One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

by Tova Reich

  Yet all this was worth nothing to him so long as he could still see Temima sitting in her palatial house or parading through the streets receiving full honors like royalty. Why was the pulsa denura curse he had so painstakingly devised to target this demoness exclusively taking so long to work? Where was his personal God? The veils and cloaks that enshrouded her completely—he could only hope and pray that they were concealing boils oozing pus and inflamed open sores bubbling with worms, rotting white skin shriveling and flaking like scorched parchment off her crumbling bones. It was a comfort to picture the curse festering underneath all those rags, but only a small comfort. Kaddish needed more proof to find peace at last, he had to see with his own eyes.

  Draped in black robes from head to toe with a black mesh pane across his eyes like an Arab matriarch just returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, he entered the Temima Shul on a day a public lecture was announced. He endured the indignity of fighting for a spot in the main study hall in the herd of cows, squeezed in among menstruating females with mouths open like pitchers full of blood drinking in the words of their guru. Apparently, she was giving some kind of talk about Bruriah, the brilliant wife of the Mishna giant Rabbi Meir. Could it be that this witch had the hutzpah to compare herself to Bruriah, practically the only woman in rabbinic history whose moral authority and legal rulings are mentioned, even praised, even on occasion accepted in the pages of the Talmud? Kaddish was horrified. No comparison was possible, lehavdil elef havdolos, the two were separated from each other by one thousand separations. But in the end, Kaddish was reminded, Bruriah proved herself to be no less empty-headed than any other woman, despite her arrogant insistence to the contrary, surrendering to the seductions of one of Meir’s students who was charged by his teacher, her own husband, with the task of bringing her down for the thrill of winning the argument about the fundamentally unserious and flighty nature of a woman’s mind.

  When a woman submits to temptation, Temima was offering her sick commentary to this story, it tells you something about her mind. When a man submits, it tells you something about his body.

  Kaddish felt sullied by her sarcasm, he needed a bath. In his black shrouds, vile intimate fumes gusting from all the orifices of these females pressing against him, he could hardly breathe. At least Bruriah had the decency to strangle herself afterward, Kaddish reflected, more than could be said for this shameless female up there, she continues to cackle away with her woman’s naked voice—about what? About Meir’s guilt for destroying a prideful woman? I should be so lucky. Not with hexes and voodoo, Temima was saying, as some among us have been known to attempt to destroy a woman. We shall not name names here because our sages of blessed memory teach that whosoever embarrasses a fellow human being in public has no place in the world to come, it is like spilling blood—But you know who you are. She strained her neck and jutted her chin and swiveled her head as if to cast a hidden seeing eye like the beam of a searchlight over the crowd. How he would have loved to clamp that windpipe of hers with his two hands and squeeze, if only to get her to shut up once and for all. I know you, he heard her calling out into the congregation. Your spells and black magic and hocus pocus and mumbo jumbo and evil eyes and pagan curses and lashes of fire, they are nothing less than idol worship, plain avodah zara. Commandment Number One—I Am the Lord your God. There is nothing else besides I Am. I Am, I Am, I Am.

  Bruriah’s husband, Rabbi Meir Master of the Miracle, is said to be buried standing up, not out of remorse for his sexual manipulation setting up his wife or his ruthless intellectual competitiveness and condescension, but rather like a sleeping horse positioned to be first out of the gate when the Messiah arrives to awaken him.

  The morning after Temima’s talk, the fourteenth of Iyar, the anniversary of Meir’s death, a warm spring day, Temima with her entire inner circle and protectors left Jerusalem for the north in a caravan of taxis. She performed her hitbodedut at dusk on an isolated beach on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Lake Tiberias, not far from the tomb of Bruriah’s husband, an albatross circling in the otherworldly refracted light of the sky over the silvery waters of the Kinneret as she cried out to God as to a mother and pondered the question whether it is preferable for a woman to be destroyed out of love or hate.

  They climbed by foot westward to Safed where they stopped at the tomb of Hannah mother of seven sons willingly handed over and martyred in sanctification of The Name. From there they hiked through the springs and past the fruit trees and caves of Wadi Amud, ending up on the eighteenth of Iyar, the thirty-third day of the Omer counting from the liberation from the Egyptian bondage of Passover to the acceptance of God bondage forty-nine days later on Shavuot, at the tomb of the purported creator of the Zohar Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai in Meron. Here, along with throngs of other revelers marking the anniversary of Bar Yokhai’s death, the happiest day of his life, they celebrated the hillula with torches and bonfires, singing and dancing and feasting among the women and bearing witness to the shearing of the heads of three-year-old boys by the men, and Temima discoursed on the subject of the journey from the cold rational cliff of Meir to the steamy mystical cave of Shimon paved along the way with the heads of children offered up as sacrifices.

  When the taxis brought them home to Jerusalem a little less than a week later and they entered the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter, they were struck immediately by the aura of discordance between the familiar arrangement of the sanctuary and study hall, all of its books and benches and tables in place and the eternal light still burning, clashing with the satin curtain draping the ark that they took in instantly out of the corners of their eyes hanging in ragged shreds, as if raked by the teeth and claws of wildcats roaming freely at the end of civilization. When they opened the ark they were sucked into the dark void where all the Torah scrolls had once stood; only Temima’s little mother Torah remained, mantled in dust wedged in the blackness of the far corner, forgotten and rejected and branded as a plaything to be dandled by children. The floor of the ark was covered with human feces of various textbook sizes and configurations still steaming.

  Even as they were examining the ruins and desecration, four giants entered the building dressed identically in one-piece convict suits in a fluorescent orange synthetic, white crocheted skullcaps drawn over their shaved heads to their eyebrows with two long ringlets flowing down on either side like loose ties that could be knotted in cold weather under their chins that sprouted new beards from a stippling of dark pores. They strode directly up to the ark glancing neither to the right or the left. After removing Temima’s little mother Torah and handing it like an ember rescued from the flames to Kol-Isha-Erva, they girded and trussed the ark all around with belts and straps to hold it together and seal its doors shut. The largest among them then bent over as the others lashed it to his back like a wardrobe. They did not utter a single word as they performed these tasks methodically, step-by-step, chanting instead the aphorisms of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, Gevalt, Never give up hope, Because there is no despair here in the world!—raising their voices to a soaring anthem as they made their way out of the sanctuary into the street, hauling the ark and its contents away with them.

  “I had to wait for you to return so that you could see with your own eyes—so that you would not simply conclude that the ark had been stolen along with everything inside it.” These were the first words he spoke to her when he came into her private chamber that night. She was lying in the cavern of her bed, her little mother Torah resting in the crook of her arm. His glow pierced the thickness of the curtain pulled closed all around. He parted it and lay down beside her, transparent to the bone, no longer of material weight, a shaft of light no longer connected to his physical being. “I have heard from behind the veil it said of me as it was said of the apostate Akher, Elisha ben Avuya, Return all of My backsliding children except for Akher,” he whispered in a hoarse voice. “My repentance alone will not be accepted.” From these words Temima understood that this was the last time he would co
me to her, she would never again see him in this life.

  “The greater the thirst, the stronger the pleasure when it is satisfied,” he went on, his lips grazing her ear. “The stronger the desire the greater the obstacles. Within the obstacles, God Himself can be found. Your destiny is a tight bud that has yet to open fully and reveal itself. Not the good wife-mother Sarah-Rebekah-Rachel-Leah to bless girls by. Not the Wise Woman of Tekoa or of Abel-Bet-Ma’akhah saving men from their animal nature. Not even Deborah wife of Lapidot setting up shop on her own under the palm tree, judge and prophet, warrior and poet. Yours will not be any familiar female emanation. What will still happen to me I do not yet know, but of this I am certain—the Messiah will come from me through you.” And he brought his lips down upon her open mouth and kissed her, transmitting to her whatever infection remained in him that he had not yet passed on.

  Early the next morning the four ex-convicts in their orange prison jumpsuits appeared again pushing a dolly on which was mounted a huge steel vault bank safe weighing several tons. Still without uttering a word, chanting only the mantra of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, You should know that the whole world is a very narrow bridge, they wheeled the safe to the honored spot at the head of the hall where the violated ark had stood. They hoisted and maneuvered it into place, tested the alarm system, checked the security of the tight-fitting door, and handed a sealed envelope to Kol-Isha-Erva containing the code to the combination lock. Three of them then perched on the dolly as on a scooter while the fourth, the giant who had carried the desecrated and befouled ark on his back the day before, pushed his comrades out of the study hall into the street, all of them singing jubilantly at the top of their voices over and over again the chorus affirming the most important point—Not to be afraid at all.

  When the four returned again about two weeks later they were dressed in shimmering white, their holiday best, no one would ever have known they had once been in captivity. It was the fifth day of Sivan on the cusp of summer, the anniversary of the death of Sashia, wife of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, who bore him two sons taken in infancy and six daughters, four of whom survived; therefore he had no heirs and his followers are known as the Dead Hasidim. It was also the eve of the holiday of Shavuot when the liberated Hebrew slaves received the Torah in the wilderness at Sinai—or, as Temima observed referring to the text, at least the men among them received the Torah at Sinai, since it stands to reason that God’s command to prepare and sanctify and make themselves pure three days in advance by abstaining from going near a woman could only have been directed to the men. There was thunder and lightning, the mountain was covered in clouds of smoke from God’s fiery presence upon it, it trembled violently, the blast of the shofar grew louder and louder. The trumpets blared as the four freed slaves, each one holding aloft a pole attached to a corner of a canopy stretched overhead as in a wedding procession, made their way toward the Temima Shul through streets lined with onlookers. Beneath the canopy other newly redeemed slaves carried the reclaimed Torah scrolls freshly decked out in gleaming white satin mantles and ornate sterling pomegranate finials and lavish high silver crowns like brides, and behind them came more men rejoicing, whirling with all their might and leaping into the air, shouting and blasting their horns, roaring the words of Rav Nakhman, The bride is beautiful, Love is perfect.

  Temima, also dressed in white with a heavy white veil over her face, opened the safe-ark with the combination of numbers that equaled three hundred and forty-four totaling pardes, the orchard at the heart of which the universe’s most dangerous knowledge is guarded. The Torah scrolls were settled inside the ark-safe in their rightful places, the doors were shut, and the white satin huppa was taken down from its four poles and hung on a specially designed rod to serve as a curtain over the face of the ark.

  Embroidered in gold thread across this curtain were the words, AMONG WOMEN IN HER TENT OF TORAH MOST BLESSED, THE RABBI, THE ZADDIK, THE QUEEN, THE ANOINTED ONE, TEMIMA BA’ALATOV, DAUGHTER OF RACHEL-LEAH OF BROOKLYN. This was Elisha Pardes’s final gift to her, she knew now for sure that he had set out and was gone. Temima took her place in front of the ark and surveyed the congregation, the women packing the main stalls, overlooking them in the balcony the men including a few of Kaddish’s Hasidim who had been swept in with the crowd and whom she recognized from the pulsa denura, conspicuous now for the white gauze bandages wrapped around their heads, arms in casts and splints, black eyes, bruised and swollen faces, leaning on crutches, still groaning in pain days after the battle to reclaim the abducted scrolls, and as she gazed outward she searched within herself for the truth concerning the fate of the beautiful bride once the wedding is over.

  Kaddish waited three days from the end of the Shavuot holiday and the Sabbath that followed. On the third night he dispatched his commandos with brushes and pails of flour paste and thousands of new posters still smelling of wet ink to be hung up wall-to-wall screaming in thick black letters that a herem is hereby imposed upon the witch known as Temima Ba’alatOv. She is hereby excommunicated from the congregation of Israel. She is to be ostracized and treated as dead. She has no place in the world to come. All God-fearing people are hereby strictly ordered to shun her like a leper lest her defilement rub off on them and contaminate them. Should they unintentionally cross her polluted path or come within four cubits of her contagion they must immediately turn their backs to her and run away, they must stuff their fingers in their ears if she attempts to speak, they must spit three times onto the ground as if to vomit her dreck out of their system and utter the words, Ptui, Ptui, Ptui.

  “What does it mean for a woman to be excommunicated, to be put into herem?” Temima calmly posed the question to Kol-Isha-Erva who had conveyed the news of this latest assault and then took down the words of her teacher. “Not to be counted in the minyan? Not to be called up to the Torah? Not to be honored with leading the blessing after the meal? To be banned from the study hall? To be isolated and excluded and treated with contempt? To be ignored in public? To be considered unclean and impure? To be regarded as weak and inferior and light-minded? To be kept out of sight and confined to the harem? Is it at all surprising that over the centuries no one has really taken the trouble to put women into herem? I shall send word to the Oscwiecim pretender that I am honored among women to be singled out for official recognition and, yes, somewhat befuddled as to why he even bothered.”

  She dictated to Kol-Isha-Erva her thank you note to be delivered to Kaddish, adding as a helpful postscript the personal suggestion that for his own sake he might wish to consult the Gemara Sanhedrin page such-and-such, column such-and-such for a discussion of the cut-off age for abusing a child above which pederasty is considered a sin warranting stoning, but if the urge is too overwhelming for him with no convenient outlet she suggested that he take the advice of those sages who ruled that it is not a capital offense to relieve oneself by using one’s own member to penetrate one’s own anus.

  Temima raised no objections when Kol-Isha-Erva indicated she would make this response public. By no means was Temima of the camp that maintained it is preferable to refrain from washing dirty linen in public out of fear of what the goyim might say or from pointing an accusatory finger at a clerical figure who has exploited his position lest the entire congregation of Israel be stigmatized. She fully intended to air out the filth inside Kaddish’s house, but her immediate task was to fumigate the courtyard in front of her own. Kaddish’s people had appropriated it as if she no longer existed, the logical outcome of the excommunication imposed against her like a death certificate. They laid claim to the vacated estate. Temima ordered her Bnei Zeruya and other supporters to prevent the trespassers from invading the building itself, but for the interim she was tolerating their squatting outside her door.

  They transformed the courtyard overlooked by her headquarters into a bazaar bustling late into the summer night. Young boys escaped from stifling schoolrooms to this new attraction to engage in the furious trading of rebbe cards bearing port
raits of rabbinical luminaries with their records and rankings—I’ll give you nine Teitelbaums for one Feinstein, five Gerrers for one Munkacz—which they would then flip against the wall panting asthmatically in long intense matches. Married men left their study halls where they were serving the nation spiritually through Torah learning to deal in all manner of goods from lottery tickets to cigarettes to ritual objects to diamonds. Old men were parked in the morning in their wheelchairs under the fig and pomegranate trees by female members of their households where they sat until the moon came up and the chill set in peddling single shoelaces and half-used toilet paper rolls that they had secreted out of the house in their pockets, false teeth belonging to the recently departed or plastic bottles of unfinished pills with the labels peeled off. Throughout the day they all ate nonstop, food that did not require the washing of hands and a full grace after the meal. The yard filled up with the remains, sunflower seeds and peanut shells, wax paper from greasy snacks, candy wrappers, fruit pits and peels, empty soda and juice cans, tea and coffee cups. Cats poked in the rubbish, ravens perched high up on tree limbs, foxes were seen prowling at night.