by Tova Reich
These are the five survivors of our camp, the embers salvaged from the flames. The decimation of our ranks is in no small measure my fault, I take full responsibility, I am prostrate with shame and remorse, I am abject, our holy mother has forgiven me but I shall never forgive myself. All that is asked of me now is to write it down, to hold nothing back, to lift my woman’s naked voice and make public confession. I was tested and I failed—flunked, flunked! I stand now on the block as the emissary of our congregation and deliver myself into the hands of the Lord, the high executioner up above: Here I am, impoverished of deed, quaking and terrified, unworthy and unsuitable, a sinner and transgressor, have mercy.
Now at last, in compliance with the admonition of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, to hold nothing back in these pages, I accept that it is no longer possible to avoid setting down a full accounting of what happened here in our “leper” colony starting on the tenth of Tishrei, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, two months and a day after the passage of our high priestess, Aish-Zara, za’zal, from this world to the next. It is my duty to acknowledge that my reluctance to testify to these events, putting the task off day after day, was nothing but a small-minded, self-centered defense mechanism on my part to rewrite history through omission due to the corrosive light these compromising events shed on the weakness and baseness of my own character. Our holy mother’s continued silence warns me that I can no longer hide behind the excuse of female modesty or my hypocritical aversion to calling attention to myself in order to be spared the disgrace I deserve for my inappropriate behavior, for all the pain and suffering I have caused, for corrupting and contaminating our community with a sin that festered undercover until it leaked and spiraled out of control to a disastrous climax.
WE WERE still a community of about one hundred souls on that Day of Atonement. How long ago it now seems, a past life, a full year has not yet gone by since that Yom Kippur when it all began but the questions we asked then have already been answered—Who by madness? Who by disease? Who by despair? Who by degradation?
HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, did not join us in prayer on that Yom Kippur due to physical issues, but instead remained cloistered over the entire twenty-four-hour period in the holy chambers attended by the only non-Jew from our inner circle, the nomad Kadosh-Kadosh. Everyone else, including Aishet-Lot, who had become the primary caregiver to Ima Temima, was ordered to take the day off to fast and pray as was required, optimally with the full congregation.
During the short break following the afternoon service, highlighted, to my mind, by its detailing of the frenetic ancient priestly rites and sacrifices and costume changes on the Day of Judgment when our Holy Temple still stood in all its glory on its Mount, may it be rebuilt speedily and in our time, and with its rapturous exhalation of relief when the radiant high priest manages to make it out of the Holy of Holies in one piece, I found myself in the northern garden outside our holy mother’s quarters beside the burial spot of our own high priestess, Aish-Zara, za’zal, who had not been so lucky, she had not been spared. There I sat and also wept as I remembered Aish-Zara, za’zal, just as our ancestors also musicians (entertainers like other eager-to-please immigrant population groups) once wept in exile by the waters of Babylon.
So deep in end-stage grief and longing was I crouched there between the still-unmarked grave of Aish-Zara, za’zal, and the sealed door of our holy mother that I did not at first notice the stranger in our midst climbing over the wall until he came scrambling and scraping down and crash-landed on the ground. Naturally, I rose at once to come to his aid, but gesturing defensively with lacerated hands, as if on guard to repel me if I turned out to be a hostile or allow me cautious limited access if I showed myself to be a potential ally, he cried, “The go’el ha’dam is after me! This is an ihr miklat! You have to take me in!”
The white garments he was wearing as is the custom on Yom Kippur, from his great white crocheted yarmulke pulled low and snug over his skull to the white cloth sneakers on his feet and all the whiteness in between symbolizing purity, a clean slate and fresh start for the new year, were filthy, shredded and bloodied from the ordeal of the gripping chase scene he had just starred in with the blood avengers pursuing him, hot on his heels.
Even then I wondered where in the world he had picked up the notion that our “leper” colony was an ihr miklat, a city of refuge, set aside to give asylum to accidental murderers, but he was pitifully battered and distraught, it was not the time to interrogate him, he had the right to remain silent. He was not such a young man either, well beyond the age to be scaling walls. Nor was he in very good physical shape for such an extreme workout, panting heavily, sweating lavishly, clutching his gut. His patchy grizzled gray beard was wiry like steel wool, his sidelocks were white and wispy, but his eyes, set a little too close together, gave off a poignant childlike wounded quality, as if expecting something good and expecting to be disappointed, both at the same time. He reminded me of someone, I couldn’t at first quite put my finger on whom.
As I continued to stand there in silence taking pains not to make any threatening gesture or abrupt move—for instance, backing up a few paces and turning to pound on our holy mother’s door in this genuine emergency to demand the nomad’s help in dealing with this intruder—his agitation began to cool, he calmed down to a degree though he remained wary and alert, and he went on declaiming, “The whole world’s going crazy—you know? I’m the main go’el ha’dam—that’s my job description, to avenge the blood, I’m the blood redeemer, so how can a go’el ha’dam be chased by another go’el ha’dam? Hel-lo? The buck has to stop somewheres, otherwise you get your endless cycle of violence, blahblah, ve’hulai ve’hulai. And where does it stop? The answer is—Right here, lady, in your “leper” colony. Who’s gonna come in after me into this joint anyways, and maybe catch the sickness and turn all white and bumpy like a cauliflower with boils like from the ten plagues and pus pimples like you wouldn’t believe oozing gunk all over the carpet and all of his body parts that stick out hanging from a piece of skin and then dropping down on the floor one by one, plop, plop, plop, first his toes, then his nose, then his fingers, then his ears, then his pecker—gross, right? So I’m safe in here—right? Until the Moshiakh comes, quickly in our day, amen, the “leper” colony is our ihr miklat, my refuge city. It’s your job to gimme shelter, lady, like Reb Mick says—’cause there’s a war going on, the end of days, Apocalypso, Gog and Magog, fire, flood, rape, murder, and the mad bull lost his way. I’m the main bull, lady, and boy am I mad, I’m real mad!”
All this and more he poured out in English, it occurred to me. There we were in the “leper” colony of Israel but he wasn’t speaking Hebrew, he had sized me up instantly as an Anglo. It was a New York accent of some sort, definitely not Upper East Side, nothing I was familiar with, some neighborhood in one of the outer boroughs probably. That was when I also realized whom he reminded me of—our holy mother’s son, Paltiel.
Then it all came together for me, like sparks fusing into a bolt of lightning, like prophecy. This was Paltiel’s father, aka Go’el-HaDam the blood avenger, aka Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, the former Howie Stern of Ozone Park, Queens, New York. I had never met him personally but I knew all about him, there was no mistaking him, this was the man our holy mother, Ima Temima, was still technically married to by the law of Moses and Israel, though, as I also knew perhaps better than anyone, our holy mother’s true husband was and remains the Toiter in the line of the redemption and fulfillment of the messianic mission.
Out of concern for embarrassment to HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, therefore, without informing anyone of the arrival of this potentially compromising incendiary figure within our gates, I led him along back pathways around the northern garden through the tangled brush and nettles on the east side of the hospital up the stairs under the JESUS HILFE inscription to the refuge of my room, where I closed the door and offered him asylum.
I HID h
im in my room for close to six weeks, convinced that during that period, with the exception of Basmat, my cat, I alone knew of this stranger’s presence in our midst, and I alone would bear the consequences for shielding a fugitive from justice should his whereabouts ever become known. During that time, I took care of all his needs, from soup to nuts, it pains me to confess. Apart from food and shelter, it would be morally equivalent to a violation of attorney-client confidentiality to give a full blow-by-blow of all the needs I provided for; suffice it to say they were across the board, to my everlasting shame. He called me his “little righteous gentile,” I blush to admit, and promised to plant a tree in my honor at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum when all of this blew over for placing myself at mortal risk by hiding him from his Nazi anti-Semite persecutors. I am equally mortified to confirm that I called him my “Hero of Our Time,” but it is my intention in these pages not to spare myself any humiliation or hold anything back except for a pointless recapitulation of the intimate details, which, in any event, would simply reward prurience and idle curiosity, and bottom line always boils down to the same-old same-old tiresome drill between a man and a woman with very limited wiggle room for originality or variation on the theme to the disappointment and boredom of voyeurs and pornography junkies everywhere.
As for attending to his emotional needs, this consisted primarily of listening, of allowing him to talk, which he did practically nonstop when I was in the room with him and we were awake. Fortunately, he did not talk in his sleep, nor did he cry out from nightmares most likely because he was congenitally immune to fear or guilt, nor, to my surprise, did he snore though judging from the position of his septum that was on full display in flagrant deviation when he slept on his back with his nose pointed to the ceiling, coupled with the nasal quality of his voice to which I am acutely sensitive thanks to my musical training and his open mouth that shut only to grind his teeth, he looked and sounded like he would have been a snorer. Each night’s sleep, however, I am obliged to note, was interrupted at least once by the thud of poor Basmat’s body striking the wall when he hurled her out of the bed across the room. The flow of his talk ran on without pause or interruption or comment from me, which was his sexual preference as well. The only caveats I imposed were that all conversation must be conducted in a whisper, and that above all he was banned from uttering a single word or syllable, either negative or positive, about his so-called “wife,” our holy mother, or anything even remotely touching upon our holy mother. In no uncertain terms I warned him that all it would require would be one violation of this restriction and he would be out the door on his rear end in the street before he knew what hit him, at the mercy of the revenge freaks, which is the main natural resource and export of the Middle East.
It was through his endless ramblings, supplemented by my own sleuthing and Internet stalking, that I got full disclosure of his escapades as a blood avenger—not only how many Arab thumbs and big toes he had chopped off, or how many ugly buttocks he had exposed, or how many beards he had half-razored, or how many earlobes he had punctured, for all of which he had already served an abbreviated oddly triumphant jail term flashing his V for victory every time he was hauled out in front of the cameras smiling insanely, but also an exhaustive listing of his more-recent exploits, including shootings through car windows, bombs planted in mosques and discotheques and cafés, buses blown up, packages rigged with explosives, olive groves burned down, wells poisoned, and so on, targeting Muslim extremists and latent jihadists (which, in his world view, encompassed all Muslims), Christian proselytizers, Mormon baptizers of dead Jews, Jews for Jesus, Jewish left-wing intellectuals, homosexuals, Israeli historical revisionists, women rabbis and women wearing prayer shawls or raising their naked voices to cantillate from a Torah scroll at the Western Wall, Holocaust deniers, anti-Semitic European academics posing as anti-Zionists, Zionism-equals-Racism propagandists, international Israel bashers, neo-Nazis, self-hating Jews, women immodestly dressed, the list goes on. The growth curve in his choice of victims was staggering, rendering it exceedingly hard for the authorities to finally figure out that this broad-spectrum violence streak was coming from a single source. For by the time I had given him asylum in my room it was not only the blood avengers who were pursuing him, the law was also on his tail, he was right up there on the top-ten charts of the most wanted. Still, it was not for me to be a moseret or a rodefet. For the informers let there be no hope. Excuse me, but I would not be the one to squeal or turn him in.
I suppose it is necessary for me to pause here to tap into my unconscious, drawing on my years of treatment with my amazing hearing-impaired Park Avenue mental health therapist, in order to try to analyze my motivations while in no way justifying or turning into an apologist for my transgressive behavior in sequestering an individual who was so clearly the antithesis of everything I had ever stood for during my entire life—a bigot, racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobe, yaddayadda, never mind an outright murderer, a first-degree criminal and felon, not to mention cruel to animals, which speaks volumes about a person. And not only did I take him in, literally and figuratively, at great personal risk, but in doing so I was also endangering our community and all we had journeyed so long and so hard to accomplish at such heavy spiritual and emotional and material cost. Most importantly, though, I was jeopardizing the reputation of our holy mother, our epicenter, our source, to whom I had devoted, and continue to devote, all of my energy and passion, my very life’s breath, whose well-being and interests I place above my own without reservation in every way, for whom I would take a bullet anytime, for whom with no hesitation whatsoever I would throw myself away. HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, Ima Temima, our holy mother, was and remains the overriding and consuming passion of my life, I can never let go of it and I never will because were I to do so, there would be nothing left of me, I would be eviscerated, hollowed out, empty, I would cease to exist. How then can I explain the root cause of such inappropriate and unacceptable behavior on my part?
What I now recognize and acknowledge, specifically with regard to my relationship with Go’el-HaDam and how it impacted me, is that it was subconsciously my way of connecting with Ima Temima who, when he literally dropped into our “leper” colony that Yom Kippur, was more and more turning inward and withdrawing from us, avoiding association with almost all of the established inner core circle with the exception of the nomad Kadosh-Kadosh. To put it simplistically and, I should add, superficially, when I hooked up with the admittedly somewhat unbalanced and unstable Go’el-HaDam, once again Temima and I were connected through a man as we had been through Abba Kadosh, a’h, in the Bnei HaElohim days in the Judean Desert. Go’el-HaDam was “into” me as once he had been “into” our holy mother. He was the link between us. We formed a triangle, a trinity, a ménage à trois so to speak. I don’t want to push this idea any further than is necessary out of respect for our holy mother lest it be misinterpreted as irreverent, coarse, even obscene, though for my part I see it and intend it in purely spiritual terms, a mystical union beyond human understanding, like in the Song of Songs. Whatever my motivations in harboring Go’el-HaDam, they reflect not at all upon the lofty spirit and sacredness of Ima Temima, but rather on my own flawed nature and neediness.
And indeed, when all of this sordid affair involving Go’el-HaDam was winding down to its inevitable miserable smashup, spewing wreckage everywhere and nearly wiping us out, it was our holy mother who got it exactly right and explained me to myself. “The serpent beguiled you,” HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, taught, “and you ate.”
Our holy mother then offered a radical teaching based on the provocative similarity between the words haya, animal, beast, and the name given to the first woman Hava, mother of all living, the airborne tiny letter yod dragged down into the mud and tamed to a vov. “When God realized that it is not good for man to live alone, He passed every haya and bird of the sky before Adam to choose from and name. According to some sources Adam mated with the female
of each kind to try her out, but from none of these did he get satisfaction and he did not find a fitting helpmeet, which obliged God to perform the first recorded surgery to come up with a new and improved model. This one Adam liked, she would serve, and he named her Hava. From Haya to Hava. What do we learn from this?” HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, posed the question. “That a woman is an animal—so she is perceived and so she is used.”
Our holy mother went on to elaborate, in more words spoken aloud than in several months prior, more words by far than we have since been worthy to hear to this day from the sacred source, that the wilde haya wild beast is Lilith, Adam’s first wife some say referring back to the conflicting double narrative of the creation of woman—Lilith, the woman created at the same time as the man in the image of God like the man, who would therefore not accept a subservient role, rebelled against the missionary position, would not lie still underneath and just take it, but spread her wings and flew off to yenne welt, the land of imps and demons, of Asmodeus and Samael, witch and sorceress, disobedient, uncontrollable, a bird of prey, a raptor, a wild horned goddess, a tigress prowling and lusting and wreaking her havoc on lonely men and newborn babies in the night, not a suitable helpmeet. In contrast, Hava, fashioned through Dr. God’s cosmetic-surgical intervention from a spare rib of the man created in the image, was a behaima, a domesticated animal, cattle, a cow to milk, a sheep to fleece, an ox to pull the cart, an ass to carry the load, a mare to ride upon, a fitting helper doomed to suffer endlessly, cursed with desire for the man who rules over her.
Whether I was the daughter of Lilith or of Hava, whether I was a Lilith haya who had been beaten down into a Hava behaima, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, did not go on to specify, nor was it necessary, for both fell prey to the temptations of the flesh, leading to the loss of paradise, shame and death.