Here I Am

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  “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.​operation​armsofmoses.​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 s
urgery 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.