by Tova Reich
Throughout her father’s seven days of mourning over herself, as a point of honor, Temima took great pains to make her living presence felt. At first she called the Boro Park house nonstop on the telephone. One of the girls would always pick up in the way of youth still hopefully expecting their lives to be altered dramatically through a message communicated from the outside world. Temima could hear the girl yelling across the living room to her father sitting on the floor—she could picture it—on the avocado green wall-to-wall carpeting in his stocking feet with the ornate smoky mirror in its gilded frame draped with a sheet behind him, accepting condolences from visitors for her passing. “Tateh, it’s Tema,” the kid would yell, “long distance, from hell—she wants to talk to you.” Naturally, her father did not come to the phone since she was dead. He wasn’t like some kind of meshuggeneh in the street, he didn’t talk to himself, though as he never failed to point out to others he conversed with that at least if he talked to himself he would be talking to an intelligent person, a person with some brains in his head.
Even so, despite the brazenness of Temima’s constant calls, the family tolerated them longer than she might have predicted, probably because the girls kicked and screamed and raised a fuss and threw a fit against unplugging their lifeline, until finally, at the end of the third day, they clamped down and took the phone off the hook. Temima considered coming to Brooklyn herself from Israel and sitting down on the floor beside her father in sackcloth and ashes to mourn her own life like Jephta’s daughter or like a character always wearing black in a Russian play, and thereby in the presence of family and friends, mourners and comforters, rub in the absurdity of the whole travesty and farce, but that would have been too much of an effort, that would have implied she cared too much. Instead she arranged through the Toiter to have some of his people march full time back and forth in front of the house carrying signs on poles, Tema Bavli Lives, Tema Bavli Is Alive and Well and Living by the Dead Sea, Reb Berel Bavli—Your Daughter Tema Is Not Dead Meat, and so on, now and then breaking out in joyous singing and dancing, giving the lie to the rumors of death. On the sixth day, by personal order of the police commissioner of the city of New York, the Toiter’s demonstrators were arrested for disturbing the peace. On the seventh day Temima rested—not in peace but in indifference.
Now, as she worked with the other three women to dress Frumie in her simple white linen shrouds like the high priest in the Temple on Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment and Awe, it required all of Temima’s inner strength to hold back from bursting out in hacking laughter that would have glided inevitably into savage crying. She looked down, focusing on her task, chanting the order of the dressing in a soft trembling voice—And she shall be attired in a linen headdress, and linen breeches shall be on her flesh, and she shall don a holy linen tunic, and with a linen sash she shall be girded, and God Almighty will give her mercy. She did not inform her companions who this woman was to her even though now that she had recognized her she ought to have been spared this further painful invasion of the physical privacy of someone who, after all, was related to her even if only by marriage, she should have been shielded from revealing the nakedness that belonged to her father, an explicit incest prohibition in Leviticus, a variation on the sin of Ham. May I be lost in the depths of the sea, Temima prayed to herself, may I be vaporized in the atmosphere, may I be swallowed up by the earth rather than have this poor body of mine that I have guarded so zealously to dispose of in accordance with my own desires subjected to handling even by well-meaning souls such as these earnest good women who are toiling at my side at this very moment.
The lifting of Frumie’s dead weight to slip on the pants, simply finding a pair of pants that would fit her from among the shrouds, a sash that would go around her waist just once much less three times with a bit left over to tie with a slip knot, never mind such fancy stuff as fashioning it in the shape of the letter shin for God Almighty’s name Shaddai—viewed from above, with detachment, with no imperative for reverence, the scene was slapstick, black comedy. Temima turned her inner vision to her memory of Frumie pregnant, sitting at the edge of the bed in the Boro Park house where her own mother had once slept and perished, Frumie dressed in her hat and coat with the white fur trimming, her black patent-leather pocketbook in her lap, her suitcase packed ready beside her, all set to escape, crushed by the realization that there was no way to sustain herself on her own, no one who would be left to protect her daughters, no place for her to go—she was trapped. Few and bad had been the years of her life. Now she was released early for good behavior, she had found the only way out. For your salvation I had hoped, O Lord.
Temima was overcome with a desire to give Frumie a parting gift, some token to thank her with for her kindness over the years they had lived together under the same roof, for the generosity of simply leaving Temima alone to find her own way, but that was impermissible. Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I will return. Shrouds do not come with pockets for little treasures or mementos, in death there is no discrimination between rich and poor, the same uniform for everyone, the same plain pine box put together without nails, in Israel maybe no box at all, affording unimpeded access for the maggots and all the other creatures of decay burrowing in wait. Even between men and women the distinctions fade in death; a devout woman is clad in trousers in death perhaps for the first time in her life just like a man, the restrictions fall away—with the exception, Temima now reminded herself, of the prayer shawl in which only a man is privileged to be cloaked in life, in death his prayer shawl can become his winding sheet.
With a nod to her companions Temima stepped away for a moment from the corpse to retrieve her capacious white talit with its licorice black stripes. It was a traditional prayer shawl, with no extraneous ornamentation and no feminizing accents. She wore it whether praying alone or with others regardless of the time of month in a woman still cyclic, she did not consider it a show of excessive piety or ostentation as a woman to wrap herself in it but rather an essential cocoon inside of which she could achieve the focus and transcendence that carried her to new mystical planes considered unattainable by her sex. She always carried it with her in a special bag in those days should the opportunity for hitbodedut present itself, which she performed during this period in the enhanced isolation of the sheltering white tent of her prayer shawl.
The three women working alongside Temima did not question her actions, they simply followed her lead, putting their complete trust in her higher powers. It required the maximum effort from all four of them heaving together to levitate the rigid, putrefying mass of Frumie’s body, whisk away the cloth it was resting upon and replace it with Temima’s talit with its fringe torn, no longer usable for prayer. As they were folding the talit over Frumie as if shaping a stuffed cabbage, bundling her to be sent off from the struggle of this world to the void who knew where, Temima pronounced the words, “Frima daughter of Zsuzsi and Rudolf, know that you are dead.” Only then did the body seem truly to expire, to relax and deflate. The face cloth with the broken pieces of earthenware over the eyes and mouth seemed to flutter and they all heard the words, “Thank you, Tema.”
The members of the holy society turned stunned to Temima. One of them dared to inquire. “You know her?”
Temima nodded. “Yes, I knew her. Alas poor Frumie.”
The more flesh, the more worms, Rabbi Hillel was wont to say. In almost the same breath he also used to say, The more women, the more witchcraft. This was the more tolerant sage Hillel, the Hillel of the Golden Rule, the Hillel who did not, as did the more severe Rabbi Shammai, swing his stick in the air to whack the prospective proselyte who had the audacity to demand to be taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot, but answered instead, What is hateful to you do not do to your friend.
The rest is commentary.
As word spread throughout the Jewish Quarter and beyond that the dead women prepared by Temima for the next life invariably raised their voices in the final mo
ment to thank her, there were those among the living who also raised their voices—to accuse Temima of witchcraft. Conjuring up the dead, consulting familiar spirits and ghosts, the ov and yedonim—this is a Canaanite abomination strictly forbidden in the Torah, an encounter with the supernatural we are fiercely enjoined to shun, an odious practice we must ruthlessly extrude from the sanctified precincts of the Promised Land along with its idolatrous priestesses.
Temima’s response was sharp and absolute. She let it be known that henceforth she would be called Temima Ba’alatOv, Mistress of the Spirits, to honor the woman / witch (here the two words had elided and become synonymous) of Endor who at the behest of King Saul raised from the dead the ghost of Samuel to ask for a prophecy.
You have sinned, God has forsaken you, tomorrow you will die, the prophet said.
You shall not let a sorceress live, the Torah says. “It depends how we define ‘live,’” said Fish’l Sabon, leader of the movement in the Jewish Quarter against Temima. “In that golden age when the Messiah comes, speedily and in our day, God willing, when the Holy Temple is restored on its Mount and the Torah is once again the law of the land, a witch will be put to death by stoning, the same as a person who has had sexual intercourse with an animal. Meanwhile, in these dark and profane times, we shall not let her live in peace.”
Out of pity for Fish’l Sabon, Temima tolerated his harassments for nearly a full year. In a sad way, she felt a strange kinship with him. The story was that he too had taken his name—Sabon, soap—in a spirit of defiance reminiscent of how she herself had assumed the mantle of Ba’alatOv, in his case to spit in the eye of the arrogant Zionist powers who, with such disdain for what they regarded to be the sheep-to-the-slaughter passivity of Diaspora Jews, had called the victims of the Shoah sabon since, as rumor had it, soap was what the fat of their bodies had been processed into by the Nazi psychopaths. You call us Sabon, you obnoxious Zionist snobs? Fish’l in effect was saying. Henceforth, that will be my name, my badge of honor, I wear it with pride.
Of course, Fish’l had not been recycled into soap himself, but he was a survivor—as Temima taught, Who in this life is not a survivor? Orphaned before the age of ten, he wandered alone in perpetual terror somewhere in Eastern Europe, hiding due to the ineradicable scar of Jewishness on his male flesh, joining a band of partisans in the woods where, because of his small stature and undernourished size, he was used to plant explosives on railroad tracks. After the war he was smuggled by Zionist activists out of a displaced persons camp, arriving in pre-state Israel singing the “Hatikva” at the top of his lungs and dancing a hora, then forcibly turned away by the British occupiers to Cyprus. There Fish’l, by then already a young man nearly twenty years old, along with his fellow survivors, was herded yet again, to the everlasting shame of the entire so-called civilized world, into another prison camp behind barbed wire.
No one knew how he eventually made it back to Israel to settle permanently. There were some, it is true, who maliciously and it is generally agreed falsely maintained that Fish’l had never actually been in the war at all or even a bit player in its theater—that he had never even been out of the Holy Land in his entire life, that he was a ninth-generation descendant of a family that sustained itself on alms from the Diaspora and begging from pilgrims in the alleys and arcades of the Old City of Jerusalem, and that his true name was Yonah Seif. For this version of the story, there is very little authoritative support.
One thing is certain, however. Until his public emergence as Fish’l Sabon, as if fully formed like Adam himself the first man without the tenderizing benefit of childhood or youth or for that matter a mother soon after the Six Day War of 1967, very little is known about Fish’l Sabon except that he had been a constant presence at the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann six years earlier as evidenced by the repeated capturing of his unmistakable image in the background of news photographs and television footage from that historic event. No one even knew how he had made a living until he came out fully and definitively in that triumphant messianic year, 5727 from the creation of the world, though there were some who asserted that he was the mysterious author known as 202500, widely admired and revered as the writer and illustrator of a series of booklets that brought to public attention in painful detail the terrible sadistic sexual tortures of the Nazis, may their name and memory be erased.
For Fish’l, Israel’s stunning victory in the Six Day War against such impossible odds was an irrefutable sign that the redemption was underway and the messianic age at hand. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to recognize the mighty hand of God in such an obvious miracle, Fish’l insisted, or damaged even more hopelessly, in the very pith of your soul. It was around this time that Fish’l assumed the title Baba, an acronym heralding the imminent arrival of the Messiah, B’mhera B’yamenu Amen, Speedily and in our Time, Amen. Baba Fish’l Sabon burst into the public consciousness by establishing himself as a fixture at the redeemed and repossessed Western Wall, declaring himself its official janitor. Every night he could be seen with a squeegee and a bucket, mopping the stones of the plaza in front of the wall, and once a week, after the Sabbath, when three stars appeared in the darkened sky and the blessing dividing the sacred from the profane was recited with sprigs of fragrant rosemary wafted in the air, Baba Fish’l would come out with a long rubber hose and aim a powerful stream of water full force at the stones of the wall, sending the piteous kvittlakh and petitions stuffed in their crannies pouring down in rivulets like copious tears, which he swept up with a brush broom into plastic garbage bins and dumped.
Everyone agreed that the fissures and clefts had to be regularly cleared out to make room for the next batch in the endless flood of pain and supplications, but there were those who were troubled by Baba Fish’l’s seeming callousness and sacrilege in discarding with such casual disrespect and hardheartedness these poignant letters many of them doubtless inscribed with the name of God as the addressee, therefore rendering them holy fragments requiring eternal preservation through burial in a designated cache. To these benighted souls, Baba Fish’l coolly pointed out, “A retaining wall, nothing more,” with a contemptuous shrug of a shoulder toward the massive stones bolstering the western side of the mountain. “An exterior wall, a prop, a casing, like a pita bread,” Baba Fish’l added. Raising his eyes to indicate the plateau protruding above the wall overlooking the plaza with its two domed Muslim edifices, like two invasive tumors, he said, “Up there—that’s the big falafel.”
Not for a single minute did Baba Fish’l lose sight of this prize. It infuriated him that the Zionist government had so cravenly handed over control of the Temple Mount to the imams of the Muslim Waqf after the war in June of sixty-seven, an unforgivable suicidal multi-culti concession to stroke and make nice to the gentile world that loathed us even more for our imbecile simpering fawning and obsequiousness. Every one of Baba Fish’l’s thoughts and actions from that day forth was focused on reclaiming this old threshing floor of Arauna the Jebusite, which David our king who is alive and everlasting had purchased for fifty silver shekels fair and square for the purpose of erecting an altar up there to stanch the plague that was consuming the Jewish people in those days—and, in our own day, too, Baba Fish’l hastened to add, is still eating us up alive.
To build an altar up there once again, to restore the Holy Temple erected on this site by David’s son Solomon in all of its splendor so unparalleled that he who had never seen it had never seen beauty in his life—this was the goal to which Baba Fish’l now dedicated himself. To reach this height, he publicly declared himself a Nazir, asserting that he would faithfully adhere to his Nazirite vow of asceticism until the Temple Mount was reclaimed. It was this Nazirite path that rendered the particular offense of Temima’s communion with the dead, her necromancy, even more profoundly distressing to him than her all-around witchcraft, which in and of itself was already bad enough. He declared himself a Nazir very soon after he came to the wall as its self-st
yled custodian in his quest to discover the divinely ordained path from this peripheral station to the Holy of Holies at the summit. Standing in front of the wall with a cadre of fellow seekers he declared, “The first kvittel I pluck out from between these stones will reveal to me the way to the top.” He inserted his hand, pulled out a precisely folded note torn from a pad with a letterhead that indicated it had come from a law firm in Washington, D.C., and read aloud these words: Dear G-d, Please don’t let me go bald. Thank you in advance. Sincerely, Mervin Zupnik, Esq.
In a flash, Baba Fish’l recognized that this was the sign he was seeking. The most distinctive feature of the Nazir, the way in which a person who has taken the Nazirite vow can instantly be recognized, is his hair that he is forbidden to cut, like Samson, because it is in his hair that a man’s life force and vital strength reside, it is his crown and glory that he dedicates to the Lord. A razor may not touch the head of a Nazir; the fullness of his growth of hair is the outward mark of his vow as its inward expressions are his abstinence from eating grapes in any form wet or dry, intoxicating or not—the blood of the grape—and his avoidance of all contact with a dead person, even his closest relative, mother or father, sister or brother, son or daughter. With these three strictures the Nazir sets himself apart as holy to God throughout the specified duration of his vow, in certain respects even holier than the high priest himself who can sip his wine while getting a haircut. Extracting from the lawyer Zupnik’s note the divine sign he was seeking intended for him alone, Baba Fish’l immediately announced that he was taking upon himself the yoke of the Nazir, sanctifying himself to God for a designated period of time, which, Baba Fish’l affirmed, would be the day on which he would be able to mark the fulfillment of his vow by offering up the requisite sacrifices on an altar on top of the Temple Mount.