Ripping Stories

Um. Thats my arm.

Feeding foxes.

I am a Jew.

During high school, I was a punk. I was the class clown, but not in an attention gathering way, but in a both smart and pain in the -ass kinda way.

In my senior year, my English teacher placed me and my two partners in smart-assedness in a single row of desks. “Welcome to delinquent row,” he would say every day I walked in to the room.

Normally, I responded with a smirk, a nod and a short giggle. Like most teachers, he must have assumed he had properly put me in my place, when the truth was that he had given me a place and the notoriety necessary for a nerdy student to stand tall among his peers.

One day, after using my go to conversation ender “You must just hate the Jews,” he pulled me outside the classroom.

“Micah,” he muttered shaking his head, “you wear your Jewishness on your sleeve. You will find difficulty in life if you don’t do a better job of hiding it.”

It was about a year after I had sobered up. I kept thinking about all the decisions, both good and bad, I had made over the years. Simple ones, small ones, big ones. Years later, all of them had come to shape where I was. For some reason, that day my English teacher had pulled me out of class kept circling back through my memory. Jewishness on my sleeve.

I had been obsessed with Jenny Lewis’s voice and had been listening to a lot of her various collaborations, including with The Watson Twins, her boyfriend at the time Jonathon Rice, and her band Rilo Kiley. Thematically, her music matched my mood and headspace. The song Portion for Foxes included the lyrics:

There’s blood in my mouth
Because I’ve been biting my tongue all week

and so I looked up the phrase, which lead me to Psalm 63. In the psalm is the passage:

But those who seek to destroy my life
shall go down into the depths of the earth;
they shall be given over to the might of the sword;
they shall be a portion for foxes.

The biggest lesson I learned in sobriety was the importance of the people around me. As someone who defaults to being helpful, recognizing when helpful crosses over into being taken advantage of was paramount.

As the last stroke of the Hebrew was tattooed on my arm, as my Jewishness was permanently written on my sleeve I smirked, nodded and giggled slightly.