One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

by Tova Reich

The feast celebrating the weaning was held in the grand pavilion, attended by the entire village, the men and boys separated from the women and girls by a line of blooming plants, bright reds, pinks, vermillion. In the men’s section, Abba Kadosh was enthroned on a peacock chair in pluming extravagant display. His daughter, the freshly weaned child he called Zippora bat Cushi, decked out like a bride in a white dress and white headscarf for this special occasion, was seated on his lap under a canopy held up by four men while his chief wife Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha took her place in an honorary position behind him, screened by the flamboyance of the throne. To symbolically mark the separation of mother and child that weaning signified, Temima was seated at the opposite end of the pavilion amid the women on a lesser peacock chair meant for a queen also under a canopy held up by four women. The gospel choir, Kol-Koreh-BaMidbar under the baton of Melekh Sinai, to the accompaniment of Shira Silver Kedaisha’s small orchestra in a curtained-off area, performed a medley of tunes, including the spiritual “Oh Mother Don’t You Weep” and a hearty rendition of the Hebrew celebratory hymn, “Siman Tov and Mazel Tov,” setting the entire crowd rocking and waving its arms jubilantly.

  The dancing and hand clapping and singing of Siman Tov u’Mazel Tov continued full force even as Melekh Sinai left his position at the podium in front of the chorus and took his place under the canopy. Siman Tov u’Mazel Tov went on throbbing and pulsating as Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha, carrying in her arms Zippora bat Cushi, the child Temima called Hagar gearing up for a tantrum because her face was covered by her white scarf and she couldn’t see anything, encircled Melekh Sinai seven times. Since in this instance Abba Kadosh held with the sages of the Talmud who asserted that a girl of three years and one day may be betrothed by sexual intercourse (though prior to that age it would be like sticking a finger in her eye), he now read out loud the marriage contract in full legal Aramaic and recited the seven marriage blessings in Hebrew in the traditional rabbinic style. The cloth was lifted from the girl’s face and she was given some sweet wine to sip, which calmed her down. Melekh Sinai slipped a glittery ring on her milk-fattened dimpled finger, which pleased her very much, and pronounced the prescribed words to Zippora bat Cushi, Temima’s daughter Hagar: Behold, you are consecrated to me with this ring in accordance with the law of Moses and Israel. Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah, father of the bride and officiator at this sacrament of matrimony, intoned, May your Yah rejoice over you, as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride. Then Melekh Sinai brought his foot down, stamped on a glass and shattered it. The crowd went wild, roaring Siman Tov u’Mazel Tov ever louder and more ecstatically. Melekh Sinai turned to face the congregation, one arm plumbed downward gripping the raised hand of his bride Zippora bat Cushi, Temima’s Hagar, happily sticking out her bright red tongue to lick the cherry lollipop that Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha had reached into a pocket to give her. Basking in a shower of Siman Tov u’Mazel Tov auspicious signs, good luck and good wishes, the couple stood there under the wedding canopy facing their guests, by the law of Moses and Israel husband and wife.

  And Dina

  Came Out

  You must wrestle through the night until the break of dawn to discover your true name, the name that unlocks your destiny, Temima said to Shira when they came out of the desert, it’s a fight for your life that leaves you forever mangled and crippled, it will pulverize your hip, it will cost you dear. Names give you away, Temima went on, repeating a basic tenet she had taught over the years, which is why God conceals His so that uttering even the aliases is so dangerous and charged, but for us in this life it is a matter of uncovering the one that signifies, insisting on who we are.

  During that first year after they left Abba Kadosh’s patriarchal compound deserting the child bride Hagar ruined for the outside world like a deliberately mutilated infant condemned to a life of beggary, as they wandered the streets of Jerusalem to find their ordained path, Shira’s name was the first to be revealed, then Temima’s.

  When they came out of the wilderness they took up residence at first in the Royal Suite of the King David Hotel, the Toiter’s base while in Jerusalem. Impeccably trained management and staff did not betray with even a sniff or flinch any sense that something bizarre or out of the ordinary was unfolding before their eyes as word spread that a holy wise woman healer had established herself in their historic hotel from where it was reported she was performing miracles every day. The grotesquely disfigured and the putridly contagious in all their unseemliness came out of their holes in the ground and streamed through the stately gilded lobby of the hotel like an invasion of locusts and boarded the elevators with their pustules and tumors alongside the aghast guests paying full price and ascended to the sixth floor desperate for a cure. Temima would greet her supplicants with the words, It is not I but God who will see to your well-being, yet she offered comfort, palliative care, temporary relief from all the pain of this life. God is your healer, Temima said, but she at least would do no harm.

  Taking direction from the incident described in the book of Exodus when the Hebrews arrived at the oasis of Marah in the wilderness and complained about the bitterness of the water, which Moses then sweetened by throwing into it a piece of wood equally bitter, Temima applied a homeopathic method based on the principle of like curing like to effect healing. She created a personalized distillation of the disease tailored to each suppliant, diluted it in living water, and gave it to the sufferer to drink in order to restore the vital physical and spiritual energy and balance unique to each individual. For a person afflicted with intestinal agonies, for example, Temima might encapsulate the disease by writing out on a piece of paper the verse from the book of Chronicles describing King Jehoram smitten in the gut until his bowels fell out. She would fold the paper as small and compact as a pill, drop it in a glass filled with fresh living spring water, and as the patient drank this potion to the dregs she would chant the words that Doctor God spoke at Marah, All of the diseases I brought upon Egypt I will not bring upon you, for I am the Lord your healer. In a similar fashion, for the supplicants tormented by skin diseases and rashes and sores and eruptions all over their bodies like Job and rot and pollutions and infestations of all varieties, she might drop into the pure water a totemic verse pill projecting one of the Tanakhi lepers, Naaman or Gekhazi or Uzziyahu and also her punished Miriam.

  More and more of the wretched and cursed poured into the aristocratic old hotel as Temima’s reputation spread through the city and radiated beyond among Jews and Arabs until the order came down from top corporate headquarters for the doormen to direct these instantly identifiable unsightly specimens and human blights to the service entrance of the building; let them follow their pocked and inflamed noses to the stench of the overflowing dumpsters and the reeking sewage outlets and then up the freight elevator assigned to menials and the invisible. Temima was outraged and offended on behalf of her petitioners—I will bring healing to you and cure you of your wounds because they called you an outcast, said the prophet Jeremiah speaking for the Lord—though not as outraged or offended as the Polish head of state with a nose like a kiel-basa when he and his entire drunken retinue with flaming red faces were ordered late one night to the dark side of the hotel by a nobody, an Arab hooligan decked out in a uniform with gold epaulets and tassels on his shoulders.

  Soon after, Temima with Shira clinging faithfully to her side relocated to the Old City of Jerusalem within the massive Suleimanic walls, taking up residence on the Street of the Kara’im next door to the underground Karaite synagogue in the Jewish Quarter undergoing exuberant restoration in the wake of its reconquest in the Six Day War. Here she remained for more than a decade. It was here that her renown and her following grew, here she solidified her reputation throughout the land as the illustrious guru and Tanakhi luminary, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv—Ima Temima.

  She fixed on the Street of the Kara’im intentionally in order to confront head-on the charges that her approach to Tanakh in its emphasis on the literal text, on p’shat, and
rejection of rabbinics as the sole and definitive authority was essentially a variation on the Karaite heresy. It is true that Temima was a great believer in text, in p’shat. She insisted first upon a literal reading of text without the intervention of commentary and interpretation, exegesis and hermeneutics, pilpul and midrash, often tendentious and agenda-driven—at times ameliorating, at times exacerbating. This is what she taught. Only by facing the text head-on, without partisan constraints and orthodoxies, can we recognize in the relevant passages the truth about how woman is regarded and valued in the basic scheme of things—and in the face of that recognition perhaps nevertheless not jump off a cliff, make our choice, seek out how to justify the ways of God to women, consider not rejecting it all, man and God.

  By settling in the Street of the Kara’im she sought to nullify the lethal accusations that she was an undercover Karaite as she nullified physical illness by dissolving its toxic essence in clear water, like a vaccine containing the weakened pathogen of the very illness it was designed to prevent. You may consider me a Karaite if it serves your purposes to think of me in that way to mock and marginalize me, was what Temima was in effect declaring, since I subscribe to the principle of the Karaite founder Anan ben David, Search the Torah thoroughly on your own and do not rely on my opinion—even if Anan may not exactly have had me or any other woman in mind when he enunciated this principle. Even so, I too have opinions, I too am open to new forms of interpretation and oral law not restricted exclusively to the Talmud and the authorized rabbis, especially in reading the text as it applies to the inescapable reality of how contemptuously we women are viewed and how cheaply valued. But no, I am not in the camp of Anan or the other Karaite or Samaritan fanatics in their strict fundamentalist adherence to scriptural law. I do not sit in the dark for the entire Sabbath because of the injunction against lighting a fire on the day of rest. And I do not refrain from sexual intercourse on the Sabbath because of animal husbandry—the prohibition against plowing.

  To Temima’s new quarters on the Street of the Kara’im flocked the seekers of Torah enlightenment and the yearners for self-knowledge, also the ailing in body like the afflicted who had been drawn to the King David in their numbers, and increasingly more and more souls racked with mental and emotional anguish, gripped like King Saul by an evil spirit from the Lord, cursed with an unquiet, agitated heart, disappointed eyes, a despondent and despairing spirit, their lives hanging perilously before them, terror day and night, utter loss of faith in themselves, in the morning longing for evening and in the evening wishing it were morning. Sitting knee-to-knee face-to-face with these tormented souls Temima would clutch both of their hands in her own and with her thick-lashed, frank, penetrating eyes gaze silently and deeply through their layers of veils until their personal healing word would rise up or their true name would manifest itself, which she would then guide them in absorbing in an inward flow of acceptance to soothe their spiritual wretchedness.

  But most comforting for these souls sunk in the depression of hopelessness and misery like the depths of a black pit crawling with snakes and scorpions, the slough of despond, were the two exercises she instructed them in to be performed simultaneously and in complete privacy even in the most crowded of settings bringing a measure of healing to the chronic human condition of physical and spiritual emptiness. Physical emptiness was relieved through an exercise known in the outside world as the Kegel designed to awaken and strengthen the walls of the lower orifices, two openings for men and three for women, all of these holes and hollows exposed and known before His throne of glory, a technique that involved conscious contractions of the muscles of the pelvic floor surrounding these cavities.

  At the same time, spiritual emptiness could be relieved through an exercise known to the inside world as the Silent Scream of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, a meditation technique that involved summoning up in the mind the visual image of the black hole of the mouth rounded into a scream and the aural sensation of the sound of a scream coming out of that black hole until you are actually screaming full time inside your head in a still, small voice that no one can hear, though occasionally a faint cry might escape from you just as a small trickle might leak out while squeezing the muscles of one of your nether apertures. It did not take long before men and women in public and private places all over Jerusalem and disseminating throughout the Holy Land, from the Knesset to the kiosks to the kitchens, were furiously kegeling down below and silently screaming up above, and no one saw or heard them, and no one knew.

  Trailed by bands of wrecked kegelers and wasted silent screamers, along with other assorted seekers and believers, surrounded by an early incarnation of her Bnei Zeruya security contingent, with Shira sutured to her side, accompanied on occasion also by Ibn Kadosh in a red-and-white keffiyeh with a goat slung over his shoulders and a herder’s crooked staff in his hand, Temima set out almost every day from her residence on the Street of the Kara’im to find her place in the world in anticipation of her full anointment. She bedecked herself for these excursions very deliberately in the full regalia of a grand rebbe—long satin kaftan of striped silver or gold or brocade like a dressing gown, girdled around the waist with a black rope gartel to divide the upper spiritual portion of the body, heart and mind and breath and spirit, from the grossness below, on her head the giant wheel of a shtreimel, its ring of thick dark fur fashioned out of hundreds of tails of sable, all of her rich black hair tucked under its black velvet hubcap with the exception of two long ringlets corkscrewing down in peyot on either side of her face, and fastened to her chin with a string a false beard symbol of royalty like those shown on the clean shaven faces of the pharaohs made of hammered gold, spade-shaped, jutting forward as depicted also on the statues and sphinx of the mighty queen Hatshepsut.

  Garbed in this fashion she strode at the head of her procession through the Old City of Jerusalem, engaging as she walked in intense discussion in the gesticulated tradition of a master with disciples like the strict Rabbi Hillel or the even more strict Rabbi Shammai surrounded by their warring factions or the late-bloomer messianic martyr Rabbi Akiva with his twenty-four thousand squabbling students debating the fine points of Torah—discoursing on a range of topics, on the fleshpots and other temptations of Egypt, on the eunuch minister Potiphar buying the ravishing seventeen-year-old slave boy Joseph for personal sodomy, on Joseph losing his striped shirt to Potiphar’s wife burning with lust as her kitchen maids watched from behind a curtain cutting artichokes down through their bones, their fingers dripping blood so dazzled were they by the boy’s beauty. Temima posed the question pointedly, Where in the Tanakh do we find a Jewish woman expressing sexual desire in all of its rutting intensity and feverish urgency like Potiphar’s wife? The idealized boilerplate Jewish woman, she is stripped of all eroticism, Temima said. Charm is false, beauty is vanity, the God-fearing woman, she will be praised.

  As she continued to offer her radical teachings on these and other subjects, Temima led her flock through the ghetto of the Jewish Quarter ignoring the taunts of bystanders—Hey, what’s with the beard, Queen Tut? So you wanna be a rebbe, Rabbi Kook-Kook? Immersed in Torah talk they made their way through the newly laid plazas and arched passages of the restored Jewish ghetto into the Armenian and Christian and Muslim Quarters also enclosed within the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, their dark narrow streets of ancient stones worn slick from centuries of traffic by humans and other mortal beasts of burden. At the head of her flock she meandered through the labyrinth of the shuk and bazaars, past men straddling low stools in cultivated idleness at the entrances to shops, fingering their beads, smoking green tobacco, absentmindedly scratching their privates, brazenly following her passage, undressing her with their eyes. Never mind her monumental learning, she was naked to them, never mind her apotheosis in the vestments of a holy man, her nakedness was on full display before them, every female part in its predictable place, a familiar piece of goods, no different from any other woman—her femaleness, all you ne
eded to know.

  They violated her with their eyes, their dirty thoughts rose visibly like gassy cartoon bubbles out of their heads, but they were absurdly insignificant to Temima. They were as beneath her notice as the intrusion along her path of the vulgar idolatrous symbols of the three faiths battling over the same dismal patch of blood-soaked turf—the hodgepodge sinking lean-to of the Holy Sepulchre church, the Golden Dome and the Al-Aqsa Mosque flaunting their biceps like bullies in the arena of the Temple Mount, the pathetic Western Wall wringing perverse pride from weeping and wailing. She swept past all of these disturbances in the aura without a glance or a nod or a teaching. She led her congregation out of the garrison of the walled city through the Dung Gate and turned eastward for the ascent to the Mount of Olives, wild dogs prowling among the shattered and crumbling gravestones, Arab boys squatting on their haunches against gnarled tree trunks observing their approach through slitted eyes, picking their teeth.

  Signaling with a hand to indicate to her followers to halt so that she might proceed on her own to engage in the practice of hitbodedut, she set forth in solitary walking meditation among the rows of graves, searching for the burial place of Rabbi Hannah Rachel Verbermacher, the Maiden of Ludmir, the shocking woman rebbe whose body had been laid to rest in this ancient cemetery almost a century earlier but whose soul now resided in Temima. Temima was the Maiden’s gilgul, like the Maiden learned and devout, charismatic and mystical, ostracized and motherless, the Maiden’s incarnation. Like the Maiden, Temima had also stubbornly refused to marry, the marriages that each of these women had acceded to in the end under duress were nothing but sham and pretense. Even so there was true issue from Temima as there was from the Maiden, contrary to received opinion. The Maiden’s daughter was Temima, a pariah like her mother. Temima searched for her mother among the graves, she sought the one her heart loved, she sought her but could not find her.