One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

by Tova Reich

  Even before Temima’s physical arrival in the Bukharim Quarter, Kaddish had taken upon himself the task of mounting the campaign against her, ordering his men to harass and attack the Arab workers renovating her headquarters and to plaster posters on walls throughout the neighborhood especially in the crucial media-center intersection of Sabbath Square warning of the danger that her existence in their midst would pose. Now from her window Temima could hear every word of his incantation in a Hebrew richly schmaltzed with a Yiddish inflection, each phrase then repeated in unison by the pack reciting from the scripts in their hands illuminated by the streetlights, first zooming in on her by name as at a bull’s-eye—Tema daughter of Rachel-Leah of the family Bavli, also known as Temima Ba’alatOv—followed by the plea that the blasphemous perversions and corruptions she promulgates never come to fruition, May they not come to pass, May they not come to pass, May they not come to pass—culminating with the call to bring down upon her head the full wrath of God, May all the curses listed in the Torah cling to her, all the plagues, all the afflictions, all the malignant diseases of the body, all the derangements of mind and spirit, May her name be erased from under the heavens, May she die immediately.

  The angel Metatron was disciplined with sixty pulsa denura maledictions for passing himself off in paradise as a co-God, thereby encouraging the heretical dualism in the mind of the brilliant apostate, Elisha son of Avuya, known as Akher, the Other. Temima stood at her window with the curtain drawn slightly back as if she were in a theater box observing herself being played by the actor receiving the lashes of fire, and as she stood there witnessing her laceration her mind expanded with the realization that this trial befell her as a consequence of the spiritual penetration of another Elisha, her Elisha Pardes known as the Toiter, the Dead One.

  Since the seven days when they had sat on opposite sides of the synagogue tent in the army camp overlooking Hebron mourning the baby boy Kook Immanuel she had not seen him in any form resembling the flesh she had known that had led her deep into the most dangerous and secret levels of understanding, from text to subtext, literal to allusive to interpretive to mystical, contained in the orchard of paradise. Daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, tell him this—that I am sick with love. Sick unto death he came to her afterward, his apparition, his ghost, his familiar spirit, directing her into the tent of Abba Kadosh in the wilderness and keeping her there until the correct hour, a figure faded and wasting away, she did not know if it was he or his shadow, if he was alive or dead, he took his hand back from the hole and everything inside her stirred for him. He appeared among the gravestones on the Mount of Olives when she sought her solitude to cry out, a wan and gaunt messenger at dawn with his cloak drawn up across his mouth, tolling a warning bell and calling out Unclean! Unclean!—bearing the news that a grand dwelling place was being prepared for her outside the city walls, on the broad avenue carved out in Jerusalem by the tribal mountain Jews of the Caucasus, now in the quick of the most rigid piety, a divine test of her readiness to go forth without question. Every detail would be in accordance with the required specifications—study hall and house of worship and holy ark on the ground floor, overlooking it the men’s balcony, beyond that her private quarters, inner courtyard planted with fig and pomegranate trees.

  Within days after she moved into the stately building in the Bukharim Quarter he made his presence known again, masked, backlit with fever, ravaged by mortality, bestowing the estate upon her for all eternity, fusing and welding her to the line of the Dead Hasidim, contaminating her, so that she took to her bed infected and inflamed and did not get up for a week. Rising from her acute contagion she went out again bedecked with the veil, her personal partition that separated her ever after in all her public appearances, rendering her instantly recognizable by the manner in which she was set apart.

  Early in that week of confinement Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger stomped heavily up the stairs followed by a small entourage of retainers, pushing past Kol-Isha-Erva as if she were invisible, stationing himself in Temima’s room at the foot of her bed that was surrounded and concealed by a heavy burgundy brocade curtain puddling on the floor like pools of melting wax. He began at once to state his position, without bothering to ascertain if Temima was actually present on the great raft within that enclosure; for his purposes he would consider himself completely absolved, in fulfillment of his obligation whether she was there or not.

  The notorious path she had carved out for herself, Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger declared, sinning and causing others to sin like Jeroboam son of Nevat that led directly to the destruction of our Holy Temple and our exile from the Holy Land, made it incumbent upon him to set aside any personal connections he might feel toward her through their fathers and shared roots in Brooklyn, New York. At great personal risk, he has brought himself and a few of his inner circle to her infested residence, a recklessness that would now oblige them to immerse their bodies in the ritual bath immediately after departing from her in order to cleanse themselves from her pollutions. He has come to serve notice that she must without a moment’s delay remove herself and her malignant teachings and influence from their midst. As the designated successor of the holy Rebbe of Oscwiecim, the town better known by its infamous German name of Auschwitz, he, Kaddish Lustiger, bore upon his shoulders the responsibility to do everything in his power to prevent another Hurban such as befell our people at the hands of Hitler, may his name and memory be blotted out forever. This catastrophe that overtook our people was, as everyone knows, the deserved punishment for the abomination of men lying with men as they would lie with a woman, the very same sin for which the city of Sodom was gassed and cremated and reduced to ashes.

  Her unnatural behavior—her insistence on carrying out commandments and obligations that are the exclusive province of men, on wielding authority and participating in ritual and studying and commenting and pronouncing on texts reserved for men alone, on setting herself up as a special case among women, and so on and so forth—all of this can only be explained in one way. She is in actuality a man—a man locked inside the body of a woman. Her external female shell is possessed and inhabited by the dybbuk of a man who in his lifetime was guilty of the grave sin of lying carnally with men as if they were women. Now his punishment for all eternity is to be imprisoned inside the body of a woman. Midah ke’neged midah—as he had sinned so is he punished. And what punishment could be more terrible to such a sinner than to be trapped forever inside the body of a woman, a place that in his lifetime he found so loathsome and disgusting? “You are nothing but a vessel,” Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger reminded Temima, “a putrid vessel for the fulfillment of the ordained punishment of this male sinner. But unlike the vessels of the Holy Temple defiled by idolators, there is no living water, no ritual bath, no mikva, that can ever purify or reconsecrate you. You can only be cast out.”

  When he finished he turned at once to leave, neither requiring nor expecting a response from behind the curtain, so when Temima’s voice came at him like a heavenly bat kol he stopped short as if the breath had been knocked out of his body by a punch in the gut from a hidden assailant.

  “I know you, Kaddish,” Temima’s disembodied voice called out to him as he reached the door. “The inclinations of your heart have been nothing but evil from your youth. When you go to the mikva bath now to purge yourself of me, beware lest you put a naked little boy on your lap again as you have done so many times in the past. It is an abomination.”

  For a few days afterward there was a halt in the defamatory poster campaign that Kaddish had launched well before Temima’s actual arrival when news of her impending residence in their midst had first reached him. During this pause he conferred with his kitchen cabinet as to whether to pull back so as not to antagonize this witch lest she unleash a vindictive barrage of false rumors and calumnies against him, or whether to push forward even more vigorously with their righteous mission of forcing her out of their sphere of influence. They determined on the latter course,
setting up as a precaution a squad of swift boys to tear down immediately any counter posters that Temima’s people might dare to put up.

  The new set of posters slathered on the walls by Kaddish’s camp setting out like guerrillas in the night armed with brush brooms and flour paste were far more furious and slashing than the earlier ones had been, like the deadly curses on Mount Ebal, calling on Temima and her cohorts to Get Out Now Or The Land You Pollute Will Vomit You Up, bringing down upon her head Blood And Fire And Pillars Of Smoke, Cancer And Heart Attack, Terror And Torture, Madness And Humiliation, Agony And Death, issuing an urgent warning to the People Of Israel to Guard Against This Nazi Who Will Turn Your Skin Into Lampshades And Your Hair And Beard And Payess Into Mattress Stuffing, this Sotah Adulteress, this Makhshefa Sorceress, this Lilith She-Devil, this Delilah Seductress, this Female Who Commits The Perversion Of Standing Naked In Front Of An Animal For The Purpose Of Mating—An Abhorrent Transgression For Which She Is Condemned To Death Along With The Animal—and so on and so forth. All of this was communicated to Temima who absorbed it with a vague smile, noting only that it was instructive and on balance maybe also even slightly insulting how, considering the immediate provocation, Kaddish’s new offensive abstained from retaliating in kind by according her at the very least the dignity of the equivalent label of lesbian—no doubt, Temima observed, because there is no specific ban in the Torah against such woman-on-woman activity, it is not taken seriously, no seed is spilled, it leads to nothing, woman’s desire is beside the point and probably does not officially exist in any case, a woman is merely a receptacle, all that is required of a woman is to lay there like a dead carp that is turned into gefilte fish.

  For a period of time Temima watched with mild interest while Kaddish’s attacks unfolded, as if to gauge the limits of his creativity, until the night she grew bored with the range and predictability of his insults and invective and simply to add interest entered the fray. She gave the order to her Bnei Zeruya bodyguard contingent to fan out and hang up multiple copies of the same poster at strategic points throughout the neighborhood and to watch over them lest they be vandalized in any way. In almost every respect these posters resembled notices that sprang up daily announcing a recent death—Blessed Is The True Judge, Let Every Eye Weep And Every Heart Groan, Oy Vey, We Shall Never See His Like Again—but in this instance the name of the deceased in stark bold black letters was Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger, za’zal, son of the Oscwiecim Rebbe, may his candle shed light.

  Kaddish himself was the one who happened to pick up the telephone when the first condolence call came to the house. “Kaddish, is that really you? I expected to get the rebbetzin, you know, the widow, the almunah, or maybe God forbid one of your eleven yesoimim. Where are you talking from? I’m telling you, I’m so shocked my hand is shaking, I can’t even get the words out from my mouth, I didn’t expect to find you among the living, much less you should answer the telephone. The notices are hanging up all over the place, about you being niftar, God forbid. Maybe it’s a different Kaddish Lustiger with a different father the Oscwiecim Rebbe, it shouldn’t happen to us. Oy vey, Kaddish, thank God, thank God you’re still alive, such a terrible terrible mistake, it should only not be a bad omen, God forbid, it should only not God forbid open up a mouth to the Satan.”

  Directly after hanging up, Kaddish buried himself in his bed, drawing the covers over his head. In a muffled shriek as if from underground he ordered his wife not to bother him. “Leave me alone, woman. Can’t you see? I’m being hunted down by the angel of death.” Yet over the years, in times of intense tribulation and stress, relief was always at hand for Kaddish by imagining himself already dead, untouchable by his enemies, indifferent to all outcomes. With a kind of morbid onanistic pleasure he would evoke his own namesake by chanting in Aramaic over and over the Kaddish elegy for himself, Exalted and Sanctified Is His Great Name. But this time the tranquilizer didn’t work. The specter of his own death this time had come from outside, he had not summoned it up, it was not under his control. However many times he sought to lull himself with the drone of his Kaddish, no comfort was forthcoming, he was not soothed until, like the holy Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai setting down the mysteries of the Zohar Book of Radiance in the darkness of his cave while in hiding from his Roman oppressors for thirteen years, Kaddish also dipped into the bottomless well of the kabbalistic mysteries. There in the darkness of his bed he plunged into the mystical depths to retrieve the correct pulsa denura curse with Temima’s name on it that would bring about the end of his tormentor. He drew forth the white-hot fiery lashes, repeating this pulsa denura to himself again and again like a charm until he knew it by heart word for word. When he finally emerged from under his covers and resumed his place in the world as the living heir designate of the Oscwiecim Rebbe, he wrote out the pulsa denura personalized for Temima in a fluent stream as if taking dictation from a voice within, channeling it. Together with his elite strike force of loyalists, he then awaited the most auspicious night to deliver this precision bomb that would explode in the face of his persecutor and wipe her and her abominations off the face of the earth once and for all.

  Over the weeks and months that followed, Kaddish and his cadre watched and waited for the powerful spell to take effect. They had full faith that it would succeed, and though they could not predict in what form exactly it would show itself, they knew that the disaster that would soon overtake Temima would be the result of the pulsa denura they had planted like a mine.

  Reports were delivered to them regularly of the activity at the Temima Shul, the streams of supplicants and petitioners coming and going, men and women, including rabbinical authorities arriving incognito seeking and then taking full credit for responsa to newly urgent questions such as those relating to technology with its God-defying hubris and power for good and evil, like the copper and iron invented by Tubal-Cain and the overreaching of the Tower of Babel. Jews and non-Jews made their way through the upstart Ba’alatOv’s quarters, according to the reports of those who had been sent to spy out the land, among them Arabs emerging as if drugged, cradling precious blessings, hailing miraculous cures, extolling life-altering insights, the meaning of dreams, of past events, of future possibilities, and also students and seekers notable for the hordes of women who packed the sanctuary to hear the words of Torah from the mouth of this so-called holy woman delivered from behind a curtain on the elevated platform of the bima or at the great tisch over which she presided veiled at Sabbath eve dinners on Friday nights tearing one hallah after another and distributing the pieces to her Hasidim clamoring for a blessed morsel touched by her sacred gloved hands.

  There were also many eyewitness accounts of sightings, Temima moving freely through the streets, always veiled, always accompanied by her sidekick, Kol-Isha-Erva, guarded by her Bnei Zeruya phalanx, trailed by assorted acolytes, a sorry band of lost souls and misfits, from Kaddish’s aspect. Word reached him of how on one such outing she had removed her gloves and placed her two hands nakedly upon the head of the penitent beggar Yisrael Gamzu, and blessed him ostentatiously as he held out his cup at his usual post on Malkhei Israel Street in front of the pizza store, the upper half of his drastically mutilated body, all that remained of him after his tank exploded in the Sinai during the Yom Kippur War, potted like a surreal rootless growth in his wagon. Immediately Kaddish arranged for posters to be slapped up all over the neighborhood denouncing this brazen woman for her lewd immodesty in touching a man, even one missing all of his lower-level equipment, her shameless flaunting of physical contact between the sexes in a public place.

  It was also communicated to Kaddish, despite some trepidation among his Hasidim, that Temima on one of her forays through the streets of Geula and Mea Shearim had encountered his father, the Oscwiecim Rebbe, as he was being taken out in his wheelchair for an airing by Ishmael their Arab houseboy, and of how the old man had greeted her by her childhood name—Tema—grasped both of her hands in his aged liver-mottled claws and in a quaveri
ng voice had declared to her that he had been waiting to meet her, he had been prevented from dying until he had the chance to see her once again face-to-face and beg forgiveness from her for ever thinking she was possessed by a dybbuk and forcing her to suffer the humiliation of an exorcism, now by the refracted light of the next life he recognized all she had endured in her childhood, he prayed she would accept his apologies since only the injured party could forgive a sin between one human being and another, even God could not wipe him clean, he hoped she would grant him full and sincere pardon for the sins he had committed against her so that he could die in peace at last and be allotted a place in Gan Eden when he stood before the heavenly throne to be judged, she was a holy soul put upon this earth for an extraordinary destiny, he recognized that now and bowed his head.

  Kaddish dismissed this story entirely. It was not possible to believe some Muslim menial’s report that his father with a brain sucked dry like a prune could experience even a moment’s lucidity, insofar as such an encounter even if it actually took place could be cited as an example of lucidity. Within the week, however, the old man expired, as if in confirmation of the report that he had been holding out only for the opportunity to be absolved by Temima before throwing off the burdens of this life.

  Following all the mourning rituals and a decent interval of thirty days, Kaddish immersed himself in the mikva to purify himself from the taint of death, after which he was declared the new Oscwiecim Rebbe—at the very hour by the clock, as it happened, that his brother Koppel was named the successor in Brooklyn in a private ceremony attended by the mayor and governor and senators of New York as well as other bigshots at which his mother served marble cake and prune compote on real china plates rimmed with gold and cherry heering in genuine cut-crystal goblets. But since Kaddish was in Israel his anointment came first by the world clock, a divine confirmation deeply gratifying, seven hours before his brother’s elevation as the earth rotates on its axis seeking the light of the sun.