One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

by Tova Reich

  Afterward, the congregation dispersed, many to bring a version of the Passover sacrifice on improvised altars of small stone mounds, offering up instead of the Paschal lamb mostly pigeons they had bagged in the “leper” colony and slaughtered, a priestess standing by to collect the trickle of pink blood in a paper cup. Paltiel wandered about the grounds inquiring if anyone had seen Cozbi’s little doggie, Abramovich, since the night of the Seder. This was the approach he had devised to save face; he had processed it as an insult to his masculine self-image, a form of neutering, to allow it to be publicly known that he could not account for the whereabouts of his woman, so, God forgive him, he used the dog as a surrogate. Nobody could remember having seen Abramovich lately, but one or two people did mention that they thought they had heard his distinctive shrill yip, somewhat muffled, but maybe that was just an auditory illusion because the dog barked so much and at all hours of the day and night, it was as if his grating sound lingered on the airwaves like an irritating tune that had been played so relentlessly in the background you could not shake it out of your head. In any event, if Abramovich were around, one woman conjectured, the smell of roasting flesh on the altar barbeques would have launched him off of his satin cushion and sent him scampering over for a bite, drooling like his Russian cousins, Pavlov’s dogs. There was not a single expression of sorrow or regret that Abramovich might be lost. Clearly, this hound was not a favorite in the camp, regarded by many as more privileged than some of the humans, which was not news to Paltiel who also shared a similar feeling in his own way, especially when he allowed himself to compare the pittance of affection that Cozbi occasionally doled out to him with the way she doted every second on the puny rodentlike mutt.

  As Paltiel went about our “leper” colony continuing to inquire after Abramovich, several of our members also mentioned that, by the way, they had not seen Cozbi either since the Seder—nor, as it happened, had anyone noticed her either leaving the “leper” compound or entering it. Naturally, as he admitted to me later, it did cross Paltiel’s mind that he could get the information he was seeking most directly and efficiently simply by going to his mother’s apartment to which he was granted unrestricted access—perhaps Cozbi was working an extended shift, for example. But for self-empowerment reasons he elected not to involve our holy mother until the very end, which, from my personal point of view, was all to the good as Ima Temima was progressively caught up as the days and weeks passed in the agony of the dying of our beloved Aish-Zara, za’zal. Instead, after making the rounds in the wake of Cozbi’s first disappearance under the guise of searching for Abramovich, Paltiel found his way to the kitchen where he liked to drop in now and then for a little nosh even when we had been headquartered at the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter. The Daughters of Bilha and Zilpa under the supervision of Rizpa, our nurturing domestic management associate, were busy crushing matzot and cracking eggs for a matzah brie lunch. As Paltiel reached for a coconut macaroon, Rizpa drew close to him and with her characteristic discretion whispered into his ear, “Where is Cozbi? Not since the Seder do we see her. She is sick?”

  The next morning, when Paltiel awoke and opened his eyes, Cozbi was there in her usual place in the bed beside him, her long naked body blotched with bruises, giving off a rank odor as if it had risen from the swamps or the sewers.

  This was the pattern that continued over the ensuing months. Paltiel would wake up to find Cozbi gone, and then a few days later, when he opened his eyes in the morning, there she would be again, her sleeping body twisted in the soiled linen, skin splotched and discolored and ravaged, reeking of the nether-world, Abramovich stuffed like a rag between her breasts. When in his frustration he could muster up the nerve to probe where she had gone off to, which was, he insisted, his right, she would gaze at him through lowered lids smeared with mascara and eyeliner as if he were not quite in focus or not quite present and flip him some words—Vampire. Dracula. Baba Yaga. Gypsy. Werewolf. Alien. Satan. Djinn.

  She hardly had the energy to toss out even those syllables much less to fulfill her responsibilities to our holy mother, passing the intervening days between disappearances mostly in bed as if recovering from a near-fatal illness. Our saintly Rizpa, in addition to her other duties, which now also included ministering to Aish-Zara, za’zal, in the terminal stage, would come to Cozbi when she could with some puréed food and tenderly feed her suffering sister against whom she passed no negative judgment spoonful by spoonful with little success, giving up in the end and setting down the bowl on the floor for Abramovich to finish off.

  “Another kidnapped soul,” Rizpa said to Paltiel on one of those occasions, her heart brimming with pity in contrast to the anger-management issues he was dealing with after each disappearance stunt—and, of course, Paltiel grasped the reference to this little woman’s enduring bereavement, from the days when he had channeled the Internet in the service of finding her nut-brown babies who had also disappeared, abducted from their cradles.

  The strain on Rizpa was becoming unbearable, and so, at the request of our holy mother, who by this time had ordered that Aish-Zara, za’zal, be conveyed in her death bed to the inner sanctum of the northern apartment in order that she might be escorted to the gates of the next life by her closest friend who loved her profoundly, I detailed my prophetess Aishet-Lot to Cozbi’s slot as Ima Temima’s second attendant. One exceptionally clear night at the height of summer, at the end of the month of Tammuz during the three weeks of mourning beginning with the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century of the Common Era and climaxing in the tragic destruction of our Holy Temple, may it be rebuilt speedily and in our time, as Rizpa and I sat in the private chamber of our holy mother, Aish-Zara, za’zal, sleeping fitfully on her back, our two senior wise women holding hands across the gap that separated their beds, Ima Temima turned to Aishet-Lot who was knitting furiously under the window, a bright crescent moon floating in the sky behind her. “Tell me where Cozbi disappears to,” HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, said to my prophetess. Aishet-Lot turned around and looked back, pointing with her fat knitting needle to the open parenthesis of the crescent moon with one star in its dip framed in the window behind her. “Yes,” Ima Temima said, “it is as I thought.”

  The waning moon also shone through the window of Paltiel’s room that night, and for the first time in all those months he dared to reach out his hand to Cozbi whose back was turned to him in their bed and stroke her flank, only to be informed, in more words than she had managed to string together during that entire period, that their relationship had been downsized to brother-sister status. By morning Cozbi had gone missing again. It was then that Paltiel finally turned to his mother.

  Walking and sobbing, walking and sobbing, Paltiel made his way to his mother’s chambers in the northern corner of our “leper” commune and plunked down with implicit entitlement on the bed. In reviewing this moment with me later, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, made reference to the one-hundred-and-twenty-sixth Psalm, the Song of Ascent often chanted before the grace after a meal, in which those who sow in tears walk along weeping, carrying their bag of seeds. “How terrible it is if one must walk while crying, the need to cry must be so unbearably overwhelming,” our holy mother taught. “For crying, one should at least be given the grace to stop, not to be forced to go on, as on a death march. This is the most painful kind of crying.” But then Ima Temima noted, with a mother’s tender heart, the happy ending—the walking-crying bearing bundles of ripe sheaves, reaping with joy.

  Moreover, in recalling the encounter, our holy mother, accentuating the positive, pointed to an unexpected and in some measure a gratifyingly therapeutic streak of acting-out on Paltiel’s part when he settled himself on the bed and described his last confrontation with Cozbi. Mimicking her heavy cigarette voice in a provocatively exaggerated way and dropping his articles in mockery of her Slavic accent, Paltiel reported that she had announced to him, “You are brother to me, mama boy. I am si
ster to you.” He went on to inform his mother that as far as he was concerned, with respect to this vulgar slut Cozbi, he was now left with two options—either to dump her or to kill her. Ima Temima recommended the former, counseling him to leave our “leper” colony to assert his own dignity and self-respect, and to return to the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter from where he could continue to run the operation and from which Cozbi would be strictly barred by designated enforcers.

  As for the second option, in discussing the exchange with me afterward, Ima Temima wondered out loud if the boy’s father, Howie Stern, reinvented as Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, whom she seemed to have always regarded as mentally challenged, was actually some kind of variation on an “idiot” savant, as demonstrated by his prescience in naming the boy Pinkhas. For the man who had entered our holy mother’s quarters walking and weeping brokenhearted like Paltiel son of Layish when his beloved Mikhal was wrested from him and reclaimed by her husband, King David, as his property rightfully acquired with the payment to her father King Saul of her price tag of one hundred Philistine foreskins plus a big tip of an extra one hundred thrown in for good measure—that same man went forth like the zealot Pinkhas son of Elazar son of Aaron the high priest who had raised his spear and rammed it through the guts and groins of the fornicators, Zimri son of Salu, a chieftain of the tribe of Shimon, and the idol-worshipping shiksa, Cozbi daughter of the Midianite elder Zur.

  Pinkhas son of Elazar son of Aaron the high priest has his fade-out in the Tanakh at what must have been a phenomenally old age in the closing chapters of the book of Judges, as strict as ever. By the end of his days he is high priest in Beit El, where the Ark of the Covenant was then housed. Speaking for the Lord as His oracle, he rallies the Israelites to battle against their brothers of the tribe of Benjamin, perpetuating a bloody civil war in which thousands are slaughtered and Benjamin is nearly wiped off the face of the earth. With her finger pressed to these verses, my prophetess Aishet-Lot rose from amid the heaps of white wool streamers she had knitted that encircled her like a salt mine and brought the open book of Judges over to our holy mother after Paltiel left. Ima Temima nodded in complete understanding, and with noble generosity praised my prophetess Aishet-Lot with the words, “I see you have enlarged your vision from the past to the future.”

  The verses that Aishet-Lot was pointing to in which Pinkhas takes his farewell bow are in the middle of what it pains me to say is one of the most offensive sections of the Tanakh—the story of the concubine of Gibeah. This poor pilegesh is violently raped all through the night by a gang of men in Gibeah in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin where she and her master had stopped in their travels. When the Benjaminites of Gibeah are finished with her, they dump her at the door of the only house in town in which the travelers could find hospitality, her hands clawing the threshold. In the morning, her master loads her lifeless body onto his ass and hauls it home. He carves her up into twelve parts with his knife, hacking through the bones, dispatching the pieces of his violated property throughout the borders of Israel with the message, Take heed, Take counsel, Such things have never happened in Israel.

  Are there truly some things left that have never happened in Israel? That is my question.

  Paltiel departed from our “leper” colony that evening. Rizpa followed behind dragging one of his suitcases and a plaid vinyl bag filled with his favorite dishes in plastic containers that she had prepared for him as he made his way to an exit on the David Marcus Street side where a taxi waited. About a week later a package was found at the door of Ima Temima’s apartment in the northern garden. I raised my woman’s naked voice to express my concern that it might be a suspicious object, cautioning against handling it lest it blow up in our faces, but our holy mother overrode my security concerns and commanded Aishet-Lot to open it at once. Inside was the mangled shriveled carcass of Abramovich, barely recognizable, poor thing, next to a blackened waxy human ear of indeterminate gender except that from its piercing a long gold earring hung that no one could have mistaken as belonging to anyone other than Cozbi—the same earring that had jangled so prettily in happier times when she had crossed the floor in her three-inch stilettos to open the door on Passover eve to welcome Elijah the Prophet and the prophetess Miriam-Azuva-Snow White to our Seder.

  MENTION of Elijah the Prophet moves me at this time under the aspect of the shattering life-cycle events, birth and death, that followed soon after the shocking revelations of the Cozbi case to legato in my thoughts to Rabbi Elijah, the formidable eighteenth-century Lithuanian Talmudic genius known as the Gaon of Vilna. Our own formidable Jerusalem Tanakh genius HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, would on occasion cite the Gaon of Vilna in definitively identifying who among our women could rightly be included in our priestly tribe, in the lineage of Aaron, the first high priest. Such positive ID became a matter of particular sensitivity in our post-modern age, when traces of Aaron’s DNA could be found on the Y chromosome of men from Africa to India no matter how alien, automatically conferring upon them the honor of priestly status by virtue of patrilineal descent, the indisputable manifest destiny of genes.

  We women, of course, do not possess a Y chromosome, I thank God for this every morning in my prayers—Blessed are You Lord our God King of the Universe Who has not made me a man. Amen. Ah women. In determining who among our women could rightly be classified as a kohenet, therefore, our holy mother ruled according to Rabbi Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna. Surnames such as Cohen, Kahan, Katz, and so on and so forth, were all well and good and might or might not indicate that the individual so called descended from the priestly line. But, as the Vilna Gaon is reported to have decreed, if a person’s name was Rappaport, that person was a certifiable priest, conferring upon her not only the extra burden to always be on the best exemplary behavior that is laid upon the back of a daughter of a priest (the harsher punishment of burning, for example, if she is caught in adultery), but also the right to partake of all the privileges and honors accorded to the men of that holy caste (eating the best cuts of meat of sacrificial animals, being called up first of the pack to the Torah).

  The majority of our priestesses, maximum four in all remaining at our “leper” colony at that time, were certified to have descended from family trees with Rappaport signatures from either the maternal or paternal branch, including our beloved high priestess Aish-Zara, za’zal, née Essie Rappaport, and also including the nearly senior citizen priestess whose advanced stage of pregnancy I had noticed for the first time the day after we arrived here, when the dead goat came flying like a nostalgic image from a painting by Chagall over the stone wall of our “leper” shtetl. I admit now that I cannot (perhaps due to an extended senior moment of my own) recover the memory of her original given first name, and neither she nor to my deep regret Aish-Zara, za’zal, is with us any longer to enlighten me. In any case, it is sufficient for me to assert at this time that she was a guaranteed genuine Rappaport. As for her first name, when she was initiated into the sacred mysteries of the priesthood she took the name Tahara, with all its complex allusions to purity.

  The priestess Tahara Rappaport’s birthing travails began in our “leper” colony just a few days after the hideous body-parts parcel was delivered to our holy mother’s door. Her water broke on the eve of the Ninth of Av as we began our fasting and lamentations over the destruction of our Holy Temples, two catastrophic blows dealt us by an astonishing coincidence around the same day of the same month half a millennium apart, proof positive that they could only have been delivered by the hand (anthropomorphically speaking, in the language of human beings) of the Almighty Himself. Tahara’s harrowing labor lasted through the night, and by early afternoon of the next day, the Ninth of Av—the day on which some say the messiah is slated to be born and coincidentally the purported birthday of the false messiah Shabbtai Tzvi—the child was delivered. As the first day of the newborn’s mortal journey on this earth advanced and darkness descended, our beloved
Aish-Zara, za’zal, drew her legs up onto her bed, biblically speaking, took her final breath, let out her final mortal gasp, her agonized death rattle, and was gathered back to her mothers.

  On that Tisha B’Av eve, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, delegated me to preside at our communal recitation of the Scroll of Lamentations composed by my colleague the prophet Jeremiah—Alas, how the city once teeming with people sits solitary, like a widow weeping, weeping through the night, no one to comfort her from among all who once loved her. The divinatory powers bestowed on a personage of such expanded consciousness in such close communion with the spiritual realm as Ima Temima rendered our holy mother’s inspiring presence in our midst out of the question that night. Ascending to the heights, our holy mother saw with the certainty of pure inner vision that the precious soul of Aish-Zara, za’zal, would depart from her body within the next twenty-four hours, on the Ninth of Av itself, a day on which so many other calamities befell our people, this one only adding to the list. It was unthinkable—impermissible—for Ima Temima to leave the side of Aish-Zara, za’zal, at such a time, a matter of danger to the soul overriding all other sacred obligations. I accepted my mandate from our holy mother, therefore, and with humility took my place at the head of our mourners of the destruction of Jerusalem sitting on the floor of the great hall of our “leper” hospital in stocking feet, candles flickering in the dark sealed by their own pools of melting wax to the cool stones.