I waited beside his chair for him to notice me. After a minute of nothing, I dropped my pass on his keyboard. His shoulders jumped like I’d startled him and he revolved. It was a fun thing to watch — him seeing me. His tri-focals were smeared heavily with finger-grease, and on top of that, I was standing in an unfocused middle-ground he’d have had quadrafocals for if they made them. His eyes wobbled in their sockets and he moved his head down-and-toward and then up-and-away from me like a strolling pigeon.
“I know,” he said, pulling on his string-tie. “I know. If Mark Twain were a pigeon and etcetera.”
I said, You’re my favorite teacher.
“But you never come to class, you little firebrand!”
I said, I’m not in your class!
“How come?”
I’m in the Cage, I said.
“Hell with the Cage!” he said. He checked his roster. “Gurion Maccabee?”
Would you like a warm Coke? I said.
“No thank you,” he said. “Burns my guts, that stuff. Check your email?”
I said, I’ll wait til I get home.
“Well,” he said, “that’s discipline! I have to check mine every hour, or I get nervous, know what I mean. Now, I want you to take a seat, but before you do that, I want you to take this asinine assignment off my hands and, once you’re sitting, I want you to fill it with assininities multitudinous.”
I said, Where should I sit?
“Wherever,” he said. “Just don’t yell or kill anyone.”
He handed me the detention assignment and I headed to a table at the back of the library to sit with Nakamook.
Nakamook said, “That Klapper? He pretended to be all fuddy-duddily angry about how noisy the lunchroom was, and then as soon as we got out of there, he told us, ‘Not to worry, students, I’m no fascist — just wanna check my e-mail.’ And then he let us check our e-mail if we wanted. I got one from my cousin Phil in New Hampshire. His dad just bought him a rifle. He’s lucky. I want a gun. Not to shoot anybody with or anything, but to clean it and know the parts of. The barrel and the trigger and the stock and the sight — that’s all I know. But there’s all these other parts, the parts that make it work. And plus you could shoot people with it.”
Where’s Eliyahu? I said.
“Probably trying to decide if someone’s a Jew.”
I said, He’s a good person.
“He’s a weird person,” Benji said. “He lives with his aunt and uncle. Why’s he live with his aunt and uncle? He mentioned something about it in a way like he wanted me to ask him, and so I didn’t ask him cause I don’t like being hinted at.”
I said, I don’t know why he lives with his aunt and uncle, but he’s friends.
Benji said, “He said you shouldn’t be in love with the girl you love — that’s not friendly.”
I said, He didn’t say that. He just said she didn’t look like an Israelite. And she doesn’t really. Not particularly.
“It’s what he meant, though,” Benji said. “It’s like a kind of racism.”
I said, I can’t marry a girl who isn’t an Israelite — Eliyahu was looking out for me.
Benji said, “Of course you can marry a girl who isn’t an Israelite.”
I said, But my sons wouldn’t be Israelites.
Benji said, “What if she converted?”
I said, Conversion’s complicated — you don’t so much convert, it’s this other thing. It’s called converting, but if you do it, it means you’ve been an Israelite all along, so it’s not really converting and—
He said, “But either way, she could do something?”
I guess so, I said.
He said, “And if she wouldn’t, then you’d—”
I said, My lobe would break.
“Your what?”
I said, It doesn’t matter. I said, She’s an Israelite.
He said, “Calm down. How hard is it to convert, anyway?”
I said, I told you it doesn’t fucken matter.
He said, “I’m just asking.”
Why? I said. I said, You wanna marry me?
All of a sudden, Benji acted real interested in the grain of the library table’s fakewood. So I wrote my detention assignment because I wasn’t going to apologize to him.
Name: Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee
Grade: 5 6 7 8
Homeroom: The Cage
Date: 11/14/2006
Complaint Against Student (from Complaint Against Student Sheet)
Speaking out of turn, inappropriate tones, speaking out of turn, turning in seat. The Cage. 1st Period. 11/07/06. Mr. Botha.
Title
Actual, Potential, and Potentially Potential Messiahs
Introduction
A potential messiah is born once every generation.
No one ever knows who he is, since there are so few restrictions on who he could be. If you look into the face of any male Judite, you may be looking into the face of the potential messiah. You probably aren’t, but you may be. And because the diaspora has left so many of the records of our paternal lineages mangled, you may find yourself looking into the face of a Judite while believing he’s a Levite, which means that you are potentially looking into the face of your generation’s potential messiah whenever you are looking into the face of any Israelite male. And so if you are an Israelite male yourself, and you are looking in the mirror, you might be a lot more important than you look. You probably aren’t, but you might be.
It is surely true that the prophets were aware of this problem and wanted to address it — there are many prophecies about who the messiah could be. But it is just as true that when facts can’t get bent to fit prophecies, prophecies can bend to fit facts. Either kind of bending could be an exercise in sacrilege. Some might call that statement an exercise in sacrilege, which means some might call me sacrilegious for making it. That does not mean they would be right. They could be sacrilegious themselves. Yet even if they were pious they might not be right. If I am right, it might make me a prophet, and a prophet is a bright thing, and while those who can’t see a bright thing are blind, those who do see a bright thing can get blind doing so.
Either way, it is surely true that when facts can’t get bent to fit prophecies, prophecies can bend to fit facts.
Body
Persons
For example: Yeshua.
Yeshua came to Jerusalem from Nazareth, and the priests believed prophecies which stated that the messiah would come from Bethlehem. The Christian gospels say that Yeshua, though he was raised in Nazareth, was born in Bethlehem. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Either way, who can really say where Bethlehem is? If the actual messiah turns out to have been born in Big Fork, Montana, a wiseman at a later date will manage to determine that Big Fork, Montana is, in some relevant and probably figurative way, Bethlehem. Either that, or that the meaning of Bethlehem is something entirely different than what we’ve suspected for thousands of years. In that sense, Bethlehem could be anywhere, and so the Bethlehem prophecy is useless.