The Instructions (26 page)

“No,” said my father, “just tyrannical gods.”

Hashem is not tyrannical.

“He made a world full of tyrants, a world short on justice.”

He made the only world we know.

“But how can you believe He is perfect, Gurion? How can you believe His Law is perfect? How can you call perfect an all-powerful being who makes a world where there is rape and there is murder? Will you tell me He works in mysterious ways? Have I raised a Christian child?”

Hashem is not perfect, I said, and I’ve never said He was perfect.

I said, He is not all-powerful, either. I said, Only His Law is perfect.

His Law and His intentions.

“Isn’t that blasphemy? You make Him sound like a person.”

I said, No person can make a universe, or destroy one; he can at best repair it, and at worst he can damage it. And when I say that Hashem is not all-powerful, I am not saying He isn’t more power-235

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ful than us—He
is
more powerful than us; He is the
most
powerful.

And when I say He isn’t perfect, I am not saying He isn’t
good
—He
is
good
.
He is at least as good as we are. It is because He is good, and because He is so powerful, that He has the potential to become as perfect as His Law. He
helped you
, Aba. Why can’t you see that?

My dad pulled hard on his cigarette and I could not tell if smoke made him squint, or disappointment.

I said, If by speaking like Hashem you killed one man more than you meant to have killed, then why not understand that your failure was in what you
meant
to do, rather than in what you did? Why not decide that it was righteous to kill the second man? Why not that you are so righteous that even when you think you’ve made a mistake, you couldn’t have? Why not think that you can’t help but enact justice? Because that is what I think. I think you did right. I know it.

“You continue to miss the point,” my father told me. “The man who threatened us with the gun—I did what I could to stop him, but I should not have known how to stop him that way. Had I not known how to stop him that way, then I would have had to have found another way, and that other way would not have cost the rapist his life.”

If you didn’t know how to use the sephirot, you might have been shot dead, I said.

“Or I might not have, Gurion. There were three of us there, plus the girl. Would the gunman have shot all of us? Would he have shot even one of us, knowing that he would then have to shoot all of us? It is unlikely.”

You don’t know that, I said. I said, The potential—

“Our neighbors don’t like me, Gurion. They wish me ill. They 236

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vandalize our home because I defend the rights of those they despise.

Yet they know I’m human, and a father, and so they know that the surest way to harm me would be to harm you. Potentially, one of them could go crazy, like that boy who shot Rabin in Israel.

Potentially, one of them could go crazy and try to harm you. Should I kill them all to prevent it? Would you suggest I do that? Because I would not do that. It is dangerous to exist in the world. To exist is to be threatened. We must live with threats.”

I said, That contradicts everything you said before about protection from sneak-attacks! And a loaded gun pointed at you by a criminal is far more threatening than a gun in a store that might get bought and loaded and walked over to your house and used on your son and you know it. I said, If the danger wasn’t real, you would not have done what you did.

“How can you know so much,” said my father, “and hear so much, and speak so pristinely, and meanwhile be so completely muddled, boychical? How is it that your loyalty enables you to justify everything your father does, but you go deaf when he’s speaking to you? I am telling you that what I did was wrong and you have to trust that I am correct, if for no other reason than I am your father and you are to honor me, and to honor me—I’m telling you—you have to be a mensch. You do not need to prove to me that you are a good
son
. I believe it, Gurion. You are a good son. And I am glad that you are a good son, but a good son is not necessarily a good human being. A good son is just a son who is loyal to his father, and loyalty is not in itself goodness, and a good father would never teach his son otherwise.

I want you to understand that. If you want to honor me, you will allow that I was wrong to take that man’s life. You will call it a mistake, and 237

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after accepting it as a mistake, you will forgive me my mistake, rather than claiming it a victory. You will love me
despite
my mistake. You will cease to be my apologist and… Aye, Gurion, I’m sorry. I thought we were talking—I’m sorry, Gurion. I got a little carried away. Come on. Why are you crying on poor Michael Weinberg?”

There were a lot of reasons why I was crying: my father was angry at me; he was disappointed in me; he was worried about me; he used a Yiddish endearment; he believed he was a murderer; he kept trying to protect me from things I could protect myself from; and by calling me an apologist, he was calling me a bad scholar.

Despite his perfect intentions, despite his saying everything that he was saying out of love for me, he was wrong and I was right. I was crying because he was not God and I was not Avraham. I was crying because I saw that to honor him, I would have to disobey him—

that to honor him would be to disobey him—and it is sad to learn you have to disobey your favorite man.

I let him squeeze and play-punch my arms and my shoulders while he delivered a light, singsong monologue about tears and the grass atop the grave of poor Michael Weinberg; whether the water of the tears would grow the grass more than the salt of them would kill the grass or the salt would be the victor; whether the two would cancel each other out; whether the salt content of the tears was negligible, and what, if anything, that might say about the power of the tears; whether the tears themselves might be negligible and what asking that question might say about the fitness of the father asking it; whether or not the monologue was intentionally symbolic and whether or not one could be
un
intentionally symbolic while delivering a monologue; and if one could not be unintentionally sym-238

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bolic, could one be intentionally but un
know
ingly symbolic; can a man have intentions he doesn’t know he has?

And so on til I stopped crying.

On the walk back to the Forems’, I gave my uneaten bagel to a homeless black guy on Western. The black guy was standing a couple feet away from two homeless white guys. I didn’t give the bagel to the white guys because I worried they were Jews, which meant, I reasoned, that the bagel would harm them. Then I felt dumb about it because the black guy might have been a Jew like me, even though it was statistically less likely. And then I felt even dumber because statistics were irrelevant because even if the black guy
was
a Jew, he was starving, and Hashem should not have had a problem with me feeding a starving Jew chometz. He should, if anything,
prefer
that among three starving men, I would choose to feed the Jew, regardless of what I was feeding him. And if I was wrong, and that was not what He preferred, then He and I would already have had so many more other problems I didn’t even know about that to spend time worrying about a bagel and whether or not some guy I gave it to was Jewish seemed pretty wasteful. In the big scheme of things. So I stopped worrying. I held my dad’s hand and let myself be tired.

Although she favored a far less modest look—t-shirts and jeans or fatigue pants, if not tank-tops and shorts or cotton dresses that quit above the knee—my mother, who never paid attention to weather forecasts, had, on the day before she was to meet my father’s parents, bought for the occasion an ankle-length skirt of unbreathing fabric and a blouse that buttoned up to her chin and down to her wrists. This was springtime, and Chicago, and despite it having been wintery on 239

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the day she’d purchased the clothing, the temperature climbed forty-five degrees over the ensuing twenty-four hours. My mom did own other slightly less formal, far less constricting items that she wore to the hospital, but those clothes were at her apartment in Hyde Park, whereas she was at my father’s apartment on the other side of the city, in Uptown. She had Fridays off and had spent Thursday night there, as had become her habit, and by the time it occurred to her that she would suffocate in the clothing she’d bought, she and my father had only half an hour to get to my grandparents’ house; even if she’d had enough money to buy a new outfit at a local thrift store—the only kind of store there was back then in Uptown that didn’t sell liquor, candybars, or used saxophones—there was just no time to do it.

So she frummed up as originally planned, and over the course of the two-mile walk to his parents’ house, my dad, nervous himself, attempted to lighten the situation with one-liners that failed to hit til he came upon, “At least the material’s too thick to shvitz through,” at which point my mother, bent at the knees with gallows laughter, turned her head and saw that she had, in fact, shvitzed through the fabric that covered her left underarm, and began to cry.

They got to my grandparents’ a few minutes early, only to find my grandmother behind schedule. In order to finish the cooking before sundown, she needed help in the kitchen.

“We’re going to have to use the pressure cooker because we are under pressure. Do you know how to use a pressure cooker, honey?”

“Yes,” my mother said, dabbing a damp handkerchief behind her ears.

“And how are you with a chicken?” my grandma said.

“I fix a nice chick-chicken,” said my mother, the stutter the 240

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only evidence of the gasp she’d otherwise stifled upon realizing, mid-sentence, that the chicken she was committing to would be a kosher one.

My grandma said, “You don’t sound so sure,” and my father, who did not yet know about the Six-Day War chicken trauma, and who was still in the kitchen at the time, believed his mother had said so lightheartedly.

My mother, on the other hand, was confident that “You don’t sound so sure” = “Are you telling me that you expect my son to spend his life with a woman who balks at the thought of cooking a nice kosher chicken in a pressure cooker on Shabbos?” = “Do you expect me to believe that you are presenting yourself honestly in that high-collared get-up when already a rash is forming on that delicate neck of yours?” = “With your skin so dark, and my son’s so light, how can you even consider bringing my grandchildren into the world?”

“I’m sure,” my mom said.

She was shown the vegetables and the knives, the spicerack and the pressure cooker, and then she was shown the chicken. “Will you poke it just to double-check it’s thawed?” said my grandmother.

My mom, a soldier, a killer, poked the hairy chicken with the knuckles of her clenched fists and got to work. She prepped the chicken with the spices, pressure-cooked the chicken with the vegetables, and set the chicken on the chicken-dish when the chicken was finished cooking. By the time they all sat down to eat, she had performed so many compulsive eyelid-checks that the small bit of mascara she’d applied that afternoon was smudged like warpaint.

“I looked like a harlot,” she always tells me. “Tell him, Judah.

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I looked like a cheap harlot.”

And “Of harlots I know only what I’ve read in books and seen through the windshield on North Avenue,” responds my father. “So a harlot if she says so, boychic; but if a harlot, the most expensive harlot in the history of man, and of that I can be sure, for the one thing about which all the books agree is that the less a harlot looks a harlot, the more that harlot costs.”

“You are such a sweet man,” my mother says to him, “but so superstitious. He is so sweet and superstitious, Gurion, that in the cause of protecting me from the evil eye his mother was casting upon the shvitzing black harlot her son had brought to her sabbath dinner table, he actually convinced himself I looked as nice as I wished I did. I did not.”

“You looked gorgeous!”

“He is crazy.”

However my mother looked, and whatever my paternal grandmother thought of her, this is where the story of that Shabbos bends its knees for the leap into slapstick that it must make to remain true.

It is at this point in their telling of the story that my father lights a cigarette to share with my mother, to pass back and forth with her like soldiers in a forest, the filter pinched between thumb and pointer-finger, the cherry pointed down, their cupped hands turned to shield the orange light from the eyes of snipers who hide behind anterior trees; it is at this point that my parents lean toward me and fiction-alize unabashedly and I lean toward them and listen without questioning and we get so involved that I sometimes take the cigarette from one of them and put it to my own lips before any of us becomes aware of what I’m doing; this is the point at which we three conspire.

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We agree to act as if what’s about to get said actually took place.

Hardly any of it did, but the meaning of what my parents describe is truer than the meaning that would come across if they attempted to describe what actually happened—what actually happened was, I am led to believe, mostly unlistenable, if not untellable: a series of uncomfortable glances cast in near-silence, a few cutting remarks that echoed off the soup tureen, the damage of these remarks magnifying even as the decibels diminished. What actually happened, I am led to believe, was not funny at all, was painful and dull. Yet so would have been the life of the tramp in Chaplin’s
City Lights
, if the tramp were not fictional; so would have been the life of the blind girl the tramp loved, if the girl were not fictional; so would have been the operation the tramp struggled to pay for and the struggle to pay for it, were the operation and the struggle not fictional. And that operation never would have worked if it weren’t fictional, and even if by some miracle it had worked, the tramp would never have been able to get the money for it. But in
City Lights
, the tramp does get the money, the operation does succeed, and everything eventually works out for the lovers. And all of it
should
be true. And so in a way it
is
true. And they are worth crying for, a non-fictional tramp and the non-fictional blind girl he loves—in real-life such a doomed couple would deserve our tears. Yet had Chaplin presented them as they would have been had they not been fictional, we would turn away after five minutes instead of staying til the end and weeping as we should. I once asked my father: Why do we go to the symphony hall once a year to see
City Lights
with orchestral accompaniment at seventy-five dollars a head? “Because it is the greatest movie ever made,” he said. And what makes it the greatest? “It is the truest,” he told me. And why 243