The Instructions (11 page)
Authors: Adam Levin
I would like to see harm come to you, Rabbi, and this troubles my soul because I know you must be damaged, for only the damaged can act as you have acted, and the damaged need our mercy, not our contempt.
It is with mercy, then, however strained, that I advise you to put aside your goyische equestrianism in favor of studying dogs. If you study with any rigor, you will surely come across those, like you, who are damaged; and you’ll note these damaged dogs keep their heads down whenever they’re aware that you’re seeing them. Will you know why that is, Alan? why it is that a damaged dog keeps its head down when you watch it? why it lowers its eyes when it passes you on the street? A damaged dog lowers its eyes when it sees you coming, Alan, because it mistakes you for a man, and a damaged dog, unlike a broken-legged horse, knows of man’s capacity for mercy. A damaged dog lowers its eyes among men lest it provoke the mercy men exercise on damaged animals. Forget your horses, 100
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Kalisch. Horses can’t teach you what you need to learn.
The rest of you:
There’s at least one of you who isn’t wondering how the email in question got leaked. Being but a lowly, however tenured, principal of Judaic Studies, I don’t know how to find out which one.
I do know that the email was sent to me by my friend Michael Schloss, who received it off a listserv whose manager is based in Jerusalem. As you will see below, the Fwd “originated” from [email protected] and then passed
through two other listservs before getting to Michael. Apparently, one of you possesses this FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL account and you cut-and-pasted the original to cover your tracks. I know it wasn’t Kalisch, for although a mamzer, it was clearly not his intention to commit a worldwide tarnishing-by-association of the names of the other boys mentioned (an assured outcome, that tarnishing, by the way, as well as its worldwideness, for how many Fwd’s must the email have been through by now? how many people on either of the listservs to which it has been posted?).
As for you, Unger, you’re vindictive enough, true, and I’m sure you’re raucously celebrating the takedown of the nine-year-old in question, but you’re at once prideful and naked of anything that even resembles savvyness and I doubt you’d have thought to hide your identity.
So FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL is one of the other four of you.
I would gleefully go after all of you to be sure I got to the one, but your victim has asked that I refrain. Of Judah Maccabee—a profoundly talented attorney, in case you don’t watch the news—
Gurion has commanded compliance with the same request.
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Though I spent all of today devising a number of highly public methods by which to avenge him, and though his father would wrap tort around your necks like phonecord where his mother would actual phonecord, the boy himself—who was on the first listserv to which FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL posted; who has spent these past couple days in tears at the thought of no longer being allowed to study Torah among his friends; and who, as the email circulates more and more widely through our community, is being denied access to more and more of these friends by their parents, who FEAR him now—when tonight, over dinner, we presented Gurion with the thousand possible ways in which we could ruin you, he declined all of them, saying, “What has been done to me is dirty, but no Israelite, no matter how corrupt, must ever be rendered unto the law of Caesar, much less the scrutiny of Canaanites. Apart from that, I love all of you, and will not have you sully yourselves in dirt that is mine to wash away. I will wash it away. I will wash it away truly.”
May he.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Avel Salt
Principal of Judaic Studies, Solomon Schechter School of Chicago
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Schloss
Date: Thur, 8 June 2006 09:40 AM CST
Subject: Fwd: Important
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Avel,
Is this not the same Gurion you’ve spoken so highly of? I hope not.
Best,
Michael
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: TorahScholars Listserv
Subject: Fwd: Important
I can’t see what this has to do with the TorahScholars listserv, but if one of you wants to post something, who is Tsvi to deny him?
—Tsvi
--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: EastCoastTzadiksListserv
listserv.com>
To: TorahScholars Listserv
Subject: Fwd: Important
Friends,
Were the words “no little bit disturbing” for some reason unavailable this evening, I believe I would describe this Fwd as “very compelling.” Though I must also say I doubt its authenticity. Feel free to post on this topic.
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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: FIFTEEN23FIRSTSAMUEL
To: EastCoastTzadiksListserv
Subject: Fwd: Important
Sent: June 7, 2006, 2:01 PM Central-Standard Time Subject: Fwd: Important
From: [email protected] (Alan Kalisch, Northside Hebrew Day School)
To: [email protected] (Richard Feldman, Northbrook Hebrew Day School), [email protected] (Lionel Unger, Solomon Schechter School), [email protected] (Benjamin Weissman, The Goldstein School), [email protected] (Harold Nieman, Anshe Emet), [email protected] (Michael Kleinman, North-Suburban Solomon Schechter School) Fellow Headmaster Rabbis:
Earlier today, one of our third-graders, Moshe Levin, was on his way to morning davening when a first-grader, David Kahn, stepped out of the doorway of a bathroom at the opposite end of the hallway and shot Moshe in the eye with a slingshot-type weapon that David and, I fear, no few others, refer to as a “pennygun.” It appears that the attack on Moshe was provoked yesterday afternoon, on the after-school bus, where Moshe and some other boys teased David—by all reports rather harshly—about his stutter. Moshe has suffered a bruised retina and much psychological 104
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trauma. The doctors tell us that the ocular injury should heal shortly, baruch H-shem, but it is impossible to know how long the psychic damage will linger.
After having met with David, I am entirely confident that he is repentant and will not repeat-offend. Nonetheless, the boy must be expelled from Northside. For David’s sake, justice would do well to be tempered with mercy here, but our no-tolerance policy against violence need be unequivocally enforced for the good of the school. If David should attempt to enroll in one of your schools at the start of next year, I urge you to keep that in mind.
It is my hope that you would admit him as a second-grader—we are only three days away from the end of the academic year, and he is a good boy, a good student. He would come to you with my highest recommendations.
Of greater concern than the attack itself are the pennyguns.
There is evidence which suggests that a number of boys at Jewish day schools throughout the Chicago area may be in possession of these weapons. This evidence comes in the form of a photocopied document, titled “Ulpan,” that we discovered during a search of David Kahn’s desk. A copy will be faxed to each of you. As you will soon see, the document not only offers instructions for how to build weapons, but instructions for how to teach others to build them.
Most troublingly of all, “Ulpan” terminates in a call to arms in the name of the Jewish religion.
I am confident that desk- and locker-searches should do away with most of the weapons and copies of “Ulpan.” We are currently in the process of performing such searches at Northside. I would imagine that the students whose weapons are not discovered (and 105
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confiscated) will—upon witnessing the penalties (one-day suspensions) suffered by those students who are found to be in possession of the weapons—see the academic, if not the moral, liability in carrying pennyguns, and will proceed, of their own volition, to dispose of their weapons, as well as their copies of “Ulpan.”
Of greatest concern is the document’s author, Gurion Maccabee, a nine-year-old Northside sixth-grader who most of you know, if not personally, then by reputation. After his expulsion from the Solomon Schecter School, I admitted Gurion to Northside because I believe in mercy, in second chances. Our student body had, up until this point, profited by that belief. Now we suffer for it.
Students, as Headmaster Unger can attest to, follow Gurion.
Many call him “Rabbi.” In class, they defer to him in all matters, whether secular or Judaic, and on the playground, they stand on line to speak to him. He is as intelligent and charismatic a boy as rumors would suggest, but he is equally as disturbed. When, earlier today, in conference, I asked Gurion why he felt the need to arm his fellow students, he said that his aim was to “help the Israelite children to protect themselves from the increasingly violent population of Canaanites for whom you (I, Rabbi Kalisch) would have us lay down.” He then made reference to the antisemitic violence that took place three Saturdays ago, outside of the Fairfield Street Synagogue after services, commenting that,
“Sometimes a scholar must become a soldier.” When I pointed out to him that the teenagers who’d thrown the stones at the congregants had, within twenty-four hours of the attack, been taken into custody by the authorities, he said, “There’s no King in Israel.”
When I let him know that he would be expelled from Northside, 106
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he told me, “There’s no King in Israel.” And when I told him that I would be sending a letter about him to the heads of all the Jewish parochial schools in and around Chicago, urging them to bar his enrollment, Gurion said, “There’s no King in Israel.” A short time later, while waiting in my office for his father to pick him up, he became visibly upset, and called me a “snivelling Sadducee.”
The boy’s mother—a mental-health professional, herself—has, since his enrollment at Northside, done everything she can to limit our social worker’s access to him, has taken him off his medication (if ever she administered it at all—this was being looked into), and refuses to acknowledge that he needs help. Judah Maccabee will hear nothing against his son. The situation is impossible.
I sincerely hope that some institution in this world will make Gurion better, but it is my whole-hearted belief that his continued presence in any of our schools would only be detrimental to the well-being of the local Jewish community. I hope you will not grant Gurion another chance. He would surely disappoint you.
In closing, I ask you to please forgive the informality of this group e-mail. If the information it contains did not require immediate dissemination, I would have taken the time to send individualized letters by post. Please feel free to contact me with any questions you might have. I will do my best to answer them.
Sincerely,
Rabbi Alan Kalisch,
Headmaster, Northside Hebrew Day School
PS: Janice and I will be hosting a 4th of July picnic at our family farm. The foals born there this spring (2 of them!) are not only 107
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healthy, but beautiful—just to see them walking, with all their horsey pride, is a treat—and we want to share our joy with others, as well as some kosher barbecue and traditional festivity (the fire-works, though nothing compared to those you’d see at Navy Pier, do rival the suburban), so if you’re willing to shlep the kids out to Galina, please do so; we have many guestrooms for those who’d like to stay overnight. RSVP to this email address.
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The lights were on, but the gym was empty; third-period PE had swim-unit, too. The end-of-class tone was twenty minutes away, so they’d be at the pool for at least another ten, which gave me time to 108
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piss without risk of detection, and that’s what I did, though I only barely had to. I wanted no distractions when I fired on the clock.
In the language of industrial psychology researchers, the locker-room bathroom was a 2S-3U, which meant it housed a pair of stalls and three urinals. According to this study my mother once showed me—she thought it was funny—most guys entering 2S-3U’s go straight for the urinal farthest from the door, unless the urinal farthest from the door is occupied, in which case most go to the one that’s closest to the door so as not to stand next to a guy who is pissing, and if the only unoccupied urinal’s the middle one, not only do most guys go to one of the stalls, but even though all they’re doing is pissing, they stay for much longer than it takes to piss, engaging in what the authors of the study term “the phantom defecation stratagem” because they are embarrassed that they didn’t choose to go to the unoccupied urinal and they feel that they need to save face.
I’d never once phantomly defecated, myself, but my choices in bathrooms, apart from that, did used to be typical. After I’d read the study, however, I quit going to the urinal farthest from the door. Whenever I’d enter an empty 2S-3U, I’d head straightaway for the one in the middle. What that did was cause most guys who came in after me to go to a stall. More than most guys, really; nearly all guys. Say eight out of ten, and call the stat reliable—