Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(153)
“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.