Adam Levin - The Instructions

“So where was I before?” Yuval said.

“Litberg’s!” shouted Sara.

“Yes, Litberg’s,” said Yuval. “Delicious bagels. We’d get our delicious bagels gratis and walk around, and talk about all of you, our futures, how we’d one day bring you to Litberg’s, maybe at midnight twelve-thirty even, like how the Spanish do in Barcelona. When we were bar-mitzvahed together at the Western Wall, we fathers of yours, we had a day’s layover in Barcelona on the way back, all because of these two here,” Yuval nodded to his silent, smiling parents, “and your grandparents, too, Gurion, may they rest in peace. The four of them wanted to make us worldly, and we loved them for it and we love them for it. And on the Ramblas at midnight twelve-thirty, what you see is men pushing strollers and holding hands with their dramatic wives. The Catholic Spaniards! We’d do it like them, but without a Rambla or Gaudi facades. It would be Devon Avenue, true, but what we had was Litberg’s bagel factory, and those poor Spanish ham-eaters — they didn’t. Just a lot of pickpockets and a giant Lichtenstein at the end, some fantastic coffee, true, and some tomato-stained bread that seemed like maybe it was the perfect snack, a snack to end all snacks, and yet we never knew for sure since we couldn’t try for its proximity to all that ham.”

“Traif!” shouted a younger daughter.

“Traif like you wouldn’t believe, Kreindeleh. The ham was everywhere in Barcelona! As if striving to forbid us from joy, the ham. But we had a great time, anyway, a great time despite the ham. Am I making this up, buddy? Tell them — am I making it up? About the ham? About how we’d talk about them all the time, about taking them to Litberg’s?”

“Oh the ham,” said my father, mashing flat with his fork’s curved part the cross-hatches he’d earlier sculpted from his potatoes. “He’s telling the truth.”

My mom said, “We went to Litberg’s on our first date, and for all of this time I thought because Judah was broke.”

“He doesn’t like to tell anyone anything is why you thought that, Tamar. It’s how he is, it’s been very well established. And probably he was broke — broke never damaged the charm of a nightwalk to Litberg’s — but what I’m telling you,” said Yuval, “is that your husband beside you, smiling wryly at his old friend, at ease enough here among us to register a little embarrassment at the revelations I’m spouting, him; to violate with nervous hand-movements the physical integrity of these delicious potatoes my mother never fails to cook in just enough juice from the briscuit that they become flavorful but still maintain their firmness, your husband — they slice rather than crush , the potatoes, is what you always said, hey Pop? What I’m saying, Tamar, is when we were young, Judah dreamed of you without ever having met you. When he wasn’t being this weirdo with his nose in arcane scripture even the rabbis couldn’t teach him from, your husband, or writing these articles insisting first that Leviticus was enjambed, and then that it was incorrectly enjambed, he would talk about you; your husband was a romantic above all else, and he would pray to meet you, he lived to meet you, and to raise you , Gurion. Others might have said, ‘Yehuda, he’s a cold S.O.B.,’ but I was his closest friend and I roomed with him, and I knew him the best, I knew it wasn’t for books that he lived, but family, that he studied in order to be better at family; that when he wasn’t arranging various syllables of the ten sephirot for seemingly dubious purposes that turned out would save that girl from—”

My father dropped the fork on his plate and it clanged and he said, “Yuval.”

“What?” Yuval said.

“My son is here,” said my father.

“Yes?” said Yuval.

My father set his hand on Yuval’s and told him something, but quietly, so that I, at the other end of the table, with the other children, couldn’t hear.

Yuval, in full voice, said, “Bobe-mayses what, Yehuda? I saw with my own eyes. Why the whispering?”

“My son is here,” said my father.

“I see him,” Yuval said. “He’s beautiful. Why keep secrets from such a beautiful boy? You keep so many secrets… I still don’t know,” Yuval said to no one and everyone, “what Rebbe Schneerson told him on my wedding day! Imagine! It’s my wedding day, the ceremony is halted by the most important rabbi in the world — the most important man in the world — so that he can whisper something to my closest friend in the world. Do I complain? I don’t complain. Do I expect to hear what it was, this big secret? No. I don’t expect, because this closest friend of mine is a peculiar and highly secretive individual. However… However! Do I hope ? Do I dare to hope that this veritable brother of mine will one day tell me, or even hint to me what it was that was so important that my wedding was halted? Yes! I hope. And still: what? Disappointment… And now he says, now he says, ‘Oh…’”

“Gurion is my son,” said my father, “and you’re in your cups, my friend, and in your cups you are expansive.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Yuval, “but this—”

“This is nothing to argue about,” said my father.

Yuval said, “I agree! Why talk me in circles? All I said—”

My father said, “Please.”

My father’s voice is fuller than anyone’s, even Yuval’s, so when it goes quiet suddenly, like it did when he said “Please,” it is normal to notice how shadowed and angly and completely unjolly my father’s face is, how coiled it is, how ready, how unreadable its stories, and it is normal to be shaken. I shook, but I wanted to hear more. When Yuval said the thing about changing around the syllables in the ten sephirot, I knew what he was talking about. The ten sephirot are: Malchut, Yisod, Hod, Netzach, Tiferet, Gevurah, Hesed, Binah, Hochma, and Keter. Their meanings, translated respectively, are: Kingdom, Foundation, Splendor, Victory, Beauty, Power, Mercy, Understanding, Wisdom, and Crown. Sometimes they are diagrammed into something called the Tree of Life or Tree of Man. The words on the right side are believed to refer to aspects of Love, and those on the left side are believed to refer to aspects of Justice. The words in the center are thought to refer to aspects of both:

It is also believed that these aspects correspond to different parts of men’s bodies in such a way as I have diagrammed on the following page.

Yet the ways in which the ten sephirot can be diagrammed are not as important as why so much time is spent on thinking about them by those who would diagram them: They are the ten words that Hashem speaks billions of billions of times per second to hold the world together. Everything that happens gets said by Hashem first, and he says everything into happening with combinations of those ten words. I think that when you combine the sounds of them in a certain order, you get His true name, Hashem’s, the name the Cohain Gadol used to speak in the Temple on Yom Kippur, when there was still a Temple. It is said that if you recite the ten sephirot in certain orders, fast enough, you can affect the world — physically. You can walk on water, maybe, or heal people, or make someone’s head explode. I’d often thought of recombining the syllables myself, but a No! from Adonai would exact swift paralysis on my muscles whenever I’d sit down to try, so I’d never actually tried.

While I shook in the silence after my father’s “Please,” my thoughts about the sephirot led me to thoughts of nice Amit Bar-Sheshet, son of Rolly the trilling cantor, to a story Amit had told me when I was six, and it was that story I meant when I said to Yuval: Were you going to tell about the fire?