At first, there was the dream. It was the Headmaster‘s dream, and it was so alive in Him, and he in it, that you could say the dream itself was the Headmaster. Everything at Jeshurun grew from that dream, and nothing existed outside of it. The dream gave life to the school, and this life was a fire that gave light and warmth to all its students. That fire continued to burn and was too strong for the cold wind to blow out. Finally, when it was time, the dream itself came to life and lived with us.

My name is John, and these are not just my words, but ones the White Parakeet chirped in my ear. I have no idea what year it is for you or how Jeshurun has changed by the time you read this. But, whoever you are, and whatever Jeshurun is like now, please believe me that I have an amazing story of good news for you. It’s about my friend, Jes, who came and then left in a really extraordinary way.

But, first, I should tell you something about Jeshurun at the time I was there.

I came to Jeshurun Academy for Boys at the start of the fall semester of my freshman year in High School, when I was fourteen. Jeshurun was about twenty–five years old at the time, and consisted of some three hundred boys from the seventh through twelfth grades. The campus was about five miles from the nearest town, and its 300–acre wooded grounds were sandwiched between the State Highway on the west and Jeshurun Creek on the east, with Augustus Military Academy to the north, the Athena School of Fine Arts to the south, and Gerazim Academy was across the creek, farther to the East. The entrance to Jeshurun was covered by a metal arch with the school name in crimson letters and a gold crest crowning the top. A paved road with tall pine trees on both sides went under the arch and up a small hill. Several hundred yards in, at the top of the hill, the road ended in a circular driveway at the Administration Building, which looked like a red granite castle, with rounded turrets on either side and a low balcony bordering the roof. Beyond the Administration Building was a large open square, with classrooms on the left, dormitory on the right, and, at the far end, a building housing the cafeteria and the library. The campus was pretty much one large rectangular building wrapped around this square and broken only by breezeways at either end of the Administration Building, connecting the square with open fields to the north and south.

When I arrived on Saturday afternoon with my parents, Mr. Moses, the superintendent of studies, met us in the reception room on the south wing of the Administration Building and went over certain of the rules and procedures that I was, of course, paying no attention to at all. Mr. Moses was a tall, muscular man in his seventies, balding on top, with a wispy gray circle of hair above his ears and a thin gray beard extending from his sideburns. He wore black–rimmed glasses that he had to pull to the end of his nose when he began to read passages from the Jeshurun Academy Student Handbook, a copy of which was tucked under my arm as I was sent off with my bags to the dormitory. Parents generally couldn’t go beyond the Administration Building, so one of the older students, a hall monitor, led me to the dormitory building and checked me into my room there.

After signing some paperwork, I had an hour and a half to unpack before dinner at 5:30 in the cafeteria. My roommate wasn’t there yet, so I had plenty of room to spread my things out and get comfortable. There were no uniforms at Jeshurun, but the dress code required us to wear a shirt that buttoned at the collar and a tie during all classes. I tore the plastic off of a week’s supply of new shirts and put them each on a separate hanger in the closet next to my three pairs of pants and four ties.

When I finished unpacking and left my room for dinner that night, a few other boys were getting out at the same time and I followed them down the stairs and across the square to the large double-doored entrance to the building which housed both the cafeteria and the library. We entered a hall with a bulletin board on the right wall already holding a half–dozen postings. The cafeteria was on the left, through another set of doors, where I stood in line along the wall, waiting to pass through the kitchen at the far end.

Just in front of a rack of trays at the beginning of the serving line, there was a sink with a sign above it that read, “Literary Society members must wash hands here before every meal. Respect the Headmaster’s rules!” Most of the boys ahead of me did wash hands in the sink, though some just went through the motions of getting their hands wet and quickly dried them off on the towel next to the sink. But, a few of the older boys, ones that also looked better dressed, avoided the sink entirely.

I heard one of those older boys say to another, “I see the Farsees haven’t given up their silliness yet.”

The other responded, “They never will. Poor deluded fools – to think that the Headmaster would want his boys to wash in a common sink like that. Anyone with a little breeding and polish can see that it’s ridiculous.”

When it came my turn to pass by the sink, I decided to do what most of the other boys had done and washed my hands there, but I had no idea until later how some small detail like this could be so important, or why the boys here would bother to argue about it.

I ate by myself that night, like many of the other new students. The older students, the upperclassmen, sat at their own tables, closest to the kitchen. And most of the younger returning students sat in small groups, talking among themselves. I tried to catch some of what they were saying.

“Do the rules apply now?” one nervous–sounding voice asked.

“Of course,” another answered, “all but the dress code. That doesn’t start until tomorrow.”

“What about study hall silence, the sun hasn‘t set yet?” the nervous one asked.

“Just don’t worry about it. The monitors probably haven’t gotten their whistles and clipboards yet, so just go with what everyone else is doing.”

“Is the game on for tomorrow?” another voice asked.

“I heard it wasn’t going to start until Kaffie came.”

“He’ll be here tomorrow.”

“I hope not until too late for the game.”

“Pipe down over there,” an older student warned them, “or else some students are going to get written up for violating Study Hall silence.”

At this, all voices hushed and the rest of the meal was eaten in what seemed to me to be an unnatural quiet, something like what I imagined it must be like in prison. I looked across the room at a poster centered on the far wall showing what must have been a student in a well–pressed shirt and tie, but one who looked older than a highschooler should have been. He was facing me and, while opening the front door to the Administration Building with one hand, he stretched out his other hand to his audience, inviting them to join him, and showing on his underarm the interlocking “C” and “A” tattoo that marked him as a Jeshurun student. His eyes were calm and his face looked confident and strong. The caption read, “Anything is Possible at Jeshurun.“ Maybe, I thought, no matter how strange this place seemed in the first few hours I was there, Jeshurun would grow to fit me in the same way that it seemed to fit the student in the poster.

Just before I finished dinner, I heard a bell-like sound at the upperclassmen’s table and saw an older boy standing up and tapping his knife against a glass. I then heard for the first time what I would hear every morning after breakfast and every night after dinner, and what every other boy who had come to Jeshurun before me heard.

In a crisp, clear voice, the older boy recited, “Listen, Jeshurun, the Headmaster is our leader, He’s number one!”

Every boy in the cafeteria then thunderously repeated that same line together.

The older boy then continued, “We study for Him. We strive for Him. We live for Him.”

Again, every other boy in the room repeated this, followed by a round of applause and whistles. After that, everything settled back to normal again, as boys finished their meal and bused their trays.

The strangest part of my first day at Jeshurun came shortly after 10:00 p.m. lights out. Before getting into bed, I looked out my window across the empty square, in the light of a full harvest moon, and saw the dark outline of the Administration Building with one light from a room on the top floor and the silhouette of a man also looking out on the square, completely motionless. I had already turned out the light in my own room, so that I was certain he couldn’t see me, and I decided to make a game out of how long this person would stand there staring into the night. He was there, completely still, for what seemed like it must have been more than an hour, so long that I began to think that it was not a man at all, but some object that only looked like a person in a strange twist of light coming from the room. Then I thought to myself, if you‘re just an object, then I certainly won‘t waste my time any longer leaning against the window here like an idiot. Just then, I saw the figure move His arm in a waving motion. So it was a man after all! But, who could He possibly have been waving at in the darkness? Maybe, I thought to myself, it was some thoughtless movement or some gesture he was making to himself. Anyway, the motion stopped after that, and I soon went to bed, but with the strange feeling that it might have been me He was waving at, and that I was now welcome here.

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