One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

by Tova Reich

  With the baby in her arms now loosely diapered and bundled, Temima made ready to leave when, as if something else had just by chance occurred to her, she turned to the doctor and asked if he would be willing to take a quick look at one more thing. His expression turned bemused, wily. “If the one-more-thing is on you, then please, with pleasure, no charge for looking.” Temima showed him a nodule on her lip, and a bump on her ear, as well as a spot on her neck, each of which he examined attentively without comment. “Anywhere else?” he asked. So Temima allowed him to look at the others, in the private places, which the doctor inspected closely and lingeringly, pronouncing in the end, “Healthy, completely healthy!”—advising her to eat foods such as spinach and lentils and soybeans rich in the right kind of protein, which would also benefit the baby when it would be piped in through her breast milk. Then, as he was letting her out the door, he switched tone and added gravely, with the entitlement of authority, “This is not coming from heaven, you know—not the disease, and not the cure, not the blessing, and not the curse. You have a choice. Choose life if you want to live—you and your child.”

  Over the next few weeks it seemed to Temima that things were beginning to fall into place, that her life was taking on a semblance of control. She was not asking for happiness, happiness was not a guaranteed right to pursue, especially in Israel; she was asking only for the right not to be consumed by the land, she was asking for a normal child untouched by danger. The baby improved day by day, until all signs of the outbreak had disappeared entirely; no one would ever have to know there had even been a stigma. She called the Toiter to report the good news. Together they reconsecrated themselves to the child.

  They agreed that she would contact Howie to inform him of her return—that she was using her remaining time in Jerusalem to put the apartment up for sale and arrange for storage of all their furniture and possessions in anticipation of the day in the near future when, God willing, the Kiryat Arba villa her father had bought for them would be ready and they could move out of their tent in the army camp overlooking Hebron. She asked Howie to call off Ibn Kadosh and his tape recorder, to drive him out of the Ben-Yefuneh Street building. With the telephone clamped to her ear by her hiked-up shoulder, the baby naked in her arms reaching out with his pudgy hands to tug at the wire, Temima watched from her window as Ibn Kadosh slowly made his way down Ben-Yefuneh Street toward Bethlehem Road carrying his belongings including the tape recorder in his sack, his mother, Ketura, over whom he now towered, faithfully at his side. She speculated whether, when they arrived at Hebron Road, they would turn left in the direction of the Old City of Jerusalem or right toward Hebron, as she gave Howie the date and time to send the bulletproof car to pick her up and bring her and the child back to the compound. “What do you need a military escort for?” Howie demanded in frustration. “Who do you think you are anyways, Queen Tut? It’s a zillion times safer here than on Coney Island Avenue. You’re coming home to Hevron, Tema—to the Me’arat HaMakhpela, for God’s sakes, the second holiest site in the Jewish world next to the Western Wall.”

  The third holiest site is the tomb of Rachel Our Mother. When Temima with her baby Kook Immanuel and her little mother Torah reached this domed shrine by the side of the road as they were traveling in the bulletproof vehicle back to the army compound overlooking Hebron on the appointed day, she asked the driver to stop to allow her to make a brief pilgrimage. Rachel Our Mother was the least maternal of the matriarchs, and yet, of the four, she above all the others had come to most stand for the idea of mother—the voice heard in Ramah, weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, the Jewish Our Lady of the Highways, wailing and crying bitterly for her children as they pass her in fetters trudging off to exile, greeting them from the roadside as they return to their borders dancing the hora.

  Temima brought her little mother Torah up to the tomb of Rachel Our Mother and brushed her against it, in a kind of ritual greeting of soul mates. Temima’s mother, Rachel-Leah, lay alone and unvisited in her grave in the Old Montefiore cemetery in Queens, and here was Rachel Our Mother buried alone on the roadside, excluded from the family mausoleum at the Makhpela, the couples’ club. This was her punishment, according to the commentator-in-chief Rashi—to lie alone forever for so contemptuously selling a night lying with Jacob in exchange for a bunch of mandrakes with forked roots that Reuven, the eldest son of her sister and rival-wife, Leah, had pulled shrieking out of the earth, giving off their intoxicating scent redolent of all the possibilities and risks of love and death that enshrouded Rachel Our Mother and those she elected to gather under her veil.

  When Temima returned to the military compound a fragrance clung to her, enveloping her like a cloud so intense that people came out to sniff what was in the air. And instantly, as when she had arrived the first time and walked between the raindrops, the sense was renewed and restored of a presence among them endowed with special powers that practically made them bow down as they stood at the entrances of their tents and observed her passage. Soon Temima was holding court again, either up in the army camp itself in the intervals between men’s prayer quorums three times a day inside the tent that had been designated as the synagogue, or down in the heart of Hebron at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, under the vigilant eyes of her four bodyguards, where she presided by the cenotaph of Mother Leah, privileged to lie beside Father Jacob for eternity. Wherever she sat, she was never without her two children—Kook Immanuel on her lap or loosely suspended in a sling on her back or front, Temima’s fingers encircling a chubby ankle or wrist like a shackle, the child her husband called Pinkhas playing quietly on the floor at her feet, pushing a toy army jeep with one hand and, with the other, clutching a handful of her skirt.

  At the Makhpela, Arabs and Jews, men and women, made their way to the holy woman reputed to be endowed with mystical powers—seeking her out for blessings, advice, consolation, cures, foreknowledge and self-knowledge, the interpretation of dreams, restoring the memory of what they had once known and forgotten, leading them to the discovery of what they had lost, from a lost earring to a lost child, for, as Temima taught, When you find sixty-nine objects you have lost you will find redemption.

  From all over the land of Israel and from outside the land they risked their lives and ventured into this danger zone to the learned woman sage with questions pertaining to ritual or law, renowned rabbis arrived in disguise or secretly dispatched lackeys to seek out responsa they would later claim as their own to questions ranging from artificial insemination to autopsies, soul birth to brain death and all the confusion in between, whether a woman may elect to take on the risks of cosmetic surgery, six months marinating in oils of myrrh and six months in perfumes and female ointments, whether a man may be counted as a member of the minyan for prayer if he had been born as a woman who had undergone a sex change, and so forth. In the synagogue tent of the military compound, learning circles gathered around the great wise woman, forums for rigorous study, not only men and boys in mixed classes but, often at Temima’s specific behest, drawing on her own priorities, women and girls exclusively, which permitted her to nurse Kook Immanuel as she taught with a blanket draped over her shoulder for modesty, and many of her students were breast-feeding their babies too, including the convert Yehudit Har-HaBayit with newborn twins at her breasts, she who had once so joyously offered herself as a wet nurse to the infant Howie kidnapped and named Pinkhas on his circumcision day, from whom the little boy now turned away in alarm whenever she batted her false eyelashes and bared her long teeth to smile and beckon to him, running to Temima and burrowing his face in her lap.

  Temima’s recent encounter with Rachel Our Mother by the roadside inspired her to devote these sessions to an exploration of the narrow range of authorized feminine categories a woman can inhabit regardless of who she was as an individual. Borrowing from the methods of her revered teacher, Morah Nekhama Leibowitz, she unfolded the discussions through questions, but rather than questions that perplexed commentators
or sages she dwelt on the simple human questions, her own and her students’, evoked by the plain text, with no mandate to manipulate the answer to arrive at an acceptable foreordained conclusion within the constraints of the orthodoxy. Who was Rachel Our Mother as a woman? Temima asked. There’s evidence in the text that she was the beloved of her husband, Jacob, though he spoke cruelly to her when she lamented her barrenness and effectively cursed her with an early death when she stole her father’s little idols. But did she love him in return, was she even attracted to him as he so dramatically was to her, or, in the overall scheme of things, are her feelings irrelevant and beside the point? And who was Rachel Our Mother as a mother—childless for so long that she turned to her husband and cried, “Give me sons or I’ll die,” when what she really might more correctly have said was “Give me sons and I’ll die?” How did it come about that a woman who died in childbirth, leaving behind the newborn, Benjamin, and his brother Joseph, a little boy with a lot of big personality problems, a woman who in the end had engaged in very little actual mothering—how did it happen that she above all other women emerged as the symbol of the ideal mother whose abiding love for her children renders her inconsolable, the mother her children could rely upon to be in the same spot in perpetual grief for their suffering, the mother who always cares?

  “Because the best mothers are those who let go of their children,” Yehudit Har-HaBayit answered, her twins now asleep in a double stroller parked outside the tent. Rising from her seat, she continued, “Look at Hagar with her son Ishmael when they were dying of thirst in the wilderness. Only when she lets go of Ishmael and casts him away from her under one of the bushes into God’s hands is the boy saved—hallelujah!” She began to move toward Temima. “You have to learn to let go of your child. That’s what makes you a good mother—like Rachel Our Mother, who let go by dying.” With everyone’s eyes fixed upon her, Yehudit Har-HaBayit planted herself in front of Temima with both arms outstretched—waiting.

  The heaviness of the silence bore down in the tent, replacing the air, until the moment that Temima acknowledged what was being asked of her by raising Kook Immanuel ceremoniously like an elevated offering and passing him over into Yehudit Har-HaBayit’s hands open before her, palms upturned to receive the child. It was the first time during the nine months of this baby’s life outside of Temima’s womb not counting his circumcision that she had fully released him into the hands of another.

  From across the room as he sat on this alien lap the baby Kook Immanuel would occasionally give out a doleful whimper, or lurch forward toward his mother with longing, but Temima could see from his clear eyes and calm breathing that he was safe and at ease, and after a while the eyes closed and he was sleeping tranquilly in the arms of the stranger. After that day, Temima began to set him down on a blanket in the center of the learning circle, and her eyes would follow him calmly as he crawled off to a corner of the tent before someone would go to scoop him up. When the days were warm, she would occasionally leave him outside in a nursery enclosure with other babies supervised by teenagers responsible and mature much beyond their years, the eldest sisters to dozens of siblings; and more and more frequently, when Temima went down to sit by Mother Leah’s tomb in the Makhpela, she left him in the charge of another woman, usually Yehudit Har-HaBayit, who had illuminated for her the faith of maternal letting go. As the sages commented, From all of my teachers I have learned, but from my students more than from all of them.

  Now at last Temima was also able to resume her regular practice of hitbodedut with the luxury of true solitude, seeking an isolated spot on the hilltop overlooking Hebron among the olive trees a safe distance from the perimeter of the military compound even in the dark of night to beseech and converse with God—trusting Howie, before she set out, to watch over the baby, handing over the baby to him along with a bottle of warm milk freshly expressed from her breasts. Just such a bottle covered in blood she found in his stroller on the day her husband, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, with the child he called Pinkhas strapped in a carrier on his back, pushed Kook Immanuel in his stroller at the head of a demonstration along Al-Shuhada Street lined with Arab shops and businesses to reassert sovereignty over what had once been the heart of the Jewish quarter of the old city. Since the blood is the life of the flesh, when the body was prepared for burial the blood-stained bottle was slipped inside the tight swaddling of the blue-and-white Israeli flag with which the stroller at the head of the procession had been bedecked. It, too, was soaked with the blood that had streamed down from the wound when the stone struck the baby’s forehead and sank in and he slumped over. The tiny corpse with all of its bloodied artifacts that had been transformed into body parts was then wrapped by his mother in the talit with its silver-and-gold-embroidered neckpiece and azure fringes, a small package to be shipped into the dark belly of Sheol.

  Thousands of people from all over Israel and from outside the land as well poured into Hebron for the funeral of this innocent baby so savagely cut down. They marched in the procession as it snaked its way down from the army compound on the hilltop through the heart of the city and its teeming casbah into the ancient Jewish cemetery breached for the first time since 1929 when the sixty-seven corpses slaughtered in the pogrom of Tarpat were deposited in a mass grave. Brandishing placards on sticks emblazoned with the words KOOK HAI! and NEKAMA!, and blowups of the baby’s face with his bright hopeful eyes and rosy cheeks, wave after wave of raging mourners surged forward. Israeli military personnel heavily armed crouched behind sandbags or stood at alert with their weapons poised along the entire route as helicopters hovered overhead, helpless to halt the advance or to quell the calls for revenge with fists punching the air or to suppress the incendiary cries of the child’s unvanquished spirit living on.

  At the head of the procession, the bereaved father, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, was pushed in a wheelchair surrounded by masses of men in knitted yarmulkes with fringes hanging out of their untucked white shirttails. His head bound in a turban of white gauze and his arm in a sling from the wounds inflicted upon him by the stones with which he too was pelted, and from using his body as a shield to protect the child he called Pinkhas riding on his back, Howie cradled in the crook of his uninjured arm the tiny wrapped package of the dead baby, Kook Immanuel, rocking him back and forth and singing over and over the lullaby—“No, no, no, no, we won’t go from here. All of our enemies, all those who hate us, all of them will go from here. Only we, only we, we won’t move from here.”

  Behind the throng of men came the multitude of keening women with the stately figure of Temima in front, a long shawl on her head draping over her shoulders and down her back that she clutched together with both hands at her throat, her dry eyes concealed by dark glasses, supported on either side by her students to whom at one point she turned and said, “There is no word in the English language for a parent who has lost a child, but we have one in Hebrew—shakula for a mother, shakul for a father—because we Jews have always needed such a word, the way Eskimos need words for ice.” And she coughed out a hard subversive laugh, like Mother Sarah.

  Over the loudspeaker came the eulogies of the rabbis and leaders, their voices cracking, rising and falling in outrage and grief, breaking into shouts and sobs. The Lord gives, the Lord takes, may the name of the Lord be blessed. The little wrapped package containing Kook Immanuel with all of his bloody body parts was lowered into the freshly dug grave that awaited him, and the men dumped shovelful after shovelful of dirt on top of it until there rose an imposing mound. Howie was helped out of his wheelchair and supported on either side as he stood up in order to recite the mourner’s Kaddish for his dead son—Exalted and sanctified is His Great Name. At the far edge of the cemetery Temima could see the cadaverous figure of the Toiter clad in rent white garments with his arms raised to the heavens and his hands clenched into fists, the silent scream drowned out by the mourner’s Kaddish emerging hoarsely
from his own lips—He Who makes peace in His heights, May He make peace on us and on all Israel, And now say Amen—and she watched as his body crumpled and collapsed prone on the ground with the arms outstretched, prostrate with grief.

  The father of the dead baby, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, was assisted back into his wheelchair, which was then pushed down the long aisle created by the two rows of men facing each other that had formed like a wake from the vessel of the mound over the gravesite that would ferry the child to the next world. As he made his way forward in his wheelchair down the aisle he received from each of the men on either side the ritual consolation—May the Presence comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

  The baby’s mother, who one day would be revered and beloved as the holy woman HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Ima Temima, moved forward alone as if floating and entered between the two rows to collect her portion of the consolation. A voice called out, “Men only! Men only!” She heeded it at once, turning back and resuming her place among the women. “He’s right,” Temima said. “We are all Mother Rachels. We cannot be comforted.”

  More Bitter

  Than Death

  Is Woman: Yiska

  The Teachings Of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Shlita

  (May She Live On For Many Good Long Years)—

  Recorded By Kol-Isha-Erva At The “Leper” Colony Of Jerusalem

  IN THE awareness of the Presence and the awareness of the congregation, in the convocation of the heights and in the convocation below, and at the personal gentle admonishment of our holy mother, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, I beg forgiveness for neglecting my duty to set down for us transgressors the teachings of Ima Temima, and for putting off my task of recording events of note that have transpired over these past months here in the “leper” colony of Jerusalem. Over the course of this difficult period of adjustment during which I have been so remiss in my responsibilities as scribe and collector of recovered memories, our numbers have diminished relentlessly. Through the grinding attrition of impoverished faith and weak commitment, our general population has declined to a census of fewer than one hundred, mostly women assessed at thirty silver shekels apiece between the ages of twenty and sixty, ready to bear arms for battle. Of the two senior women in our ranks above the age of sixty, valued at ten silver shekels a head, our elders before whom we are enjoined to rise and whose aged faces we are bidden to glorify as the Torah commands us, Ima Temima alone remains, increasingly frail in body but still a towering presence in spirit and mind.