Adam Levin - The Instructions

And my father became pale.

Amit had told me that when my father was still at yeshiva, he killed a mugger in the middle of the night by setting him on fire. Amit said that that’s why my father became a lawyer — to defend himself in court.

When I heard the story, I asked my mom about it. She told me, “Became a lawyer to defend himself over some fire? It is nonsense.” Her answer seemed like it had loopholes, like that comma that might or might not be there in Noach , when, after the flood,

Hashem said in His heart: “I will not continue to curse again the ground because of man, since the imagery of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again continue to smite every living being(,) as I have done.”

With the comma, it might be a promise to never again destroy the world, but without it, it’s only a promise to never again destroy the world by flood . Sometimes there’s a comma and sometimes there isn’t, and even though my mom’s answer seemed tricky, I’d never asked my dad about the fire story; partly because he didn’t like to talk to me about his days as a Torah scholar, but mostly because I wanted to believe he set fire to a man who tried to take something from him and I worried he’d tell me it wasn’t true.

“The fire!” Yuval said to the table. “He already knows,” he said to my father.

My father said, “We’ll see what he knows, Yuval, and when it turns out he doesn’t know what you think he knows, we’ll allow the subject to drop.”

“Agreed,” said Yuval.

“I’m not asking,” said my father. He turned to me. “Tell us what you think you know,” he said.

His voice was quieter and harder than I’d ever heard it.

I said, You set fire to a mugger. I said, Then you became a lawyer to defend yourself.

“There,” my father said to Yuval.

“It’s dropped,” said Yuval.

“It’s not true, what you heard,” my father said to me.

“Yet it has true pieces,” said Yuval’s Sara. That sentence was so pretty, and if I weren’t so in love with Esther Salt, I think I would have fallen in love with Sara Forem, just for her nervous Israeli English, but I wanted to hear the story right, so I told her to tell me in Hebrew.

I said, Tell me in Hebrew. And my dad said, “Gurion,” but my mother, who’d spent the last few minutes as quiet and content as the rest of us to watch the two giant fathers tease each other, spoke up. She said, “Know your son, Judah. He can hear this story now, in front of us, from the daughter of your oldest friend, or he will ask around the neighborhood until he will ask someone at that synagogue, and few will know the story he is hoping for, yet all of them will have something to say of you, and, unable as your son is to believe that anyone could harbor true contempt for his aba, he will be open to every twisted bobe-mayse any of these hundreds of local mamzers who would like to see you ruined will tell him. And it is not you he will ask to corroborate their whispered half-truths. He will ask me to do so, Judah, and I will, as I have, do my best to confuse him, and soon he will stop forgiving me for it. And soon after that, he will do exactly what you fear. Look on the face of your son and notice the smoothness around the orbits. There is not a trace of a line to be found. He sees everything, and can hear just as well, but he has not yet learned to squint. He has never squinted once.”

It was a very dramatic speech to hear in the middle of the most dramatic Seder I’d ever been to. It is very dramatic to hear your mom call everyone at your shul a mamzer and then say you don’t squint and that she confuses you on purpose and your dad is afraid of something, and I wanted to squint and tell everyone that my father was not afraid of anything, but before I could do that, Sara Forem was already saying, “I will tell you, but in English, because my smaller sisters don’t understand well.”

Her sisters understood that , though, and they began to cry, so Yuval told them, “Girls, go find the afikomen. Ma, Papa, Rochel — get them outta here, please.” The girls’ tears stopped falling, and their grandparents and their mother led them away, to further parts of the house.

Sara said, “What about us?”

“Would you rather look for matzo in an envelope, Gurion?” said Yuval.

No, I said.

“You,” Yuval said to Sara, “are twelve years old.” = “You’ve been bat-mitzvahed and the afikomen is no longer yours to find.”

Sara said, “Fine.” Then she said, “I forgot.” Then she told the story in Hebrew because her sisters were already running around out of earshot, looking under and between things throughout the house. “Years before we were born,” Sara said, “my father and your father were returning to the yeshiva from Litberg’s with the shmendrick Rolly, when they came to an alley where there was a very bad struggle between two men and a girl. Our fathers and the shmendrick went to help the girl. One man, he turned to them with a pistol, while the other man, he struggled with the girl. These men should have run from our fathers, but instead there was this pistol in the hand of the one and the girl was still struggling against the other, so there was nothing else to do, so your aba said some words that no one else can pronounce, and this man with the pistol, he was covered in fire. When he fell he was dead and then he was ashes and then he was nothing, he blew away. The shmendrick and my father, they struck the other man’s neck and held him against the ground, and then your father gave his coat to the girl, and he said some more impossible words, and she fell asleep against his shoulder, and he carried her home while my father and the shmendrick brought the man who struggled with her to the police, who put him in jail for the rest of his life.”

I said to my father, For the rest of his life?

It was proof I could squint, but no one seemed to hear me because my father was saying to Sara, “Go look for the afikomen.”

Yuval nodded to her that it was okay, and once she left the room, my father said, “All this narishkeit from you about keeping secrets, but you lied to your own daughter?”

“Not lied. Made a lesson,” said Yuval.

My father dropped his head on the backs of his hands and made air-sounds with his mouth.

Yuval stood up and was wobbly. He leaned on the table. He said, “She’s a child. What good is a complicated story to a child? What kind of protection does that offer?”

“Why tell it at all, then, Yuvy? Why are you like this?”

Yuval said, “Don’t start with the Yuvy why are you like this. This is what I’m like and it’s a good story about a good man doing good and there are very few of those, so I told it to my daughter. In a slightly simpler form.”

Now my father stood up, unwobbling, and he told my mother, “We’ll be back soon,” and to Yuval he said, “Keep my wife company,” and to me, “Let’s you and I go look for Elijah.”

We walked six blocks in silence, to Litberg’s. My father knocked on a door in the alley, and a black man wearing a paper boat on his head and a pin on his shirt that said CARL came halfway outside. Carl said, “Who is this?”

“My boy.”

“Hello his boy — two tonight?”

My father held up two fingers, and Carl ducked back inside.

My father said to me, “You knew that second man didn’t go to prison.”

I said, Yes.

My father said, “How did you know that?”

I said, Because you don’t go to prison for life for anything less than murder or treason, and Sara said the man went to prison for life, so I thought he probably didn’t go to prison at all.