Adam Levin - The Instructions

Loose slats on the tracks clunked and the whine of metal rubbing metal bounced between the stairwell walls. “You getting on this train with me or what?” said Emmanuel.

We ran up the stairs and got on. I was going to ask him if maybe his grandfather didn’t ask Mongo about the swastika as nicely as it seemed like he had; if it was possible that, with his voice, Emmanuel’s grandfather made the question sound like an accusation, like when someone says, “Are you a Jew?” but then there was this homeless guy with no thumbs. Not even nubs where the thumbs would have been. Two smoothnesses. He stuck out his hands and said, “I was born this way.”

I gave him a dollar and he took it with his pointer and swearfinger, then turned to Emmanuel, who gave him another dollar.

The guy blessed us and walked off.

Emmanuel said to me, “Why’d you have us give away our fathers’ dollars?” He said it in Hebrew, and that is the language the conversation continued in.

I said, That man was cursed with thumblessness.

Emmanuel said, “By Whom, though?” = “His thumblessness is the will of Hashem.”

I said, So maybe the thumblessness was a blessing. Maybe that man’s homelessness was not caused by his thumblessness — maybe he’s homeless for some reason we don’t know, and Hashem granted him thumblessness so more people like us would give him dollars.

Emmanuel said, “Is that different than saying the Shoah may have been a blessing for us because, without it, the West might not have backed Israel in 1948?”

The train stopped. I was in the seat to the left of Emmanuel and two men in yarmulkes got onto our car through the door to his right, then went to the right so we didn’t see their faces and couldn’t tell if they knew us.

Emmanuel tried to make himself invisible with slouching and it didn’t work, so I switched to the seat to Emmanuel’s right and became as wide and tall as I could. Emmanuel nodded = “Thank you,” and once he’d relaxed a little, I said to him, It is not much different to say those two things. But I think you answered your original question with your new one. I said, Should not the West have helped Israel in 1948 regardless of the Shoah? Is the Land of Israel not rightfully ours? Should we, when we see a man without a home, not help him survive as best as we’re able, regardless of whether or not he is somehow crippled? Is life not rightfully his?

The men in yarmulkes leaned at the sound of my academic Hebrew. I didn’t see it happen, but I felt it on my back, their attention, and Emmanuel ducked his head even lower than it had already been ducked.

“Fair enough,” he whispered, “but then there’s the how of it. There’s giving fish away, and teaching the skill of fishing, and we have all heard it said that not only is it better to teach the skill of fishing to the hungry so that they may perpetually eat, but that it may actually harm them to give them fish. Being given fish, we have heard it said, may prevent them from learning to fish, for they may think, ‘Why should I learn to, when I get my fish for free?’”

I said, Who do you know that thinks that way? Who would rather rely on someone else’s help? Would that not be a kind of sickness in itself? And even if everyone was sick that way, I said, does that mean that if we can’t teach them to fish, whether because we don’t know how to fish ourselves or because we don’t have time, we should let them starve? I do not know how to give a homeless, thumbless man a home or thumbs, let alone how to teach him to get a home or thumbs, so if he believes a dollar can help him, and I don’t believe a dollar will hurt him, should I not give a dollar?

Said Emmanuel, “I see your point, Rabbi, but I have walked with you many times — I think of these times often, and miss them, and wish, even now, as I sit beside you on this train, they were not so impossible to reclaim with regularity — so many times, Rabbi, I have walked with you past homeless people to whom we did not give away our fathers’ dollars. And so I can’t help but to wonder: Why did we walk past them? Because they had thumbs? Might they not have been crippled in ways we couldn’t see or understand? And were they not, either way, homeless?”

I chugged my coffee, leaving only one sip. I liked to drink the last sip while I stepped off the train, then victory-spike it into the garbage barrel at the station = I am finished with this part of the day!

I said, I don’t know why we walked past them.

Emmanuel said, “Maybe because there are so many homeless, and so few dollars, we save the dollars to give to those who need them the most?”

I said, I don’t know that we save.

Emmanuel said, “Maybe we save the dollars to give to those who will use them best?”

I said, I don’t know why we save them, if we save them.

“And how do we know who needs them most or will use them the best?” said Emmanuel. “There is no law about it. There is no law that says it is worse to be thumbless than alcoholic, or, for that matter, better to be sober and homeless than drunken and homeless. How do we know what to do?”

I said, We do whatever seems proper in our eyes.

Emmanuel said, “That’s a terrible answer.”

I said, That does not make it false.

“But it should make it false, though, Rabbi. Don’t you think it should?”

I said, No. I said, We would be angels if it was otherwise, if the laws for everything were always clear and absolute and we always knew what to do. We would never doubt or question. We would be robots.

Emmanuel said, “The suffering of others is the price we pay for our humanity, then.”

I said, And suffering is a price others pay for our humanity.

Emmanuel said, “That shouldn’t be so.”

I said, If you were an angel, you would not be able to imagine that it shouldn’t be so. If you were an angel, you would love the suffering as you would love everything else, because all of it is the creation of God. If you were to love the suffering, you would not be able to love the world despite the suffering. And then you could never hope to repair the world, and so you could never hope to repair God, and God’s love for you would be no greater than his love for the angels, which is no greater than your love for your thumb.

Emmanuel said, “I love my thumb.”

I said, I love my thumb, too, but I would chop it off in a second if doing so was needed to save your life; it’s only a thumb, after all, not a human.

Emmanuel said, “I would chop off my entire hand to save your life.”

I said, Only if you could cauterize it immediately, though, since you’d be unable to tie a tourniquet singlehandedly and the blood-loss would certainly kill you.

I was trying to lighten the conversation a little — I hadn’t seen Emmanuel in too long, and I wanted to joke with him — but he wouldn’t have it.

“Even if I could not cauterize it,” said Emmanuel, “I would give my life to save yours, Rabbi.”

Risk your life, maybe, but not give it, I said.

“Give it,” said Emmanuel.

I said, That’s dumb.

“How can you say that?”

I said, I would never do the same for you. Your life is worth no more than mine.

“ Your life is worth more than mine ,” said Emmanuel. “And that is why I would give mine for yours.”

I said, It would be a sin.

“A lesser one than letting you die,” he said. “I mean, if you can die.”

I said, If I can die, then who so special am I to be saved at the cost of another boy’s life?

The train slowed and we swayed.

Emmanuel said, “You know who you are.” He looked really disappointed in me. He kept squeezing the knees of his pants. “Is it just you want me to say it?” he said. “Did all those fakes have the right idea after all? You find someone else to annoint you, and then, what, you’re not accountable? You never claimed to be anything more than just a person, a son of man, we have no business expecting anything from you . Is that all you’ve been waiting for, these five months? Because I’ll say it if that’s what you want, if that’s all it takes to make it so. It’s been said thousands of times about you, but what? Not in the proper way? Not at the right venue? Not by the right scholar? If all you need is annointment, just tell me how and I’ll annoint you. But you must know by now that what you’re called is beside the point. With or without annointment, we expect a lot from you. We expect everything. And I apologize for my tone. I should not raise my voice like this, we have been having such a pleasant conversation, Rabbi, but all of us have waited for five months now, and not out of obedience to our parents, who we believe to be misled in regard to you, but out of obedience to you , the one they tell us not to listen to, the one who tells us to listen to them. I am tired of waiting. We are all tired of waiting.”