Adam Levin - The Instructions

What I know for sure is that Gurion had not once acted violently toward others in our school until the day he was forced to leave; had not once in the five years he spent in my classroom offered any encouragement to those who, if you’ll excuse the pun, lionized him; and had but once (in his third-grade year) lost his temper in my presence, which was apparently the result of his remarkably sensitive cranium coming into sudden contact with the underside of an oak table while he retrieved a pencil that he’d accidentally, it seemed, swept to the floor with his fiercely animated hands, hands he’d been using, with perfect pedagogical intent, to punctuate his learned commentary on the flawed nature of angels (one-legged, soulless) and the origin of the lisp of Moses (a hot coal the infant brought to his own lips in Pharaoh’s court, if you don’t know the Midrash). (Later, I asked Gurion why he even bothered to pick the pencil up in the middle of his lecture — it had been going so strongly when he dropped it — and he told me that Simon Rothschild, a new boy at school who was sitting at the far end of the study table, was wearing on his face a look of envy and annoyance, and Gurion knew that if he wanted Simon to pay attention, a gesture of endearing clumsiness would be required to win him over. “So I knocked the pencil under the table,” Gurion said, “but Simon didn’t see. So I got under the table to get the pencil, to show him that I knocked it down there. But then when I banged my head getting it, that was an accident, and I got very angry because I don’t like it when my head is touched, and so when I came up from under the table, I was thinking: Simon made me bang my head. That is why I spun and knocked the chalk-trough off the blackboard — because I wanted to jump across the table and knock Simon’s face off his head, but at the same time I didn’t want to. And it was good that I didn’t go after Simon, but still, I’m sorry I wrecked your blackboard.”)

And furthermore, as you might or might not have noticed by way of his permanent record, Gurion did not, after leaving Schechter, engage in any violence at Northside Hebrew Day School. He is not some loose canon. He wrote those instructions after having witnessed an act of antisemitic violence outside of the Fairfield Street Synagogue, where he used to attend services (without his parents, by the way — their home is secular). If you followed the newspapers last Spring, then what you read was that a group of local Muslim teenagers, claiming to have been inspired by the current Intifada, threw stones at a group of Hasidic congregants on a Saturday and that no one was critically injured. What you did not read was that those congregants who did not duck back inside the synagogue for cover froze where they stood, and that the rabbi, a good man (I know him a little), came forward, apparently in an effort to reason with the stone-throwers, and managed to utter one word, “Please,” before receiving for his trouble a block of jagged concrete in his mouth.

Gurion was one of those who had frozen, and he told me that by the time it occurred to him to chase the fleeing boys, they were already too far ahead of him; that he ran after them fruitlessly, catching sight of them through gaps in backyard fences, turning numerous corners, and ducking into various alleys and gangways, until he became sick from exertion, and that it was not until he stopped running that he realized that no one was behind him, that he was the only one who had tried to catch them. This upset Gurion greatly, and when he returned to the synagogue, he was reprimanded by the rebbetsen for having endangered himself. He told me that, as he received his reprimand, a group of boys gathered behind the rebbetsen and that what he saw on their faces was not the remnant of fear and shock that he would have expected, but rather regret, and that he knew that what they regretted was that they had not helped him chase down the stone-throwers. And he also told me that the rebbetsen was right — that he had endangered himself — and that he should not have endangered himself. He told me that what he should have done was picked up a brick of his own, “or something with better range,” he said, and convinced the others to do the same, and to follow him. Unreasonable? Maybe. Maybe not. Not so very unreasonable, in any case. As Gurion put it: “We’re taught not to bow down before idols or men. You teach us that. Torah teaches that. We’re taught that it’s better to die than to bow, but isn’t it better yet to do neither? When someone comes at you and says, ‘Bow or die,’ isn’t it better to lay him out? And I know what you’ll say, Rabbi Salt, I know: You’ll say there’s a difference between ducking a blow and bowing down, that there’s no sin at all in ducking a blow. But that’s only true to a certain extent. To duck a direct blow is only to duck — I’ll give you that — but to duck a blow that has yet to be launched, let alone a blow that only might be coming, which is to say nothing of ducking in hopes of averting a blow’s being launched to begin with — that, Rabbi Salt, is to bow, is it not? It is. Of course. That’s exactly what it is. And I say this: It’s better to shoot. It’s better to shoot til you no longer have to, to shoot til those people who’d have you bow down duck to avert the launch of your blows.”

Once the rebbetsen had finished admonishing Gurion, the boys who had gathered behind her walked him home and, at his front stoop, he told them that if they were to return the following Saturday evening, after shul, he would teach them how to avoid losing face, how to live without bowing to idols or men. And he invented that weapon and wrote those instructions and he sent to those he’d invited an e-mail containing a list of supplies they should bring to his home, and the boys came to his home as originally planned, and the rest you know about. You can see, if you read Ulpan , that Gurion never instructed, or even suggested, that the weapons be used to attack other students, much less fellow Jewish students.

Now, if you put a weapon in the hands of a child, of course an accident is bound to happen. And of course Gurion knew this as well as any adult. Nonetheless, he is a boy. Despite his talents, a boy. And a boy is more idealistic than a man, and high ideals in the hands of children can be as dangerous as weapons. He thought he was in the right, and because he thought he was in the right, he thought there would be an exception. That’s that.

As for what happened at the Martin Luther King Middle School, it seems, now, to have been inevitable. Gurion, owing to that highly alienating and pejorative e-mail from Rabbi Kalisch, was made to see a social worker, who promptly diagnosed him with all sorts of nonsense disorders and then placed him in a lock-down program for disturbed children not dissimilar to this CAGE program you described to me outside the shul on Saturday. On his fourth day there, being both new and the youngest, Gurion was attacked at recess by one of the boys from this program. He fist-fought the boy, apparently injured him badly, and then a number of the boy’s friends crept forth, ready to avenge the boy, and what did Gurion do? He did what you would have done and what I would have done, if we were not the types to run away — he took hold of a cinderblock. The friends stood their ground, but stayed their attack, and soon a recess supervisor had arrived on the scene, and saw Gurion holding the cinderblock, and saw the bleeding child at his feet. The friends claimed that Gurion had used the cinderblock to beat the boy, the boy confirmed the lie, and, owing to Rabbi Kalisch’s e-mail (which I really do believe should be expunged from Gurion’s record), this claim seemed more than plausible to the principal, and Gurion was expelled.