The Instructions (23 page)

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“Traif like you wouldn’t believe, Kreindeleh. The ham was
everywhere
in Barcelona! As if striving to forbid us from joy, the ham.

But we had a great time, anyway, a great time
despite
the ham. Am I making this up, buddy? Tell them—am I making it up? About the ham? About how we’d talk about them all the time, about taking them to Litberg’s?”

“Oh the ham,” said my father, mashing flat with his fork’s curved part the cross-hatches he’d earlier sculpted from his potatoes. “He’s telling the truth.”

My mom said, “We went to Litberg’s on our first date, and for all of this time I thought because Judah was broke.”

“He doesn’t like to tell anyone anything is why you thought that, Tamar. It’s how he is, it’s been very well established. And probably he
was
broke—broke never damaged the charm of a nightwalk to Litberg’s—but what I’m telling you,” said Yuval,

“is that your husband beside you, smiling wryly at his old friend, at ease enough here among us to register a little embarrassment at the revelations I’m spouting, him; to violate with nervous hand-movements the physical integrity of these delicious potatoes my mother never fails to cook in just enough juice from the bris-cuit that they become flavorful but still maintain their firmness, your husband—they
slice
rather than
crush
, the potatoes, is what you always said, hey Pop? What
I’m
saying, Tamar, is when we were young, Judah dreamed of you without ever having met you.

When he wasn’t being this weirdo with his nose in arcane scripture even the rabbis couldn’t teach him from, your husband, or writing these articles insisting first that Leviticus was enjambed, and then that it was
incorrectly
enjambed, he would talk about you; 210

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your husband was a romantic above all else, and he would pray to meet you, he lived to meet you, and to raise
you
, Gurion. Others might have said, ‘Yehuda, he’s a cold S.O.B.,’ but I was his closest friend and I roomed with him, and I knew him the best, I knew it wasn’t for books that he lived, but family, that he studied in order to be better at family; that when he wasn’t arranging various syllables of the ten sephirot for seemingly dubious purposes that turned out would save that girl from—”

My father dropped the fork on his plate and it clanged and he said, “Yuval.”

“What?” Yuval said.

“My son is here,” said my father.

“Yes?” said Yuval.

My father set his hand on Yuval’s and told him something, but quietly, so that I, at the other end of the table, with the other children, couldn’t hear.

Yuval, in full voice, said, “Bobe-mayses what, Yehuda? I saw with my own eyes. Why the whispering?”

“My son is here,” said my father.

“I see him,” Yuval said. “He’s beautiful. Why keep secrets from such a beautiful boy? You keep so many secrets… I still don’t know,”

Yuval said to no one and everyone, “what Rebbe Schneerson told him on my wedding day! Imagine! It’s my wedding day, the ceremony is halted by the most important rabbi in the world—the most important
man
in the world—so that he can whisper something to my closest
friend
in the world. Do I complain? I don’t complain.

Do I expect to hear what it was, this big secret? No. I don’t expect, because this closest friend of mine is a peculiar and highly secretive 211

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individual. However… However! Do I
hope
? Do I
dare
to
hope
that this veritable brother of mine will one day tell me, or even
hint
to me what it was that was so important that my wedding was halted?

Yes! I hope. And still: what? Disappointment… And now he says, now he says, ‘Oh…’”

“Gurion is
my
son,” said my father, “and you’re in your cups, my friend, and in your cups you are expansive.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Yuval, “but this—”

“This is nothing to argue about,” said my father.

Yuval said, “I agree! Why talk me in circles? All I said—”

My father said, “Please.”

My father’s voice is fuller than anyone’s, even Yuval’s, so when it goes quiet suddenly, like it did when he said “Please,” it is normal to notice how shadowed and angly and completely unjolly my father’s face is, how coiled it is, how ready, how unreadable its stories, and it is normal to be shaken. I shook, but I wanted to hear more. When Yuval said the thing about changing around the syllables in the ten sephirot, I knew what he was talking about. The ten sephirot are: Malchut, Yisod, Hod, Netzach, Tiferet, Gevurah, Hesed, Binah, Hochma, and Keter. Their meanings, translated respectively, are: Kingdom, Foundation, Splendor, Victory, Beauty, Power, Mercy, Understanding, Wisdom, and Crown. Sometimes they are diagrammed into something called the Tree of Life or Tree of Man. The words on the right side are believed to refer to aspects of Love, and those on the left side are believed to refer to aspects of Justice. The words in the center are thought to refer to aspects of both:

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JUSTICE LOVE

Keter

Crown

Binah

Hochmah

Understanding Wisdom

Gevurah Hesed
Power Mercy
Tiferet

Beauty

Hod Netzach
Splendor Victory
Yisod

Foundation

Malchut

Kingdom

It is also believed that these aspects correspond to different parts of men’s bodies in such a way as I have diagrammed on the following page.

Yet the ways in which the ten sephirot can be diagrammed are not as important as why so much time is spent on thinking 213

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about them by those who would diagram them: They are the ten words that Hashem speaks billions of billions of times per second to hold the world together. Everything that happens gets said by Hashem first, and he says everything into happening with combinations of those ten words. I think that when you combine the sounds of them in a certain order, you get His true name, Hashem’s, the name the Cohain Gadol used to speak in the Temple on Yom Kippur, when there was still a Temple. It is said that if you recite the ten sephirot in certain orders, fast enough, you can affect the world—physically. You can walk on water, maybe, or heal people, or make someone’s head explode. I’d often thought of recombin-ing the syllables myself, but a No! from Adonai would exact swift paralysis on my muscles whenever I’d sit down to try, so I’d never actually tried.

While I shook in the silence after my father’s “Please,” my thoughts about the
sephirot led me to thoughts of nice Amit Bar-Sheshet, son of Rolly the trilling cantor, to a story Amit had told me when I was six, and it was that story I meant when I said to Yuval: Were you going to tell about the fire?

And my father became pale.

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J U S T I C E

L O V E

E T E R

K

H O C H M A H

B I N A H

M A L

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K E T

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Amit had told me that when my father was still at yeshiva, he killed a mugger in the middle of the night by setting him on fire. Amit said that that’s why my father became a lawyer—to defend himself in court.

When I heard the story, I asked my mom about it. She told me, “Became a lawyer to defend himself over some fire? It is nonsense.” Her answer seemed like it had loopholes, like that comma that might or might not be there in
Noach
, when, after the flood, Hashem said in His heart: “I will not continue to curse again the ground because of man, since the imagery of man’s heart is evil from his youth; nor will I again continue to smite every living being(,) as I have done.”

With the comma, it might be a promise to never again destroy the 215

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world, but without it, it’s only a promise to never again destroy the world
by flood
. Sometimes there’s a comma and sometimes there isn’t, and even though my mom’s answer seemed tricky, I’d never asked my dad about the fire story; partly because he didn’t like to talk to me about his days as a Torah scholar, but mostly because I wanted to believe he set fire to a man who tried to take something from him and I worried he’d tell me it wasn’t true.

“The fire!” Yuval said to the table. “He already knows,” he said to my father.

My father said, “We’ll see what he knows, Yuval, and when it turns out he doesn’t know what you think he knows, we’ll allow the subject to drop.”

“Agreed,” said Yuval.

“I’m not asking,” said my father. He turned to me. “Tell us what you think you know,” he said.

His voice was quieter and harder than I’d ever heard it.

I said, You set fire to a mugger. I said, Then you became a lawyer to defend yourself.

“There,” my father said to Yuval.

“It’s dropped,” said Yuval.

“It’s not true, what you heard,” my father said to me.

“Yet it has true pieces,” said Yuval’s Sara. That sentence was so pretty, and if I weren’t so in love with Esther Salt, I think I would have fallen in love with Sara Forem, just for her nervous Israeli English, but I wanted to hear the story right, so I told her to tell me in Hebrew.

I said, Tell me in Hebrew. And my dad said, “Gurion,” but my mother, who’d spent the last few minutes as quiet and content as the rest of us to watch the two giant fathers tease each other, spoke 216

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up. She said, “Know your son, Judah. He can hear this story now, in front of us, from the daughter of your oldest friend, or he will ask around the neighborhood until he will ask someone at that synagogue, and few will know the story he is hoping for, yet all of them will have something to say of you, and, unable as your son is to believe that anyone could harbor true contempt for his aba, he will be open to every twisted bobe-mayse any of these hundreds of local mamzers who would like to see you ruined will tell him. And it is not you he will ask to corroborate their whispered half-truths. He will ask
me
to do so, Judah, and I will, as I have, do my best to confuse him, and soon he will stop forgiving me for it. And soon after that, he will do exactly what you fear. Look on the face of your son and notice the smoothness around the orbits. There is not a trace of a line to be found. He sees everything, and can hear just as well, but he has not yet learned to squint. He has never squinted once.”

It was a very dramatic speech to hear in the middle of the most dramatic Seder I’d ever been to. It is very dramatic to hear your mom call everyone at your shul a mamzer and then say you don’t squint and that she confuses you on purpose and your dad is afraid of something, and I wanted to squint and tell everyone that my father was not afraid of anything, but before I could do that, Sara Forem was already saying, “I will tell you, but in English, because my smaller sisters don’t understand well.”

Her sisters understood
that
, though, and they began to cry, so Yuval told them, “Girls, go find the afikomen. Ma, Papa, Rochel—

get them outta here, please.” The girls’ tears stopped falling, and their grandparents and their mother led them away, to further parts of the house.

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Sara said, “What about us?”

“Would you rather look for matzo in an envelope, Gurion?” said Yuval.

No, I said.

“You,” Yuval said to Sara, “are twelve years old.” = “You’ve been bat-mitzvahed and the afikomen
is no longer yours to find.”

Sara said, “Fine.” Then she said, “I forgot.” Then she told the story in Hebrew because her sisters were already running around out of earshot, looking under and between things throughout the house.

“Years before we were born,” Sara said, “my father and your father were returning to the yeshiva from Litberg’s with the shmendrick Rolly, when they came to an alley where there was a very bad struggle between two men and a girl. Our fathers and the shmendrick went to help the girl. One man, he turned to them with a pistol, while the other man, he struggled with the girl. These men should have run from our fathers, but instead there was this pistol in the hand of the one and the girl was still struggling against the other, so there was nothing else to do, so your aba said some words that no one else can pronounce, and this man with the pistol, he was covered in fire. When he fell he was dead and then he was ashes and then he was nothing, he blew away. The shmendrick and my father, they struck the other man’s neck and held him against the ground, and then your father gave his coat to the girl, and he said some more impossible words, and she fell asleep against his shoulder, and he carried her home while my father and the shmendrick brought the man who struggled with her to the police, who put him in jail for the rest of his life.”

I said to my father, For the rest of his life?

It was proof I could squint, but no one seemed to hear me because 218

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my father was saying to Sara, “Go look for the afikomen.”

Yuval nodded to her that it was okay, and once she left the room, my father said, “All this narishkeit from you about keeping secrets, but you lied to your own daughter?”

“Not lied. Made a lesson,” said Yuval.