And so when Gurion left my office, I rushed to write down everything he said to me, as best as I could remember. You see, Leonard, he is a born tzadik, this boy, such a quick one, and it was apparent even then.
This letter is running long, and still I’ve not addressed your signal concern, so I won’t, as much as I’m tempted to, go into detail about my ensuing series of awestruck and often — unfortunately—fumbling scholarly endeavors with Gurion, other than to say that, until the very end of his fourth-grade year, the only thing he seemed to like as much as learning was teaching. And in all of Schechter, there was not a boy or girl who did not profit by or enjoy being taught by him. And yes, this led to some talk among the children at our school of Gurion’s being more than a genius (genius an epithet that no few of our students — some, like Gurion, deservingly; and others, of course, not — have had hurled at them by their loved ones); some talk of his being Moshiach. And yes, there were a few teachers here who were made uncomfortable by this kind of talk, and yes, there was one in particular who maybe did not like Gurion so much to begin with, and true, that one happened to have quite a high professional standing (the highest), and maybe that person acted unprofessionally one day, and surely he provoked an outburst of a violent nature from the quick tzadik in question, and possibly that outburst was not appropriate, and but then likely it was.
What I know for sure is that Gurion had not once acted violently toward others in our school until the day he was forced to leave; had not once in the five years he spent in my classroom offered any encouragement to those who, if you’ll excuse the pun, lionized him; and had but once (in his third-grade year) lost his temper in my presence, which was apparently the result of his remarkably sensitive cranium coming into sudden contact with the underside of an oak table while he retrieved a pencil that he’d accidentally, it seemed, swept to the floor with his fiercely animated hands, hands he’d been using, with perfect pedagogical intent, to punctuate his learned commentary on the flawed nature of angels (one-legged, soulless) and the origin of the lisp of Moses (a hot coal the infant brought to his own lips in Pharaoh’s court, if you don’t know the Midrash). (Later, I asked Gurion why he even bothered to pick the pencil up in the middle of his lecture — it had been going so strongly when he dropped it — and he told me that Simon Rothschild, a new boy at school who was sitting at the far end of the study table, was wearing on his face a look of envy and annoyance, and Gurion knew that if he wanted Simon to pay attention, a gesture of endearing clumsiness would be required to win him over. “So I knocked the pencil under the table,” Gurion said, “but Simon didn’t see. So I got under the table to get the pencil, to show him that I knocked it down there. But then when I banged my head getting it, that was an accident, and I got very angry because I don’t like it when my head is touched, and so when I came up from under the table, I was thinking: Simon made me bang my head. That is why I spun and knocked the chalk-trough off the blackboard — because I wanted to jump across the table and knock Simon’s face off his head, but at the same time I didn’t want to. And it was good that I didn’t go after Simon, but still, I’m sorry I wrecked your blackboard.”)
And furthermore, as you might or might not have noticed by way of his permanent record, Gurion did not, after leaving Schechter, engage in any violence at Northside Hebrew Day School. He is not some loose canon. He wrote those instructions after having witnessed an act of antisemitic violence outside of the Fairfield Street Synagogue, where he used to attend services (without his parents, by the way — their home is secular). If you followed the newspapers last Spring, then what you read was that a group of local Muslim teenagers, claiming to have been inspired by the current Intifada, threw stones at a group of Hasidic congregants on a Saturday and that no one was critically injured. What you did not read was that those congregants who did not duck back inside the synagogue for cover froze where they stood, and that the rabbi, a good man (I know him a little), came forward, apparently in an effort to reason with the stone-throwers, and managed to utter one word, “Please,” before receiving for his trouble a block of jagged concrete in his mouth.