Here I Am

COME HOME

In the end, they didn’t need to rush the bar mitzvah — it took Tamir and Jacob eight days to find a way to Israel — but apparently there wasn’t enough time to put Argus down. Jacob spoke with a few compassionate vets, but also watched a few horrible YouTube videos. Even when euthanasia was clearly a “good” thing — a genuinely suffering animal being given a genuinely peaceful end — it was horrible. He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t ready. Argus wasn’t ready. They weren’t ready.

The embassy continued to be unhelpful, and commercial flights to Israel continued to be halted. So they looked into getting press certification, volunteering for Doctors Without Borders, flying to another country and reaching Israel by boat — all nonstarters.

What changed their situation, and changed everything, was an internationally televised speech by Israel’s prime minister — a speech that he must have known, when writing it, would either be memorized by future Jewish schoolchildren or be etched into memorial walls.

Looking directly into the camera, and directly into the Jewish souls of all Jews watching, he conveyed the unprecedented threat to Israel’s existence, and asked that Jews between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five “come home.”

Airspace would be opened to incoming flights, and commercial jumbo jets, emptied of seats to hold more bodies, would be flown continuously from airfields near New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Moscow, and other major Jewish population centers.

The planes weren’t fueled until just before takeoff, as no one knew, even approximately, how heavy they would be.

TODAY I AM NOT A MAN

“We need to have a family conversation,” Sam said. It was the night before his makeshift bar mitzvah. In twelve hours, catered food would begin to arrive. And not long after, the handful of cousins and friends who could make it on such short notice. Then manhood.

Max and Benjy sat on Sam’s bed, their feet growing toward the floor, and Sam gave his ninety-two pounds to his beloved swivel chair — beloved because the range of motion made him feel capable, and beloved because it had been his dad’s. His desktop flickered with footage of an army moving across the Sinai.

With parental gentleness, Sam recounted an age-appropriate version of what had happened with their father’s phone, and what he knew — from the snippets Max had overheard in the car, what Billie had witnessed and inferred at Model UN, and his own piecing together — of their mother’s relationship with Mark. (“I don’t get what’s the big deal,” Benjy said. “People kiss people all the time and it’s nice?”) Sam shared what Billie had overheard of their parents’ separation-conversation rehearsal (mortared with the results of Max’s snooping), as well as what Barak had been told of their fathers’ decision to go to Israel. Everyone knew that Jacob was lying when he said Julia had spent the night at a site visit, but they also sensed that he didn’t know where she’d actually been, so no one mentioned it.

Sam often had fantasies of killing his brothers, but he also had fantasies of saving them. He’d felt the opposing pulls for as long as they’d been his brothers — with the same arms that cradled baby Benjy, he wanted to crush his rib cage — and the intensity of those coexisting impulses defined his brotherly love.

But not now. Now he only wanted to cradle them. Now he felt no possessiveness, no diminishment at their gain, no scorching, referentless annoyance.

When Sam reached the climax—“Everything is about to change”—Max started to cry. Reflexively, Sam wanted to say, “It’s funny, it’s funny,” but a yet stronger reflex prevailed, and he said, “I know, I know.” When Max started to cry, Benjy started to cry — like a reservoir that floods into an overflow reservoir, overflowing it. “It sucks,” Sam said. “But it’s all going to be OK. We just can’t let it happen.”

Through his tears, Benjy said, “I don’t get it. Kissing is nice.”

“What are we going to do?” Max asked.

“They keep putting everything off until after my bar mitzvah. They’re going to tell us about their divorce after my bar mitzvah. Dad is going to move out after my bar mitzvah. And now he’s going to go to Israel after my bar mitzvah. So I’m not going to have a bar mitzvah.”

“That’s a good plan,” Benjy said. “You’re smart.”

“But they’ll just force you to,” Max said.

“What are they gonna do? Pinch my nose until I expel my haftorah?”

“Ground you.”

“Who cares?”

“Take away your screen time.”

“Who cares?”

“You do.”

“I won’t.”

“You could run away?” Benjy suggested.

“Run away?” his brothers asked at the same time, and Max couldn’t resist calling, “Jinx!”

“Sam, Sam, Sam,” Benjy said, relieving his brother of his imposed silence.

“I can’t run away,” Sam said.

“Just until the war ends,” Max said.

“I wouldn’t leave you guys.”

“And I would miss you,” Benjy said.

When Jacob and Julia had shared the news that Sam and Max were going to get a little brother, Jacob made the mistake of suggesting the boys name him — a sweet idea that if carried out one hundred million times would never once produce an acceptable result. Max quickly settled on Ed the Hyena, after Scar’s loyal henchman in The Lion King, assuming, presumably, that that’s what his new brother would be: his loyal henchman. Sam wanted to name him Foamy, because it was the third word his finger landed on when he was riffling through the dictionary — he’d promised to commit to the first word, whatever it was, but it was extortion, and the second was ambivalent. The problem wasn’t that the brothers disagreed, but that both were such terrific names — Ed the Hyena and Foamy. Great names that any human would be privileged to have and that would all but guarantee a cool life. They flipped a coin, and then did best out of three, then seven, and Julia, being Julia, gently folded the winning name into an origami bird that she released from an open window, but made the boys T-shirts with iron-on letters that read “Foamy’s Brother,” and, of course, a “Foamy” onesie. There was a photograph of the three of them in their Foamy-wear, asleep in the backseat of the Volvo that was christened Ed the Hyena as an easy-to-give concession to Max.

Sam patted his knees, beckoning Benjy over, and said, “I’d miss you, too, Foamy.”

“Who’s Foamy?” Benjy asked, climbing onto his brother.

“You almost were.”

Max found all of this too emotional to acknowledge or name. “If you run away, I’m coming, too.”

“No one is running away,” Sam said.

“Me, too,” Benjy said.

“We need to stay,” Sam said.

“Why?” they asked.

“Jinx!”

“Benjy, Benjy, Benjy.”

Sam could have said, Because you need to be taken care of, and I can’t do that myself. Or, Because it’s only my bar mitzvah, so only I need to run from it. Or, Because life isn’t a Wes Anderson movie. But instead he said, “Because then our house would be completely empty.”

“It should be,” Max said. “It deserves to be.”

“And Argus.”

“He’ll come with us.”

“He can’t walk to the corner. How would he run away?”

Max was becoming desperate: “So we’ll put him to sleep, and then we’ll run away.”

“You would kill Argus to stop a bar mitzvah?”

“I would kill Argus to stop life.”

“Yeah, his life.”

“Our life.”

“I have a question,” Benjy said.

“What?” his brothers asked in unison.

“Jinx!”

“Jesus, Max.”

“Fine. Sam, Sam, Sam.”

“What’s your question?”

“Max said you could run away until the war stops.”

“No one is running away.”

“What if the war never stops?”

O JEWS, YOUR TIME HAS COME!

Julia came home in time to put the boys to bed. It wasn’t nearly as painful as either she or Jacob had imagined, but only because she had imagined a night of silence and Jacob had imagined a night of screaming. They hugged, exchanged gentle smiles, and got to work.

“My dad procured a Torah.”

“And a rabbi?”

“It was a two-for-one.”

“Please, not a cantor.”

“Thank God, no.”

“And you found everything at Whole Foods?”

“I got a caterer.”

“The day before?”

“Not the best caterer. Some unsubstantiated accusations of salmonella.”

“Rumors, I’m sure. We should have about what, fifteen people? Twenty?”

“We’ll have food for one hundred.”

“All those snow globes…,” Julia said, genuinely wistfully.

They were gridded on three linen-closet shelves, fifteen across and eight deep. They would stay there, untouched, for years — so much trapped water, like all the trapped air in the saved bubble wrap, like the words trapped in thought bubbles. There must have been tiny cracks in their domes, as the water slowly evaporated — maybe a quarter-inch a year? — and by the time Benjy was ready to have, or not have, a bar mitzvah, the snow was resting on dry city streets, still pure.

“The boys have no idea, by the way. I just told them you were visiting a site last night and they didn’t ask anything else.”

“We’ll never know what they know.”

“And neither will they.”

“It was only a night,” she said, loading dishes into the washer. “But I’ve never chosen to be away from them. It was always because I had to be. I feel awful.”

Rather than try to diminish her feeling, Jacob tried to share it: “It’s hard.” But there was that other angel, its tiny feet nailed to Jacob’s shoulder: “You were at Mark’s?”

“When?”

“Is that where you went?”

There were many ways to answer that question. She chose: “Yes.”

He brought the extra plates up from the basement. She took a shower, to release her shoulders and steam Sam’s suit. He walked Argus to Rosedale, where they listened to other dogs play fetch in the dark. She ran a load of kids’ underwear and socks and dish towels. And then they were back in the kitchen, putting away the clean, still-warm dishes.

Without intending to, Julia picked up where she’d left off earlier: “When they were tiny, I wouldn’t take my eyes off them for two seconds. But there’s going to come a time when we won’t speak for days on end.”

“There won’t.”

“There will. Every parent thinks it will never happen to them, but it happens to everyone.”

“We won’t let it happen.”

“And at the same time we’ll force it to happen.”

Then they were upstairs. She searched her toiletries until she couldn’t remember what she was searching for. He switched the placement of his sweaters and T-shirts — a little early this year. The windows were black, but she lowered the shades for the morning. He stood on an ottoman to reach a bulb. And then they were at the side-by-side sinks, brushing.

“There’s an interesting house for sale,” Jacob said, “in Rock Creek Park.”

“On Davenport?”

“What?”

She spat, and said, “The house on Davenport?”

“Yeah.”

“I saw it.”

“You went to it?”

“The listing.”

“Kind of interesting, no?”

“This house is better,” she said.

“This is the best house.”

“It’s a very good house.”

He spat, then alternated between rinsing the brush and brushing his tongue. “I should sleep on the sofa,” he said.

“Or I can.”

“No, I’ll go. I should get used to sleeping in uncomfortable places, toughen myself up a bit.” His joke applied pressure to something serious.

“The shabby-chic sofa isn’t such a deprivation.” Her joke pushed back.

“Maybe it would be a good thing if I set an alarm for quite early, and came back up to the bedroom so the boys could find us there together in the morning?”

“They’re going to have to know at some point. And they probably already know.”

“After the bar mitzvah. Let’s give them this last bit. Even if everyone is in on the make-believe.”

“Are we really not going to say any more about your going to Israel?”

“What else is there to say?”

“That it’s insane.”

“That’s already been said.”

“That it’s unfair to me, and to the kids.”

“That’s already been said.”

What hadn’t been said, and what he wanted to hear, and what might even have made him choose differently, was “That I don’t want you to go.” But instead she’d given: “You’re not my spouse.”

The sofa was perfectly comfortable — more comfortable than the seven-thousand-dollar organic kelp and pony hair mattress Julia had insisted on buying — but Jacob couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t even make it to tossing and turning. He wasn’t sure what he felt — it could have been guilt, it could have been humiliation, or just sadness — and as always, when he couldn’t place a feeling, it became anger.

He went to the basement and turned on the TV. CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC: it was all coverage of the Middle East, all interchangeable. Why could he never admit that he was just looking for his show, which wasn’t even his show? It wasn’t ego, it was self-flagellation. Which was ego.

There it was, syndicated on TBS. Sometimes Jacob convinced himself it was better with the swearing and brief flashes of nudity removed, that they were there only because the freedom to do such things had to be justified by exercising it. Jacob wondered what the executive producers were making for the airing, and switched the station.

He flipped past some sort of cooking reality show, some sort of X Games something or other, past one of the despicable Despicable Me iterations. Everything was another version of something that was never good to begin with. He made a full journey around the planet of television, ending at his point of departure: CNN.

Wolf Blitzer had once again relieved the horrible tension of his purgatorial beard — neither a beard nor not a beard — with yet another new pair of glasses. He was a man on TV standing in front of a TV, using this TV-in-a-TV to explain the geopolitics of the Middle East. Jacob zoned out. Normally, he would have taken this moment of mental meandering to contemplate masturbating, or whether whatever Pirate Booty rubble could be found at the bottom of the bag would justify the trip upstairs. But instead, inspired by the next day’s bar mitzvah, he thought about his own, almost thirty years before. His portion was Ki Tissa, which, his bad luck, happened to be the longest portion in Exodus, and among the longest in the Torah. He remembered that much. Ki Tissa means “when you take,” the first distinctive words in the portion, referring to the first census of the Jews. He had some vague memory of the melodies, but they could just as well have been generic Jewish-sounding musical phrases, the kind people fall back on when faking a prayer they are embarrassed not to know.

There was a lot of drama in the portion: the first census, Moses ascending Mount Sinai, the golden calf, Moses destroying the tablets, Moses ascending Mount Sinai a second time and returning with what would be the Ten Commandments. But what he remembered most clearly wasn’t even in the parsha itself, but a related text, a passage of the Talmud, given to him by his rabbi, which addressed the question of what was done with the broken tablets. Even as an uninterested thirteen-year-old, it struck Jacob as a beautiful question. According to the Talmud, God instructed Moses to put both the intact tablets and the broken tablets in the ark. The Jews carried them — the broken and the whole — for their forty years of wandering, and placed them both in the Temple in Jerusalem.

“Why?” asked the rabbi, whose face Jacob couldn’t visualize, and whose voice he couldn’t conjure, and who was certainly no longer living. “Why didn’t they just bury them, as would befit a sacred text? Or leave them behind, as would befit a blasphemy?”

By the time Jacob’s focus shifted back to CNN, Wolf was addressing a hologram of the Ayatollah, speculating about the contents of his forthcoming speech — the first public comments out of Iran since the fire at the Dome of the Rock. There was apparently great anticipation in the Muslim and Jewish worlds for what he would say, as it would establish the most extreme response to the situation, draw the outer edge.

Jacob ran upstairs, grabbed the Pirate Booty — and a pack of roasted seaweed, and the last two Newman’s Own Oreo imitations, and a bottle of Hefeweizen — and hustled back down in time to catch the beginning. Wolf hadn’t mentioned that the speech would be delivered outside, in Azadi Square, in front of two hundred thousand people. He’d managed to commit the unpardonable sin of TV journalism: to undersell, to reduce expectations, to make actually necessary television seem optional.

A slightly chubby man approached the microphone: pitch-black turban, snow-white beard, black robe like a black balloon filled with shouting. There was an undeniable wisdom in his eyes, even a gentleness. There was absolutely nothing to distinguish his face from that of a Jew.

COME HOME

“It is now nine p.m. in Israel. Two p.m. in New York. It is seven p.m. in London, eleven a.m. in Los Angeles, eight p.m. in Paris, three p.m. in Buenos Aires, nine p.m. in Moscow, four a.m. in Melbourne.

“This speech is being broadcast around the world, on every major news outlet. It is being simultaneously translated into dozens of languages, and will be viewed by people of every religion and race and culture in the world. But I am speaking only to Jews.

“Since the devastating earthquake two weeks ago, Israel has endured calamity after calamity, some brought upon us by the indifferent hand of Mother Nature, some by the fists of our enemies. With ingenuity, strength, and resolve, we have done what Jews have always done: we have survived. How many more-powerful peoples have vanished from the face of the earth while the Jewish people have survived? Where are the Vikings? Where are the Mayans? The Hittites? The Mesopotamians? And where are our historical enemies, who have always outnumbered us? Where are the pharaohs, who destroyed our firstborn but could not destroy us? Where are the Babylonians, who destroyed our Holy Temple but could not destroy us? Where is the Roman Empire, which destroyed our Second Temple but could not destroy us? Where are the Nazis, who could not destroy us?

“They are gone.

“And here we are.

“Spread across the globe, we have different dreams in different languages, but we are joined in a richer, prouder history than can be claimed by any other people to have graced the earth. We have survived, and survived, and survived, and have come to assume that we always will. But brothers and sisters, descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah, I come to you tonight to tell you that survival is the story of the Jewish people only because the Jewish people have not been destroyed. If we survive ten thousand calamities, and then, in the end, we are destroyed, the story of the Jews will be the story of destruction. Brothers and sisters, heirs of kings and queens, prophets and holy men — children, all of us, of the Jewish mother who released the wicker basket into the river of history — we are cast into the current, and this moment will determine our story.

“As King Solomon knew, ‘A righteous man falls down seven times and gets up.’ We have fallen down seven times, and seven times we have gotten up. We have been struck by an earthquake of unprecedented proportions. We have endured the collapse of our homes, the loss of basic utilities, aftershocks, disease, missile attacks, and now we are assailed on every side by enemies funded and armed by superpowers, while support for us has wavered, while our friends have averted their eyes. Our righteousness has not diminished, but we cannot fall down again. We were defeated two thousand years ago, and we were doomed to two thousand years of exile. As the prime minister of the State of Israel, I am here to tell you tonight that if we fall down again, the book of Lamentations will not only be given a new chapter, it will be given an end. The story of the Jewish people—our story — will be told alongside the stories of the Vikings and Mayans.

“Exodus recounts a battle between Israel and Amalek: man against man, army against army, people against people, with commanders observing from vantage points far behind their own lines. While he watches the battle, Moses notices that when his arms are raised, Israel makes advances, and when they are lowered, Israel takes losses. So he keeps his arms raised in front of him. But, as we are again and again reminded, Moses is only human. And no human can keep his arms raised forever.

“Fortunately, Moses’s brother, Aaron, and brother-in-law, Hur, are nearby. He summons them, and they hold up his arms for the duration of the battle. Israel is victorious.

“As I speak to you, the Israeli Air Force, in collaboration with the other branches of the Israel Defense Forces, is commencing Operation Arms of Moses. Beginning in eight hours, El Al planes will be departing from major Jewish population centers around the world to bring Jewish men and women between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five to military stations in Israel. Those flights will be met by fighter jets, to ensure safe travel. Upon arriving in Israel, our brave brothers and sisters will be assessed and directed to how they can best support the effort of survival. Detailed information about the operation can be found at www.operationarmsofmoses.com.

“We have been preparing for this. We brought home our Ethiopian brothers and sisters from the desert. We brought home Russian Jews, and Iraqi Jews, and French Jews. We brought home those who survived the horrors of the Holocaust. But this will be an unprecedented undertaking — unprecedented in Israel’s history, and unprecedented in world history. But this is an unprecedented crisis. The only way to prevent our total destruction is with the totality of our strength.

“By the end of the first twenty-four hours of flights, we will have brought fifty thousand Jews to Israel.

“By the end of the third day, three hundred thousand.

“On the seventh day, the Diaspora will be home: one million Jews, fighting shoulder to shoulder with their Jewish brothers and sisters. And with these Aarons and Hurs, our arms will not only be raised in victory, we will be able to dictate the peace.”

TODAY I AM NOT A MAN

They unrolled the Torah on the kitchen island, and Sam chanted with a grace that had never before touched a member of the Bloch family — the grace of being fully present as oneself. Irv lacked such grace, was self-conscious about crying, and held in his tears. Julia lacked such grace, was too concerned with etiquette to respond to her most primitive instinct to go to her son and stand beside him. Jacob lacked such grace, and cared enough to wonder what others were thinking.

The Torah was closed and dressed and replaced in the cabinet that had been emptied of shelves and art supplies. The men who surrounded Sam took their seats, leaving him alone to chant his haftorah, which he did slowly, resolutely, with the care of an ophthalmologist performing surgery on his own eyes. The rituals were complete. All that remained was his speech.

Sam stood there, at the kitchen-island bimah. He imagined a cone of dusty light projecting from his forehead, creating everything in front of him: the yarmulke on Benjy’s head (Wedding of Jacob and Julia, August 23, 2000), the tallis that wrapped around his grandfather like an unfinished ghost costume, the unoccupied folding chair on which his great-grandfather sat.

He walked around the island, then awkwardly between chairs, and put his arm on Max’s shoulder. With a physical closeness that neither could have borne in any other moment, Sam took Max’s face into his hands and whispered something into his ear. It wasn’t a plan. It wasn’t a secret. It wasn’t information. Max softened like a yahrzeit candle.

Sam made his way back to the other side of the island.

“Hello, gathered. So. Right. Well. What can I say?

“You know how sometimes, when someone wins an award, they pretend that they were so sure they weren’t going to win it, they didn’t bother to prepare a speech? I don’t believe that that has ever once, in human history, been true. Or at least not if it’s for an Oscar, or something big like that, and the awards are televised. I guess people think that saying they didn’t prepare a speech will make them sound modest, or even worse, down-to-earth, but they actually sound like totally disingenuous narcissists.

“I guess a bar mitzvah speech is like a plane in a storm: once you’re in it, there’s no way out but through. Great-Grandpa taught me that expression, even though he hadn’t been in a plane for like thirty years. He loved expressions. I think they made him feel American.

“This isn’t really a speech. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d be here, so I didn’t prepare anything, other than my original bar mitzvah speech, which wouldn’t make any sense now, given that everything has completely changed. But I did work on it a lot, so if anyone wants it, I suppose I could e-mail it to them later. Anyway, I brought up that thing about actors who say they didn’t prepare a speech, because maybe demonstrating my awareness of the untrustworthiness of saying you are unprepared might give you a reason to believe me. The real question is why I care if you believe me.

“Anyway, Grandpa Irv used to do this thing where he’d give Max and me five bucks if we made a speech that convinced him of something. Anytime, anything. So we were constantly making little speeches: why people shouldn’t have dogs as pets, why escalators encourage obesity and should be illegal, why robots will defeat humans in our lifetime, why Bryce Harper should be traded, why it’s OK to swat flies. There was nothing we wouldn’t argue, because even though we didn’t need the money, we wanted it. We liked how it accumulated. Or we wanted to win. Or to be loved. I don’t know. I’m mentioning it because I guess it made us pretty good at speaking off the cuff, which is what I am now about to do. Thanks, Grandpa?

“I never wanted to have a bar mitzvah in the first place. My objection wasn’t moral or intellectual, I just thought it would be a colossal waste of time. Maybe that’s moral? I don’t know. I assume I would have continued to object even if my parents had genuinely listened to me, or proposed other ways of thinking about a bar mitzvah. We’ll never know, because I was simply told that it’s what we do, because it’s what we do. In the same way that not eating cheeseburgers is what we don’t do, because it’s what we don’t do. Even though we do sometimes eat real-crab California rolls, even though it’s what we don’t do. And we often don’t observe Shabbat, even though it’s what we do. I don’t have any problem with hypocrisy when it’s self-serving, but applying the logic of what we do to having a bar mitzvah didn’t serve me.

“So I made efforts to sabotage it. I tried not to learn my haftorah, but Mom would put on the recording whenever we were in the car, and it’s actually unbelievably catchy — everyone in the family can recite it, and Argus starts beating his tail with the first verse.

“I was incredibly obnoxious to my tutor, but he was happy enough eating my crap if it meant cashing my parents’ checks.

“As some of you might know, I was accused of writing some inappropriate words in Hebrew school. As terrible as it felt not to be believed, I was happy to get in trouble if it would get me out of this. Which it clearly didn’t.

“I’ve never thought about it until right now, but it occurs to me that I don’t know if I’ve ever actually tried to stop anything from happening in my life. I mean, obviously I’ve tried to get out of the way of inside pitches, and I make a lot of efforts not to use urinals without vertical privacy shields, but an event. I never tried to stop a birthday or, I don’t know, Hanukkah. Maybe my inexperience made me think it would be easier. But for all of my efforts, Jewish manhood only got nearer.

“Then the earthquake happened, and that changed everything, and my great-grandfather died, and that also changed everything, and Israel got attacked by everyone, and a whole lot of other things happened that this is not the right time or place to get into, and suddenly everything was different. And as everything kept changing, my reasons for not wanting to have a bar mitzvah changed and became stronger. It wasn’t just that it was a colossal waste of time — that time was already wasted, if you think about it. And it wasn’t even that I knew that lots of bad things were going to happen after my bar mitzvah, so the effort to stop my bar mitzvah from happening was actually an effort to stop all kinds of bad things from happening.

“You can’t stop things from happening. You can only choose not to be there, like Great-Grandpa Isaac did, or give yourself completely over, like my dad, who made his big decision to go to Israel to fight. Or maybe it’s Dad who is choosing not to be there, which is here, and Great-Grandpa who gave himself over completely.

“We read Hamlet in school this year, and everybody knows the whole ‘To be or not to be’ business, and we talked about it for like three consecutive classes — the choice between life and death, action and reflection, whatever and whatever. It was kind of going nowhere until my friend Billie said something incredibly smart. She said, ‘Isn’t there another option besides those two? Like, to mostly be or mostly not be, that is the question.’ And that got me thinking that also maybe one doesn’t have to exactly choose. ‘To be or not to be. That is the question.’ To be and not to be. That is the answer.

“My Israeli cousin Noam — that’s his dad, Tamir, over there — told me that a bar mitzvah isn’t something you have, but something you become. He was right, and he was wrong. A bar mitzvah is both something you have and something you become. I am obviously having a bar mitzvah today. I chanted my Torah portion and haftorah, and no one was holding a gun to my head. But I want to take this opportunity to make clear to everyone that I am not becoming one. I did not ask to be a man, and I do not want to be a man, and I refuse to be a man.

“Dad once told me a story about when he was a kid and there was a dead squirrel on the lawn. He watched Grandpa take care of it. After, he said to Grandpa, ‘I couldn’t have done that.’ And Grandpa said, ‘Sure you could.’ And Dad said, ‘I couldn’t.’ And Grandpa said, ‘When you’re a dad, there’s no one after you.’ And Dad said, ‘I still couldn’t do it.’ And Grandpa said, ‘The more you won’t want to do it, the more of a dad you’ll be.’ I don’t want to be like that, so I won’t.

“Now let me explain why I wrote all those words.”

O JEWS, YOUR TIME HAS COME!

“O Muslims, the hour is here! The war of God against the enemies of God will end in triumph! Victory in the Holy Land of Palestine is within the reach of the righteous. We will have our revenge for Lydda, we will have our revenge for Haifa and Acre and Deir Yassin, we will have our revenge for the generations of martyrs, we will have our revenge, praise Allah, for al-Quds! Oh, al-Quds, raped by the Jews, treated like a whore by the sons of pigs and apes, we will restore to you your crown and your glory!

“They burned Qubbat Al-Sakhra to the ground. But it is they who will be burned. I say to you today the words that filled the hearts of a thousand martyrs: ‘Khaybar, Khaybar, ya Yahud, Jaish Muhammad Saouf Ya’ud!’ As the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon Him, defeated the perfidious Jews at Khaybar, so too will the armies of Muhammad inflict the final humiliation on the Jews today!

“O Jews, your time has come! Your fire will be met by fire! We will burn your cities and your towns, your schools and your hospitals, your every home! No Jew will be safe! I remind you, O Muslims, of what the Prophet, peace be upon Him, teaches us: that on Judgment Day even the stones and the trees will speak, with or without words, and say, ‘O servant of Allah, O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’”

COME HOME

“‘Watch me,’ Gideon told his men, greatly outnumbered, facing the Midianites not far from where I now stand. ‘Follow my lead. When I get to the edge of the camp, do exactly as I do. When I and all who are with me blow our trumpets, then from all around the camp blow yours and shout, “For the Lord and for Gideon.”’ At the sight and sound of our unity, the enemy scattered and fled.

“The majority of the Jewish people have chosen not to live in Israel, and Jews do not share any one set of political or religious beliefs, and do not share a culture or language. But we are in the same river of history.

“To the Jews of the world, those who came before you — your grandparents, your great-grandparents — and those who will come after you — your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren — are calling out: ‘Come home.’

“Come home not only because your home needs you, but because you need your home.

“Come home not only to fight for Israel’s survival, but to fight for your own.

“Come home because a people without a home is not a people, just as a person without a home is not a person.

“Come home not because you agree with everything Israel does, not because you think Israel is perfect, or even any better than other countries. Come home not because Israel is what you want it to be, but because it is yours.

“Come home, because history will remember what each of us chooses in this moment.

“Come home and we will win this war and establish a lasting peace.

“Come home and we will rebuild this state to be stronger and closer to its promise than it was before the destruction.

“Come home and be another hand around the pen that writes the story of the Jewish people.

“Come home and hold the arms of Moses aloft. And then, when the guns have cooled, and the buildings have risen where they once stood, only prouder, and the streets are filled with the sounds of children playing, you will find your name not in the book of Lamentations, but the book of Life.

“And then, wherever you choose to go next, you will always be home.”

TODAY I AM NOT A MAN

“A couple of weeks ago, everybody was obsessing over what kind of apology I would give during my bar mitzvah speech. How would I explain my behavior? Would I even fess up to it? When I was being blamed, I didn’t feel like explaining myself, much less apologizing. But now that other things have taken everyone’s attention, and no one really cares anymore, I’d like to explain myself and apologize.

“My friend Billie, whom I mentioned before, told me I was repressed. She’s really beautiful, and intelligent, and good. I told her, ‘Maybe I just have inner peace.’ She said, ‘Peace between what parties?’ I thought that was such an interesting question.

“I told her, ‘I’m really not repressed.’ She said, ‘That’s exactly what a repressed person would say.’ So I said, ‘And I suppose you aren’t repressed?’ And she said, ‘Everyone is somewhat repressed.’ ‘OK,’ I said, ‘then I’m no more repressed than an average person.’

“‘Say the hardest thing,’ she said.

“I was like, ‘What?’

“And she said, ‘I don’t mean right this second. You couldn’t even know what it is without thinking long and hard about it. But once you figure it out, I dare you to say it.’

“‘And if I do?’

“‘You won’t.’

“‘But if.’

“She said, ‘I would invite you to choose the terms, but I know you’re too repressed to tell me what you’d actually want.’

“Which was obviously true.

“‘So maybe that’s actually the hardest thing to say,’ I said.

“She said, ‘What? That you want to kiss me? Doesn’t even make the top hundred.’

“I thought a lot about what she said. And I was thinking about it in Hebrew school that day when I wrote those words. I was just seeing how each of them felt, seeing how hard it was to write them, and say them to myself. That’s why I did it. But that’s not the point.

“The point is: I made a mistake. I thought that the worst thing to say was the hardest thing to say. But it’s actually pretty easy to say horrible things: retard, cunt, whatever. In a way, it’s even easier because we know exactly how bad the words are. There’s nothing scary about them. Part of what makes something really hard to say is the not knowing.

“The reason I’m here today is because I realized that the hardest thing to say isn’t a word, or a sentence, but an event. The hardest thing to say couldn’t be something you say to yourself. It requires the hardest person, or people, to say it to.”

O JEWS, YOUR TIME HAS COME!

“O Muslims, God demands of his servants the deaths of these Jews. I call on the soldiers of the Qur’an to wage our final battle against those beasts who kill the prophets. O Muslims, must I tell you the story of the Jewish woman who gave the Prophet, peace be upon Him, poisoned lamb, to kill Him? The Prophet, peace be upon Him, said to his companions, ‘Do not eat this lamb. It is telling me it has poison in it.’ But it was too late for the companion Bishr ibn al-Bara, who died from the poison. The Jewess tried to kill our Prophet, peace be upon Him, but praise God, she failed. This is the nature of the Jews, these twice-cursed people! They will try to kill you, but Allah will plant knowledge of their wicked deeds in your hearts, and save you. You must do as the Prophet, peace be upon Him, did with the Jew Kenana ibn al-Rabi, who hid the treasure of the Jews, the Banu Nadir. The Prophet, peace be upon Him, told Az-Zubair ibn Al-Awwam, ‘Torture this Jew until you learn from him what he knows.’ He held hot steel to his chest and he nearly died. And then the Prophet, peace be upon Him, delivered the Jew Kenana to Muhammad ibn Maslamah, and he cut off his head! Then he took the Jews of Kenana as slaves. Muhammad, peace be upon Him, took the most beautiful woman of the Jews for himself! This is the way, O Muslims! Let the Prophet be your teacher in your dealings with the Jews!

“O brother Palestinians! Remember! When the Muslims, the Arabs, the Palestinians, make war against the Jews, they do so to worship Allah. They enter the war as Muslims! The hadith does not say, ‘O Sunni, O Shiite, O Palestinian, O Syrian, O Persian, come fight.’ It says, ‘O Muslim’! For too long we have battled ourselves and lost. Now we will battle together and be victorious.

“We are fighting in the name of Islam, because Islam commands us to wage war unto death against anyone who plunders our land. Surrender is the way of Satan!”

COME HOME

But then, after his final word, the camera stayed on the prime minister. His gaze held. And the camera held. At first it seemed like an awkward broadcasting mistake, but it was no accident.

His gaze held.

And the camera held.

And then the prime minister did something so outrageously symbolic, so potentially kitschy, so many miles over the top, it risked breaking the legs of its intended recipients just as they approached the necessary leap of faith.

He removed a shofar from beneath the lectern. And without any explanation of its meaning — its biblical or historical significance, its intent to awaken sleeping Jews to repent and return, without even sharing that this particular shofar, this twice-curled ram’s horn, was two thousand years old, that it was the shofar discovered at Masada, stashed in a water hole and preserved by the dry desert heat, that its inside contained biological remnants of a noble Jewish martyr — he brought it to his lips.

The camera held.

The prime minister inhaled, and gathered into the ram’s horn the molecules of every Jew who had ever lived: the breath of warrior kings and fishmongers; tailors, matchmakers, and executive producers; kosher butchers, radical publishers, kibbutzniks, management consultants, orthopedic surgeons, tanners, and judges; the grateful laugh of someone with more than forty grandchildren gathered in his hospital room; the false moan of a prostitute who hid children under the bed on which she kissed Nazis on the mouth; the sigh of an ancient philosopher at a moment of understanding; the cry of a new orphan alone in a forest; the final air bubble to rise from the Seine and burst as Paul Celan sank, his pockets full of stones; the word clear from the lips of the first Jewish astronaut, strapped into a chair facing infinity. And the breath of those who never lived, but whose existence Jewish existence depended on: the patriarchs, matriarchs, and prophets; Abel’s last plea; Sarah’s laughter at the prospect of the miracle; Abraham offering his God and his son what could not be offered to both: “Here I am.”

The prime minister aimed the shofar forty-five degrees, sixty degrees, and in New York, and in Los Angeles, and in Miami, Chicago, and Paris, in London, Buenos Aires, Moscow, and Melbourne, television screens trembled, they shook.

TODAY I AM NOT A MAN

“The hardest thing to say is the hardest thing to hear: forced to choose between my parents, I would be able to.

“And I’ve talked about it with Max and Benjy, and if forced to choose, each of them could choose as well. Two of us would have chosen one, and one of us the other, but we agreed that if forced to choose, we would all choose the same one, so that we could stay together.

“When I did Model UN a couple of weeks ago, the country we were representing, Micronesia, suddenly came into possession of a nuclear weapon. We didn’t ask for a nuclear weapon, and didn’t want a nuclear weapon, and nuclear weapons are, in pretty much every way, horrible. But there’s a reason people have them, and it’s to never have to use them.

“That’s it. I’m finished.”

He didn’t bow, they didn’t clap. No one moved or spoke.

As always, Sam didn’t know what to do with his body. But the organism that was the roomful of family and friends seemed to depend on his movement. If he started to cry, someone would comfort him. If he ran out, someone would follow. If he’d just go talk to Max, everyone would schmooze. But if he continued to stand there, fists balled, they would continue to stand there.

Jacob thought maybe he could clap his hands, smile, and say something lame, like “Dig in!”

Julia thought maybe she could go to Sam, put her arm around him, and touch her head to his head.

Even Benjy, who, by virtue of never giving it any thought, always knew what to do, was motionless.

Irv longed to assume the authority of the family’s new patriarch, but he didn’t know how. Was there a five-dollar bill in his pocket?

From the middle of the room, Billie said, “Yet.”

Everyone turned to her.

“What?” Sam asked.

There was no sound to overcome, but she screamed: “Yet!”

O JEWS, YOUR TIME HAS COME!

The cheering would continue long after the Ayatollah lowered his final raised arm of solidarity. Long after he made his way behind the temporary stage, surrounded by a dozen plainclothes bodyguards. The cheering — the applauding, the chanting, the hollering, the singing — would continue after he was greeted by a line of his closest advisers, each kissing him, blessing him. After he was put into a car with two-inch-thick windows and no door handles and driven away. The cheering continued, and intensified, but without a gravitational center, the crowd moved outward in every direction.

Wolf Blitzer and his panel started discussing the speech — without the time to digest the translation, they just pulled quote after quote until they’d reassembled it out of order — but the camera stayed on the crowd. The mass of people couldn’t be contained by Azadi Square, which pumped them through the connecting streets like blood, and it couldn’t be contained by the camera’s frame.

Jacob imagined every street in Tehran packed with people throwing fists in the air, beating their chests. He imagined every park and gathering space overflowing like Azadi Square. The camera closed on a woman slapping the back of one hand into the palm of the other, over and over; a boy screaming from his father’s shoulders, four arms in the air. There were people on balconies, on rooftops, on the branches of trees. People atop cars and corrugated metal awnings too hot to be touched with bare skin.

The Ayatollah’s words had dripped into more than a billion open ears, and there had been two hundred thousand pairs of fixed eyes in the square, and 0.2 percent of the world was Jewish, but watching the replays of the speech — the Ayatollah’s gesticulating fists, the crowd’s undulations — Jacob thought only of his family.

Before they were allowed to take Sam home from the hospital when he was born, Jacob had to sit through a fifteen-minute course covering the Ten Commandments of Caring for a Newborn — the absolute rudiments of new parenting: YOU SHALL NOT SHAKE YOUR BABY; YOU SHALL CARE FOR THE UMBILICAL STUMP WITH A COTTON SWAB SOAKED IN WARM WATER AND SOAP, AT LEAST ONCE A DAY; YOU SHALL BE AWARE OF THE FONTANEL; YOU SHALL FEED YOUR BABY ONLY BREAST MILK OR FORMULA, BETWEEN ONE AND THREE OUNCES, EVERY TWO TO THREE HOURS, AND YOU SHALL NOT BE OBLIGATED TO BURP YOUR BABY IF HE FALLS ASLEEP AFTER A FEEDING; and so on. All things that anyone who had gone to a parenting class, or had ever spent time in the presence of a baby, or had simply been born Jewish, would already know. But the Tenth Commandment rattled Jacob. YOU SHALL REMEMBER: IT WILL NOT LAST.

COME HOME

After the guests went home, after Uber came for the Torah, after Tamir took all the kids to the Nats game (where, thanks to Max’s thoughtful ingenuity, Sam’s bar mitzvah was announced on the scoreboard during the seventh-inning stretch), after a bit of unnecessary e-mailing, after a walk to the corner with Argus, Jacob and Julia were left to clean up. Before they had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like “Reading in bed,” and “Giving a bath,” and “Running while holding the seat of a bicycle.” Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn’t them. It’s cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you.

Julia couldn’t bring herself to accept paper plates in the end, so there were a few loads of dishes to do. Jacob filled the machine to the brim and then hand-washed the rest, he and Julia taking turns with the soaping-up and the drying-off.

“You were right not to believe him,” Jacob said.

“Apparently. But you were right that we should have believed him.”

“Did we mishandle it?”

“I don’t know,” Julia said. “Is that even the question? Everything with kids is some kind of mishandling. So we try to learn, and mishandle it less badly in the future. But in the meantime, they’ve changed, so the lesson doesn’t apply.”

“It’s a lose-lose.”

They both laughed.

“A love-love.”

The sponge was already well on its way to mush, the only clean dish towel was damp, and the dish soap had to be diluted with water for there to be enough, but they made it work.

“Listen,” Jacob said. “Not fatalistically, but responsibly, I arranged a whole bunch of things with the accountant and lawyer, and—”

“Thank you,” Julia said.

“Anyway, it’s all pretty clearly spelled out in a document that I put on your bedside table — in a sealed envelope, in case one of the kids came upon it.”

“You’re not going to die.”

“Of course not.”

“You’re not even going to go.”

“I am.”

She turned on the disposal, and Jacob had the thought that if he were a Foley artist tasked with creating the sound of Satan screaming out from hell, he might just hold a mic to what he was now hearing.

“Another thing,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ll wait till it’s done.”

She switched it off.

“Remember I mentioned that I’ve been working on a show for a long time?”

“Your secret masterpiece.”

“I never described it like that.”

“About us.”

“Very loosely.”

“Yes, I know what you’re referring to.”

“There’s a copy of it in the bottom-right drawer of my desk.”

“The whole thing?”

“Yes. And on top is the bible.”

“The Bible?”

“For the show. It’s a kind of guide for how to read it. For future actors, a future director.”

“Shouldn’t the work speak for itself?”

“Nothing speaks for itself.”

“Sam sure does.”

“If the show were Sam, it wouldn’t need a bible.”

“And if you were Sam, you wouldn’t need a show.”

“Correct.”

“OK. So your show and its bible are in the bottom-right drawer of your desk. And in the event that you actually go to Israel and, what, perish in battle? I’m supposed to send it to your agent?”

“No. Please, Julia.”

“Burn it?”

“I’m not Kafka.”

“What?”

“I was hoping you’d read it.”

“If you die.”

“And only if.”

“I don’t know if I’m touched by how open you’re being, or hurt by how closed off you are.”

“You heard Sam: ‘To be and not to be.’”

Julia wiped the suds from the counter and hung the dish towel over the faucet. “Now what?”

“Well,” Jacob said, taking his phone from his pocket to check the time. “It’s three o’clock, which is too early to go to sleep.”

“Are you tired?”

“No,” he said. “I’m just used to being tired.”

“I don’t know what that means, but OK.”

“Aqua seafoam shame.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t assume it has to mean anything.” Jacob put his palm on the counter and said, “It’s you, of course. What Sam said.”

“What he said about what?”

“You know. About whom he’d pick.”

“Yes,” she said with a kind smile, “of course it’s me. The real question is, who was the dissenter?”

“That might very well have been a little weapon of psychological warfare.”

“You’re probably right.”

They laughed again.

“Why haven’t you asked me not to go to Israel?”

“Because after sixteen years, it goes without saying.”

“Look! A crying Hebrew baby.”

“Look! A pharaoh’s deaf daughter.”

Jacob slid his hands into his pockets and said, “I know sign language.”

Julia laughed. “What?”

“I’m completely serious.”

“No, you aren’t.”

“I’ve known it for as long as you’ve known me.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“I’m not.”

“Sign, I’m full of shit.”

Jacob pointed to himself, then moved his open right hand over the top of his left fist, then he held out his right hand with the thumb sticking up, grabbed the thumb in the fist of his left hand, and pulled his left hand up and off the thumb.

“How am I supposed to know if that’s real?”

“It is.”

“Sign, Life is long.”

Jacob made his hands into the shape that kids use for guns, aimed his forefingers at his belly, then traced them up his torso toward his neck. Then he extended his left arm, pointed at the fist with his right forefinger, and moved the finger along his arm up to his shoulder.

“Wait, are you crying?” Jacob asked.

“No.”

“Are you about to?”

“No,” she said. “Are you?”

“I’m always about to.”

“Sign, Look! A crying Hebrew baby.”

Jacob held his right hand by his face, about eye level, raised his index and middle fingers, and pushed his arm forward — two eyes moving forward in space. Then he ran the forefinger of each hand down his cheeks, one at a time and alternating, as if painting tears onto himself. Then, with his right hand, he stroked an imaginary beard. Then he created a cradle of his arms, palms up and overlapped at belly level, and rocked it back and forth.

“That beard-stroking? That’s the sign for Hebrew?”

“For Hebrew, for Jew. Yes.”

“That manages to be at once anti-Semitic and misogynistic.”

“I’m sure you know that most Nazis were deaf.”

“Yes, I did know that.”

“And French people, and English, and Spaniards, and Italians, and Scandinavians. Pretty much everyone who isn’t us.”

“Which is why your father is always shouting.”

“That’s right,” Jacob laughed. “And by the way, the sign for stingy is the same as the sign for Jew, just with a clenched fist at the end.”

“Jesus.”

Jacob held his straightened arms out to his sides and tilted his head toward his right shoulder. Julia laughed and squeezed the sponge until her knuckles went white.

“I really don’t know what to say, Jacob. I can’t believe that you’ve kept an entire language secret.”

“I wasn’t keeping it secret. I just didn’t tell anyone.”

“Why?”

“When I write my memoir, I’m going to call it ‘The Big Book of Whys.’”

“People hearing that title might think it’s w-i-s-e.”

“Let them think.”

“And I thought you were calling it ‘The Bible.’”

Julia turned off the radio, which had been broadcasting at no volume for who knows how long. “Different countries have different sign languages, right?”

“Yes.”

“So what’s the Jewish sign for Jew?”

“I have no idea,” Jacob said. He picked up his phone and googled “Hebrew Sign Language for Jew.” He turned his phone toward Julia and said, “It’s the same.”

“That’s sad.”

“It is, isn’t it?”

“On a few levels.”

“What would you make it?” Jacob asked.

“A Star of David would require some serious double-jointedness.”

“Maybe a palm on the top of the head?”

“Not bad,” Julia said, “but it doesn’t account for women. Or the great majority of Jewish men, like you, who don’t wear yarmulkes. Maybe palms open like a book?”

“Very nice,” Jacob said, “but are illiterate Jews not Jews? Are babies?”

“I wasn’t thinking that it was reading a book, but the book itself. The Torah, maybe. Or the Book of Life. How do you sign life?”

“Remember from Life is long?” he said, once again making his hands into guns, and then moving the forefingers up his torso.

“So like this,” Julia said, putting her hands in front of her, unpeeling them like a book, and then moving those upturned palms up her torso, as if pushing a book through her lungs.

“I’ll run it up the flagpole next time the Elders of Zion convene.”

“What’s the sign for gentile?”

“Gentile? Who fucking cares?”

Julia laughed, and Jacob laughed.

“I can’t believe you knew a language all alone.”

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda single-handedly revived Hebrew. Unlike most Zionists, he wasn’t passionate about the creation of the State of Israel so that his people would have a home. He wanted his language to have a home. He knew that without a state — without a place for Jews to haggle, and curse, and create secular laws, and make love — the language wouldn’t survive. And without a language, there wouldn’t ultimately be a people.

Ben-Yehuda’s son, Itamar, was the first native speaker of Hebrew in more than a thousand years. He was raised forbidden to hear or speak any other language. (His father once berated Itamar’s mother for singing a Russian lullaby.) His parents wouldn’t allow him to play with other children — none of them spoke Hebrew — but as a concession to his loneliness they gave him a dog with the name Maher, meaning “fast” in Hebrew. It was a kind of child abuse. And yet it is possible that he is even more responsible than his father for the first time a modern Jew ever told a dirty joke in Hebrew, ever told another Jew to fuck off in Hebrew, ever typed Hebrew into a court stenography machine, ever shouted unmeant words in Hebrew, ever, in Hebrew, moaned in pleasure.

Jacob put the last dried mugs back on the shelf upside down.

“What are you doing?” Julia asked.

“I’m doing it your way.”

“And you’re not hysterically concerned about their ability to dry without proper circulation?”

“No, but neither am I suddenly convinced they’re going to fill with dust. I’m just tired of disagreeing.”

God instructed Moses to put both the intact tablets and the broken tablets in the ark. The Jews carried them — the broken and the whole — for their forty years of wandering, and placed them both in the Temple in Jerusalem.

Why? Why didn’t they just bury them, as would befit a sacred text? Or leave them behind, as would befit a blasphemy?

Because they were ours.