Seven skinny cows cannibalizing seven fat ones as dreamed by a man who’d never dealt with cattle: that, with its crystal-clear one-to-one relationship between the symbols and what they corresponded to — and without anything extra, without spilling a single drop—that is what I believed a prophecy was supposed to look like.
Though wholly beloved, Main Man was retarded, and, as with no few other famously compelling lies — e.g., beautiful girls can’t get dates, powerful men father weak sons, terrorists are the new freedom fighters, enmity breeds respect, no one hates the Jews more than the Jews, etc. — the lie that being retarded inherently makes a person closer to Adonai only seems true because it describes an irony. So even though, on reflection, Main Man’s weird utterances seem to have been obliquely prophetic — and maybe they were — there was no good reason to believe they were prophetic at the time.
“But what about Vincie Portite?” ask both the haters and scholars alike. “What about what he said to you on Thursday’s intramural bus?”
What Vincie Portite said to me on Thursday’s intramural bus was that he, Eliyahu, and the rest of the Side believed, to varying degrees and for nebulous reasons, that something big was to happen soon; whether as soon as Friday or not, no one but Eliyahu seemed to be certain at all, and even he, as he has himself since testified, “was somewhat less than reliable due to [his] overwhelming state of verklemptness” when he told Vincie, “There will be no Monday.” Furthermore, the “something big” that Vincie and the rest of them believed was soon to happen, was described to me as “the destruction of the Arrangement.”
Now, it is true that when Vincie described it, I quickly came to believe he was correct. I quickly came to believe that “the destruction of the Arrangement” was imminent. I knew it to be true the way I knew Adonai was real and I was in love with June, and I will not deny that. However, what this phrase meant to me—“the destruction of the Arrangement”—was hardly comparable to what ended up happening on Friday. I imagined we might arrive at a means of action that would cause Botha to quit his job, or Floyd to be humiliated, or Desormie to never desormiate again. I thought certain deserving basketballers might receive some come-uppance, and that maybe, if I was lucky, I might find justification to cause our local up-and-coming young popstar to bleed a little, or even get deformed. In sum: I thought of Vincie’s and Eliyahu’s use of “the destruction of the Arrangement” as a kind of overstated euphemism for such events. Kind of like how when a toughguy in a movie threatens his enemy with an “I’ll break every bone in your body,” and everyone watching, as well as the toughguy and the guy he has threatened, knows full well that if there is a physical confrontation in which the toughguy is victorious, there will nonetheless be enemy bones — many, if not all of them — which will remain unbroken; and furthermore that none, let alone all, of the enemy’s bones need be broken for the toughguy’s threat to come true. The every-bone-threatening toughguy who acquires victory by way of any act of violence — a single blow to his enemy’s windpipe, for example — is not considered a liar, let alone called one.
But “Sudden Holiday”: If I hadn’t already planned the Damage Proper, then why, in the email, did I tell the scholars to bring their weapons to Aptakisic? Why did I tell them to come to Aptakisic at all? Could I not have met with them in my backyard after Havdallah on Saturday, as so many of them had already been planning?
I had them bring their weapons for the reason I stated in the email. If there was to be a holiday, I didn’t know what the holiday would celebrate. I didn’t even know if “celebrate” was the right verb. Some holidays, like Yom Ha-Shoah, only commemorate. Some, like Simcha Torah, do both. Yom Kippur does neither — it’s a day of atonement. What I knew was I would deliver my scripture to the scholars. Maybe the holiday would celebrate the deliverance; maybe, if I was somehow wrong to deliver scripture, the holiday would mournfully commemorate the folly of my having done so. Maybe the deliverance would lead to something else that the holiday would celebrate or commemorate. Maybe what it led to would be military, for no calendar, let alone the Israelite calendar, is short on military holidays. And again, maybe there would be no holiday. If there were going to be a holiday, though, and if that holiday were going to be military, I wanted to do all I could to make sure it was more like Chanukah or Yom Yerushalayim than the Fasts of Tammuz or Tevet. I wanted to be sure that victory for the scholars was at least possible. So I told them to come heavy.
And as for why Aptakisic instead of my backyard: I was finished with stealth. It was time to get caught, witnessed. I wanted to incite as bold-faced a brand of defiance as I could. For a scholar to leave his home after Havdallah was not uncommon, so it was possible, even likely, that if the scholars came to my house after Havdallah, many of their parents would not find out — let alone all at the same time — where the scholars had gone. The absence of two-hundred-plus scholars from a few Israelite schools, however, could not help but get noticed. Calls would be made. Panic would ensue. Furthermore, for the scholars to compound the forbidden act of contacting me with that of ditching school — which they would have to do to get to Aptakisic on time — would attest to my being in possession of a much larger influence over them than would their merely coming over to my house.
The greater the demonstration of my influence, the more the scholars’ parents would fear me, and I wanted as many of them to fear me as possible, and I wanted them to fear me as deeply as possible. I wanted them to dread evermore what I might, if crossed, do with their sons. Since they had not thought once, let alone twice, then let them think a thousand times, I thought, of what I might be capable if again harm came to my father.
I expect that many scholars, even those with the best of intentions, will, at first, attempt to resist this commentary on commentaries. Since the Damage Proper, well-meaning factions have been culting up my personality, and although I’m flattered by the intent behind this culting, efforts to render me and my actions perennially good and cohesive lead — at least in some cases — not only to Orwellian doubletalk (“the people’s prince,” “peacemaking warrior,” etc.), but also bad scholarship, a kind that permits and even sometimes encourages lazy, unrigorous interpretations of the as-yet-quite-young Gurionic oral tradition, wherein I’m put forth as everything to everyone, and all at the same time. Which is bad enough. And it will be even worse if this lack of rigor establishes itself as a habit, for such a habit will certainly have undermined — will certainly be undermining—the study and interpretation of this, The Instructions.
Nothing, scholars, nothing in all the world is good because I say it is good. Nothing is right because I say it is right. What I say is good is good for the reasons I cite. What I say is right is right for those reasons. If you don’t understand the reasons, you will one day — if you study — but you can’t just take my word on what is right and good and expect that to suffice. If you could do that, I would never have mentioned my reasons.