Free The Instructions by Adam Levin

split the center of the lectern with a flying axe-chop. It’s a trick of the wrists my mother taught me—you twist them. It adds torque.
    A couple students were crying by then, and Unger had me around the chest with his arm, and Emmanuel and Samuel told Unger to leave me alone, and so did Ben Brodsky, who wasn’t crying at all.
    I yelled up into Unger’s ear: You’re scared of anything you don’t understand so you worship it. You kiss its ass! He dragged me into the hall and through the door of his office and said he was sick of this and he would kick me out. And I told him he wouldn’t.
    And then he said, “You’re not the messiah.” And I told him that all my actions had served justice, and he yelled, “You are not the messiah!” He yelled it so loud that if there was an audience, the audience would have suspected dramatic irony. They would have suspected that Unger had run out of reasons to think I wasn’t the messiah, so all he could do was yell really loud that I wasn’t. Which is even more ironic because I obviously wasn’t the messiah. First of all, if I was the messiah, there’d be perfect justice throughout the world and the schmuck across from whose desk I was sitting wouldn’t hold a position of authority over me. Secondly, we’d both be in Israel. Thirdly, all the dead would have begun to rise out of the peak of the Mount of Olives, the most righteous first, and I’d be studying Torah with Moses, who’d want to hear what I thought, and probably Rashi and Maimonedes and Samuel and Ruth and Rabbi Akiva too. Those are just some of the reasons why it should have been obvious to anyone who was scholarly that I wasn’t the 77
    ADAM LEVIN
    THE INSTRUCTIONS
    messiah. And I never said I was the messiah, either, and when other kids said it in front of me, I set them straight, and if they couldn’t be set straight, I’d distract them off the subject, usually with pratfalls, which I had a serious talent for. What I did say, after the third time Unger yelled “You are not the messiah!” was: I might be. And that was also true. Even though my father’s name was Judah Maccabee, and the original Judah Maccabee was a Cohain, we weren’t Cohains. My father’s grandfather was a Judite who changed his name when he got to America—in Russia, his name was Macarevich. We were Judites, my family, and it is for sure that the messiah will be a Judite, and Unger knew the messiah would be a Judite, and he also knew that he, himself, was a Cohain, which meant he was in the line of Moses’s brother Aron, and Aron, like Moses, was a Levite, and a Levite can’t be a Judite, so Unger couldn’t be the messiah, and I think this made him angry. Cohains are assigned custodianship of the Temple, and that’s an honorable thing to be assigned—but there’s no Temple. It takes the messiah to build the Temple. It takes a Judite. And it’s true that lots of Israelites—especially Cohains—didn’t like to hear that.
    They didn’t like to hear that the Temple needed building . They liked to say the Temple would descend from the sky, but I never believed that, and neither did any number of other scholars, Maimonedes included. We did not believe the Temple would descend from the sky. So when I said to Unger what I was just about to say, and I used the word you , I did not mean we , and Unger knew that. What I said to him was this: You can’t build the Temple.
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    ADAM LEVIN
    THE INSTRUCTIONS
    And what Unger did was laugh at me, right in my face, and he told me, “The Temple will descend from the sky. No one will build it. That is the truth. But that’s well beside the point, isn’t it, Gurion? Because even if I’m wrong about that—even if the vast majority of the rabbinate is wrong and the Temple will after all be built by the messiah, Gurion—and who knows, right? it’s possible, I guess, that we’re all wrong about that—the one thing we know for sure, the one thing no one, not even anyone in this room