One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  Mikhal, whose loins must have once throbbed for that irresistible bad boy David so that she even betrayed her father to save him, letting him down out of the window of their bedchamber to escape the assassins the old man had sent after him and tucking idols (What? Another Tanakhi lady, like Rachel Our Mother, who could not bring herself to part with her teraphim?) in the bed with an absurd tuft of goat hair sticking up on top to trick the pursuers in another of the Bible’s great comic interludes. How much bitterness and loathing and alienation must have encrusted the heart of this degraded woman as she stood years later at the window, a prisoner of the harem, staring down at David in his triumph, observing him as he whirled and leaped half-naked in the street like a lunatic in front of all the riffraff and lowlife, despising him in her heart as he led the processional bearing the Ark of God back to Jerusalem.

  Temima let out a sharp, caustic laugh, like a bark, the first sound she had emitted all morning not counting her prayers, which launched Cozbi and Rizpa straight to the window. There below, turning into the Bukharim Quarter and propelling himself toward them, was a small man girded only in a loincloth and a fringed garment threaded with azure strings and a snug-fitting white crocheted openwork skullcap drawn low over his head, spinning ecstatically like a Sufi or a dervish and singing with such fervor that rills of drool snaked down from his mouth, matting his beard, chanting more than singing, over and over again, the refrain, “Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn.”

  “It is Paltiel,” Cozbi said. “They are coming. We better get ready.”

  Forgive me, Paltiel, Temima beseeched him in her heart—not denying, as had Mother Sarah, her indiscretion of laughing at some masculine absurdity. Inwardly she begged him to pardon her. Her laugh that to some ears might have sounded contemptuous had just burst out of her in an unforgiving flash before she had recognized him as her own son, in the fraction of a second when she had seen him coldly through a stranger’s eyes.

  At the head of the great throng that began streaming into the Bukharim Quarter behind Paltiel, heavy with women and girls, but also including multiple kosher prayer quorums of tens of men, surging forward to the front of her shul, dancing, stamping their feet, twirling, clapping their hands, swaying, many bearing musical instruments, drums, tambourines, rattles, bells, roaring, ululating, whooping, chanting the Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn mantra, she now also easily spotted her eighth and last child, the daughter Zippi she had with Abba Kadosh. Temima’s eyes even in the dimness of age were instantly snagged by the bright yellows and reds of the African kente cloth turban that wrapped the mass of Zippi’s dreadlocks and the coordinated robe that cloaked her matronly form, the solid protruding bolsters of breasts and buttocks. In each of her upraised pumping fists Zippi waved a tool of her trade—a double-edged knife in her right hand, a shield to hold back the prepuce in her left. She was a mohel, a circumciser, like her namesake Zippora, the reputedly black-skinned wife of Moses Our Teacher, the blood groom too busy having visions and saving the Jewish people to attend to his own sons, forcing her to do the job and sacrifice their boys herself. The third tool of Zippi’s trade were her own plump lips, with which she performed the meziza, sucking the blood from the wound, and with which she now was chanting Te-Tem-Ima along with the swelling congregation packing the entire area in front of the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter, snaking around the corner to Yekhezkel Street with no end in sight.

  It had been because of this child Zippi, now a grown woman, not only already a mother in her own right but also a grandmother, that Temima had finally broken with Abba Kadosh and fled his patriarchal kingdom in the Judean Desert, followed out of the wilderness by Shira, another one of his concubines, who had started life as Sherry Silver and now went by the name Kol-Isha-Erva. The former lead singer and instrumentalist of the once-popular band Jephta’s Daughters, which performed for audiences of women only, Shira had been living on a trust fund in the Nakhlaot section of Jerusalem and working part-time as an ecological nature guide when she surrendered to Abba Kadosh, who was madly turned on by her vibrato. Temima now spotted Kol-Isha-Erva easily in the crowd, a thick twisted rope girdling her waist, its trailing length encircling the waists, one behind the other, of the women who were her students in her school for prophetesses, some of them blowing long sustained blasts followed by pulsing beats on upraised shofars, others flinging their arms in the air, their shoulders twitching, ecstatic utterances coming from their lips in an ancient, mystical tongue that no one but fools and children could any longer decipher—the spirit of God had settled upon them so that if anyone wondered what had come over these girls, it could be said of them that they too were among the prophets.

  Kol-Isha-Erva had taken her name around the same time and in the same spirit of defiance and revelation as Temima when she had recast her own name to honor the Woman of Endor. A woman’s voice is nakedness, you say? Well then, that is how I shall be known—Woman’s-Naked-Voice, Kol-Isha-Erva. She tilted back her head to look up to Temima’s window, and even through the veil they knew their eyes linked instantly. The two women were closer in spirit than twin sisters still in the womb in body. Kol-Isha-Erva was to Temima Ba’alatOv as Rav Nosson of Nemirov was to Rav Nakhman of Bratslav. She was Temima’s scribe and the recorder for posterity of all her stories and wisdom since, like Rav Nakhman, Temima never wrote anything down herself, she regarded writing to be a crime, and as Temima herself used to say, Were it not for the voice of Kol-Isha-Erva, no one would ever hear me and nothing of me would remain.

  As Kol-Isha-Erva and her band of student prophetesses were prodded forward by the surging crowd, she flicked her head sideways in a signal to Temima to look in the direction she was indicating. The aperion borne by her four bodyguards, her Bnei Zeruya, was turning the corner and coming into view, preceded by her white-robed knot of priestesses led by Aish-Zara, Temima’s girlhood friend from Boro Park, Essie Rappaport, in the tall white mitre of the high priestess and with an Urim and Tumim jewel-encrusted breastplate hanging from a heavy chain around her neck that Paltiel had ordered on the Internet from the Yale University website. Taking her halting and excruciating steps leaning on two canes, the pain of her metastasized cancer creeping along her spine through her hips down her legs, fortified by a fierce inner will, Essie had insisted upon undertaking this arduous final passage in the procession accompanying her beloved Temima. Under no circumstances would she even consider accepting the invitation to be transported beside her teacher in the aperion, which now approached the Temima Shul in the very center of the crowd, like the Tabernacle with its ark and cherubim, its Holy of Holies, in the wilderness surrounded and shielded by the priests and the Levites and the twelve tribes in prescribed formation, the heart at the heart. The four Bnei Zeruya carried it on poles high above the heads of the assembled. They were big men, from their shoulders and upward taller than all the people; the poles went through rings attached to the sides of the palanquin and extended to rest on their shoulders elevated above the throng pressing in on all sides. They passed through the opening into the courtyard to reach the door of the Temima Shul, and set it down ceremoniously on the ground to await her arrival.

  King Solomon made an aperion for himself out of wood from Lebanon. Its posts he made of silver, its top gold, its seat rich purple cloth, its interior inlaid with love by the daughters of Jerusalem—the first recorded traveling orgone box. That was your high-end aperion model, and those were the luxury features, fully loaded. When his mother informed him it was her wish to be conveyed through the streets of Jerusalem to the place to which she now intended to go in a palanquin such as King Solomon had made for himself as specified in lyric detail in Song of Songs, Paltiel’s job as her chief of staff was to make this happen.

  Where in the world could a Solomonic aperion be found in this day and age, even in Jerusalem, the center of the earth where all things converged? To import some sort of equivalent conveyance made out of bamboo or rattan and festooned with colored baubles from an alien and distant
place like India or China, and maybe also a white elephant to accessorize it upon whose back the contraption could ride, would be entirely inappropriate for the culture and mentality of the Middle East, which was more camel and donkey oriented. And to build such an aperion from scratch, with the designated precious materials, would be an outlay prohibitively beyond their resources, and would require craftsmen of divine endowments long vanished from the guild—a Bezalel, an Ahaliav, a Hiram of Tyre, an artisan of the skill and genius attributed to Solomon himself. Paltiel had almost despaired, but then, by a stroke of great good luck, while goofing sullenly around on the Internet, his second favorite pastime, he came upon an outfit almost in the neighborhood—in a hilltop trailer settlement outpost in Samaria—that specialized in authentic reproductions of biblical artifacts, garments, incense, musical instruments, vessels, coins, celestial azure dye, and so on, including among its offerings a full Old Testament wedding with the bride conveyed to the canopy by four bearers in what they actually called an aperion, with the appropriate verse appended to the luscious product description.

  Accompanied by Cozbi, Paltiel went out to the headquarters in Samaria of this for-profit to personally check out the merchandise. They both agreed, upon close inspection, that it was a depressingly antique heap, a battered crate, resembling more a sedan chair that had seen far better days than what they imagined a royal aperion might be like, gussied up a bit with scrollwork and friezes, arabesques and filigrees to give it a generic Levantine look, but that, bottom line and considering the kind of time pressure they were under, it would serve. They stepped inside to examine the seat, a bench really—a bit worn, a bit hard, the purple cloth some sort of frayed glossy synthetic. Nevertheless they sat there for a while and exhaled in relief, mission accomplished, the close darkness and love veneer applied by the daughters of Jerusalem putting them in the mood. On the plus side, they noted, it was exceptionally solid—sturdy enough to carry five brides at once to a Moonie wedding, and Temima was a woman of great bearing and distinction, a flimsy contraption just would not do, Paltiel did not, God forbid, want any embarrassments.

  They speculated that perhaps a century and a half ago a conveyance of this type might have been new, used perhaps to transport a well-fed personage of substance and heft around the country, up and down the hills of the Holy Land, an English baron or lord, a Montefiore or a Rothschild, for example, whose manicured hand with its blinding diamond ring and starched white shirt cuff with gold links would extend out the window and drop coins for the beggars and cripples scrambling in his wake. The windows, they noted approvingly, were thickly curtained, a great advantage in Temima’s case, affording her privacy from unseemly stares, not only of spectators who would inevitably be lining up along her route, but also of journalists, photographers, and other assorted rabble and gawkers and predators. After some perfunctory haggling, they signed the rental lease at an extortionist price, which Paltiel wrote off as a donation to the biblical restoration venture. This was the aperion that was now parked at the threshold of the Temima Shul, gently and reverentially lowered by the four Bnei Zeruya who ducked out from under the rods that had rested on their shoulders as they maneuvered it to its reserved spot. They proceeded inside the building and up the stairs, dizzied by Cozbi leading the way to the men’s balcony where they were directed to sit down and wait as final preparations were completed for Temima’s departure, when they would be summoned to carry her down in a dignified fashion and settle her comfortably inside her chariot.

  As they bore her down the stairs, Temima’s heart filled with pity for these four overgrown boys she called her Bnei Zeruya though she never really took pains to get to know them; they were not related to each other as far as she knew, she had never troubled to etch into her mind their individual names. It was entirely on account of their mothers that she felt such an ache for them; to her eyes, though they were so muscular and sleek and inscribed with such beguiling tattoos, and, on the surface at least, in the prime of health, they nevertheless seemed to her pathetically mortal, like every mother’s son. Yoav ben Zeruya, Avishai ben Zeruya, Asa’el ben Zeruya—these were the sons of Zeruya in the book of Samuel. It made no difference at all to Temima that Zeruya had only three sons; for her purposes, her four bodyguards and bearers were Bnei Zeruya. Zeruya was their mother, Temima taught. Where else in the text did you find sons, and especially sons of such extravagantly wild belligerent instincts, such testosterone sons, identified by their matronymic? They definitely were not mama’s boys, Zeruya’s sons. Jesus son of Mary was another such case that came to mind, but that was a different story, another personality type entirely with a paternity issue too complicated to go by his patronymic. What was his father’s name anyway?

  They ferried her down the steps with almost choreographed delicacy and caution in a special transfer chair that had been devised for this purpose as befitted her stature in the world. Temima gazed sorrowfully at her four Bnei Zeruya through the veil with which Cozbi had covered her face, which was glowing alarmingly like the face of Moses Our Teacher as if infected by a fatal disease contracted from God in the thin air of the mountaintop. Speaking through this veil she requested that, before being brought outside and placed in the aperion to embark on the journey that would be her ultimate statement, she be set down for the last time on the bima in front of the ark of her sanctuary where her priestesses led by Aish-Zara, hooded in their great white prayer shawls and in their stocking feet, had on so many occasions bestowed upon the worshippers the priestly blessing dictated to Aaron in God’s name, raising their hands over the assembled who obediently shielded their eyes from the blinding mystery of it all. This was where Temima herself had taught and preached for so many years to her congregation of women in the main sanctuary and to the men sitting up in the balcony until she had retired definitively to her chamber. This departure moment, her last moment in this holy place, would be especially auspicious for a prayer for the healing of all humankind, she believed, for the sick and the soon to be sick, for the mortality of these Bnei Zeruya decaying in front of her eyes, asking for mercy in the name of their mothers.

  Cozbi and Rizpa drew back the maroon satin curtain draping the ark, which, when exposed, revealed itself to be a fireproof steel safe, an authentic bank vault of great weight and thickness, donated by the anonymous benefactor following an act of savage vandalism and pillaging perpetrated by an antagonist who, it was believed by many in the neighborhood, had acted out of a justifiable sense of righteous outrage against this brazen hillul HaShem, this intolerable desecration of the Name, committed daily by this female upstart who called herself HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, the abhorrent liberties she took with all that was sacred and pure and forbidden to her as a woman. The massive doors of the ark were opened with the combination entrusted to the memories of Cozbi and Rizpa, who then, from either side, assisted their mistress out of her portable chair. After positioning her securely upright to keep her steady with her hands clutching the ledge behind which the Torah scrolls were arrayed, they stepped respectfully back a few paces to allow her these final private moments with her girls.

  That’s what she always called them—My girls. There they were all lined up like debutantes at a ball in their fancy velvet and satin dresses trimmed with gold and adorned with silken embroideries and their soaring ornate silver crowns. On the Sabbath, in the synagogues of her childhood, some man would ask one of them to dance, take her out, give her a spin around to show off his trophy that everyone else reached out to stroke, to fondle, to kiss—lay her down, undress her, open her up, gaze at her, find her place, read her, know her, and when he was finished with her, raise her up and exhibit her exposed—the largest and strongest man would exult in displaying her open at her widest—then dress her again before taking her around for one more whirl now properly decent and placing her back with the other girls to await the next time she would be asked out again. The best moment for Temima, a moment she savored even when she was herself a young girl, had always be
en when they dressed her again after having undressed her and entered her—when they gave that little tug, such an awkward gesture for a man, the gesture of a father who is not often called upon to dress his little girl, to straighten the bottom of her mantle skirt so that it would not ride up.

  Temima inserted her head deep within the ark, inhaling the fragrance of dust and moldy plush, then turned her eyes to the far corner where she knew the wallflower was wedged—the smallest and plainest girl, the one who was never taken out except on the festival of Simkhat Torah, when Temima alone would rejoice and dance with her in the days when she was still dancing. This was the Torah that Temima herself had written secretly, with a quill on parchment and repeated ritual bath immersions in anticipation of inscribing the ineffable name. She had undertaken this radical task in order to know Torah intimately, to penetrate its mysteries letter by letter down to the tiniest thorn of the tiniest yod. Later, when she had a synagogue of her own, she bestowed her Torah upon her congregation in honor of her mother who had died when Temima was eleven; only the innermost core of her innermost circle could identify the scribe of this least prepossessing little Torah in the lineup as Ima Temima herself. On its blue mantle the inscription was embroidered in gold thread now frayed and faded: “To the precious soul of Rachel-Leah daughter of Hannah, Rosalie Bavli, may her memory be a blessing, mother of Temima Ba’alatOv, may her candle shed light, may she live on for many good long years.”

  Temima loosened one hand from the ledge of the ark against which she was supporting herself and extended her arm to stroke the poor little reject. “I still haven’t forgiven you for deserting me, Mama,” Temima said in English inside the safe. Behind her, Cozbi and Rizpa could hear her muffled voice though they could not decipher the words, and in any case they did not understand the language, but when they noticed that she was beginning to sway and totter, they shot forward to catch her. Temima stopped them with a shake of the head and, speaking clearly in Hebrew so that they could make out every syllable, she said, “Remember what happened to Uzzah when he thought the Ark was slipping off the wagon and he dared to put out his hand to steady it.”