Adam Levin - The Instructions

Stuttering, I asked Gurion to come back later, to let me think about his questions, the answers to the simpler of which, to my mind at least, have to do with the tension between the abstract nature of truth and the fact that truth actually functions, physically, and in variable ways no less, such that one of the truths about the knife is that it was a vehicle of the sun’s reflection, as was the spoon, and that what the baby became upset about, when Gurion took his knife, was the loss of his sun-reflecting vehicle. And so what soothed the baby was the acquisition of a new sun-reflecting vehicle: the knife was not, for the baby, ever functioning as a piercing or sawing instrument (thank G-d!), and the spoon was not, for the baby, ever functioning as a scooping instrument (or as a knife), and so there is no good reason to believe that the baby was tricked. There is no good reason to believe, as Gurion believed, that the baby believed the spoon was the knife. Knifeness or spoonness (to us distinguished, respectively, by the properties “ability to pierce/saw” and “ability to scoop”), if even the baby was aware of knifeness and spoonness, were likely irrelevant to the baby. So where’s the trick? Nowhere. Imagine if it were a pet. My Esther had a pet mouse and the mouse died of a rare cancer and Esther moped until I replaced the dead mouse with a hamster. She did not believe the new rodent was the same rodent as the old rodent, but the new rodent did function similarly enough to the old rodent that she was able to forget, for the most part, the pain brought on by the old rodent’s loss. She wasn’t tricked out of being sad, but soothed.

The story of Jacob and Esau, however, is more complicated. (And you’ll please forgive me for going on like this, Leonard; I realize I must sound more like a blowhard proud father than a concerned teacher, here, but it is so important to me that when you put down this letter, you understand the kind of talent of which Gurion is in possession, and I feel that the best way to help you understand is to detail what he has done for me . I.e., if even I, an adult, a lifelong Torah scholar, can be inspired by this boy — the kindergartner version — to re-examine fundamental notions about Torah, just imagine what he, five years later, can do for other children . I tell you he makes them better. Not merely smarter —though he certainly does that — but more decent . Kinder. More reflective. Of our children, he makes mensches. This is not a boy you lock away in a room. This is a boy to whom you introduce everyone .)

On one hand, Esau’s birthright was voluntarily forfeited by Esau for the bowl of soup our star student mentioned, indicating that it was not his , was never his (What kind of son trades his birthright for a bowl of soup? Not the kind who is deserving of a patriarch’s birthright, I can tell you!), and so one might say that Isaac, rather than being tricked by Jacob into giving Jacob Esau’s blessing, had actually been tricked earlier, by his sons’ birth-order, into thinking the birthright ever belonged to Esau: Jacob’s trick could then be understood as a correction. Even so, Jacob deliberately misleads Isaac, via the goat-fur, into believing he’s Esau. And although a number of scholars suggest that Isaac knew Jacob was pretending, that Isaac was colluding in his own trickery, that Isaac was thereby not tricked, the fact of some kind of truth being undermined cannot be dispelled: Even though we can all agree that the trick of the goat-fur served a higher truth (i.e., the birthright rightly belonged to Jacob), and even though (rather, even if —for we don’t all agree on this part) we can agree that Isaac was not actually tricked by the trick, we cannot deny that a trick is being played. But if not a trick played on Isaac, then on whom? For whose benefit or detriment this trick? The reader’s? Of course not. Though possibly an unreliable narrator (more on that in a moment), Torah’s is not an unreliable author — He’s G-d. And there’s no need to trick Esau, who sold the birthright and isn’t present anyway. As for Rebecca: we know for sure by the scripture that she has colluded with Jacob, orchestrated the whole goat-fur bit. So whom does that leave to trick? Rather: So Whom does that leave? H-shem? Yes. At least: Maybe. And this is not to say that G-d, for even a second, would have believed that Jacob was Esau, but that maybe G-d believed that Isaac believed Jacob was Esau, when that was not necessarily the case. And if G-d believed such a thing, despite its being untrue (which it may or not be), it would suggest — as many other portions of scripture do — that G-d has only limited access to the minds of men, if any at all. We know He cares greatly about what is “in our hearts”—that is plainly stated throughout scripture — but we do not know how it is that he learns what is in our hearts. Though we surely cannot hide what we do from Him, it may be the case that we can hide what we think from Him, and even what we think of Him. This may be why we are commanded to engage in so many rituals, why we are taught to pray aloud, never silently. It may be that H-shem, because he cannot access thoughts that we don’t express in words or deeds, cannot completely understand Torah — a book about men that He, Himself, wrote — without our interpretation, without scholars or sagacious little boys to talk about it within His omnipresent earshot, to write about it so that He may read about it. It may be that Jacob and Isaac colluded to trick G-d, who loved them both, and that because He loved them He wrote of them so that we may read of them, because it is only by our reading of them and writing of them and speaking of them that He may come to understand them. And Gurion’s capacity, as a five-year-old boy, to be haunted by certain of these possibilities, was shocking to me. And his ability to think scripturally in his assessment of everyday events was shocking to me, and that he could describe the sun on the belly of a baby at a barbecue as gorgeously as he had. And when, after I dismissed him, he said to me, “I’m sorry if I’m being very complicated. I’d ask my father these questions, but he doesn’t like to talk to me about Judaism. He’ll do it, but I can tell he doesn’t like to. He quit it before I was born. He was supposed to be a great rabbi and kabbalist”—when he said that, I was shocked, too, for I knew his father to be Judah Maccabee, Esq., and all I’d known of the man was exactly what everyone else knows: that he defends the rights of Nazis to hold parades in the streets of Jewish suburbs. A complicated person, Judah Maccabee.

And so when Gurion left my office, I rushed to write down everything he said to me, as best as I could remember. You see, Leonard, he is a born tzadik, this boy, such a quick one, and it was apparent even then.

This letter is running long, and still I’ve not addressed your signal concern, so I won’t, as much as I’m tempted to, go into detail about my ensuing series of awestruck and often — unfortunately— fumbling scholarly endeavors with Gurion, other than to say that, until the very end of his fourth-grade year, the only thing he seemed to like as much as learning was teaching. And in all of Schechter, there was not a boy or girl who did not profit by or enjoy being taught by him. And yes, this led to some talk among the children at our school of Gurion’s being more than a genius ( genius an epithet that no few of our students — some, like Gurion, deservingly; and others, of course, not — have had hurled at them by their loved ones); some talk of his being Moshiach. And yes, there were a few teachers here who were made uncomfortable by this kind of talk, and yes, there was one in particular who maybe did not like Gurion so much to begin with, and true, that one happened to have quite a high professional standing (the highest), and maybe that person acted unprofessionally one day, and surely he provoked an outburst of a violent nature from the quick tzadik in question, and possibly that outburst was not appropriate, and but then likely it was.