Love and Leviticus

Warnings: Slash (though that's pretty obvious by now, I'm sure), verbal antisemitism, some violence, and a Hell of a lot of swearing; it's about British teenagers, what do you expect? May be more appealing for those interested in Judaism (or religion in general), but is pretty self-explanatory for those less educated on the Tanakh. I should also probably point out that this is not classical Judaism as a culture (there will be no Rabbinic explanations or specification as to the orthodox, liberal, conservative, reform, etc), but rather is the independent study of the Tanakh.

Prologue: Skin for Skin.

(Job 2:4)

Joxepa Isaacs gave her son her copy of the Tanakh exactly one week before she died.

Tobiah would only remember this specific detail in the years to come because of his subsequent confusion. She had approached him with no forewarning and handed him the book – the 1999 Hebrew-English second edition from the Jewish Publication Society, with gold indented lettering on the front and spine. For years, he would think of her while tracing his fingers over the gold letters.

Looking back, he wouldn’t remember anything poetic like the smell of her skin or the glint in her eye; all he would remember, really, were her words. He’d look back so much on that moment and wonder what she meant. Even as an eight-year-old he had a certain knowledge on the rules of the Torah what it taught about how to live, and how his Christian friends were told that their Bibles could teach them everything they needed to know about life, but her words were still strange to him.

She leaned over to him and said, “This book will teach you everything you’ll ever need to know about love.”

And a week later, she died.

Again, there was no great poetic climax. Tobiah came home from their neighbour’s house to neither parent and climbed in through the living-room window. There was no note or message on the machine, so, as any other day, he lay on the sofa with his kitten Australopithecus and turned on his television.

His mother’s face was all over the news.

That would be how he remembered his mother’s face from then on. Though through the more recent years she had begun to look worn and pale, the picture that he saw on the television was of a younger her, when she wore her hair loose in tousled curls rather like his own.

Joxepa Isaacs’ death was not an accident, and it was the news reporter who gave her son the information. She had been seen walking along the tracks before the train had hit her; there was no room for doubt. The boy stared at the screen for several long minutes, holding the kitten’s grey fur so tightly that she yowled at him and struggled to get away.

From that day onward Tobiah’s knowledge of love slipped from his grasp. Before the age of eight, like any child, he would have proudly stated that he knew exactly what love was. However, at the loss of his mother and his father’s slowly deteriorating interest, the boy began to question the existence of love at an unusually young age.

His father, Peter Briggs, had not been around for the first few years of Tobiah’s childhood, and it had never been shielded from Tobiah that his birth was not planned. However, his father did not lack substantial parenting skills; it was, most likely, the loss of Joxepa that destroyed the link between father and son. Tobiah stopped sustaining friendships with the other children (and soon teenagers), almost in reflection of his father’s declining relationships with the rest of humanity.

In tandem, both father and son began to lock themselves away; Tobiah coping through dictating his life with his mother’s rules, and Peter… well, it could be said that Peter did not cope at all.

However, this story is not about Tobiah’s childhood, nor is it about Peter’s lack of coping methods. The story begins far after this point in time, where the boy learned the rules without value and the man slipped away from the meaning of value altogether. No, the story begins when Tobiah was suddenly found not only without a mother.

The last time that Tobiah saw Peter react to anything should, perhaps, have played as a warning to where his father was heading. It was the last proper conversation that the pair of them ever had, and it was about Joxepa’s death. Tobiah, eight years later, had lived half of his life without her by this point and was beginning to wonder for her motives.

Peter had looked lost, perhaps slightly haunted, as he turned to his son and replied that depression can affect anyone. It wasn’t a particularly long conversation, but later Tobiah would still see it as significant.

The boy – at this point sixteen, almost a man – had left the house to do the food shopping that morning feeling somewhat unusual. His hands shook, and his head ached deeply underneath his eyes and down to his jaw. The headache and dizziness eventually caused him to dump the shopping basket and walk back home, occasionally stopping to lean against a tree and try not to pass out.

By the time he got home and began to call out for his father, his chest was joining in with the pain and he knew that something was wrong.

The death was ruled a suicide. Another suicide. It was as if they ran in his family, Tobiah thought, mixed up somewhere in their genes. Both of his parents had committed suicide, and after his mother’s mother had died of cancer, her husband had followed her. That was three suicides in two generations of his family history. As he sat in the hospital with the oxygen mask strapped around his head, he couldn’t help but repeat Genesis 9:5 over and over again in his mind.

But for your own life-blood I will require a reckoning: I will require it of every beast; of man, too, will I require a reckoning for human life, of every man for that of his fellow man!

He wouldn’t be like them. He knew he wouldn’t.

But disregard his thoughts (and unusual lack of tears) at the death of his parents for now; the real story begins several days later, when the boy went to live with his one remaining relative – a great aunt from his father’s side, the Headmistress of a prestigious boarding school.

This is where the real story begins…