The Instructions (122 page)

This news comes late, I know. Most of you are in bed already.

Most of those in bed won’t check email before school tomorrow. But for those of you who Hashem has chosen to receive this email, I suggest He chose you for a reason. And though I have cancelled school, there is no reason for you to think that showing up early at Hebrew Day or Schechter to wait covertly near the entrance and spread the news to our brothers would be a bad idea. In fact, if we are just, then to do so would be a mitzvah.

Lastly: There may be a toll to pay. As this potential holiday creeps closer, I am less and less certain about what exactly it will celebrate, and I see it would be irresponsible, even criminal, to leave out mention of a toll’s possibility. What’s curious, scholars, or maybe not so curious at all, is that despite not knowing if there will be a toll to pay, I do know what that toll will be, should we have to pay it: a dollar per scholar, delivered in parts. From a distance.

I pray that we are just.

If we are just, then tomorrow a new holiday will arise.

1147

ADAM LEVIN

Rabbi Gurion

___________________

AptakisicDirections.doc

24K View Download

1148

ADAM LEVIN

18

COMMENTARY ON

COMMENTARIES

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

So far, Tanach aside,
The Instructions
has predominately been concerned with things that general readers, and even most scholars, were not aware of prior to reading
The Instructions
. The majority of the exceptions haven’t required any correction: the previously published texts* have appeared as they were written; the differing opinions of editorialists—those of academia and mass-media both—have been enough at odds as to mutually nullify one another’s authority; the facts of the War and my earlier childhood have, for the most part, been reported accurately by the press.

In cases where facts have been made up, misinterpreted, or warped by proximity to the agendas of those presenting them,* the lies and warpage and misunderstandings have

* E.g., the many reprints of
Ulpan
and the “Important” email by Kalisch, which—apart from having been disseminated by Israelites both electronically and via backyard-handoff since the summer of 2006—appeared in most Reuters- and AP-sourced newspapers after 11/17/06.

* E.g., (most conspicuously) in the Pulitzer-winning “profile” of me in
The New Yorker,
with its blame-the-mother retro-pop psychology; the ostensibly regretful yet subtley self-congratulatory “Critic at Large” one (also in
The New Yorker
) by Malcolm Gladwell, who claimed I’d “maliciously used [my]

1150

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

been easy enough for me to correct in passing by simply telling the story of the Side of Damage and the Gurionic War as I experienced them, free of nearly all reference to what was to come.

At this point in the story, however, owing to the motives that I’ve since been erroneously ascribed for having written “Sudden Holiday”—motives
universally
ascribed to me, by my supporters as well as my detractors—I have to look forward, however briefly, in order to correct you all directly, friends and enemies alike.

In case the reader is scratching his head, unaware of the misconstrued motives to which I am referring—whether because he has been living in the wilderness between the end of 2006 and the present, or, more likely, because the present in which he is reading this is far enough ahead of the present in which I am writing it that
The Instructions
has become hegemonic, and the miscontru-ances thereby forgotten—he’ll just have to take my word that I am justified in temporarily (as temporarily as possible) breaking the mostly old-timey flow of the narrative here, in Book 18 in C.E. 2013, and push on like a good soldier, a good scholar.

innate understanding of tipping points in order to ignite the current nationwide epidemic of radically defiant tween-group behavior”; the “Person of the Year” article in
Time
,
with its sidebars on my mom, dad, Nakamook, June, and Eliyahu, which said I was a Karaite, a vegan, and fan of Ayn Rand; the interview with my former and would-be “teachers” on that episode of
Nightline
where Kalisch referred to me as a “Jewish-Supremacist,” Unger described me as an “antisemite,” and Schinkl (either making fun of them or attempting to create accord between them or maybe even sincerely calling it as he post-post-colonially saw it) said I was “the living dawn of the antisemitic Jewish-Supremacist movement”; and the peerlessly demagogic feature in
Harper’s
, which compared me in one windy, weirdly punctuated breath to Moshe Dayan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat, Jonathan Pollard, the Rosenbergs, Ari Fleisher, Ariel Sharon, and Sabbatai Tsvi, then repeatedly used the word

“Zionist” the way Marxists and neocons use “liberal,” and ended by forming—accidentally or not—an acrostic of the word “kike” with the first letters of its last four sentences.

1151

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

The rest of you are certainly aware that “Sudden Holiday”

has been regularly cited as material evidence that I, Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, had been plotting since at least the night prior to that YouTube-crashing geologic razzle-dazzle which far too many people (
one
would be too many) have taken to calling

“The 11/17 Miracle,” to execute what is currently known by my supporters as “The Damage Proper” and by my detractors as

“The Gurionic War.”

Once and for all, friends, and once and for all, enemies: While I do accept full responsibility for bringing the Damage Proper, I did not plan the Damage Proper until
minutes
prior to the Damage Proper. Furthermore, I had no idea that there would
be
a Damage Proper. No one did. Not even Eliyahu. Not until I planned it.

How could we have?

Yes, it is true that the recurring themes of Main Man’s ramblings contained what might now be construed as the stuff of prophecy; that had we understood his words to be prophetic, we might have better predicted what would happen on Friday. But—

with the exception of Eliyahu—we did not understand his words that way, I least of all. Or no moreso, I should say, than I understood my vision during the Electric Chair wager or my dream of the Tower of Restraint (to be described shortly) to be prophetic.

I will not deny that these three phenomena seemed to me to be possessed of insight, nor that I trusted and eventually acted upon those perceived insights to a certain degree. However, because they could all, as well, be mundanely explained—i.e., “Williams 1152

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

Cocktail Party Syndrome leads its sufferers to engage in a novel kind of verbal behavior characterized, for the most part, by ‘mash-ups’ of previously overheard statements”* to explain the utterances of Main Man, who split his time outside the Cage between Pentecostal Mass and marathon sessions of network television, and fell asleep at night listening to mixes Vincie’d burned him; an oxygen-deprived brain to account for the Electric Chair vision; a combination of latently understood evidence and my not-solatent desire to salvage my friendship with Nakamook to account for the Tower of Restraint dream—I did not take it for granted that Adonai was trying to tell me anything.

Seven skinny cows cannibalizing seven fat ones as dreamed by a man who’d never dealt with cattle: that, with its crystal-clear one-to-one relationship between the symbols and what they corresponded to—and without anything extra, without spilling a single drop—
that
is what I believed a prophecy was supposed to look like.

Though wholly beloved, Main Man was retarded, and, as with no few other famously compelling lies—e.g., beautiful girls can’t get dates, powerful men father weak sons, terrorists are the new freedom fighters, enmity breeds respect, no one hates the Jews more than the Jews, etc.—the lie that being retarded inherently makes a person closer to Adonai only seems true because it describes an irony. So even though, on reflection, Main Man’s

* p. 147,
Linguistics Is for the (Language of) the Birds
by Tamar Maccabee, Hebrew University Press (forthcoming, pending change of title)

1153

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

weird utterances seem to have been obliquely prophetic—and maybe they were—there was no good reason to believe they were prophetic at the time.

“But what about Vincie Portite?” ask both the haters and scholars alike. “What about what he said to you on Thursday’s intramural bus?”

What Vincie Portite said to me on Thursday’s intramural bus was that he, Eliyahu, and the rest of the Side believed, to varying degrees and for nebulous reasons, that something big was to happen soon; whether as soon as Friday or not, no one but Eliyahu seemed to be certain at all, and even he, as he has himself since testified, “was somewhat less than reliable due to [his] overwhelming state of verklemptness” when he told Vincie, “There will be no Monday.” Furthermore, the “something big” that Vincie and the rest of them believed was soon to happen, was described to me as “the destruction of the Arrangement.”

Now, it is true that
when
Vincie described it, I quickly came to believe he was correct. I quickly came to believe that “the destruction of the Arrangement” was imminent. I knew it to be true the way I knew Adonai was real and I was in love with June, and I will not deny that. However, what this phrase meant to me—“the destruction of the Arrangement”—was hardly com-parable to what ended up happening on Friday. I imagined we might arrive at a means of action that would cause Botha to quit his job, or Floyd to be humiliated, or Desormie to never desormiate again. I thought certain deserving basketballers might 1154

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

receive some come-uppance, and that maybe, if I was lucky, I might find justification to cause our local up-and-coming young popstar to bleed a little, or even get deformed. In sum: I thought of Vincie’s and Eliyahu’s use of “the destruction of the Arrangement” as a kind of overstated euphemism for such events. Kind of like how when a toughguy in a movie threatens his enemy with an “I’ll break every bone in your body,”

and everyone watching, as well as the toughguy and the guy he has threatened, knows full well that if there is a physical confrontation in which the toughguy is victorious, there will nonetheless be enemy bones—many, if not all of them—which will remain unbroken; and furthermore that none, let alone all, of the enemy’s bones
need be
broken for the toughguy’s threat to come true. The every-bone-threatening toughguy who acquires victory by way of any act of violence—a single blow to his enemy’s windpipe, for example—is not considered a liar, let alone called one.

But “Sudden Holiday”: If I hadn’t already planned the Damage Proper, then why, in the email, did I tell the scholars to bring their weapons to Aptakisic? Why did I tell them to come to Aptakisic at all? Could I not have met with them in my backyard after Havdallah on Saturday, as so many of them had already been planning?

I had them bring their weapons for the reason I stated in the email. If there was to be a holiday, I didn’t know what the holiday would celebrate. I didn’t even know if “celebrate” was the right verb. Some holidays, like Yom Ha-Shoah, only
commemorate
. Some, 1155

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

like Simcha Torah, do both. Yom Kippur does neither—it’s a day of
atonement
. What I knew was I would deliver my scripture to the scholars. Maybe the holiday would celebrate the deliverance; maybe, if I was somehow wrong to deliver scripture, the holiday would mournfully commemorate the folly of my having done so.

Maybe the deliverance would lead to something else that the holiday would celebrate or commemorate. Maybe what it led to would be military, for no calendar, let alone the Israelite calendar, is short on military holidays. And again, maybe there would be no holiday.
If
there were going to be a holiday, though, and
if
that holiday were going to be military, I wanted to do all I could to make sure it was more like Chanukah or Yom Yerushalayim than the Fasts of Tammuz or Tevet. I wanted to be sure that victory for the scholars was at least possible. So I told them to come heavy.

And as for why Aptakisic instead of my backyard: I was finished with stealth. It was time to get caught, witnessed. I wanted to incite as bold-faced a brand of defiance as I could.

For a scholar to leave his home after Havdallah was not uncommon, so it was possible, even likely, that if the scholars came to my house after Havdallah, many of their parents would not find out—let alone all at the same time—where the scholars had gone. The absence of two-hundred-plus scholars from a few Israelite schools, however, could not help but get noticed.

Calls would be made. Panic would ensue. Furthermore, for the scholars to compound the forbidden act of contacting me with that of ditching school—which they would have to do to get to 1156

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

Aptakisic on time—would attest to my being in possession of a much larger influence over them than would their merely coming over to my house.

The greater the demonstration of my influence, the more the scholars’ parents would fear me, and I wanted as many of them to fear me as possible, and I wanted them to fear me as deeply as possible. I wanted them to dread evermore what I might, if crossed, do with their sons. Since they had not thought once, let alone twice, then let them think a thousand times, I thought, of what I might be capable if again harm came to my father.

I expect that many scholars, even those with the best of intentions, will, at first, attempt to resist this commentary on commentaries. Since the Damage Proper, well-meaning factions have been culting up my personality, and although I’m flattered by the intent behind this culting, efforts to render me and my actions perennially good and cohesive lead—at least in some cases—not only to Orwellian doubletalk (“the people’s prince,” “peacemaking warrior,” etc.), but also bad scholarship, a kind that permits and even sometimes encourages lazy, unrigorous interpretations of the as-yet-quite-young Gurionic oral tradition, wherein I’m put forth as everything to everyone, and all at the same time.