The Instructions (93 page)

ADAM LEVIN

THE INSTRUCTIONS

much as it would be possible—hear or (with the exception of studying the canons of Philip Roth and Don DeLillo, whose
End Zone
he has lately, for hobby purposes, been translating into Hebrew) read English.

Of course I protested: Why so Borgesian an assignment? Weren’t there more important things for me to do than translate a translation back into its original language?

“No,” said the Rabbi. Nor would he let me see the original. Just Emmanuel’s translation.

Long made short, my task was surprisingly easy. I brought the re-translation to Gurion on June 18, 2009, and I told him so. He informed me that Emmanuel had reported similarly. He took out his original English version and compared paragraphs for a few minutes, a quarter-hour tops, then told me, “It’s good. Thank you, Eliyahu.”

To have three months of work, however easy, merely browsed by the friend for whom you did that work, and even if he tells you it’s good—not to mention that it seemed insincere, he wasn’t smiling, scholars, I’ll tell you that—it was infuriating.

I said so.

The Rabbi pushed the two versions across the table. “See for yourself,”

he said.

And so I saw: My re-translation was, word for word and jot for jot, identical to the original.

“I thought it might be this way,” the rabbi said. “I guess I probably knew it would. I guess this means I have to finish.”

My re-translation’s having turned out identical to the rabbi’s original meant—to him—that his scripture was translingual, and therefore definitive. That is what he told me. Had it turned out otherwise, i.e.,
not
definitive, he would have, he explained, ceased to write scripture and 868

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stayed silent forever, never allowing what he’d written to be read by anyone other than myself and Emmanuel, never completing what he’d spent nearly three years starting. As scholars can imagine, the thought of that shook me, still shakes me today (had I somehow managed to screw up the re-translation, “The Gurionic War” would not have been written;
The
Instructions
would not exist
), though not half as much as did the look on Gurion’s face when he uttered the words, “I guess this means I have to finish.” That look, scholars, the grimness of which I’d not seen in evidence since the so-called “11/17 Miracle” itself… That look would have wilted young David ben-Jesse astride Gath’s giant in the Valley of Elah; the head would have dropped from his capable hands.

Even so, while I do agree without hesitation that the scripture you hold in your hands is definitive, I cannot share—try as I might—in Gurion’s certainty that it is “translingual” (though for reasons I trust by now to be obvious, I did not argue when he first claimed it was). However remarkable, the identicality of my re-translation and Gurion’s original—

along with the identicality of the original and re-translation of the latter ten books, which you’re about to read, and to which Emmanuel and I applied the same methodology as we had to the first ten (Hebrew-to-English-to-Hebrew this time)—might be otherwise explained by what’s lately known in social-science communities as “The Gurion Effect,” and

“Gurionic Solomony” among non-pseudoscientists. Both Sandra Billings, in her “Assessment of a Client” (p. 291), and Rabbi Avel Salt, in his letter to Leonard Brodsky (p. 217), glancingly refer to certain outcomes of Gurionic Solomony, but neither really describes it, not even briefly. And so, to describe it, however briefly:

Anyone who reads or listens to Gurion ben-Judah without enmity becomes more like him; demonstrably more like him. E.g., before I, at the 869

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age of twelve, met Gurion, I was no doubt booksmart, even exceptionally so, but I was not on a path toward finishing college at the age of nineteen.

Now, at the age of nineteen, I’m in law school. I will not detail it here for security reasons, but Emmanuel Liebman’s experience has been highly similar to mine. Suffice it to say that among those who have encountered the Rabbi and/or his work, instances of grade-skipping and a generally increased talent for verbal articulation are not only manifold, but well documented. You can even witness these changes happening (to Vincie Portite, for example) over the course of the four days on which the vast majority of
The Instructions
focuses. And lest I be accused of coyness, let it not go without saying: If you are with us, you will certainly witness such changes in yourself as you proceed through the scripture. I would not be too surprised were I to learn that you have already.

But the point I’m trying to make is this: Given the effect of Gurionic Solomony, Emmanuel and I, two of the five people with whom Gurion has maintained the closest contact over the last few years, might be two of the
only
five people with the ability to translate/re-translate
The
Instructions
in the way that Gurion himself would have. And so the fact that we have done so does not—not necessarily, at least—indicate that
The Instructions
is translingual, at least not in the general sense. It only indicates the
potential
of
The Instructions
to be translingual. It might, of course, further indicate that if you’re a scholar without enmity toward Gurion, and you were to come to know him as well as we do—it is his hope, and ours, that reading
The Instructions
will itself engender such knowing, or at least a sufficient approximation thereof—
The Instructions
would in turn
become
translingual. For you. The scholar. It might. We hope. And so maybe I’m merely splitting hairs.

Yet maybe, though splitting hairs, I’m not
merely
splitting hairs. In 870

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either case, who am I to split hairs? To you. Who, to you, am I to split hairs? You don’t know me from Adam. Not really. Not yet.

Come heavy next year in Jerusalem.

—Eliyahu of Brooklyn, December 2013

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13

THE FIVE

Thursday, November 16, 2006

4th Period–5th Period

THE INSTRUCTIONS

Fourth period, I had individual therapy. Call-Me-Sandy had a bag of wrapped caramels. She held it out across her desk. A one-pound bag, an inch above the blotter, her elbow at rest between the lips of a tissuebox.

“So?” she said. “How are things?” she said.

Her bony wrist, her medium-length nails, raggedy cuticles, the bag slightly trembling, its stiff plastic rattling. The overhead light panel flickered twelve times.

“I’m worried about you.”

Thirty more flickers, and she set the bag of caramels to rest on the blotter, put her hand in her lap, took a sip from her coffee.

Ninety-six flickers. Three sips from her coffee. Uncountable flickers. She chinned the air at the bag of caramels.

Twenty-seven flickers.

She lifted the bag, held it over the blotter. Again the bag rattled.

“I’m worried about you.”

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You said that already.

“You didn’t respond.”

You’re not worried about me. You’re worried because you’re nervous.

“I worry that I’m nervous?”

Maybe that too, I said. What I meant is you’re a nervous person and nervous people worry. The nervousness comes first with nervous people. The vector proceeds from nervousness. Like how you’re worrying that bag of candy. As it were. Your hand’s not shaking because the bag’s rattling—the bag’s rattling because your hand is shaking. And maybe you don’t notice the bag rattling and it stops there, or maybe you do notice the bag rattling and you realize your hand is shaking, and so maybe you stop your hand from shaking, or maybe seeing that your hand shakes makes your hand shake worse, which makes the bag shake worse. Either way, though, your worries are a rattling bag of caramels in the hand of your nervousness. Some people, though: their nervousness is a rattling bag of caramels in the hand of their worries.

Those people look calmly on the world until they come across something worrisome, and only then do they worry, and only when they worry do they get nervous. They act upon themselves prior to being acted upon
by
themselves. They’re the healthier kind of people.

“That’s an almost gestalt kind of observation.”

No it’s not, I said. I said, It’s homuncular. It’s nonsense. Games with prepositions to impress and intimidate.

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“Was your mother a gestalt practitioner at any point?”

Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates.

“Are you upset with me, Gurion?”

Why should I be upset?

“I’m asking.”

Why are you asking?

“You don’t usually make fun of me.”

Was I
making
fun? I said. I knew I was
having
fun, but—

“It sounded like you were making fun of me,” she said.

How long have you known you were a lesbian? I said.

She choked and coughed—wrongpiped coffeespit—and

dropped the caramels. “Excuse me?” she said.

You heard me, I said.

“I don’t…”

How long have you known you wanted sex from women?

“This isn’t appropriate.”

If someone with a vagina likes vaginas but tells herself she doesn’t like vaginas, or tells herself she likes penises but just hasn’t found the right one, or admits to herself that she does like vaginas and doesn’t like penises but consistently refuses to act on her desires for vaginas, is she a lesbian, Sandy? What do you think?

“This is not appropriate.”

How about this one: If someone with a vagina, at age, say, twenty, realizes she likes vaginas and has never liked penises—

i.e., realizes she’s a lesbian—has she been a lesbian all along, or has she only been a lesbian since the moment she realized she 875

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liked vaginas? And if it turns out to be one of the latter two cases, is ‘realize’
the correct verb? That is: Do lesbians become lesbians, or are they born lesbians?

“I can see that you’re angry, Gurion. That’s why—”

Are you getting any? Sex from women, I mean. Have you gotten any sex from your professor? Did you switch voices over coffee and decide to get beers?

“Please, Gurion. You’re worrying me.”

But did you say it like Obama or Daley, Call-Me? That is, if you said anything, how did you suggest it? ‘Join me for a beer, Professor Lakey?’ Or ‘What say we blow dis popstand and get some beerce?’ Which code did you use? Was the moment all post-modern and meta and intertextual and post-ironic because both of you knew that Professor Lakey had read “Assessment of a Client: Gurion Maccabee”?
Or was the moment, after all, just nice and straightforward and full of tension and potential romance because even though she’d read the paper, you couldn’t be sure she’d read it
right
—you couldn’t tell if your encoded, footnoted professions of love for her had even come across—and your professor herself was worried that maybe she’d only seen in the footnotes what she wanted to see, a student with a desirable vagina who wanted to see
her
vagina where there was but a desirably vaginaed student who wanted to talk about linguistics? Did you end up going home together? Did Professor Lakey take you home, Call-Me, or did you end up alone that night, using her, in fantasy, as a tool for venting?

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“You were never supposed to have read that paper.”

That’s the response you’re settling on? Blame the victim?

That’s the response?

“The victim?” she said.

The victim being me. The victim being sentenced to the Cage indefinitely.

“Gurion, you hurt people.”

I hurt people.

“You hurt people, Gurion. You have a history of hurting people. You cause physical harm to people, and you show no remorse.

That’s why you’re in the Cage. I will admit that a lot of what I said about you was inaccurate. This owed partly to my not having known you so well at the time I wrote the paper, but—”

University of Chicago dialect, now. Nearly stentorian. And from such a small head. You are one bold lesbian. You are—

“Make fun of me all you want, Gurion, but I’m coming clean here. I will even admit that many of the inaccuracies in the paper weren’t mistakes, per se, as much as they were—how should I say this? In grad-school—well—”

Sometimes you have to go analytically overboard to prove to your teachers that you’re worth their time.

“Yes. That’s about—”

You constructed me in such a way as to allow yourself room to riff. You needed room to riff on all the valuable knowledge you absorbed in your beloved professor’s writings and lectures.

That would get you the A. Or the date.

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“Yes.”

Did I mention that I think professor Lakey is imaginary? I think she’s your imaginary friend.

Sandy pushed me the tissuebox. I pushed it back. I wasn’t crying. Not even close.

“You were never supposed to have read the paper. I don’t know why Bonnie filed it with your records. I didn’t know she would when I wrote it. She’s—”

It’s your supervisor’s fault.

“Yes.”

The buck stops there.

“Stop it now. Please. If you know half as much as you seem to, you know that despite my mistakes, I care about you, Gurion. I am fond of you. I worry about you. You should not have read that paper. You should never have seen it. I am very worried about you right now.”

You’re nervous.

“That too.”

And I’m in the Cage because I’m remorselessly violent.

“Yes.”

If you had the chance to do it all over again, you’d still have me placed in the Cage indefinitely.

“When you put it like that—”

From the CYA POV—

“It’s not just to cover my ass, Gurion, no. It’s because you hurt people. You cause disruptions and you hurt people. You cannot 878