One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

by Tova Reich

  And speaking of our people, Abba Kadosh went on, in our own holy land of Israel, I’m proud to report, prostitution is a leading growth industry. Percentage-wise, more men in the Holy Land take advantage of this ancient privilege than in any other country on earth, according to the statistics my sources tell me—what with all the stress, the tension, the pressures, religious, political, basic survival, etcetera etcetera, a man needs an outlet, you would expect no less, we Jews are number one as always. Even the uptight rabbis of the Talmud gave the go-ahead to unload in a whore in cases of pent-up horniness; with no outlet short of self-abuse, spilling and wasting your seed like the aforesaid Onan, completely forbidden, naturally, a man could burst apart at the seams. And our whores, by the way, were expected to give tithes from their earnings to the Temple like any working woman, further proof that the business was considered totally normal. His own name, Kadosh—holy, consecrated, separated, set apart—was also relevant to this topic, he declared. The women of his household could be a holy wife kedosha, yes, but from the very same root and just as worthy was a holy concubine kedaisha, which some might define as a harlot but to his mind was simply another aspect of the feminine emanation of the divine presence, equally holy. Everything on this earth contains both itself and its opposite, Abba Kadosh said; the kedaisha is also kedosha, consecrated and set apart. These are the deep, deep thoughts of the Kabbalists, the mystics, the Hasidim—they get it. After the Tanakh, they’re my boys.

  The next morning, in a courtly gesture of gratitude for the night, as a special treat, Abba Kadosh rented two bicycles for the short ride out of the city to the old Jewish cemetery where Rabbi Menashe ben Israel is buried. Temima had never ridden a bicycle before; it was not something Boro Park girls were taught to do, they did not mount, they were mounted, they did not straddle, they sidesaddled in their skirts. But Abba Kadosh insisted, and spreading wide his strong arms, one hand gripping the handlebars and the other firmly on the back of the seat, he held her steady as she wobbled and swayed, the two of them laughing carefree as he ran alongside until he let go and she was triumphantly launched. It was astonishing how quickly she mastered it—but what after all had her life been until then but a fine balancing act? Whatever had transpired between them in the past and however the future might unfold, Temima knew she would always be indebted to Abba Kadosh for forcing her to get up on two slender wheels and go.

  “When the messiah comes, it won’t be a man on a white donkey but a woman on a white bike,” Temima sang out over her shoulder to Abba Kadosh pedaling behind her as they rode over the flat green countryside along the Amstel River to Ouderkerk, past windmills and dikes and quaint little churches and tulips and wooden shoes. Had they not been such a bizarre looking couple as if from another millennium, another planet, Planet Bible, it would have been a flawless picture postcard.

  At the gravesite Abba Kadosh reverentially intoned the words, “The Hope of Israel,” which was also the title of Rabbi Menashe ben Israel’s booklet inspired by the news of the survival of the lost tribe of Reuven in the fantastic form of Andes Indians with painted faces in South America—just another heartwarming example of a you-don’t-look-Jewish incarnation. He took a small Tanakh out of his pocket and began to read aloud from the prophet Isaiah: And on that day the Lord will redeem the remainder of his people from Assyria—from Egypt and from Patros and from Cush and from Elam and from Shinar and from the islands of the sea. And He will gather the outcasts of Israel and the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth. And Ephraim will no longer envy Judah, and Judah will no longer torment Ephraim. He turned to Temima and said, “You hear that, sister? First dispersal, then ingathering. That was the holy brother Rabbi Menashe’s genius, to hasten the ingathering by promoting the dispersal. That was why he negotiated with Oliver Cromwell to get the Jews back into England almost four hundred years after they were expelled—to bring on the redemption. First it’s let my people in, then it’s let my people go.”

  “Ah, Cromwell,” Temima said, “God’s instrument. Another wild fanatic from another crazy religion, like my stiff-necked Annie Hutchinson—like you.” She bent down to pick up two stones, one for Abba Kadosh and one for herself, to leave on the grave as a token of their visit.

  “Did you ever see the portrait of Rabbi Menashe by the Dutch artist Rembrandt?” Abba Kadosh went on severely, communicating his irritation by ignoring her remark. “From the looks of him, sister, I do believe our hero had black blood flowing in his veins. He came from the land of Cush.” He eyed her disapprovingly. “You should show a little more respect, sister,” Abba Kadosh admonished. Raising his two index fingers as if to scold her, he licked them with his long pink tongue and inserted them deep into her ears, twisting them around until he was satisfied. Temima was thinking she might already be pregnant.

  Hardly a word passed between them for the rest of that day and into the evening through the flight back to Israel. When they landed at Lod Airport and descended the staircase to board the buses waiting there to transport them to the terminal, a few of the passengers bent down to kiss the holy ground, a ritual with its own decorum that Abba Kadosh furiously expropriated by throwing himself dramatically onto the tarmac, embracing it passionately and weeping as if to attach himself to it with no possibility of dislodging him, his body splayed out like a giant bird that had fallen from the sky as a jeep pulled up followed by a black limousine.

  Three soldiers in uniform with Uzis slung from their shoulders stepped out of the jeep, great muscular specimens evolved from the ghettos and shtetls, and while one restrained Abba Kadosh the other two unlatched his fingers from the earth and drew the outspread wings of his arms together behind his back and shackled him. “They’re selling me back down the river to slavery in exile—their own brother Joseph from the tribe of Ephraim,” Abba Kadosh was howling, his head turned to look behind him as the soldiers prodded him forward into the jeep. His eyes were focused unforgivingly on Temima, and what his eyes were saying to her was, It may look like I’m in their hands, but I am in yours.

  The driver of the limousine held the door open for Temima and she climbed in, huddling in its dark corner, making herself small, her arms wrapped around her body for comfort and warmth. She was a motherless child, singled out by a cruel God to be forever alone to her very core, set apart and chosen by Him—Accept Me, Know Me, Love Me, He demanded as He held a mountain over her, threatening to drop it on her head if she dared to refuse. The limo was drawing near to the portal of the terminal building with its massive welcoming sign blessing all comers to Israel not including Abba Kadosh, a black man who insanely had willingly doubled his portion of suffering and humiliation by taking on the yoke of a Jew. Who gave the rabbis the authority to say whether this persecuted and despised man, arrogant and stiff-necked and unctuous and grasping and pushy and perpetually taking offense like the best of us, like almost every other certified member of the tribe, was not also welcome as a blessed comer? And yet, Temima was thinking, it was she not the rabbis who had the power at this critical moment over this man, the destiny of this particular discordant variation on the Jewish theme was in her hands at this moment, but even so, even in the face of that knowledge, she could nevertheless ride on right now, straight to Tel Aviv, she could sit down in a café, order a coffee and a pastry and smoke a cigarette, turn the pages of a ladies’ magazine instead of poring over the toxic Tanakh all the time, transform herself into a normal person, become a secular Jew, go to the port of Jaffa and board a ship to Tarsis and land in the belly of a giant sea monster, return to America, forget about being a Jew altogether, start all over again, leave him to his fate.

  From the front of the car she heard a still, small voice and for the first time she noticed the shrunken figure in the passenger seat almost completely buried under layers of blankets. “Do not try to escape, daughter,” the voice said. “It is your destiny, a decree from above—Accept it! The black man has a part to play. I could give the order to liberate him, but from behi
nd the partition above I have heard it decreed that it must come from you.” He nodded to the driver, who indicated to Temima the phone installed for her use in the back of the limo. She made the call to the powers above using her influence. By the time she was ushered through the terminal building to the other side of passport control Abba Kadosh was already there waiting for her, rubbing his wrists reproachfully, offering no gratitude.

  Temima awoke early the next morning in her cave, placed into a cloth sack a small toy sewn by the women of Bnei HaElohim and sold in their souvenir shop, a stuffed ibex with curled horns, and, accompanied by Shira, she summoned Melekh Sinai to drive her to Hebron. When in less than an hour the white Cadillac reached the bottom of the hill on the outskirts of the city where the settlers were still encamped in the military base on top she instructed her companions to wait for her there while she ascended to take care of her business, after which she would return to them.

  The first person to greet her arrival back at the compound, like Jephta’s daughter upon her father’s return from battle, was her son, her only one, the one she did not love enough, the boy her husband called Pinkhas who had spent most of his days since her departure playing quietly alone outside the tent waiting for her to come back, sucking his thumb and telling himself stories. “Ima,” he cried. “Here I am, my son,” Temima said. “What did you bring me?” the boy asked. She took the stuffed mountain goat out of the sack and gave it to him. She sank down to the ground in front of him and pulled him to her, holding him for a long time. “Oh my son,” she said, “you have brought me to my knees.”

  No one was inside the tent when she entered it. She found her little mother Torah at once exactly in the place where she always kept it, basted in dust, and put it into the sack. She had remembered it almost immediately after leaving with Ketura to the desert; even as she had been preparing to go she felt herself agitated with the sense that she was forgetting something vital, and every day since then she knew she must go back to lay claim to it. Now with her little mother Torah in her sack she walked out of the tent where the child was standing guard waiting for her. As she leaned over to kiss him good-bye she heard a voice cry out, “Do not touch that boy, do not do anything to him!”

  It was her husband, Howie Stern, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, Go’el-HaDam. Someone had alerted him to her presence; let there be no hope for informers, Temima reflected. Howie had come running out of the synagogue tent from morning prayers as soon as he had received word, he was still cloaked in his great white talit, the black tefillin box on his forehead, the leather straps wound around his arm. She had heard he had been released from custody to house arrest. Who among us is not under house arrest? Temima thought bitterly. With a slight farewell wave of her hand to her son, she turned and began to make her way out of the camp, the child following behind, walking and weeping like Paltiel son of Layish when his beloved Mikhal was wrested from him by the outlaw David. “Ima, don’t go, please don’t go, Ima,” the boy was sobbing.

  “Come home now, Pinkhas,” Howie said. The child threw himself down shaking and panting, beating the ground with his fists, slamming the stuffed ibex against the hard earth, and raised his voice in shrill cries. Howie lifted him to his hip with one arm around the waist like a bundle, the legs thrashing and kicking. “Let her go down alone without you,” he said. “Forget you ever had a mother. Next time you see her will be when you bury her.”

  His name should no longer be called Pinkhas or even Paltiel, Temima reflected when she returned to the desert, but Isaac, because she had sacrificed him. Maybe Isaac had to be sacrificed because he was a mamzer, the product of an explicitly forbidden incestuous relationship, the son of a man who had uncovered the nakedness of his sister, as Abraham himself admitted to Avimelekh king of Gerar about Sarah, It’s true she is my sister the daughter of my father though not my mother, and she became my wife. The mamzer Isaac was the middle link of the three main forefathers; all of his descendants, therefore, all of Israel, were mamzerim, barred from admission into the congregation of the Lord at least unto the tenth generation—outcasts, untouchables, mongrels, lepers, in the absence of a more precise word, bastards—and marked for elimination. But what sin had poor little Paltiel ever committed to deserve such misfortune? Yeshua HaNozri, the star of the sequel, was also a mamzer, purportedly God’s son with a woman married to someone else, and was sacrificed in Jerusalem. Temima was a woman married to someone else, a forbidden woman; her son Kook Immanuel the mamzer was sacrificed in Hebron.

  She was pulverized with guilt for the punishment she had brought down upon all of her children—she, a child whose own mother had withdrawn her protection, she should have guarded her children from everything bad, she should have guarded their goings out and coming back, now and forever. Now she was carrying another innocent, another unborn mamzer, doomed like all the others. She was still living in the cave by special arrangement with Abba Kadosh, a privilege unprecedented for a wife, concubine, or other in his menagerie, and she could go and come freely thanks to her ongoing contributions to the Bnei HaElohim coffers from the resources available to her, padded with bonuses from the trust fund of Shira Silver Kedaisha, who could not bear the thought of losing Temima. Her cave became her headquarters during this early stage of her pregnancy for her campaign to rescue her gestating mamzer from stigma and ostracism and immolation by demanding a divorce from her husband, the criminal Go’el-HaDam.

  “Over my dead body,” Howie sent back word through Temima’s emissary. “No way I’m gonna give that bitch a get.”

  In this way Temima officially became an agunah, chained to a dead marriage by a recalcitrant husband who had sole power to grant the divorce—gufah kanui, as the Talmud liked to put it, her body is bought, it was Howie’s property, all rights of ownership to her body had been acquired by Howie in the marriage transaction when he had uttered the words, Behold, you are consecrated to me. Now she was agitating for him to give her the get by pronouncing the flip side of those words, Behold, you are permitted to any man, divesting himself of his personal goods, dumping them in the open marketplace. Since he refused, though, she was in lockdown; she could not remarry in the Jewish tradition, not that she would ever want to marry again in any tradition, she had never wanted to get married in the first place, but for the mamzer in her womb, now no more than a tiny worm with no idea what awaited it, there were crushing consequences—branding over generations, shunning for centuries, targeted for extinction. So it was a great surprise, and at first a relief, when a few days after Howie had rejected out of hand her overture requesting a divorce she received word from him that, on second thought, maybe there was some room for negotiation.

  It would cost her plenty, however. First of all, there was the matter of child support for the boy he called Pinkhas, over whom she would, as part of her concessions, naturally relinquish all custody rights and visitation privileges. Then there was compensation for himself for personal insult and injury, not to mention loss of face and loss of conjugal rights, damage incurred both above and below the waist, which could run into the very high figures. He also needed a new car—actually at this point a bulletproof van was absolutely necessary. There was also the matter of annual contributions in the platinum circle in his name to the Greater Israel movement and all of its future projects including the ultimate restoration of the Holy Temple on the Mount by whatever means with all of its accoutrements—golden altars for incense and animal sacrifice, golden menorah, golden showbread table, golden vessels, golden ark complete with golden-winged cherubim, golden priestly garments, suitable equipment for the Messiah’s entry through the golden gate of Jerusalem on a white donkey, the white donkey itself, and so on. Her trust fund if she truly had one, her inheritance, her allowance from her father, other money and treasure from other sources, the proceeds from the sale of the Ben-Yefuneh Street apartment, and so forth, whatever she had—all of these assets and all that he omitted in his haste, none of these would be
off-limits if she ever wanted to see that divorce. Finally, a bit of research on Howie’s part had disclosed that the two apartments already underway bought for them by her father, the one in Kiryat Arba and the other in the hostile heart of Hebron itself, were officially in his, her father’s, name—the devious old finagler. If she really wanted this divorce she had better hustle and get on his case ASAP, she had better talk to her sneaky old man to transfer ownership and property rights pronto, to him, to Howie, master of the houses.

  “Over my dead body, the momzer!” her father Reb Berel Bavli spat out across the telephone wires from Brooklyn so that Temima almost felt the need to wipe off her face when she called him. “What? You think I’m some kind of moron?”