One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  Her father, Reb Berel Bavli, showed up at Temima’s apartment the next night still high from the audacious event the day before, raving with enthusiasm for the entire resettlement project to which he had already made a substantial financial contribution, announcing that he now intended to establish it as his number-one charity, above even supporting the Oscwiecim Rebbe. Imagine, he cried, the first bris mila in Hebron since the massacre of 1929, when sixty-seven of our people were slaughtered by the Arab murderers, may their names and memory be blotted out, and the rest, Jews who had lived there for hundreds of years, were banished from our second-holiest city. Well, watch out boys, we’re back—believe me, you putzes, we are definitely back, and this time, we’re here to stay! The first bris in Hevron in almost forty years—that we have been kept alive and sustained to reach this day!—and in the Me’aras HaMakhpela no less, by the grave of our forefather Avraham Avinu himself of all places, the very same Avraham who performed the first recorded circumcision in Jewish history, the original mohel. And who of all people is given the honor to perform this one, with his own hands, for his own grandchild, his only male descendant? I’m telling you, Tema’le, tears were running down my face, and you know me—I’m not the type who usually cries because of a little blood. In thirty seconds flat—a new record!—I snipped it right off, good-bye and good riddance, quicker than a wink, faster than you could say Moishe Pipik. The sandek, Rabbi Moshe, the leader of the movement himself, who was given the honor to sit in the chair of Eliyahu HaNavi and hold the baby on a pillow on his lap while I did my business, couldn’t believe it was over—it should go in the Guinness Book of Records for the fastest bris ever, I’m telling you, someone should write to them, even with my jet lag and my reflexes not so ay-yay-yay I broke the record. The baby didn’t know what hit him, he didn’t even have a chance to let out one good holler before I sucked the blood from the cut with my own mouth and spit it out into a cup, and then I wrapped his little schmeckel’e up in a piece of gauze, it was so delicious, a delicacy like a chicken neck, a gorgel, and just as he was getting ready to yell bloody murder I dipped some gauze—a different piece of gauze, needless to say, not the same one I used on his little you-know-what—into the bekher filled with nice sweet wine and stuck it into his mouth, and he sucked away happy as a lambchop. I’m telling you, Tema’le, this is a grade-A baby, and I know from grade-A, believe me. He looks just like his father, the spitting image, also with a pot belly, also bald, all he needs is a beard and they could go on the road together and do a comedy routine in the Catskill hotels, on the borscht belt, Maxi and Mini. Then Howie announced the baby’s name: Pinkhas—Pinkhas Hevroni, may he grow up to Torah, to the wedding canopy, and to good deeds. Hevroni, you know what that’s for, of course, and such an honor it is for him to be the first boy to be circumcised in the Me’aras HaMakhpela in Hevron, he’ll never forget it, he will go down in the history books. And Pinkhas, so that he should be blessed with the balls, the baitzim, you should excuse the expression, to stand up and do the right thing by our people in times of danger, when God is so mad at us for our sins He is ready to wipe us out like a bunch of cockroaches—to stand up like Pinkhas son of Elazar son of Aharon the kohain, who took his spear in his hand and went straight into that tent, he didn’t think for one minute should I / shouldn’t I, he stuck that spear right into those two, that bigshot from the tribe of Shimon, what’s his name?—stuck it into him right there, while his schlang, you should excuse me, was schtupped in a place where it had no business being, in that shiksa from Midian, that temptress who leads men to sin, may her name be erased forever. That’s the kind of boy we want our Pinkhas Hevroni Ba’al-Teshuva to grow up to be—am I right, Tema’le? And afterward, I’m telling you, such a meal we had, a kiddush like you wouldn’t believe, right there in the Makhpela, courtesy of yours truly—super deluxe, catered five stars, one-hundred-percent kosher for Passover, nothing but the best for my grandson, with real tablecloths and napkins and dishes and silverware—no paper or plastic for our young prince, Pinkhas Hevroni Ba’al-Teshuva—and with flower centerpieces and waiters in uniforms, all Arabs by the way, so much for their principles when you wave a few dollar bills in front of their noses, that’s the Arab mentality. I’m telling you, it’s amazing what you can accomplish, even in so-called Occupied Territory, even in the wild West Bank, with a little money and a little hutzpah. Every kind of smoked fish and salad you can imagine we had—twelve stations, meats like you never saw, and I know from meats, wild ox and leviathan just like in Gan Eden—cakes and fruits, mountains of shemura matzah that cost me an arm and a leg, drinks like you wouldn’t believe, hot and cold, including the world’s best kosher wine to toast a leHaim in honor of the occasion, and even two ice sculptures, one molded in the shape of the Holy Temple, may it be rebuilt speedily and in our time, filled with pickled lox, and the other in the shape of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, filled with pickled herring. I’m telling you, Tema’le, you missed an event of a lifetime, I’m sorry to say. You should have been there. That’s where you belong. What kind of mother and wife are you anyways? Your baby is there, your husband is there—what are you doing here, if you don’t mind my asking? Howie tells me he sent you a letter asking you to get off your m’yeh, you should excuse the expression, and come right away—so tell me already, what are you waiting for, the Moshiakh?

  Temima listened to all of this without a word. She did not offer her father refreshments, not even a glass of water or a cup of tea. When finally he paused long enough for her to conclude that he had come to the end of his story, she stood up and said, “You must be very tired, Tateh, from your jet lag and from beating the world’s brit record and from dealing with the caterers—and I am in great pain. I gave birth to a baby a few days ago and now they’ve stolen him away from me. My breasts feel like they’re going to explode like bombs”—and she blushed crimson from the ordeal of being obliged, in her urgent desire to end this meeting, to offer her father intimate information about her woman’s body.

  At the door, Temima asked after Frumie, and her father made a slicing motion like a karate chop down the front of his chest. “Cancer, very bad. They cut them right off, yup, both of them”—and then he left, without even a light kiss or a fatherly embrace, it would have been too awkward and unseemly after such news about Frumie, and also after being made privy to details about the state of his own daughter’s equipment, all this talk of breasts, even for a man like Reb Berel Bavli whose life’s work with creatures had eviscerated him of every shred of sentimentality about flesh and mortality.

  Howie telephoned the next morning on the pretext of informing her of the name he had given to their child. “Pinkhas is not a name I would have chosen,” Temima retorted coldly.

  This response provoked from Howie a fiery outpouring on how the land of Israel had just been handed back to the Jewish people on a silver platter, it’s a miracle that only a blind man or a fool would spit at and reject. He then went on to inquire if she had read the note he had sent to her with Ketura. “I’ve already paid with interest for your writing,” Temima replied. “I don’t have time to read any letters from you. I’m sick with fever and sores because you snatched my baby from my breast. What kind of animal are you anyway? Even Hannah was allowed to wean her boy Samuel before turning him over to the corrupt bosses in Shilo. Even that fanatic Abraham allowed Sarah to finish weaning Isaac in the natural course of events, and made a party to celebrate the milestone before he took him up to the Moriah to slit his throat and sacrifice him.” And she slammed down the receiver with a crash to prevent him from hearing her sobs.

  She cried for six weeks without pause, even in her sleep she wept in her bed, and in the daytime she wept at the window of her apartment on Ben-Yefuneh Street, looking out as if seeking the one her soul longed for, never leaving the house lest the expected one show up and she not be there to greet him. Yet it was beyond her power to amass the energy and will to rush to his side, sweep him up in her arms, and flee with him to safety
. This was a child conceived in a compromising deal with a man she scorned, carried off to a place she could not justify or bring herself to. She who had been forsaken by her own mother, she should have done better by her own child. Maybe she just did not love him enough, poor thing. The best she could offer him was to dress herself in sackcloth, to wail and refuse to be comforted, and go down mourning to the depths of Sheol.

  Throughout this time, Ketura did not leave her side. As Ibn Kadosh was dispatched for food and supplies, Ketura squeezed and pumped milk from Temima’s breasts to ease the swelling, at times suckling from them herself but never emptying them entirely, to wean them gradually until they dried out. She placed frozen cabbage leaves over Temima’s breasts to soothe them, rubbed olive oil into the nipples to soften them, brewed teas from sage and peppermint leaves to prevent infection, and she defrosted a portion of the placenta she had saved, ground it up, and stirred it into the food she prepared for Temima, without even notifying her of this added ingredient, to lift the heavy cloud of sadness that crushes the spirit after childbirth. But for a mother whose baby had been torn from her as had been Temima’s lot, Ketura reflected with keen distress, since she herself had been an accomplice, even the garnish of the placentas of half the women of China might not suffice.

  When the child was about six weeks old, Howie telephoned again ostensibly to let Temima know that they had moved from the Park Hotel in downtown Hebron to an Israeli military compound overlooking the city. This, of course, was something that Temima was already aware of, as the tortured internal ideological debates of the Hebron settlers who were insisting they would never move from this place in which they had established a foothold at such personal cost and travail seared the news day after day. But not to worry, Howie assured Temima, even though the government considers us a royal pain in the rear, we sealed in cement a major deal with the big enchiladas: first, a new city will be built for us overlooking Hebron, to be known as Kiryat Arba, and then the old Jewish quarter in the heart of Hebron itself, Beit Romano, Beit Hadassah, the Avraham Avinu courtyard, and so on, will be restored to its original grandeur. For Temima’s information, her father, Reb Berel Bavli, had already purchased for them the best villa in Kiryat Arba and the best apartment in Hebron, sight unseen, still only a dream, fully paid-up, no mortgages, no headaches whatsoever. So there was nothing to be concerned about, Howie went on, there was no risk in abandoning our stronghold in the Park Hotel. Hebron is ours now and forever, it is ours in this day as it was then, even if meanwhile we are living in tents on an army base with a communal kitchen and the latrines in the mud. As the Gemara teaches us, the land of Israel is acquired only through suffering. He asked again if Temima had read his note, and when she did not respond, he said, The main thing is, I’m inviting you to come and live with us. This is where you belong—your baby is here, this is your home.

  “Is there a Jacuzzi on the army base?” Temima inquired.

  Howie groaned. “How come you’re still such a JAP, Tema?”

  “Maybe when they put in a Jacuzzi, I’ll think about coming,” Temima said, and she hung up the phone.

  She began to venture out of the house, returning to her Tanakh classes with her steadfast teacher, Morah Nekhama Leibowitz, who with a swift, curiously raw female appraisal took note of Temima’s restored trim shape and asked about the baby.

  “In Hebron,” Temima said, “with the settlers. His father kidnapped him for his brit and I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Ah,” Nekhama said, “already they are sacrificing the children to the Molekh. Avodah zara, idolatry. As the prophet Jeremiah says, ‘The number of your cities has become your gods.’”

  And then, in a manner strikingly alien for her, so rigid was she in keeping to her program, in a gesture that Temima appreciated as the fumbling attempt of an incurably formal spirit to comfort a desolate mother with the nearest thing to a touch that she could muster, Nekhama returned to the final portions of the book of Exodus, even though it was already late spring, almost summer, and they had completed those sections months ago—posing a question without even covering herself modestly by channeling it through the male commentators: “If the Holy Temple was created as the permanent dwelling place for the earthly presence of the Master of the Universe, why do you think its artifacts—the ark, the altars, the table, and so on and so forth—continued to have the original design of rings with poles through them for ease of portability, a quick getaway, so to speak, from the days of the Tabernacle when our ancestors were still wandering in the wilderness?” And even more atypically, Nekhama answered her question relying on her own authority rather than that of the sages, even throwing in another colloquialism meant to brighten the face of the stricken mother who had endured such a blow. “Because the heart of the matter has never been land, it has always been Torah. Have Torah, Will Travel, as they say on the great frontier—that is our ticket.”

  More and more now, Temima left the apartment on Ben-Yefuneh Street, which had become for her increasingly suffocating and unbearable with remembered pain. This was when she began to take up with intense seriousness and concentration the practice of hitbodedut, which she continued over the years in different forms. In those days, she would throw a shawl over her head and shoulders on the cool Jerusalem nights and seek a solitary place, in the woods or the fields where she could hear, as Rav Nakhman of Bratslav had heard, the unique song of each blade of grass. She would converse with God in her own language and in her own way, supplicating Him, spilling out everything in her heart as to a mother, no matter how shameful or frivolous.

  At first she sought out secluded spots in the western part of Jerusalem, parks and gardens, Ein Karem, the Sultan’s Pool, the leper colony, Gehinnom. With time, she ventured alone deep into East Jerusalem, beyond the walls of the old city, along the slopes near what was said to be Absalom’s tomb, by the springs of Gihon and the pool of Shiloah and Hezekiah’s tunnel. She stood alone among the crumbling gravestones on the Mount of Olives one dark night, wild dogs prowling nearby, her arms raised to the heavens, confessing to God yet again with strangled cries the terrible guilt that was churning within her for abandoning her child, for allowing pride and perverse principle to override her maternal responsibilities to this blameless boy, for colluding by her stubbornness in letting go of him so passively.

  As she beat her breast in anguished confession again and again, God answered her by sending a gang of Arab boys to fall upon her and throw her to the ground. Their hands began groping at her woman’s body—breasts, belly, buttocks, between her thighs—she who had always felt herself to be set apart and chosen, and yet, in the end, she was no different from other women, the geography of all her hidden places was known to any stranger and imbecile and thug. Her mouth open but no scream issuing forth as in a nightmare, she struggled to detach her spirit from her body and nullify her inconsequential physical self with thoughts of God. This is what a woman who casts away her own child deserves, this is what a woman who wanders alone in such a place in the dark of night deserves, this is what a woman who presumes to take on the spiritual calling of a holy man deserves.

  Then, as suddenly as the attackers had descended upon her, they were gone, taking flight like a flock of crows rising from carrion. Coming toward her now she recognized Ibn Kadosh in a white loincloth, brandishing a sword like an epic warrior, braying like a wild donkey, obeying the command of his mother Ketura, who had charged him with following Temima at a distance in her perilous night wanderings. Temima is a holy woman who must be allowed to move freely, Ketura had said to her son, but we her followers must follow her wherever she leads, and guard her in her comings and goings from all evil.

  Her wanderings continued through the summer into the fall. She walked the length and the breadth of the city of Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, east and west, by night and by day, her Tanakh in her cloth bag slung across the front of her body like an ammunition bandolier. Now and then she would sit down to rest, on a bench, or a stone para
pet, on the ground under a tree, and occasionally in a café where she would order some Turkish coffee or a mint tea and, once in a while, something to eat.

  That is how she found herself late one afternoon in early autumn as the High Holidays were drawing near in a café on Ben-Yehuda Street, with her Tanakh open before her at the chapter on the binding of Isaac on the altar on the top of Mount Moriah where the Golden Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque of the Muslims now stood—the chapter that would be chanted very soon on Rosh HaShana—and she decided that the time had come to break the seal and read Howie’s letter. Though he had composed it in the spring at the end of Passover, he began with the Kol Nidre language of Yom Kippur coming soon upon them: All my vows, my oaths, my obligations with which I once pledged and bound myself I now repent of, I deem them absolved and annulled and voided, with no power over me. I no longer will consider you my sister. If you want your child back, you must come to Hevron and live with me as my wife in accordance with the law of Moses and Israel.

  Temima folded the letter, slipped it back into its envelope and reinserted it between the pages of her Tanakh, this time at the Second book of Samuel, chapter three. She raised her eyes at a grating noise, followed by coarse shouting, and saw the manager of the café, his face red and glistening with perspiration, scuffling with three young men dressed entirely in white with exceptionally long sidelocks descending from their crocheted white skullcaps in waves down to their waists. She recognized them as the trio of Bratslaver Hasidim who staked out the spot in front of the café, singing and dancing until they brought themselves to a climactic pitch, then passing around a large empty tin can with its Kibbutz Beit-HaMita pickles label still affixed.