Shmone Levenstein Hardware, closed Saturdays

Jacob and his fiancee invite me to spend a day with them at the Dead Sea.

When I was twenty-five, I took an unforgettable vacation across Italy with my then-sixteen-year-od sister. When we got to the Tower of Pisa, I was amazed by this fact: that mo-fo really LEANS. I thought people were just exaggerating for effect when they depicted it in cartoons and stuff. But no, man, it’s sideways.

So it is with the Dead Sea. It’s not just, “Oh, neat, I’m sort of float-ier here.” You are flippin’ FLOATING. It is impossible to drown accidentally in the Dead Sea. You have to really, really want to drown in the Dead Sea. You have to have a will of steel, and a very high pain threshold, to drown yourself in the Dead Sea.

Seeing as how I had, at no point, any intention of drowning myself in the Dead Sea, I used my time floating there to practice my Hebrew numbers.

“Efesssss” I breathed, having trained myself to remember the word “zero” as one long exhale. “Achad”…Jacob joined me, counting out two through five. I rejoined him at six, seven, eight. Shesh, sheba, shmone.

Ah, shmone. Let’s talk about the number 8 for a minute. In my opinion, when you name a number “shmone” you are just begging me to visualize that number as an eighty-five-year-old Lithuanian who runs a locksmith shop on Pine Street. He has sparse white hair and a peppery-grey goatee, and though he only wears a kippah once a year on Yom Kippur, he somehow manages to look naked without it. He insists that he should be called “Simon” now that he lives in America, but no one can bring themselves to call him anything but Shmone.

A casual observer might accuse me of letting my imagination run away with itself, and I suppose I’ll only confirm that when I tell you what happened when I learned the word for the number five: khamesh.

Khamesh is Shmone’s half-Arab grandson, a precocious nine-year-old with thick-fringed eyes so dark they seem lined in kohl. Though Shmone can understand the temptation, he’ll never forgive his son for marrying a Druze.

I suppose you’re going to argue that logically Khamesh should be five years old, not nine. To which I can only say, in your mnemonic for the Hebrew numbers, Khamesh can be whatever you want him to be.

Although presumably in your mnemonic, the numbers 8 and 5 are not a Lithuanian locksmith and his preternaturally intelligent grandson. Because presumably, you are not completely f*cking nuts.