Adam Levin - The Instructions

“You’re telling me murder pleases Him?”

I said, I’m talking about killing, not murder, please stop saying ‘murder,’ and no, I do not believe that killing ever pleases Him, but killing is necessary, and so killing fails to displease Him. At the very least, it does not displease Him as much as the rape or torture of a rapist would, and surely it displeases him less than a rapist who goes unpunished.

“That is not justice. To take someone’s life because you don’t know what else to do with him is not just, is not killing, is murder,” my father said. “Every tyrant throughout history has claimed—”

Don’t start with the reasoning of tyrants, please. Your tyrants are straw-men and I’m not a jury and I’m not a tyrant. A tyrant wants peace. He takes lives to make peace, for in peace he’s secure, and free to grow stronger without interference, free to take lives — to take lives by murder —without interference. So whatever brings peace, the tyrant calls justice. That doesn’t make it so. Justice is not for tyrants to define.

“No,” said my father, “just tyrannical gods.”

Hashem is not tyrannical.

“He made a world full of tyrants, a world short on justice.”

He made the only world we know.

“But how can you believe He is perfect, Gurion? How can you believe His Law is perfect? How can you call perfect an all-powerful being who makes a world where there is rape and there is murder? Will you tell me He works in mysterious ways? Have I raised a Christian child?”

Hashem is not perfect, I said, and I’ve never said He was perfect. I said, He is not all-powerful, either. I said, Only His Law is perfect. His Law and His intentions.

“Isn’t that blasphemy? You make Him sound like a person.”

I said, No person can make a universe, or destroy one; he can at best repair it, and at worst he can damage it. And when I say that Hashem is not all-powerful, I am not saying He isn’t more powerful than us — He is more powerful than us; He is the most powerful. And when I say He isn’t perfect, I am not saying He isn’t good —He is good. He is at least as good as we are. It is because He is good, and because He is so powerful, that He has the potential to become as perfect as His Law. He helped you , Aba. Why can’t you see that?

My dad pulled hard on his cigarette and I could not tell if smoke made him squint, or disappointment.

I said, If by speaking like Hashem you killed one man more than you meant to have killed, then why not understand that your failure was in what you meant to do, rather than in what you did? Why not decide that it was righteous to kill the second man? Why not that you are so righteous that even when you think you’ve made a mistake, you couldn’t have? Why not think that you can’t help but enact justice? Because that is what I think. I think you did right. I know it.

“You continue to miss the point,” my father told me. “The man who threatened us with the gun — I did what I could to stop him, but I should not have known how to stop him that way. Had I not known how to stop him that way, then I would have had to have found another way, and that other way would not have cost the rapist his life.”

If you didn’t know how to use the sephirot, you might have been shot dead, I said.

“Or I might not have, Gurion. There were three of us there, plus the girl. Would the gunman have shot all of us? Would he have shot even one of us, knowing that he would then have to shoot all of us? It is unlikely.”

You don’t know that, I said. I said, The potential—

“Our neighbors don’t like me, Gurion. They wish me ill. They vandalize our home because I defend the rights of those they despise. Yet they know I’m human, and a father, and so they know that the surest way to harm me would be to harm you. Potentially, one of them could go crazy, like that boy who shot Rabin in Israel. Potentially, one of them could go crazy and try to harm you. Should I kill them all to prevent it? Would you suggest I do that? Because I would not do that. It is dangerous to exist in the world. To exist is to be threatened. We must live with threats.”

I said, That contradicts everything you said before about protection from sneak-attacks! And a loaded gun pointed at you by a criminal is far more threatening than a gun in a store that might get bought and loaded and walked over to your house and used on your son and you know it. I said, If the danger wasn’t real, you would not have done what you did.

“How can you know so much,” said my father, “and hear so much, and speak so pristinely, and meanwhile be so completely muddled, boychical? How is it that your loyalty enables you to justify everything your father does, but you go deaf when he’s speaking to you? I am telling you that what I did was wrong and you have to trust that I am correct, if for no other reason than I am your father and you are to honor me, and to honor me — I’m telling you — you have to be a mensch. You do not need to prove to me that you are a good son . I believe it, Gurion. You are a good son. And I am glad that you are a good son, but a good son is not necessarily a good human being. A good son is just a son who is loyal to his father, and loyalty is not in itself goodness, and a good father would never teach his son otherwise. I want you to understand that. If you want to honor me, you will allow that I was wrong to take that man’s life. You will call it a mistake, and after accepting it as a mistake, you will forgive me my mistake, rather than claiming it a victory. You will love me despite my mistake. You will cease to be my apologist and… Aye, Gurion, I’m sorry. I thought we were talking — I’m sorry, Gurion. I got a little carried away. Come on. Why are you crying on poor Michael Weinberg?”

There were a lot of reasons why I was crying: my father was angry at me; he was disappointed in me; he was worried about me; he used a Yiddish endearment; he believed he was a murderer; he kept trying to protect me from things I could protect myself from; and by calling me an apologist, he was calling me a bad scholar. Despite his perfect intentions, despite his saying everything that he was saying out of love for me, he was wrong and I was right. I was crying because he was not God and I was not Avraham. I was crying because I saw that to honor him, I would have to disobey him — that to honor him would be to disobey him — and it is sad to learn you have to disobey your favorite man.

I let him squeeze and play-punch my arms and my shoulders while he delivered a light, singsong monologue about tears and the grass atop the grave of poor Michael Weinberg; whether the water of the tears would grow the grass more than the salt of them would kill the grass or the salt would be the victor; whether the two would cancel each other out; whether the salt content of the tears was negligible, and what, if anything, that might say about the power of the tears; whether the tears themselves might be negligible and what asking that question might say about the fitness of the father asking it; whether or not the monologue was intentionally symbolic and whether or not one could be un intentionally symbolic while delivering a monologue; and if one could not be unintentionally symbolic, could one be intentionally but un know ingly symbolic; can a man have intentions he doesn’t know he has?

And so on til I stopped crying.

On the walk back to the Forems’, I gave my uneaten bagel to a homeless black guy on Western. The black guy was standing a couple feet away from two homeless white guys. I didn’t give the bagel to the white guys because I worried they were Jews, which meant, I reasoned, that the bagel would harm them. Then I felt dumb about it because the black guy might have been a Jew like me, even though it was statistically less likely. And then I felt even dumber because statistics were irrelevant because even if the black guy was a Jew, he was starving, and Hashem should not have had a problem with me feeding a starving Jew chometz. He should, if anything, prefer that among three starving men, I would choose to feed the Jew, regardless of what I was feeding him. And if I was wrong, and that was not what He preferred, then He and I would already have had so many more other problems I didn’t even know about that to spend time worrying about a bagel and whether or not some guy I gave it to was Jewish seemed pretty wasteful. In the big scheme of things. So I stopped worrying. I held my dad’s hand and let myself be tired.