I said, We do whatever seems proper in our eyes.
Emmanuel said, “That’s a terrible answer.”
I said, That does not make it false.
“But it should make it false, though, Rabbi. Don’t you think it should?”
I said, No. I said, We would be angels if it was otherwise, if the laws for everything were always clear and absolute and we always knew what to do. We would never doubt or question. We would be robots.
Emmanuel said, “The suffering of others is the price we pay for our humanity, then.”
I said, And suffering is a price others pay for our humanity.
Emmanuel said, “That shouldn’t be so.”
I said, If you were an angel, you would not be able to imagine that it shouldn’t be so. If you were an angel, you would love the suffering as you would love everything else, because all of it is the creation of God. If you were to love the suffering, you would not be able to love the world despite the suffering. And then you could never hope to repair the world, and so you could never hope to repair God, and God’s love for you would be no greater than his love for the angels, which is no greater than your love for your thumb.
Emmanuel said, “I love my thumb.”
I said, I love my thumb, too, but I would chop it off in a second if doing so was needed to save your life; it’s only a thumb, after all, not a human.
Emmanuel said, “I would chop off my entire hand to save your life.”
I said, Only if you could cauterize it immediately, though, since you’d be unable to tie a tourniquet singlehandedly and the blood-loss would certainly kill you.
I was trying to lighten the conversation a little — I hadn’t seen Emmanuel in too long, and I wanted to joke with him — but he wouldn’t have it.
“Even if I could not cauterize it,” said Emmanuel, “I would give my life to save yours, Rabbi.”
Risk your life, maybe, but not give it, I said.
“Give it,” said Emmanuel.
I said, That’s dumb.
“How can you say that?”
I said, I would never do the same for you. Your life is worth no more than mine.
“Your life is worth more than mine,” said Emmanuel. “And that is why I would give mine for yours.”
I said, It would be a sin.
“A lesser one than letting you die,” he said. “I mean, if you can die.”
I said, If I can die, then who so special am I to be saved at the cost of another boy’s life?
The train slowed and we swayed.
Emmanuel said, “You know who you are.” He looked really disappointed in me. He kept squeezing the knees of his pants. “Is it just you want me to say it?” he said. “Did all those fakes have the right idea after all? You find someone else to annoint you, and then, what, you’re not accountable? You never claimed to be anything more than just a person, a son of man, we have no business expecting anything from you. Is that all you’ve been waiting for, these five months? Because I’ll say it if that’s what you want, if that’s all it takes to make it so. It’s been said thousands of times about you, but what? Not in the proper way? Not at the right venue? Not by the right scholar? If all you need is annointment, just tell me how and I’ll annoint you. But you must know by now that what you’re called is beside the point. With or without annointment, we expect a lot from you. We expect everything. And I apologize for my tone. I should not raise my voice like this, we have been having such a pleasant conversation, Rabbi, but all of us have waited for five months now, and not out of obedience to our parents, who we believe to be misled in regard to you, but out of obedience to you, the one they tell us not to listen to, the one who tells us to listen to them. I am tired of waiting. We are all tired of waiting.”
I said, Emmanuel, I’m ten years old.
He said, “And you’re the only one who thinks that makes a difference, Gurion.”
The only one? I said. I said, There’s millions of Israelites who don’t even know who I am, let alone—
“There are millions of Israelites who call Torah “the Old Testament” and think that means the Ten Commandments. Millions who think Moses was an orator and Adam a Jew. Rashi an Indian God with a giant shvontz and lots of arms. My father’s own cousin Bernie in Highland Park, Gurion — my family got stuck for the night at his house last January, during that blizzard. In the morning, before davening, I ask Bernie if he has any phylacteries I can use, and after winking slyly, he takes me to the master bathroom and pulls from the cabinet an assortment of condoms. Latex ones, intestines ones, reservoir-tipped, no-tipped, with spermicide or without, anesthetically lubricated purple ones with built-in pleasure-giving rivets. Bernie says I can have as many prophylactics as I want, just as long as I’m safe. Says he won’t tell my parents, I don’t have to worry, it is natural to want to have sex with girls, ‘It is for with girls, right, Emmanuel? Not that if it’s not there’s anything wrong with that,’ he says, chuckling, play-punching my arm, this ability to appreciate a reference to Seinfeld the deepest thing we have in common, two Israelites. So yes. I misspoke. You’re the only one of any relevance—the only scholar with a pennygun — who thinks it matters that you’re ten years old. And before you start talking about your father, or Rabbi Salt, about what they believe, about how that matters, let me do the most obnoxious thing a person can do to his friend. Let me quote you at you. Let me tell you what you told me when I described to you how the implications of Chapter 15 in First Samuel gave me headaches. You said, ‘A prophet is a bright thing, and those who can’t see a bright thing are blind, and those who do see a bright thing can get blind doing so.’ I would suggest to you that your father and Rabbi Salt, wise as they certainly are — they see you and get blind. And let me tell you something else, please, before I lose steam, and this is maybe the most important thing: You’re the only one who thinks you need to be the messiah in order to lead us. It is true that none of us is certain you are the messiah, and it is true that a number of us aren’t even certain you’ll become the messiah — and I have no problem telling you that’s the camp I’m in (though were you to tell me you will become him, I would believe it) — but every single one of us agrees that if you are not already the messiah, you might become him. And not merely because you are a Judite, but because you are Gurion Maccabee. You are the person we want to lead us. We believe you were born to do that. And if following you, as we suspect, turns out to be the environmental condition that makes actual your potential, that would be ideal; but even if following you doesn’t do that, Gurion, we are certain it will still bring about an improvement. We are certain that following you will help bring the messiah, whoever he might be, whether in this generation or the next.”
I really didn’t know what to say. Whenever the subject of my possibly being the messiah got brought up this explicitly at Schechter or Northside, it was always by one of the lesser-abled scholars — most often a first- or second-grader, occasionally a sweet, lower-IQ-type or new kid — and if after I then gave them my thumbnail lecture on potential and actual messiahs, they still failed to take the lesson, I would fix a collar or do some kind of pratfall, and the conversation would end. None of the truly talented scholars had ever brought it up to me directly, let alone Emmanuel, who was the most talented of them all. And after what he’d said, I knew that any of the arguments I came up with would sound like a coy invitation to get annointed. And annointment really wasn’t what I wanted. Like everyone else I knew, I did want to be the messiah, and certainly, at times, I suspected I would be, but at the same time, there was almost nothing I could think of that I wanted less than to be a false messiah. To lose June, to see my parents get hurt — what else besides variations on those two themes? That was it. To be a false messiah would be the third worst thing in the world.