The Instructions (55 page)

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.

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“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 504

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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.”

I said, Emmanuel, I’m ten years old.

He said, “And you’re the only one who thinks that makes a difference, Gurion.”

The only one? I said. I said, There’s millions of Israelites who don’t even know who I am, let alone—

“There are millions of Israelites who call Torah “the Old Testament”
and think that means the Ten Commandments.

Millions who think Moses was an orator and Adam a Jew. Rashi an Indian God with a giant shvontz and lots of arms. My father’s own cousin Bernie in Highland Park, Gurion—my family got stuck for the night at his house last January, during that bliz-zard. In the morning, before davening, I ask Bernie if he has any phylacteries I can use, and after winking slyly, he takes me to the master bathroom and pulls from the cabinet an assort-ment of condoms. Latex ones, intestines ones, reservoir-tipped, 505

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no-tipped, with spermicide or without, anesthetically lubricated purple ones with built-in pleasure-giving rivets. Bernie says I can have as many prophylactics as I want, just as long as I’m safe. Says he won’t tell my parents, I don’t have to worry, it is natural to want to have sex with girls, ‘It
is
for with girls, right, Emmanuel? Not that if it’s not there’s anything wrong with that,’ he says, chuckling, play-punching my arm, this ability to appreciate a reference to
Seinfeld
the deepest thing we have in common, two Israelites. So yes. I misspoke. You’re the only one
of any relevance
—the only scholar with a pennygun—who thinks it matters that you’re ten years old. And before you start talking about your father, or Rabbi Salt, about what they believe, about how
that
matters, let me do the most obnoxious thing a person can do to his friend. Let me quote you at you. Let me tell you what you told me when I described to you how the implications of Chapter 15 in First Samuel gave me headaches. You said, ‘A prophet is a bright thing, and those who can’t see a bright thing are blind, and those who do see a bright thing can get blind doing so.’ I would suggest to you that your father and Rabbi Salt, wise as they certainly are—they see you and get blind. And let me tell you something else, please, before I lose steam, and this is maybe the most important thing: You’re the only one who thinks you need to be the messiah in order to lead us. It is true that none of us is certain you are the messiah, and it is true that a number of us aren’t even certain you’ll
become
the messiah—and I have no problem telling you that’s the camp I’m in (though were
you
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tell me you will become him, I would believe it)—but every single one of us agrees that if you are not already the messiah, you
might
become him. And not merely because you are a Judite, but because you are Gurion Maccabee. You are the person we want to lead us. We believe you were born to do that. And if following you, as we suspect, turns out to be the environmental condition that makes actual your potential, that would be ideal; but even if following you doesn’t do that, Gurion, we are certain it will still bring about an improvement. We are certain that following you will help bring the messiah, whoever he might be, whether in this generation or the next.”

I really didn’t know what to say. Whenever the subject of my possibly being the messiah got brought up this explicitly at Schechter or Northside, it was always by one of the lesser-abled scholars—

most often a first- or second-grader, occasionally a sweet, lower-IQ-type or new kid—and if after I then gave them my thumbnail lecture on potential and actual messiahs, they still failed to take the lesson, I would fix a collar or do some kind of pratfall, and the conversation would end. None of the truly talented scholars had ever brought it up to me directly, let alone Emmanuel, who was the most talented of them all. And after what he’d said, I knew that any of the arguments I came up with would sound like a coy invitation to get annointed. And annointment really wasn’t what I wanted.

Like everyone else I knew, I did want to be the messiah, and certainly, at times, I suspected I would be, but at the same time, there was almost nothing I could think of that I wanted less than to be a 507

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false
messiah. To lose June, to see my parents get hurt—what else besides variations on those two themes? That was it. To be a false messiah would be the third worst thing in the world.

“Rabbi,” said Emmanuel, “You look frustrated. Are you silently pooh-poohing me?”

I said, I just don’t know what to say to you.

“Say that you’ll lead us.”

Lead you how? I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “
Some
how, though. Something needs to be done soon. There is too much strife in the Land of Israel.

Everyone agrees.”

I said, There has always been strife in the Land of Israel.

“Exactly,” he said. “And always too much, and everyone has always agreed on that. It’s wisdom as old as history. Something needs to be done already.”

The train slowed and we swayed.

“Aren’t you getting off here?” Emmanuel said.

It was our stop, but Emmanuel could not be seen entering our neighborhood with me, so I told him to go ahead, that I would stay on til Loyola and walk from there.

“It makes me angry, Rabbi—at myself. I’m your student. Why should I have to worry I’ll be seen with you?”

Because you’re a good son, I told him.

“It feels like I’m a coward,” he said. “Either way, I’m the one who should walk the extra blocks—not you. And there’s no time to argue.”

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Emmanuel was right.

When the doors slid open, I snatched the
yarmulke from his head and flung it onto the platform.

He leapt out to get it, grabbed it and kissed it, and it was only after the train pulled away that I saw we’d created needless drama, that things had actually been
simpler
than they’d seemed.

We could have both disembarked at our stop no problem if one of us had just hung back an extra minute while the other one entered the neighborhood.

I stepped off the train at the next stop, Loyola, and gulped down my last sip of coffee. The nearest garbage barrel was twenty feet away. By the time I got to it, the victory spike felt forced, like a knock on wood, and nothing seemed finished at all.

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8

VANDAL

Tuesday, November 14, 2006

6:30–Bedtime

THE INSTRUCTIONS

Maccabees aren’t

MATMATMATMATMATMATMATMAT

MATMATMATMATMATMATMATMAT

MATMATMATMATMATMATMATMAT

MATMATMATMATMATMATMATMAT

MATMAT MATMAT

WELCOME

MATMAT MATMAT

MATMATMATMATMATMATMATMAT

MATMATMATMATMATMATMATMAT

MATMATMATMATMATMATMATMAT

MATMATMATMATMATMATMATMAT

Patrick Drucker wanted to stand on the sidewalk in the Wilmette shopping district and speak through a megaphone while handing out pamphlets about conspiracies. The City of Wilmette didn’t want him to speak or hand out pamphlets, and after he refused a request to desist, the Wilmette police put him under arrest, and Drucker contacted the United Civil Liberties Advocates of America, at which point my father became his lawyer.

Patrick Drucker vs the City of Wilmette had been getting public-ity for weeks. Closing arguments had begun that morning. My dad was convinced he’d defeat Wilmette, and so was most of the rest of the Chicagoland area—my father always won—but the Israelites of West Rogers Park weren’t happy about that, they never were, and one of them, in protest, had spraypainted “Maccabees aren’t”

above the welcome mat on the front stoop of our house. I couldn’t be sure how long the new bomb had been on the stoop—I hadn’t seen the stoop that morning (Tuesday) because I’d left out the back door like my parents, like usual—but I knew it hadn’t been there the afternoon before (Monday), and I had a hard time imagining 511

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someone vandalizing a stoop before midnight or after 5 AM, so I figured the vandal had come in the night.

Drucker’s pamphlets had titles like
Aspects of Zionist Power in
the United States
and
Zionists and the “Antisemitism” Cry.
Those were the two that always got mentioned on the news, but there were five or six others, and one of them was called
NBC, ABC, CBS,
AIPAC
. Whenever interviewed on television, Drucker would ask why it was that although the titles of his other pamphlets were regularly cited during newscasts,
NBC, ABC, CBS, AIPAC

was never mentioned. And then he would answer his first question with a second one; he would ask if the absence of the title’s mention might not be “very ironic proof” that “a small group of Zionists” was controlling all the major media outlets and “doing everything in their power to obscure the truth from the eyes of the viewing public.”

Drucker was always very careful to say “Zionists” and was not a stupid guy. When one of his interviewers responded to the media cover-up accusation by stating, “But Mr. Drucker, we’re an ABC

affiliate. If this controlling group of alleged Zionists are doing what you claim they’re doing, how can you account for this broadcast?”

Zucker responded like this: “You guys are out to make me look crazy, and since your so-called ‘producers’ and ‘editors’ are at the controls, you succeed to a degree. This is all pre-recorded and you do studio-tricks to my image. Anything from lowering the number of pixels per square inch in the area of my eyes so even the pupils look like an outdated video game, to simply shooting me 512

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from a slightly oblique angle which makes it appear that I am not, as they say, a ‘straightforward’ individual, not to mention sitting me on the right side of the table so I’m always leaning in what’s known as the ‘sinister’ direction to answer questions, and the way you raise the volume on my voice, and speed it up ever so slightly, and the way you ‘edit’ me, or should I say ‘censor’ me, the way you cut out portions of what I’m saying while I’m in mid-sentence…

I come off like I’m disturbed, and if a disturbed man
mentions my pamphlet
NBC, ABC, CBS, AIPAC
,
the pamphlet is sure to be associated with a disturbed man, and such a man might as well be talking about a UFO sighting—you completely undercut my credibility. If one of your starry-eyed talking heads so much as even gave a list of the surnames of the men and women who run the networks, let alone the types of—if I may be permitted to scare-quote aloud—‘philanthropic’ Zionist organizations to which these men and women tithe, the implications would be examined at dinner tables all throughout Chicago, if not on a national level; but when a slightly diagonal Pat Drucker bends sinister to discuss these same executives, to alert the viewing public to the money-hungry, war-mongering Zionist cabal that’s controlling this very interview, well, it’s obvious he’s nuts, right? Cause just look at him, yeah?

He’s a pixel-face!”

Drucker’s accusations about how the media undercut him were crazy in themselves, but at the same time, if you considered them for a second, you couldn’t avoid wondering if they could be true; and if it was
possible
that the only reason the accusations sounded 513