One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  “I know these guys,” the manager said to Temima as she approached, a great chrysanthemum of saliva spraying forth from his mouth. “They’ll order every last thing on the menu, then give us a blessing in the name of the Dead Hasidim and walk out the door without paying one lousy grush.”

  Temima nodded her head to soothe him with her understanding and sympathy, and assured him he had no cause for worry; let them eat their fill to their heart’s content, they were growing boys, she would cover their costs entirely—and she returned to her seat to continue her studies.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could take in every inch of the surface of the small round table nearby that the three were clustered around filling up again and again with the dishes they had ordered, their sidelocks tucked into their collars so they would not dip into their soup, their heads bent low over their bowls and plates, beaking their noses into their food as they stuffed it into their mouths in voracious heaps, sometimes with utensils, mostly shoving it in with their hands, gesticulating passionately with those very hands, spitting out moist, half-processed gusts as they argued with rising passion and fervor the legal correctness of taking the initiative and blowing up the mosques on top of Mount Moriah, purging the ground in preparation for the Third Temple, scorching the earth and bringing on the redemption. Someone had to do it, the idols had to be smashed, it could not be put off any longer. Maybe it was unfortunate that good people would have to be destroyed along with the bad, but the time had come to get the show on the road, the geula is coming, redemption is at hand, the question was not what but when: We must pose this question to the Toiter Rav, we must ask the Toiter when is the right moment in this apocalyptic time, the Toiter will know, the Toiter is in direct communion with the Master of the Universe—Come on, boys, let’s go, the Toiter is sitting just a few blocks away, thank God, right here in Jerusalem the holy city.

  Temima gave out a sharp little laugh. How could the Toiter be here in Jerusalem? He never came as far as Jerusalem, and besides, he was too frail to travel even to Israel, too sick, and even if by some miracle he had been conveyed to Israel, not to speak of Jerusalem, surely she would have been notified—it was ridiculous to think he was in town.

  The three Bratslavers stopped eating abruptly, swiveled sharply to face her in unison, and demanded to know what exactly she thought was so funny. Temima stared at them blankly, but they insisted, Don’t deny it, you were laughing, we heard it.

  The Toiter is in Jerusalem for the holidays, they went on. The Toiter wanted to go to Uman at this time of year, to the grave of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav of blessed memory near Kiev in the Ukraine because the holy Rav Nakhman has promised whoever visits his grave around the time of Rosh Hashana and gives a coin to charity and recites the ten psalms of the Tikkun HaKlali, that person will be cured of the sin of wasting his seed and nocturnal emissions and keri and polluting the very place of the original covenant, the brit itself, and, by extension, he will be cured of all his other sins as well. But those cursed Russian anti-Semites, they would not let even the holy Toiter into their stinking country, not for all the money in the world, they refused to give the Toiter a visa, those rotten, atheistic communists, may their names and memory be blotted out forever and ever, may their kingdom perish from the face of the earth. And so, instead of to Uman, the Toiter has come here to the holy city of Jerusalem. The Toiter is at the King David Hotel, for your information, in the Royal Suite on the sixth floor, complete with Jacuzzi for the sake of his health.

  The three Bratslavers left the café soon after, turning their faces as dusk descended and shading their eyes to look from afar and survey the Old City of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount with its mosques rising above it. Temima got up, paid their bill and her own, and set out for a ritual bath—not the regular mikva she used to visit in her neighborhood to divert the busybodies, but another one entirely to which she had never gone before—where she immersed herself for the first time since giving birth six months earlier.

  She returned to her apartment on Ben-Yefuneh Street and removed the drab maternity smock she was still wearing. She dressed herself with great care, in a white silk blouse and a flowing skirt of crimson velvet, a silver belt around her waist, embroidered slippers on her feet, a long pearl in the shape of a teardrop in one ear, kohl outlining her dark eyes, and on her head a diaphanous white veil that came low over her face. She was the vision of a matriarch, Mother Sarah, who passed herself off as her husband Abraham’s sister to save his life from kings wild to possess her for her lambent beauty.

  Carrying only her little mother Torah wrapped in a shawl like a baby in her arms, she made her way that night to the King David Hotel, where she announced herself at the reception desk only as Temima; she had an appointment to see Rabbi Elisha Pardes, she said. He knew her, she added; he was expecting her, he had sent his messengers to inform her to come. Within minutes, one of the Toiter disciples robed in luminous white came down and escorted her up to the Royal Suite on the sixth floor.

  Temima did not emerge from the private quarters of the Royal Suite of the King David Hotel for more than a month, through the holiday season, commencing with the rise of Rosh HaShana, curving up to its peak on the day of Yom Kippur, and sloping down to trail into the new year with the rejoicing over the Torah. Everything she required in the way of food and drink was left on a tray outside her door, always with a vase of fresh flowers. All of her personal needs were satisfied within. The clothing she arrived in she cast in the depths of the wardrobe. Once a day she would put on the white dressing gown with the gold crown of the King David Hotel crest embroidered over the heart, her long black hair streaming down her back, and she and the Toiter would stand in opposite corners of the room to practice hitbodedut, like Isaac and Rebekah pleading for a child. When the Toiter returned to New York at the close of the holiday season, Temima left the hotel, putting on again for the first time the clothing she had worn when she arrived. She carried her little mother Torah in her arms wrapped now in the talit that Elisha had given her as a pledge, with a neckpiece embroidered in gold and silver threads, and azure fringes, which she sent back to him at the end of ten days together with a note informing him that the father of the baby she is carrying is the owner of this prayer shawl.

  Within a week the talit was returned to her with a note pinned to it—HOLD ONTO THIS UNTIL OUR SON IS READY FOR IT. The Toiter also revealed to her that the dynasty would be restored through Temima; moreover, he let it be known to her that, should something happen to him, she would be the Toiter regent until the boy grew up. Meanwhile, he wrote, she must go to Hebron to live with her husband as his wife. Let all the world regard the boy as the son of Haim Ba’al-Teshuva until the moment arrives for him to reveal himself. In that way, perhaps, the angel of death will be deceived.

  When the time came for Temima to give birth, the familiar ideological debate sprang up again among the Hebron settlers in the military compound overlooking the ancient city, their numbers significantly increased by supporters from all over the land of Israel who had dropped everything to join the cause and give meaning to their lives. Among the women, the discussion was naturally most heated. On the one hand, the more fiery spirits insisted that, from this time forth, every child should be delivered in Hebron, in the Cave of Makhpela itself optimally, to establish the precedent of the permanence and normalcy of Jewish life cycles on this ground from death to birth to death; there were enough skilled women who could assist, and there was even a licensed midwife practitioner among them, Shifra-Puah, who could handle just about any complication that might arise—and, bottom line, God would help. Even if, in the meantime, the birth itself would have to take place up here in one of the tents of the army camp, it could still be asserted that this child was born in the holy city of Hebron, and thereby the stake of ownership would be dug in even deeper.

  Virtually all those who gave birth during this period, even first-time mothers quaking at the unknown, were shamed into having their babies in this way,
their women comrades closing a circle around them in the tent, swaying in prayer, waving sprigs of rosemary and myrtle, chanting and beating on drums.

  There were, on the other side, a few cooler voices who advocated that they take advantage of the resources available to them through the military. Within half an hour the laboring mother could be transferred to a cutting-edge hospital facility in Jerusalem with the best-trained specialists and top-of-the-line high-tech equipment, conveyed in a cortege of army vehicles mowing down everything in its path, lights flashing, sirens blaring—or she could be transported by helicopter, they could arrive in a great swoop like a spaceship from another planet spiraling down to earth. We may be stuck in Hebron with the toilets in between the olive trees, but we are enlightened Westerners, we are not some kind of uncivilized tribe from a Third World runt of a country.

  Especially in Temima’s case, when her time came, the more moderate voices grew stronger and more insistent—not only because Temima was over thirty and had given birth so far to only one child hardly a year earlier under the most primitive conditions, and not only because it looked as if this second baby was coming into this world somewhat prematurely and complications might ensue, but above all because from the moment Temima had arrived in Hebron, she was recognized as a woman set apart by extraordinary powers and gifts who must in every way be protected. Even as she entered the camp that first day there were unmistakable signs. It was nearing the end of October and the rain was pouring down as if all the fountains of the deep had split apart and the windows of heaven had opened. The prayer for rain that had just been recited on Shemini Atzeret, at the end of the Succot festival, had obviously done the job. Giving off a majestic radiance, Temima made her way through the compound to her tent like a queen on a road from which all obstacles had been cleared away as the rain pounded down; everyone was soaked to transparency while she alone remained completely dry, untouched by a single drop. She was hailed at once as the reincarnation of the holy Rebbetzin Menukha Rachel Slonim, the granddaughter of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, founder of the Habad dynasty, who had come to Hebron with her family in the year 1845, blessed with the power to walk between the raindrops, and it was said of her that never once had she been touched by rain.

  Now of course this holy woman Menukha Rachel Slonim, who became known as the Matriarch of Hebron, to whom both Jews and Arabs in their need had turned for blessings and guidance and solace, lay in the old Jewish cemetery below, not only drenched by the rain and mauled by all the other natural elements, but her grave crumbling and befouled with garbage and filth, desecrated with all manner of noxious waste, human and inhuman. Yet Temima’s reputation as Menukha’s gilgul acquired even greater force by the next morning after her arrival when it became known that the tent of the Ba’al-Teshuvas had sprung a leak directly over the spot where the entire family slept, yet not a single drop of water had fallen upon them. The simplest solution would have been to move the mattresses, but by pressing in on Temima and huddling under her wing the family was sheltered and kept dry. Temima turned on her side to face the baby her husband called Pinkhas, who lay practically beneath her with his eyes wide open, watchful and on guard, as if to prevent her from ever leaving him again and shield her from all harm, she stroking his head murmuring, I’m here, mommy, it’s okay, no one can hurt me, this is how it is meant to be—while from behind her Howie moved in, raised her nightdress to the level required for his purposes but no higher, and, without any preliminaries, asserted his rights and staked his claim.

  From the time of Temima’s arrival in Hebron, the child her husband called Pinkhas would not leave her for a minute. She carried him everywhere in a pack on her back and, when concern was expressed about the burden of the extra weight for a woman in her condition, Temima would place one hand under the child’s rump behind her and the other hand flat on the globe of her taut belly in front of her and respond that she felt herself to be perfectly balanced from both sides.

  She was excused from serving her shift with the others in the communal kitchen, the laundry, the nursery, the entire sphere of women’s workplaces, not because she was pregnant—almost every woman of childbearing age was pregnant except, for the most condensed interval possible, those who had just given birth—but due to the general consensus, stunning in that it elevated a woman but not without precedent in Hebron because of the reputation already associated with the celebrated Menukha Rachel Slonim, that a better use of Temima’s powers would be to position her in a place from which she could impart her wisdom to everyone’s benefit. The first thought was to breach the ancient Jewish cemetery of Hebron, abandoned now for forty years since the massacre of 1929, the Tarpat pogrom, even at the risk of inflaming the passions of the local Arabs, to clean up the gravesite of the holy Rebbetzin Menukha Rachel Slonim and to set up a pavilion with a canopy there under which Temima could preside comfortably on a nice lawn chair and receive students and petitioners, but this proposal was rejected because of the danger of the evil eye to a pregnant woman who flaunts the promise and hope of life in a place saturated with death.

  Temima herself spurned the concept of the evil eye; she found no support for it in the plain, unmediated text. Not only was it a form of superstition and idolatry, as far as Temima was concerned, but whatever malevolent power it possessed if indeed it existed at all was acquired only through human beings’ collusion with it to their own detriment through misguided belief. Nevertheless, out of deference to those who would have been horrified by the presence of a pregnant woman planted in a graveyard holding court there, she set up her chair on the top of Tel Rumeida, in front of the stone ruins that sheltered the tombs of Ruth the Moabite and her grandson, Jesse, father of King David, alive and everlasting.

  For the remainder of her pregnancy, with four armed soldiers surrounding and guarding her at all times—the first emanation of her Bnei Zeruya quartet—Temima sat there almost every day like the prophetess Deborah under her palm tree. When the weather was warm she sat outside in front of the stone archway of Ruth’s tomb, and in the winter months she sat inside beside a small heater attached to a generator in the army jeep, the child her husband called Pinkhas playing quietly at her feet, careful not to disturb lest she grow angry and leave him again.

  Men and women, Arabs as well as Jews, would come to the wise woman Temima with their griefs and woes, with all the disappointments and worries that vexed them, and she would illuminate for them who they are and reveal to them their innermost worlds. Then there were those who would simply climb the hill for a respite, to gather at her feet and learn with her. The thread she was drawing out from the texts at that time as her pregnancy advanced in Hebron, the city in which David was anointed and ruled for seven years before consolidating his kingdom in Jerusalem, related to the dynasty that would lead, in the end of days, to the Messiah son of David. Above all, Temima sought to illuminate the line of women—maligned, disgraced, meek, adulteress—who lay down compliantly to receive the seed and pass it on: Leah the unloved, mother of Judah; Tamar, Judah’s harlot, mother of Peretz; the convert Ruth, supplicant at the feet of Boaz the landowner, the great-grandmother of King David in whose aura Temima now sat. And then there was the mother of Solomon through whom the line of David would snake onward into the messianic age culminating in the minister of peace—Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, plucked dripping from her bath and impregnated with a doomed child by David the king, who then marshaled his royal clout to get her husband, Uriah, to sleep with her too so that the cuckold would believe he was the father and take the blame.

  With regard to the birth of his child, Temima’s husband, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, was among the strongest advocates for it to take place in the army compound, the closest they could come at this moment in time to the heart of the ancient holy city of Hebron itself. The spiritual honor and privilege of an entry into this world in such a sacred place by far outweighed any advantages that modern science co
uld provide in an approved hospital, in Howie’s view. Besides, he argued, compared to the floor of the hovel in which poor Pinkhas was delivered by an Arab urchin whose hands had been who knows where, the military compound and the loving support of experienced women could only be considered state-of-the-art. Temima was a strong woman, as every Hebron woman was expected to be, she had survived far worse.

  Nevertheless, when the time came, he found himself sitting glumly in an army helicopter opposite his wife, the child he called Pinkhas, about fifteen months old, curled up in her lap. Shifra-Puah, the authorized midwife, had expressed concern about the early onset of labor that might necessitate special care for the newborn not available on the military base—no Jewish child could be wasted, especially given the wildly spiking demographics of the surrounding Arabs breeding full time like rabbits. On the basis of Shifra-Puah’s recommendation, the rabbinical authorities that Howie consulted then ruled that danger to life overrides even the mandate to settle the land of Israel.

  When they touched ground at the Hadassah hospital, Howie was faced with the humiliating task, in the presence of all the onlookers—doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who had gathered around instantly—of peeling Pinkhas, wailing as if bereaved, out of his mother’s arms as Temima was ushered into a VIP suite. Her father’s shekels, no doubt, Howie reflected bitterly, spoiling and pampering her as usual. He passed the next few hours entertaining the child, mostly in the hospital cafeteria, where the little boy, who had not that long ago evolved into an upright biped, spent most of his time pulling the levers on vending machines that Howie kept feeding with coins spitting forth candies and salted snacks and sugared drinks. When at last they were summoned back into the room, Temima was sitting up in bed against a bolster of cushions, cradling in her arms an infant in a white crocheted cap swaddled in a blue blanket. It is true that this baby was much smaller than Pinkhas had been at birth, weighing just over two kilos, and he was much darker and more wizened, but the expert opinion was that he was sufficiently well formed to thrive without artificial support. Ketura with her savagely burned face was leaning over the bed offering a cup with a straw poking out for Temima to sip from—like a bad omen, Howie felt, another source of embarrassment to him due to the intimate nature of his prior relationship with this Arab handmaid before he had returned in penitence and metamorphosed into Haim Ba’al-Teshuva. What is she doing here in the middle of our nuclear family at such a time anyway? Howie shivered with loathing and disgust.