"If you have acquired knowledge, what do you lack? If you lack knowledge, what have you acquired?"
— From the Midrash

"Jeremy, you got it."

His mother's words were intentionally subdued, but their guts were strung with tension and pride. His hair felt like a forest of bristles. His stomach rebeled, and he wanted to vomit.

Somehow, he recalled his first day of Hebrew school, walking through his city's crumbling old high-tech district. He was walking toward the new city of Boston, a place with supernaturally clean streets that would eventually terrify him a hundred times more than the rat highways of broken-down Cambridge.

His arrival at the building was inauspicious. He got lost when he stepped through the door. The place was armored with mirrored windows, and he floated in through a bobbing crowd of artificial whizkids and intimidating hardware. Their headgear was hidden, supposedly, by the old-fashioned cloth kipas that the local elders favored. But everyone flashed the metallic good shit at any possible opportunity, to compare batteries, and dates, and brand names. To swap model numbers, and one-up any family that had fallen behind on the education and improvement of their children.

The Rabbi had the Torah in his brain. The words of the Torah, the Talmud, the Midrash, the Mishnah, assorted modern and uncollected commentaries, the quasi-secret knowledge of the Kabbalah; all there, burned away digitally, fast and friendly like loose change on the fingertips.

Jeremy was one of the few Jewish children untouched by the gray healing hand of electronic augmentation. Worse, he'd started late on Hebrew, and despite his home-schooling in the language, he was a poor kid with a poor education, and parents who loved him.

Love didn't make the payments.

An older child: "Are you naturally stupid, or did your parents teach you?"

The teacher: "Nathan, sit down and listen for a change. Jeremy, you need to work harder."

It is not easy to work harder while surrounded by children who have the full Hebrew alphabet painted into their heads, where it occupies one-fourth of one-fourth of one-fourth of one percent of a single small chip. It's not easy to work harder when there are children mentally branded with the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and the speeches of Elie Wiesel, and poetry of Amos Oz. The words were eaten into little atomic grooves tangoed out of the silicon and fiber-optic wafers.

Jeremy read.

Jeremy read the old way, sitting under a lightbulb, letting his hands smooth down aged paper pages. The books were a gift from his grandfather, who believed somehow that the pages themselves were sacred.

"It's not the words you know, not entirely," said Grandpa Michael. "There is something sacred about the paper and ink, I think. You'll see — five hundred years from now when people have palm-sized pads containing all of Mankind's knowledge at high resolution, we'll still have these damn heavy things. If nothing else, they'll be fashionable forever. They look good on a shelf. Computers look like damn machines. And you can't put a damn Torah scroll on a silicon wafer."

Not exactly true.

Grandpa was free of implants, of course, as was the whole family. At seders, uncles and aunts would grumble about the stuff — it was unholy, God abhorred it, it was destroying the beauty of learning, of tradition, and did you hear there's a new government program to get a basic augment? Who would we give it to? Could we get a scholarship?

In fact, Jews had been among the first to embrace the new technology. This happened even when Baptists and the Vatican were denouncing it, when the rich were lampooning it in Harper's, and the poor were demonizing it in the pages of The Globe and The Sun. "Enter the Cyber-Jew," said US News and World Report. They were talking about Chaim Goldfarb, a New Haven scholar with a digitally boosted brain, but others walked behind him.

10 years later, an augmented Jew became president of US Steel. Another was elected to the Senate in Minnesota. Yet another became acclaimed as one of the best mathematicians to walk the Earth. Lutherans, Catholics, Muslims and others followed in droves (India was already 5 years ahead, having elected an augment as their Prime Minister). Among the rich or influential of the world, only a few diehard groups held out.

They defined themselves against it. Strongly. Absolutely. Philosophically.

"A man with a chip in his brain is no longer a man," said David Jones, a minister in the New Church of Salem. "He is no longer a man, he has turned away from God, and put into his brain a building block from the new Tower of Babel. God will take away from those who are arrogant. God will take away from those who mock his gifts."

Some believed it. But a lot changed when the president got a knowledge implant — including a fully updatable encyclopedia and current events database — as a Christmas gift from Learning Technologies Incorporated, of Princeton, New Jersey.

The president accepted. Jeremy's parents were humbled.

"Jeremy," said Joshua, his father. "Do you know what this means?"

Joshua's old hands trembled as they held the letter, printed on old-fashioned manilla stationary, with dark, traditional ink. "This means you can be like the others. Considerably better than the others. You already have a natural gift."

And he did. After a couple years in Hebrew school, he was keeping up with the augments. Kids whispered that he had hidden headgear, when they heard him speak.

"How did you remember that poem?" asked his teacher, one day. He'd recited, from memory and in the original Hebrew, Yehuda Amichai's "And We Shall Not Get Excited." It had come at an appropriate time during a discussion about emigration and identity. Other children knew what he was reciting the moment he'd crossed the threshold of the fifth word in the title; but they didn't understand why Jeremy was reciting it until considerably later, when he talked about what the words meant to him.

"Jeremy," said his mother Sara, "Are you going to take it?"

Jeremy held the paper in his hands, and read the letter again. It was a good scholarship, and it was a good augment. He'd have headgear as good as anyone. His parents were already proud.

"I'm doing okay without it," said Jeremy. The words came with a hard, glossy finality.

His mom began to cry. His father held her, and shook his head.

But he was smiling.