Free The Instructions by Adam Levin Page A

disagrees with, is that the messiah will be… what? He’ll be Jewish. The messiah will be a Jew. Do you understand? Do you understand what I’m expressing? To you? To Gurion Maccabee?
    Do you understand what I’m telling you, Gurion? The messiah, Gurion, will be a Jew.” It was the all-time snakiest thing anyone had ever said to me. He was talking about my mother. I was half lost-tribe. You couldn’t see it in my skin unless you were trying, but my mother’s parents were from Ethiopia, and a few Ashkenazis still thought that meant I wasn’t an Israelite. Unger was the only one who’d ever said it to me, though. Right to my face. I grabbed the nearest thing on his desk and I flung it. I flung it at his head.
    The nearest thing was a stapler. It opened in the air and caught him on the eye-corner. He shrieked. Blood streamed down onto his shoulder. That’s how I ended up at Northside Hebrew Day.
    And when I got kicked out of Northside for teaching my brothers to protect themselves in the one way our Israelite schools refused to, I went to public school in Evanston. And when I got banned from the Evanston School System for protecting myself in the most 79
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    basic way, I went to Aptakisic in Deerbrook Park. It was all connected, all the things that kept happening with me and schools, and I wanted to read what others wrote about it, then use what was relevant to give my scripture— this scripture—more context.
    Context was the one thing I wished there was more of for Torah.
    That isn’t to say I thought Torah less than perfect—I didn’t think that at all—but if, say, archaeologists somehow dug up parchments that were authored by Pharoah or any one of the twelve spies, let alone by Aron, Zipporah, or Jethro, and especially if those parchments were commentaries on the events in Torah in which their authors played a role, I would want to read them. I would want that so much.
    Brodsky said, “I’ll make you a deal. If you promise to stop fighting, I’ll have Miss Pinge give you a copy of your file.”
    Promising’s against the Law, I said. If I tell you I won’t fight anymore, that should be good enough.
    “That is good enough,” he said. “You agree not to fight anymore?”
    I said, No.
    “You’re impossible!” he said. Now he was pissed at me.
    I felt better and I egged him on. I said, My mom’ll get my record anyway.
    “That’ll be up to her,” said Brodsky. He picked up the telephone and dialed. A few seconds later, he said, “I’d like to speak to Judah Maccabee…Yes, I’ll wait.”
    Judah Maccabee was not my mother.
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    Tamar Maccabee was my mother. Whereas Judah Maccabee was my father, whose voice was louder than anyone’s. You were not Key:
    supposed to bother him at work, especially not in the middle of BOLD = HARD TRANSLUCENT PLASTIC
    ITALICS = HIGHLY ELASTIC OPAQUE RUBBER
    a trial, and he was at work, in the middle of a trial, representing Patrick Drucker, a local White Supremacist, in a case against the city of Wilmette, Illinois. My dad knew about my fight at King Middle School in Evanston, but he didn’t know about any of the ones at Aptakisic. My mom thought it was better if we didn’t mention those to him, and I agreed—I wanted to protect him from disappointment. I still remained calm though, for roughly three seconds, because I decided Brodsky had just made a mistake, and I was going to tell him that he must have dialed the wrong number, that he was supposed to dial the number for TamarMaccabee, not Judah, but right when I opened my 81
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    mouth to speak, Brodsky nodded at me, half-smiling, his