* A Nojack was a walkie-talkie-type celly without a numberpad—just a dial and a CALL/ENDbutton—that came packaged with a plan which allowed parents to program the Nojack in such a way that it could call and be called by as few as one and no greater than twenty-five phone numbers. Some parents programmed the Nojacks to permit calls to and from their kids’ closest friends, but for the most part they were programmed only to communicate with family members and emergency services. I don’t know if Sidney Beber’s was the only, the first, or even the loudest mom to push Nojacks—though neither Samuel nor Mrs. Diamond were liars, they each, like so many good storytellers, did have the tendency to exagerrate the truth whenever the effect of doing so might serve to entertain or to ironize or to amp up tension—but by the eighth day of Chanukah of 2005, nearly everyone at Schechter who had asked for a cellphone wound up with a Nojack, Samuel being one of them; and because at Schechter (and at Northside, too, I later found out), the existence of Nojacks allowed a new justification for the headmaster to ban regular cellphones (he had tried before, in 2003, and been shot down by parents of cellphone-having kids—at that time, such parents tended more than not to be near-psychotically overprotective—on grounds that they needed to have immediate access to their child in case of emergency, and vice-versa, and that it wasn’t his right, or anyone else’s, to take such access away), he did so, he banned them, Headmaster Unger, made all non-Nojack celly’s illegal to possess at school, and these same parents (gladly, in most cases), cancelled their kids’ old call-plans and bought them Nojacks. I, that year, received a set of CD ROMs of Talmud, which Ben Brodsky (iPod Nano) cracked so I could burn them for Emmanuel, who in turn had Ben crack his Zohar CD ROMs and burn them for me.Click to return.
** E.g., the many reprints of Ulpanand the “Important”email by Kalisch, which—apart from having been disseminated by Israelites both electronically and via backyard-handoff since the summer of 2006—appeared in most Reuters- and AP-sourced newspapers after 11/17/06.Click to return.
*** E.g., (most conspicuously) in the Pulitzer-winning “profile” of me in The New Yorker,with its blame-the-mother retro-pop psychology; the ostensibly regretful yet subtley self-congratulatory “Critic at Large” one (also in The New Yorker) by Malcolm Gladwell, who claimed I’d “maliciously used [my] innate understanding of tipping points in order to ignite the current nationwide epidemic of radically defiant tween-group behavior”; the “Person of the Year” article in Time, with its sidebars on my mom, dad, Nakamook, June, and Eliyahu, which said I was a Karaite, a vegan, and fan of Ayn Rand; the interview with my former and would-be “teachers” on that episode of Nightline where Kalisch referred to me as a “Jewish-Supremacist,” Unger described me as an “antisemite,” and Schinkl (either making fun of them or attempting to create accord between them or maybe even sincerely calling it as he post-post-colonially saw it) said I was “the living dawn of the antisemitic Jewish-Supremacist movement”; and the peerlessly demagogic feature in Harper’s, which compared me in one windy, weirdly punctuated breath to Moshe Dayan, Benjamin Netanyahu, Osama bin Laden, Yasser Arafat, Jonathan Pollard, the Rosenbergs, Ari Fleisher, Ariel Sharon, and Sabbatai Tsvi, then repeatedly used the word “Zionist” the way Marxists and neocons use “liberal,” and ended by forming—accidentally or not—an acrostic of the word “kike” with the first letters of its last four sentences.Click to return.
**** p. 147, Linguistics Is for the (Language of) the Birdsby Tamar Maccabee, Hebrew University Press (forthcoming, pending change of title)Click to return.
***** Though, unlike most of you, I tend to close my browser the moment any footage of the so-called “11/17 Miracle” intrudes.Click to return.
****** To be clear: such spectators were, as yet, legion. If that’s failed to come across, blame Genesis and Exodus for training my narrative eye on action, for training it away from relative stasis. Despite the avalanche and the multiplying skirmishes, and despite the attacks on the Shovers by the Israelites, the movement of at least half the kids in the bleachers—before, that is, the bandkids got their snat up—was still dedicated to blocking robotic interference in the course of manuevering for vistas.Click to return.
******* In Torah, you remember the opening the best, and the events described—on their first reading—often seem fractured, hard to connect, rarely emotional, until you subject them to serious analysis.Click to return.
******** If you don’t remember these things, you can’t possibly believe the book is good, let alone great; you must believe that someone has failed; whether you or the author depends on your temperament.Click to return.
******** The act of analysis can’t help but create a sense of distance between you and what’s analyzed. This seems much stranger than it actually is. It seems strange because not only does analysis require you to get up close to a thing, but analysis is undertaken (at least in the case of re-reading great books) with the overt desire to get up close to that thing. The resultant sense of distance thus seems to suggest that to get up close to something is to get away from it, to push it away or be pushed away by it.
That suggestion is false. That suggestion is nonsense.
To get up close to something is to get up close to something; to push something away is to push something away; to be pushed is to be pushed. The sense of distance created by the act of analysis indicates only that one shouldn’t trust his emotions to measure proximity (or, alternately, that one should not use metaphors of proximity to describe one’s emotional states). All that it means to have “a sense of distance” from something is that the emotions which that thing has provoked are less intense than one initially believed they should be. Yet when one acquires a sense of distance from something by way of analysis, instead of concluding that one was in error to believe that one’s emotions should be more intense, one believes that the thing that is under analysis has failed to provoke emotion as intensely as it should have; one believes the act of analysis has somehow ruined the thing’s ability to properly provoke (or, alternately, one’s capacity to be properly provoked).
At least Ibelieve that, even when, as now, I would seem to know better. And if this has begun to sound apologetic, or defensive, probably it is—if not one, then the other, depending on your temperament.Click to return.
******** I.e., that the teacher intended to molest Holden andHolden had suffered molestation earlier in life: If the teacher wasabout to molest Holden, then while it’s still sad for the petting to have happened, and while it’s also still sad that Holden ever had to suffer experiences prior to this one which allowed him the certainty to run from his teacher, Holden’s seeing the petting for what it is and getting out before it goes any further isn’t sad at all; it’s a kind of victory.Click to return.
Adam Levin, The Instructions
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