One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

by Tova Reich

  By all accounts he himself was not there that morning. It was possible, however, to distinguish among this throng a few who were the actual children of Aish-Zara, za’zal, by the obligatory mourning rent in their garments close to the heart, and so I approached one of them, a daughter naturally, since I knew from mortifying experience that none of the men would be willing to speak to a woman, and would, in fact, simply look right past me as if I were invisible if I attempted to address him. After expressing my sympathy for her loss, I inquired of this daughter, a large matron with a brown mustache and matching wig, if she could tell me the name of the mother of Aish-Zara, za’zal. Once again the celestial powers of Ima Temima were stunningly affirmed for me when this daughter informed me in Yiddish that she in fact had been named for her mother’s mother, for her maternal grandmother, Sora—our very own Sarah-Yiska, precisely as Ima Temima had foreseen. I was then able to insert this name in its proper place when I sang for all the assembled the El Maleh Rakhamim, which was the honor given to me thanks to the training I had received at Juilliard before dropping out—God full of mercy, grant a proper rest at the highest levels of the most holy and most pure to the soul of Essie daughter of Sarah—and it did not faze me in the least that every single male member of the family of Aish-Zara, za’zal, had his fingers plugged into the depths of his ears and was droning in a monotone as I sang lest he God forbid sin by hearing my woman’s naked voice.

  The eulogy was delivered by HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, at first in tones so soft and intimate that all the assembled were obliged to lean in to hear. I pictured the crowd as if from above, resembling a copse of trees all bending in one direction from the gust of a mysterious squall lashing them from behind.

  “My darling Essie,” our holy mother began, addressing Aish-Zara, za’zal, directly, as if they were alone in a room, as if it were a personal conversation to which we were only by chance fortunate to be privy, “my dearest friend, my teacher, my rebbe”—and our holy mother went on to speak achingly not of all the suffering and injustice endured by this tiny creature now lying blotted out on the bench at the lip of her grave, not of all the humiliation and contempt and sheer dismissal of the terms of her very existence inflicted upon her, but rather our holy mother recalled the monumental courage and defiance this little heroine had displayed. “When you assumed your rightful place as our high priestess and took on the name Aish-Zara,” Ima Temima said, “we recognized immediately that for you no name could be more fitting. Because you are like the strange-fire, the aish-zara, that the two elder sons of the high priest Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, brought to the altar in the sanctuary on the incense pan. Like them you served God in your own way. For their boldness God consumed them in an instant flash of flames, just as moments earlier He had lapped up with fire the burnt offering and the fat parts of the ox and the ram. Nadav and Avihu were just another ox and ram to God, another sacrifice, our God has a taste for blood and fire, and so their father Aaron was forbidden to mourn—Aaron was silent, the Scripture reports. We too shall refrain from mourning, mommy, we too shall remain silent, but we shall honor you by continuing to serve God in our own way, following in your path wherever it leads.”

  Our holy mother then turned away from Aish-Zara, za’zal, raising both arms to the heavens and in powerful tones, bold and young, taking on God Himself. “We know You exist because You created our world in Your image. You are a cruel God and it is a cruel world—but I have no fear at all. I shall not move from this place, I shall not leave this ‘leper’ colony, until You put an end to all the injustice and oppression, until you call a stop to all the sorrow and suffering. Yitgadal Ve’yitkadash Shemai Rabbah. Even if my protests incite You to grow more savage and furious, to heave up the entire universe and turn it back to water, to astounding emptiness and void, I shall not move from this spot until You swallow up death forever and wipe away the tears from every face. Exalted and Sanctified May Your Great Name Be.”

  There was more, but in the interest of full disclosure I must insert at this point that I was unable to hear every precious word of our holy mother’s eulogy and was obliged to reconstruct the entirety of the message afterward by consulting with others to obtain the complete transcript that I have yet to fact-check. It was a great personal loss for me, this goes without saying, but a necessary one since early on in the course of Ima Temima’s talk I detected restless murmurings in the crowd coming from the direction of the family of Aish-Zara, za’zal. As a precautionary measure, therefore, sensing the danger of brewing violence, I moved unobtrusively to a corner, pulled out my cell phone, and dialed automatically the number programmed in to alert our friends in high places of impending trouble. As our holy mother was drawing the comparison between Aish-Zara, za’zal, and the sons of Aaron the high priest, shouts rang out from the crowd—Apikorsus, Heresy, Hillul HaShem, Desecration of the Name, and so on and so forth, the usual garbage flung at us over the years. By the time Ima Temima came to the plea to our cruel, savage God, a few stones were thrown, mostly pebbles, mostly by the children in training, I observed with sadness, the pebbles they happened to bring along with them in their pockets as they must have been forewarned against touching anything of ours, all of it saturated with contamination and impurity, which is probably why no one was hurt, thank God. It might have escalated in some way, however, these things can sometimes spread faster than “leprosy,” but before that could happen we heard the thumps of a loping four-legged creature though the trot was clearly not that of the police horses I might have expected.

  Charging into the crowd at that moment came an Arab astride a huge bellowing camel baring its teeth. His long robes were flowing, his red-and-white checked keffiyeh was drawn across his entire face except for the eyes, he was riding as if through the drifts of a sandstorm on the desert dunes, one hand grasping the camel’s reins and the other cutting through the air with a glittering saber, slashing at the wind while ululating shrilly as he drove the entire crowd of masked strangers to the exits and pursued them out of our “leper” compound, disappearing along with them just as the sirens could be heard and the police wagons drew up.

  All that was left to remember our guests by were steaming piles of hoo-ha nuggets dropped by the camel, which I can only conjecture are not particularly beneficial to the soil for organic fertilization purposes since the desert is not as a rule known to bloom except through the sheer force of willpower of Zionist pioneers, though our creative domestic management associate Rizpa did later gather up the dung to use for cooking fuel. It remained for us, the embers salvaged from the blaze, the last inhabitants of our “leper” colony, to bury our dead.

  As we stood there in reverent silence, Aishet-Lot descended into the grave and the body of Aish-Zara, za’zal, was passed with the utmost delicacy and respect into the safety of her arms by the three Bnei Zeruya working in a relay like rescuers at a fire. Aishet-Lot laid our dear high priestess down lovingly at the bottom of the grave like a baby in its cradle, and ascended. For a few seconds it seemed to us as we gazed into the depths of that pit that our poor Aish-Zara, za’zal, swaddled in her white talit like a receiving blanket was stirring in distress, as if struggling to find a more comfortable position, and then it was as if she had found her place, as if she let out a low sough of relief at the prospect of never having to be bothered again, and she gave herself over to sleep.

  A shovel filled with dirt was placed in the hands of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, whose chair had been brought up to the very rim of the grave. The honor of being the first to cover Aish-Zara, za’zal, with the earth from which she had come was given to our holy mother, who tipped the shovel downward, letting the dirt spill slowly into the grave onto the body nestled below. Then we all took turns with the shovels and spades that had been supplied, thrusting them into the piles of dirt that rose on either side of the grave and emptying them on top of the unresisting body of Aish-Zara, za’zal, until the grave was filled and a soft fragrant mound rose above it into which a temporary
handwritten marker was sunk—ESSIE DAUGHTER OF SARAH-YISKA, AISH-ZARA, ZA’ZAL, with a simple drawing as if outlined by a child of two hands raised in blessing, thumbs arcing, middle and ring fingers separated, to indicate the resting place of a priest. In a year’s time, God willing, we shall unveil a suitable monument over the grave of Aish-Zara, za’zal. Our three remaining priestesses to whom Aish-Zara, za’zal, was like a mother chanted the mourner’s Kaddish standing in for her own children who had fled—exalting, sanctifying, glorifying, blessing the Name of the Holy One, praising God despite everything.

  That very evening I was summoned to the quarters of our holy mother. I expected to find Ima Temima already in bed after these strenuous days filled with so much stress and loss, but was surprised and I must add reassured instead to see our holy mother sitting in a chair drawn up to the table on which the Tanakh was open to Leviticus, chapter twelve. There were no signs of mourning in the room, not even a memorial candle, and Ima Temima made no reference at all in the course of our conversation to the passing of Aish-Zara, za’zal, or to any of the incidents that had occurred during the purification and burial rites that had taken place that very morning. Pointing to the text spread open on the table, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, reminded me that this was the section of the Torah devoted to the impurities of skin eruptions commonly classified under the heading of “leprosy.” But the portion begins with the strictures relating to the impurities of a woman who has just given birth. If a woman gives birth to a boy, she is considered to be in the untouchable state of a bleeding niddah for seven days followed by thirty-three days of a secondary degree of impurity, our holy mother reminded me; if it is a girl, the untouchable menstrual niddah stage lasts fourteen days, followed by sixty-six days of generalized uncleanness. Why the difference? Ima Temima asked. Because the baby girl, a female like her mother, is herself also a sack of blood, and doubles the impurity.

  Turning now to the subject of the baby girl who had just been born to the priestess Tahara Rappaport only the day before, our poor little Vashti, Ima Temima noted that the child already has three counts against her, possibly even four, because in addition to being a female leper with a tail it was very likely that she was also a “bastard,” a mamzer, a devastating label slapped upon an innocent soul mandating extreme forms of discrimination and ostracism. This, I knew, was a subject that our holy mother had probed very deeply and was acutely sensitive to, as Zippi, the daughter that Ima Temima had borne in the wilderness to our mutual husband, the late Abba Kadosh, a’h, had been publicly classified by some mean-spirited authorities as a mamzeret.

  Having laid all these cards out on the table like a Tarot reader, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, gave me my orders. My mission was to go at once to the priestess Tahara Rappaport and inform her that in fourteen days’ time from the day she had given birth, at the completion of her first period of extreme bloody pollution in accordance with the strictest interpretation of the text, on the twenty-second day of Av, she must pack her bags and take her baby, Vashti, with her and leave our “leper” colony forever. “Inform her that you will give her some bread and water on that morning and send her on her way with her girl child,” HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, commanded with a finality that left no opening for argument or discussion. “You may also want to add that my personal advice based on what awaits the child in this life is that she take her into the wilderness and lay her on a rock, abandon her there like a superfluous newborn Chinese girl. Tell her to expose the daughter to the elements for her own good, and to the birds of the sky.”

  Part III

  Haya

  They Have

  Gone Astray

  in the Land,

  the Desert Has

  Closed in

  on Them

  Over the seven days of mourning for the murdered baby, Kook Immanuel, stunned citizens from all across Israel, many with their children in tow, set aside their fears of venturing into the wild West Bank and flowed into Hebron to offer comfort to the bereaved parents—and, in the process, to demonstrate with their bodies their outrage that such atrocities were possible in their own land that was their God-given birthright. From common folk to dignitaries at the highest spheres of government and the religious establishment, they made their way defiantly through the treacherous streets of the Jewish people’s second holiest city up to the military base on the hilltop, almost every tree and wall along their route plastered with heartbreaking black-and-white posters of the baby’s shockingly innocent face overlaid with streaks of bright red blood gushing down like tears along his chubby cheeks from the black hole in his forehead like a third eye, and the stark words electrified in lettering evoking death camp barbed wire, SLAUGHTERED BY TERRORISTS, shrieking the savage tale.

  So great was the number of mourners who kept streaming in that the shiva was moved from the family quarters to the synagogue, the largest tent on the compound. Temima sat on the floor in her stocking feet in the women’s section to receive the female comforters, an army blanket thrown over her head that she did not raise for the entire period of the seven days of mourning, her lips moving as she rocked back and forth, reciting Psalms from memory but no sound emerging from her mouth, voiceless like the barren Hannah praying for a child in the Tabernacle so that the high priest Eli concluded she was a drunk.

  In the far more capacious men’s section of the synagogue tent, her husband, Haim Ba’al Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, his arm still in a sling, his head still bandaged in gauze, sat on the floor facing a throng of men packed tightly together undulating like a giant beast stirring in hibernation whenever one or another of them sought to push his way through to make his presence known to the chief mourner and offer the requisite words of consolation. Only when the prime minister of the State of Israel himself, surrounded by his bodyguards with faces as if carved from granite, arrived in a black bulletproof limousine did the crowd part like the Reed Sea to create a passage for his eminence as the first lady who had accompanied him set a silk scarf loosely over her helmet constructed of hair and made her way alone to the women’s section. Howie was so overcome by the honor of the appearance of so prestigious a comforter that in violation of religious protocols he rose from his place of mourning to greet him, flushing crimson with gratification at being singled out for such public recognition, to his everlasting shame and regret failing to seize the moment to cry out for all to hear demanding justice and to extract before all these witnesses the promise of retribution. For months afterward he would replay the scene in his head, with the crucial variation that in his internal drama he spoke out and said what he should have said so that as time passed he had massaged the history, recounting the story crowned with his bold outcry, and no one denied him.

  From the ranks of religious leaders, Howie was also honored by shiva calls from the two chief rabbis of Israel, the Ashkenazi rabbi in his three-piece suit with the cutaway coat and black fedora smelling of calf-foot jelly ptcha, the Sephardi in his brilliant robes and turban and tinted shades smelling of musky patchouli, each arriving separately in an armored limo accompanied by his retinue.

  No less keen an honor, which at first served in some measure to render tolerable his grief, was the constant presence of the Toiter, Rabbi Elisha Pardes, who appeared at the shiva directly from the cemetery and remained for the entire seven-day period of mourning. Declaring that since it had been he who had performed the circumcision on the child, which strictly speaking is the duty of the father, he felt himself to be like a father to the boy and therefore it was incumbent upon him to go into mourning too. With a rip like a scream, he tore his white garments and donned sackcloth that one of his disciples handed to him and, bending down, he picked up a fistful of dirt and poured it over his head. For seven days he sat on the floor in a corner of the tent, and in the night he slept there guarded by a few of the Hasidim from his inner circle. Swaying jerkily, refusing almost all nourishment, growing increasingly gaunt and frail, his white hair and beard w
ild and ragged, his eyes hollow, he looked like a madman who had wandered in from the street, and though he strove to practically erase himself and achieve a level close to invisibility in his corner, several of the comforters who took notice of him approached to drop some coins into the cup half-filled with cold tea on the floor beside him thinking he was a beggar even as Howie pointed out that this personage was no less than the holy Toiter himself, leader of the Dead Hasidim, possibly one of the hidden thirty-six righteous of the generation upon whose merit our world continues to exist.

  At the close of the seven days, as they all got up from shiva, the Toiter addressed Howie for only the second time since his arrival when he had expounded on his reason for including himself among the mourners. “You have given the child to the Molekh by exposing him to such danger in the streets of Hevron,” the Toiter said in an even voice like a judge passing sentence at the end of a long trial, revealing no trace of anger or emotion. “It is an abomination, idol worship—child sacrifice explicitly forbidden in the Torah, a profaning of God’s name for which the punishment is death by stoning. The stone that struck the boy was meant for you and will one day find you.”

  It seemed to Howie as if those words of the Toiter were like a curse spewn out by an uninvited guest in a fairy tale, like a preview of the stones themselves pelting him, yet to his eternal satisfaction he did not lose his presence of mind on this occasion as he had during the visit from the prime minister, but replied in kind with a reference to the Torah, passages of which he knew by heart primarily from his work as a scribe, in particular from the days when he had painstakingly instructed his wife, letter by letter, in the writing of her pathetic little mother scroll.

  “Excuse me, Rebbe,” Howie said, “but this time it’s not my fault. It’s the sin of our leaders and founders who had misguided pity for the inhabitants of the land and didn’t kick them out once and for all like the Torah commands us to do, every last one of them, when we returned home to Zion—I’m telling you, Rebbe, it was like we were dreaming. So now they’ve become ‘stings in our eyes and thorns in our sides,’ exactly like the Torah says they would, and they hassle and kill us right in our own backyards. Believe me, Rebbe, I know from bitter personal experience what I’m talking about. What? You think I’m some kind of idiosyncrasy?”