act? And why should we listen to you? Maybe you say, “I will tell you how to act, Emmanuel, and you should listen to me because I’m the strongest and wisest of all of us.” And that works if you become the messiah, Rabbi. Of course it does. And in that case, and only in that case, is the first potential pitfall successfully dodged.’

“And then I’d have gone on to discuss the second pitfall, which would take fewer words since, having gotten worked up, I’d probably abandon all subtlety and just form a string of rhetorical questions, like, ‘What if the thing we must do to set the messiah’s potential in motion is call him ‘messiah’? What if the words need to come first? What if it must be written before it can be done? What if he must be said to be before he can become? Is that not how the universe became, Gurion? Is it so crazy to think that the final chapter might end as began the first? So crazy to think we’ll create truth by speaking it? Why should that seem crazy? Because it would be perfect?’

“In any case, I decided that all went without saying,” said Emmanuel, “and had you not leaned forward at so acute an angle when first I began to say it, it would have remained unsaid, but you leaned forward, and I got going, so now that it’s said, what do you say?”

I’d become so engrossed in listening to him — somewhere in the middle of his remarks on the first pitfall, I got this highly familiar rush I couldn’t place just then — that when he asked that last question, it took me a second to realize it wasn’t the hypothetical Gurion who was supposed to answer, but me.

“Rabbi?” he said.

I think you’re the most talented scholar I know, I said.

“That’s good to hear. I think maybe when you spoke of this Eliyahu of Brooklyn, I became a little jealous, and I thought that was shallow of me, and wanted to prove — I don’t know. Let’s not get tender, shall we? What I was going to say, originally I mean, was that I’m troubled by this instruction to ‘lay low’ because I assume that ‘laying low’ means, at least for the most part, not telling our parents we were here.”

Yeah, I said, that’s what it means.

“But if telling them we’ve been here is not the right thing to do, then how can we be honoring them? That is: if we have, through our disobedience of them, honored them, then why should we be dishonest about it?”

Would it be dishonest if they didn’t ask where you were, and you didn’t tell them?