One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

by Tova Reich

  She had not seen her father since the circumcision of Kook Immanuel, she spoke to him infrequently, on the eve of holidays to wish him good yomtov, brief conversations at the beginning and end of which he never neglected to rebuke her for not calling enough. The only time he had initiated a call himself was during the shiva for Kook Immanuel; she had simply shaken her head when she was summoned to the phone, refusing to get up. “What a putz you got for yourself for a husband, Tema’le, I’m sorry to say, a real dope, you should excuse me, such a smart girl like you. Can you believe this guy’s hutzpah? If I were there I’d wring his fat neck like a chicken—and believe me, when a shoikhet like me wrings a neck, you hear your neck-wringing ding-dong loud and clear. Even if I could afford it, you think for one minute I would ever be stupid enough to put anything with any value in the name of such a paskundnyak like your Howie? I’m telling you, you’d have to be meshuggeh. For your information, in case you want to know or care, right now I’m sitting here in Boro Park with five daughters to marry off, not to mention a very sick wife it shouldn’t happen to a dog who’s taking her own sweet time to finish up, making all kinds of demands from me, such as like she has to be buried in Eretz Yisroel the Holy Land itself no less like some kind of fancy lady, when who even knows where her own mama and papa are buried—maybe in a lampshade, maybe a bar of soap, maybe an ash can. A nice respectable cemetery on the New Jersey Turnpike or maybe even in Queens is not good enough for her like it was for your own mama, may she rest in peace—oh no, not for such a hotsy-totsy lady like Mrs. Frumie Bavli, she has to see with her own two eyes the deed for her burial plot signed sealed and delivered before she wraps up her business. I’m telling you, Tema’le, it costs plenty to be buried in Israel, like you wouldn’t believe—graves, that’s Israel’s biggest natural resource, for your information, it will cost me an arm and a leg, it just so happens. I need your problems now to add to my own zorres like a hole in the head. I’m sorry, Tema’le, you’re a big girl now, you’re on your own this time. You made your bed, now you have to go lay down in it. Better you should go back to that little schmendrik of yours, Tema’le, that schvantz Howie—also, if you’ll excuse me, a lot cheaper. Like the Gemara says, tav lemetav tan etcetera and so forth, which bottom line means, in case you don’t know, it’s better for a girl to be married to a jerk, a complete nothing no-goodnik schmuck piece of dreck like what you got for yourself, Tema’le, I’m sorry to say, than to be alone and not married at all.”

  Short of opening her own purse or yielding on any level to Howie’s vindictive extortion, a number of options presented themselves to Temima, each of which she rejected for one reason or another. She could have arranged to have him imprisoned to coerce him into giving her the get, but if recent experience was an indicator, serving jail time not only did not faze him in his own skewed estimation, it even enhanced his self-image and made him a hero in his own eyes and in the eyes of his fellow travelers. She could have gone the Maimonidean route, one of the rare instances when the formidable Rambam saw things from the woman’s side for a change, and declared him physically repulsive to her, disgusting plain and simple, or she could have petitioned for an annulment on the grounds of failure of full disclosure of a pre-existing condition at the time of the marriage, for surely she would never have agreed to take for a husband a mental degenerate, a violent insane perverted hooligan sociopath who lurked around at night cutting off human thumbs and big toes—but she held back for the time being from proceeding in ways that might shame and blacken the name of her child’s father. Of course, she could also have sought to make the case that Howie was in violation of their original agreement with regard to the terms of their marriage and the limitations to his conjugal rights, but there was no prenuptial documentation to attest to their singular arrangement and in any case it was altogether an extraordinary and unique arrangement that would have bewildered and staggered the imaginative powers of the rabbis in a Jewish court of law, turning the full severity of their disapproval upon her head, pelting her as with a storm of blame, declaring her terms null and void.

  Above all, Temima was driven by an urgency to settle the matter fast in the hope that the baby in her womb could be spared the stigma of mamzerut. It was during this period of intense focus on saving at least this child that she received word that Howie had taken for himself another wife without bothering to divorce Temima, without even taking the trouble to go through the nicety of procuring a dispensation from one hundred willing rabbis since the medieval ban against polygamy of Rabbi Gershom the Light of the Exile was precisely that—a ban with an expiration date and without the force of law, more like the accepted practice among Ashkenazi Jews. The new wife was a little sixteen-year-old girl, Abba Kadosh informed Temima, a Moroccan fresh from Netivot in the Negev desert not too far away from Bnei HaElohim, the headquarters of the miracle worker and faith healer Rabbi Yisrael AbuHatzeira known as Baba Sali with a nose like a kebab and more than one wife in his own personal stable, as a matter of fact. Pardon me, but Bnei HaElohim would have been more than happy to express deliver a nice untouched twelve-year-old virgin divorcée to Howie to compensate for the loss of Temima, a prize package a third Temima’s age, an amazing deal, maybe even throw in as a bonus for reparations for any pain and suffering Howie might have incurred a little procedure they could perform on the girl in Health House—a clit slit and other appropriate mutilations, deliver her new but without tags, like they do in darkest Africa for extra insurance to keep her on the straight and narrow, it was something they occasionally opted for when a girl was getting too frisky, Bnei HaElohim’s holy sisters knew how to hold a filly down and cut off her ridiculous useless little button with a razor when necessary for her own good. But no, Howie was just too much of a racist and bigot to even consider a Bnei HaElohim girl, not even a black beauty guaranteed virgin who has already been carrying around her nonperforming underage husband on her back for years and already has loads of experience in how to treat a husband right and proper—“Unlike you, sister,” Abba Kadosh commented petulantly to Temima. “So your horny old man he goes for this teenybopper instead of a nice respectable Bnei HaElohim girl, a Moroccan with her henna and her cheap earrings with bells that go dingaling when she sashays around the barn like a cow so you always know where she is. Her name is Timna, by the way—kind of a Temima knockoff, you might say.”

  “Timna, the concubine of Eliphaz, Esau’s son—mother of Amalek. You must completely blot out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens—Do not forget!” Temima declaimed as if on automatic.

  Abba Kadosh rumbled his deep laugh, which rocked his soft belly that seemed to Temima to have been swelling in recent weeks. He was sitting opposite her in her cave, his legs spread wide. “I didn’t expect you to take it so hard, sister.” He shook his head with a bemused expression at this further evidence of the peculiar and inexplicable nature of the female mind. No matter how brilliant or accomplished, all women were irrational. “Like I said when I took the trouble to publicly walk unescorted across my entire village and come here in person to see you, sister, I got some good news and some bad news. That little Moroccan chick, Timna, your husband married? That was the good news.” His rolling laugh bounced off the stone walls.

  Temima would not give Abba Kadosh the satisfaction of displaying the weakness of curiosity by asking directly for the bad news. She sat there in silence preparing herself inwardly.

  “Just say the word, sister,” Abba Kadosh went on to exhort her. “One word from you, and I send some of my best commandos from Yazoo City up to Hebron to take care of your old man, Howie. Believe me, sister, when they finish with him he will fall down on what’s left of his knees and lick your feet if he still has a tongue in his mouth and beg you to accept his miserable little divorce. Howlin’ Howie they’ll call him, since the guy’s name is always morphing anyhow, maybe finally he’ll get one that fits him.”

  Abba Kadosh proceeded with keen relish to run down a list of the various techniques and equip
ment in his arsenal, from head to toe, electric drill to the skull, pliers to toenails, every variety of sharp or shock-inducing appliance for every orifice and tender part of the body, for every limb and organ, knives and razors, whips and prods, fists and spikes, dogs and rats, darkness and violation, suffocation and drowning, sleeplessness and terror, stretching and shrinking, the full catalogue of tortures straight from Sodom piled in ruins a short distance away. “On second thought, sister, we can save ourselves a whole lot of mess and bother if you’d simply be willing to use your protectzia clout with the high and mighty of the land to get his driver’s license revoked. Believe me, sister, that will do the trick in no time. You’ll get that get faster than a speeding bullet, you won’t know what hit you.”

  He sat back with a wide grin, completely at ease in his skin, a quality in him that always affected Temima physically like crescendoing music. “Frankly, sister, it amazes and befuddles me how a smart lady like you has gone and got herself into such a state over this divorce business, puffing up that ninety-pound-weakling husband of yours, making him feel mighty powerful for the first time in his life, like he has you in the palm of his hands and can just squeeze for all he’s worth. I like you fine the way you are, sister, get or no get. What more do you need? And if you’re worrying whether that future little Zephania ben Cushi or Zippora bat Cushi in your belly is going to be a mamzer unto the tenth generation—well, face it, sister, there’s no way any kid with me for a daddy born in Bnei HaElohim hollering to be accepted as a Jew in the State of Israel is going to be anything but an outcast and a pariah, mamzer or no mamzer. This kid is fated to be blackballed and blacklisted, literally and figuratively, until the last feather in the faded yellow beards of the chicken-skinned rabbis shrivels and falls out. This is going to be a kid handicapped from the get-go, sister, wandering to and fro in the land like a leper with a bell, at home only with the other mamzerim in Bnei HaElohim. And what’s so bad about Bnei HaElohim anyhow? It is paradise, Gan Eden, like the land of Cush completely surrounded by the river Gihon attached to the Garden of Eden like an umbilical cord. My advice to you, sister, is just to sit back and relax and enjoy the show. But like I said—if you still have your heart set on that get, if you still want me to straighten out that dead dog of a husband of yours, that pisser against the wall, that worthless scumbag with blood on his hands—then just say the word. I’m at your service, sister, that’s why God put me on this earth—to fulfill your destiny.”

  Abba Kadosh flashed a sly smile, like a gentleman who opens a door for a lady in order to be better positioned to get a good look at her rear end and give it a good kick. Temima did not say a word, but her eyebrows arced as if into a question mark. “Nothing big,” he replied, “just a small favor in return.”

  He anticipated that his son, Yishmael, the wild boy she called Ibn Kadosh, would be haunting the village again very soon despite the risks to life and limb he knew very well, Abba Kadosh told Temima. He suspected the boy might first stop at her cave to inquire as to his, Abba Kadosh’s, whereabouts, or might seek refuge with her as a hiding place from which to pounce like a panther. Should that happen, he was asking her out of loyalty to him, the father of the child she was carrying, and in return for his generous offer to settle the Howie business premium class five-stars deluxe all the way, to inform him immediately when the kid shows up. “He’s coming to get me, sister. He believes I killed his mother.”

  There was a deep pause as this news sank in. Tears pooled in the corners of Temima’s eyes and slid down the sides of her face, staining her cheeks.

  “Yes, sister, my own son, my own flesh and blood, he is out to kill me—that’s the bad news. It is for me you are weeping now, I take it. Those tears are in my behalf—correct? I do appreciate your sympathy, sister.”

  He gazed at her coldly. “For the record, sister, I didn’t do it, and I didn’t order that it be done, though in all candor I cannot say I don’t approve. It is an ancient tradition—an honor killing carried out by her own people for her whoring and promiscuous ways that brought only shame to her family and tribe. Stoned to death, probably by her own father and brothers and uncles, with her mother and sisters ululating and dancing in the background, by the way. You might consider it a primitive Arab custom, sister, but as far as I am concerned, it is one of the few practices still upheld by the followers of that ruthless bandit Muhammed, a model to all of us cult leaders, prophets, and messiahs, that I can relate to and respect. Her remains were discovered near Be’er LaHai Ro’i in the Negev desert, in the land of the south, where Father Isaac settled after he was sacrificed. They carried out her punishment in the time-honored way. Buried her in the sand up to the waist, then stoned her to death to uproot the evil from their midst. The flesh of her upper body and her face were already almost entirely eaten away by the buzzards and vultures of the desert down to the eye sockets, like her sister Jezebel, licked clean by wild dogs. The shadow of bird wings rested on the sand, as if peeled off her face. A pearl earring was snagged in the petrified wires of hair plugged into her skull. That’s how the boy identified his mother. What is such an earring worth without its mate? What is the value of such a used and defiled woman? She is worth nothing, a woman like that—not even one grush, not even a single Philistine foreskin, not even a mouthful of spit, not even half a shekel. She is not counted, and she does not count.”

  Seven months after losing her Ketura, less than two years after losing her baby boy Kook Immanuel, on a hot and dry day at summer’s end in the Judean Desert, Temima was seized by the first pang of her labor, astoundingly fresh in its unnegotiable iron ferocity. She was sitting in a lawn chair outside the entrance to her cave with her Tanakh open on her lap, Shira Silver Kedaisha stretched out on the ground at her feet in the posture of a disciple, left arm propping up her head and a notebook in which to record the teachings at ready beneath the pen poised in her right hand. They still had not advanced beyond the first three chapters of Genesis, the creation of the world through the expulsion from Eden, pondering the mystery of Hava, the original woman, the template, mother of all that lives, em-kol-hai. Temima asked, Why did God forbid Adam (though not Hava, at least not directly) from eating from the fruit of the tree of knowledge but not from the tree of life tucked in the center of the garden like the heart in its rib cage? Because in doing so He rendered the fruit of the tree of knowledge the most tempting and irresistible, turned it into the lure to deflect and distract humankind from the tree of life, the garden’s real prize. Taking a bite out of its fruit, so good to eat, so enticing to the eyes, so desirable as a source of wisdom, Hava traded the true divine attribute of immortality for the divine delusion of knowledge poisoned with the consciousness of one’s own impending death, she relinquished immortality for all of her descendants because that was His will. And what was her reward for fulfilling His will? Painful childbirths, everlasting subservience to man—the curse of Eve—odium and contempt down through the ages too entrenched ever to be eradicated despite lip service, the indelible and immutable image of woman as temptress, root of all evil and sin, polluted and polluting.

  Temima grimaced, her breathing sped up and deepened and grew audible, springing Shira to her feet. “Not yet. Let’s wait.” In a regal gesture, Temima raised her hand palm out as if to slow things down. For some reason she had never taken the time to look into the secret birthing protocols and rituals as practiced in Health House in Bnei HaElohim though she had heard they were extraordinary. But this was her eighth pregnancy and the third baby she was bringing to term, her entrails had loosened. Within an hour after the first contraction had gripped her, a liquid began to seep out of the hollowness of her body through the webbing of the lawn chair in which she was sitting, dripping onto the ground and soaking it; in seconds the puddle was lapped up by the blistering heat as if by the slack tongue of a parched dog. Temima groaned. How much grace will you show when the pains come upon you, the travail of childbirth? the prophet Jeremiah asked. How much dignity?

&nbs
p; Hoisting Temima upward with both hands, Shira helped her out of her seat. They went inside the cave where Temima found her cloth bag into which she placed her Tanakh and her little mother Torah, though she hardly knew what use they might serve since they contained essentially no descriptions of such behind-the-scenes women’s business as childbirth, absent most glaringly in the scroll of the Pentateuch itself. Yet they were her comfort. I will fear no harm because you are with me. With her elbow linked into the loop formed by Shira’s arm, they began an eloquently slow processional as if following a coffin down the pathway from the cave using what Shira called with a muted giggle “baby steps,” bringing one foot in front of the other in minimal increments as the fluid continued to leak from between Temima’s legs and evaporate almost instantly in the arid soil. All eyes behind curtains and shutters and shades fixed upon them as in exquisite slow motion endowing their advance with a kind of grave significance they made their ceremonious way to the birthing center in Health House as to a place of execution in the heart of the village.

  Outside of Health House a circle of ten men was seated on the sand around the enema monument, which Temima now noted resembled the male sexual organ more than anything else in all of its blooming menace. Abba Kadosh was notably absent from this group. The men rocked back and forth reading psalms traditional for childbirth as their leader, Melekh Sinai, chanted over and over above their murmurings like an incantation the blessing from the daily morning prayers, thanking God for not having made him a woman. Temima, with Shira at her side, stood for a while at the edge of this circle listening to their petitions on behalf of women in confinement, and then raised her voice to inquire of Melekh Sinai why he was not also saying the blessing thanking God for not having made him a goy. “The sister is too clever for her own good,” Melekh Sinai said, reducing and dismissing her in her exposed female weakness. Immediately two midwives who had been stationed at the doorway a modest distance away from the ring of men came forward dressed in identical immaculate uniforms including long white aprons and white headscarves like sisters of mercy from another century in a war casualty hospital. They relieved Temima of her bag containing the sacred texts, assuring her that her personal possessions would be held in a safe, uncontaminated place through the period of her impurity, her bleeding and discharge, forty days if she gave birth to a boy, eighty days for a girl.