“My dad calls you ‘that shvontz with the gums,’ so let’s go already,” said Samuel.
“What’s wrong with my gums?”
“Nothing, you shvontz.”
“Then why’s your dad specify the gums if it’s nothing?”
“Specify. He doesn’t even know who you are.”
“But I see him all the time.”
“You’re not memorable, Shai.”
“What’s wrong with my gums?”
“I’m telling you I made it up.”
“Why, though? Why’d you say ‘with the gums’?”
“It was the first thing that came to mind.”
“But why was it the first thing that came to mind?”
“Probably I was looking at your gums.”
“What’s wrong with my gums, you look at them?”
“You’re crazy.”
“Maybe you’re crazy, Samuel. Did you ever think of that? Maybe you can’t stop looking at my gums.”
“Now that you mention it, my eyes are drawn to them,” said Samuel. “What is it about them, I wonder, that draws my eyes?”
“Stop messing with me.”
“No,” said Samuel. “Before, I was messing with you. Now I’m thinking: you got a lot of gums. They’re…”
“What? No. You’re messing with me. No. What? They’re what?”
“Meaty.”
“Meaty?”
“You got a lot of gums, Shai.”
Shai looked to Solly. Solly looked away.
“What?” Shai said. “They’re meaty?”
I missed you guys, I said.
“We missed you, too,” said Shai.
“You know, you’re thick sometimes,” said Samuel. “The Rabbi already knows you missed him. That was his polite way of saying, ‘Go home.’”
“Well, I did miss him, though,” said Shai.
Emmanuel had yet to tie his second boot, and I saw that he was trying to linger. Samuel now saw too and, saying goodbye, he shouldered the others outside.
I pressed my spine against the doorframe, bracing to hear June’s conversion get questioned. Emmanuel put his hat on, took it off, stared at it. Maybe I’d overestimated my effect — my lily a sunflower, or even just a dandelion. He put the hat on again. Then he took it off again.
Nu? I said to him.
“This hiding,” he said. “That we’re supposed to ‘lay low.’ How you told us to tell the other scholars to ‘lay low’—it troubles me.”
I dropped to the floor beside him, pretended to give him a deadarm.
“What?” he said.
I thought you were gonna say something else, I said.
“Something having to do with June and your being in love with her and her so-called conversion, you thought.”
Yeah, I said.
“I might have. I might have unpacked the logics of love and Israelite conversion and then discussed your theory of potential messiahs as it relates to those logics. I might have said something like, ‘Gurion, if love is forever, and therefore what it means to be in love is that you stay in love forever, then one can never truly know if he is in love until the moment he dies. And yet you say you are in love with June.’ That might have been premise one. If I wanted to introduce premise two, I might have gone on to say, ‘Since all it means to be an Israelite is you have the soul of an Israelite, and the soul is eternal, and the soul from its creation is immutably Israelite or non-, then no one can truly convert; they have or haven’t been an Israelite all along, and therefore conversion ceremonies are only ceremonious. At best such ceremonies acknowledge a truth that requires no acknowledgment to be true—This Israelite is an Israelite—and at worst these ceremonies are but lying declarations—This non-Israelite is an Israelite. So if June is an Israelite, she has always been an Israelite, whether you or I or she believed it to be so, whether you or I or she currently believe it. And no matter what we say about it, either. Yet about it, you say, “June is an Israelite.” And in response, we say, “Amen.” And all of it is heartfelt.’
“Then,” he said, “if after presenting these premises, I felt you were still listening to me, I might have offered some preparatory commentary before arriving at the heart of the matter, like: ‘To fall in love, two people must meet somehow — fatefully, accidentally, or on purpose; doesn’t matter here — they must meet by way of their eyes, their ears, their scent, whatever. Maybe they have to do other things to fall in love, too — speak endearments, write letters, kiss, who knows? — but we are certain that before they fall in love, some type of observable phenomenon that qualifies as ‘meeting’ must take place. We know for a fact that no two people have ever fallen in love with each other without having met. To fall in love is to become in love. We all believe that is true. It is not controversial. Yet that there’s nothing anyone can do to become an Israelite — that’s not controversial either. As I already said, you are or you aren’t one, and we all believe that is true.’
“And after saying all that,” said Emmanuel, “I might have attempted to bring it all home like this: ‘So despite both truths, by nature, being immutable — once in love, forever in love; once an Israelite, always an Israelite — one truth is set in motion, at least partly, by human beings, and the other is set in motion solely by Adonai. And that is complicated enough. But now we move on to your theory of potential messiahs, which concerns itself with both types of immutable truth at once: Adonai creates a potential messiah, one per generation, and then that potential messiah becomes the actual messiah when human beings do or fail to do something or some set of things — who knows what exactly? — to set his potential in motion. So while the potential of a potential messiah is set in motion solely by Adonai, the actualization of that potential will be set in motion, at least partly, by human beings. Agreed?’—”
Agreed, I said.
“I was only asking the hypothetical Gurion, to whom I might have said all of this, but I’m glad you agree. The hypothetical one would have agreed as well. He would have agreed exactly as you have, and I would have gone on to say, ‘According to you, Gurion, we should not say that anyone is the messiah until he has had “victory undeniable”; until perfect justice is visited upon the world; until calling the messiah “messiah” is, for all intents and purposes, redundant. And that seems cautious, safe. And that is the appeal of your approach, for false messiahs haunt our history. We have followed them, and suffered greatly for it. But there are a pair of potential pitfalls to this safe approach, and these are major. The first one is this: faith becomes irrelevant. If we cannot call the messiah “messiah” til doing so is no more risky than calling a lemon sour, a goat smelly, or Natalie Portman a world-class knockout, what is the point of ever looking for the messiah? When he comes, we’ll know it, so why bother looking? What is the incentive for waiting or hoping? Why bother trying to bring him at all? He will be self-evident, and so the end of faith. And maybe you’d say, “That is the point, Emmanuel. We should not have faith because the messiah will come. We should have faith because faith is good, and part of faith is to believe that the messiah will come.” And maybe you’d be right. Maybe those scholars whose faith is bolstered by its own promise — the promise that faith’s objects, despite their current state of unfalsifiability, will one day become evident to everyone and in turn reward the scholars for their faith — maybe those scholars are lousy scholars. Selfish, self-centered would-be know-it-alls, driven by the desire to one day say to the faithless “I told you so” or the fear of having ever to hear that statement addressed to them. Maybe their faith is not a noble faith in what should be true, but a lower kind of faith in what they fear is so. And maybe that latter kind’s not faith at all. And so maybe most of us are faithless, impurely motivated, heartened only by our so-called faith’s promise of coming worldly empowerment. And yet surely some of us aren’t…