One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  Neither Rizpa nor Cozbi could remember, or, for that matter, ever even knew, what had happened to Uzzah, but they figured it was probably not something good. Temima, instead of revealing to them the well-meaning Uzzah’s cruel fate, just let go of her ark-safe entirely and stood there unassisted with her back still turned to them. She was recalling how, for almost the entire year after her mother’s death, she did not speak a single word except on Sundays, when she would take two trains and a bus out to the cemetery in Queens where her mother was buried still without a gravestone to mark the plot, and she would talk to her mother all through the afternoon, telling her mother everything that had happened to her and everything she had thought and felt that week and who had hurt her feelings and who had humiliated her, and she would cry and cry until she would pass out from grief and longing.

  But this time Temima did not collapse. She turned around and faced her long synagogue and study hall with its rows of benches, as she had so many times in the past to preach and teach. One arm encircled the shriveled body of her little mother Torah, its insides the handiwork of a woman and therefore blemished and unkosher and impure, its blue velvet dress threadbare and filmed with cobwebs, its crotch and bottom lightly straddling her hip as if she were carrying a child. With her other hand she pulled the top rim of the great prayer shawl that encircled her shoulders over her head like a hood, drawing it forward so that her veiled face disappeared inside the talit as if into the far depths of a tunnel. With her shrunken little mother in her arms, she walked on her own down the aisle of her synagogue, past Cozbi and Rizpa guarding her anxiously, past her four Bnei Zeruya gallantly awaiting her with the porta-chair, and, without looking back, she stepped out of the door of her shul and through the door of her aperion, their two openings now aligned like capsules docking in space so that it was impossible to distinguish where you were coming from in the world and where you were going.

  The transition was executed fluidly, as if she had just been ushered into the next room, and yet Temima’s breathing expanded with the sense that she had been released from a black pit like the hole into which Joseph was cast by his brothers, crawling with snakes and scorpions, in which she had been held until sold into the slavery of her position in the world, as if she had just escaped a life sentence. It had been a very long time since she had simply been outside in the free blowing air—years, she thought.

  Through the curtained window of her aperion she could feel the dear morning breeze and the sweet warmth of this early spring day. It was the tenth of Nisan, the biblical first month of the year. In four days’ time, if she lived, she would sit down to preside over her Passover Seder in the place to which she was now leading her flock, a destination she had not yet revealed to them. She had purposely chosen this day to carry out her wishes exactly as she conceived of them, with no discussion or consultation or opportunity afforded for anyone to dissuade her or modify her plans in any shape or form, because by Temima’s calculations, this was the day, in the fortieth year of the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness, that Moses’ sister, Miriam, died. The fact is mentioned in passing, Miriam’s death, practically a footnote to their itinerary—arrival at the wilderness of Zin in the first month, stopover in the city of Kadesh, and by the way, Miriam died and was buried there—immediately after a detailed discussion of the rituals of the eradication of impurities with the specially mixed ashes of a perfect red heifer. In contrast, Miriam’s other brother Aaron the high priest, creator of the golden calf, dies some verses after on a mountaintop in a ceremonial rite of priestly passage, and is given full honors, with thirty days of mourning and universal lamentation. What do we learn from this? Temima would pose the question to her students. That in the great scheme of things, a woman’s place is somewhere between two kinds of cows.

  By scheduling her radical action on Miriam’s yahrzeit, Temima sought to correct this slighting of a woman who had always tried her best to do the right thing. One year to the day after Miriam’s death, also on the tenth of the first month as it happened, the Israelites, led by Moses’ successor, Joshua son of Nun, crossed the Jordan to the Promised Land, the waters piling into a great heap at the moment the priests leading the way bearing the ark dipped their feet into the edge of the river. Like the priests at the head of Joshua’s hordes crossing the Jordan on this day more than three millennia ago, Temima in her aperion with her deflated little mother Torah in her lap intended to ride at the head of her liberated congregation, hundreds strong, to show them the way. She made this point categorically to Paltiel, she would not bend on it, she would not countenance being swaddled in the middle of the swarm like a queen bee, or protected in any way as Paltiel and the others had at first insisted. Nevertheless, they had devised a kind of makeshift seatbelt for her, which she now also rejected, actually uprooting it and tossing it out the window like a spoiled child, punctuating what she had already told them. “This time I’ll be transported my way. Next time you carry me I’ll be flat on my back with my nose in the air—and you can do it any way you want, I won’t stop you.” The only prop she accepted was a cell phone with which to communicate her orders, since she alone knew how they would be going; the route as in any fumbling human journey would be winding, it would not be direct, and only she knew where they would end up.

  She pressed the autodial to signal the chief of her bearers, the head Bnei Zeruya. “Sah!” she ordered.

  There was an unexpected lurch as they set off that caused her to almost drop her wasted mother Torah, a calamity that could have mandated a penitential fast of forty days—followed by an exhilarating gust of buoyancy as they raised her in her aperion into the air and sailed forth, cutting through the crowd that parted to allow her to pass to its head. As they swung into Yekhezkel Street and proceeded down to Sabbath Square, Temima leaned back. She was on her way. She closed her eyes to penetrate the deepest levels of inward concentration and connection to the divine as she recited the traveler’s prayer while already in motion. Save us from the hands of every enemy and ambush and bandits and wild beasts along the way, and from all the varieties of punishment and suffering that agitate to gather on this earth.

  When the first rock struck the side of her aperion, Temima’s eyes shot wide open. She strained forward to peer through the curtains of her Solomonic palanquin. They were entering the heart of Mea Shearim just before the point where the street narrows. It was precisely in that direction, into the most narrow and choked straits of pious conviction and certitude, that she intended now to march her flock, even if their course would be lengthened and circuitous and lurking with peril and drag on for forty years—in order to purge them of the mentality of slaves, in order to assert her rights and stake her claim.

  Everywhere she looked, black-clad men and women in wigs and housecoats and thick rolled-up stockings were scurrying frantically in and out of stores, shopping desperately as the merciless Passover deadline approached. Against the walls bearded men in white shirts stretched by too much kishke were positioned with blowtorches to fire oven racks and stovetops to a glow, removing every trace and memory of leaven. Temima spotted some joker in a blowtorch queue awaiting his turn with a toaster. Maybe it had been another joker who had thrown that first stone, but then she picked them out in their multitudes, shifting through the masses, boys mostly, some as young as five by her estimate, few older than sixteen with patches of new beard, on holiday from the long hours in the study halls, burning with pent-up indignation, quivering with excitement, their faces flushed and glistening, some with arms already raised, poised for the signal to begin the bombardment. Everywhere there was rumbling and hissing, and above it all a speaker mounted on top of a car thrusting out and amplifying invectives against Temima and her followers. “Impermissible! Desecration of the Name! Blood and Fire and Pillars of Smoke! Worse than the sodomites who were prepared to parade through our streets flaunting their abominations to defile our holy city!”

  Against the horn on the car rooftop saturating the airwaves, d
rowning out every rational thought, Temima had no way to raise the full nakedness of her woman’s voice. All she had was her cell phone. She reached Paltiel. As soon as her Bnei Zeruya step foot on the narrow portion of Mea Shearim Street, Temima instructed her son, the road ahead of them will empty entirely, like the river Jordan. She herself, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, will be stationed aloft in her aperion at the top of the street for the whole time as her congregation streams by as Moses stood on the hilltop with his arms held up in the air by Aaron and Hur in the battle against Amalek. When all of her people pass before her and proceed down the street and arrive at the great synagogue of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav on the other side of the Mea Shearim shuk, Temima said, she will go forth to join them. They were to await her coming there at the Bratslaver shul. It was also Paltiel’s responsibility to remind them to gather up as treasures as many of the stones that are thrown at them as they can carry. These will form our monument. The stones meant to strike us will be made to speak for us.

  Drawing up the collars of their black jackets to mask the lower portion of their faces, and with cries of Harlots! Whores! Sluts! Jezebels! Vashtis! Delilahs!—the stone-throwers were winding up and hurling their missiles. Streetlights were smashed. Tires were set aflame. Burning dumpsters were overturned. Great plumes of smoke looped up into the air. Ima Temima in her aperion borne by her four Bnei Zeruya advanced to the top of Mea Shearim Street and took her position there like the pillar of cloud that had moved from in front of the Israelites and stationed itself behind to screen them as they crossed the Reed Sea and confounded their Egyptian pursuers. And just as Temima had foretold, the narrow street in front of them was emptied of people; the only signs of human life that remained was the trash—the plastic bags and the wax paper from falafels and bourekas and knishes of every variety, kasha and potato, wafting in the breeze and plastering themselves with their own grease like some kind of installation art against the metal grates that had just been slammed down over the shop fronts.

  With cries of Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn her congregation flowed past her aperion into Mea Shearim Street—Paltiel and Cozbi and Rizpa, the ecstatic band of prophetesses tethered along their rope pulled by Kol-Isha-Erva, the ailing high priestess Aish-Zara and her consecrated knot of priestesses, and the hundreds of others, with Zippi, her daughter by Abba Kadosh, circulating among them, wiping away blood, wrapping gauzes around heads, applying antiseptic to wounds, dispensing bandages from her circumcision kit. Their numbers stretched across the entire width of the street, spreading luxuriantly in the emptied roadway as if it were the Sabbath and all traffic had rested, onto the narrow sidewalks as if they had the right of way. They could pass freely just like men, they were not obliged to step submissively off the curb to give way to a man striding briskly toward them, insulating him from the distraction and temptation that their physical existence signified.

  When the last of her followers passed through, Temima set forth in her aperion borne on poles on the shoulders of her four Bnei Zeruya down the deserted street, alone and unaccompanied, with hundreds of eyes upon her peering through shop grilles and, above the shops, through slightly parted curtains of apartment windows. Like an empress on an unfurling red carpet Temima went forth to meet her flock awaiting her alongside the great white synagogue of the Dead Hasidim on Salant Street, near the entry to the shuk of Mea Shearim. There through her spokeswoman Kol-Isha-Erva she commanded her followers to file behind her into the marketplace—and as they proceeded, she ordered them to place one by one the individual stones that had been hurled at them and that they had salvaged onto a heap as a remembrance of what had occurred on this day—like the stones that had been gouged out of the Jordan riverbed and erected in Gilgal after Joshua and the Israelites had crossed over, an eternal commemoration, like the stones set on top of a grave as a sign that you were there, you are still alive, they tried to kill you but you’re not dead yet. “When the Messiah comes and Rav Nakhman returns to take his rightful place in his empty chair that awaits him inside this shul,” Kol-Isha-Erva raised her voice speaking for Temima Ba’alatOv, “he will gaze at this memorial and kiss each stone. He will bless each obstacle that has brought us closer to our redemption.”

  Inside the shuk they were confronted by yet another obstacle placed before them, because, as Rav Nakhman himself taught, God is found in the obstacles, which obliged them to halt there to await its overcoming on the road to the fulfillment of their desire. An old man dressed in tattered and threadbare oatmeal-colored yellow-stained long underwear such as could only be seen in public in Mea Shearim hanging rigid as if electrocuted from clotheslines, was staggering back and forth screaming, No, no, I won’t! I don’t want to! I don’t want it! No, you can’t make me! Oy,Oy,Oy! His long white beard was flying, the sparse white hair rimming the bald and mottled crown of his head wild and streaming. He had escaped from his deathbed in one of the apartments above the market, a fruit stall owner explained to a member of Temima’s congregation—and the news swiftly spread. He had been screaming like that up in his apartment for three days already—Oy, Oy, Oy!—howling, howling nonstop. He was driving the whole neighborhood crazy with his unbearable screams, he was inconveniencing everyone, he was taking much too long to die, it was indecent.

  Temima and her people stopped there frozen as the old man darted back and forth flailing his arms, shrieking No! No! No! within a gradually constricting circle, as if he were being sucked down a hole that was inexorably drawing him in. In her aperion Temima was singing from the one-hundred-and-sixteenth Psalm, The cords of death have encircled me, and the straits of the underworld have found me. She was sending her message along the waves of the air to this old father, Run, my heart, run Reb Lev, flee, escape, get away from them! Chasing after him were three younger men all with dark beards, all of them crying out, Tateh, Tateh, Tateh, one of them waving a large black velvet yarmulke, yelling, “Tateh, how can you go outside without your koppel on your head?”—the second crying, “Tateh, Tateh, your little schmeckel’e is popping out from your gotchkes, it’s not dignified for a man your age to let people see his whole business hanging out in the street, it’s not becoming”—the third racing after their ancient father with a wheelchair as if to scoop him up in a net like a writhing fish already bloodied by the hook.

  It was astounding how long it took them to catch the dying old man so fired was he by his last exalted struggle—long enough for a delegation from among Temima’s followers toward the rear of the crowd not in a position to witness in its full misery this futile resistance at the last barricade, the group that called itself the Daughters of Bilha and Zilpa, to enter the hardware store with its goods spilling out into the market square and buy up every single cleaning implement they could lay their hands on—so that once the old man was finally trapped and restrained with ropes and bungee cords and the gartel belts from his sons’ kaftans in the wheelchair still screaming Oy, Oy, Oy, No I won’t, I don’t want to! No, You can’t force me! and speeded away in all his unseemliness out of sight and out of hearing forever and the aperion set off again followed by the throng out of the shuk and up the hill toward Ethiopia Street, throughout the moving mass, women, including Temima’s own Rizpa, now had their heads wrapped in turbans made of cleaning rags and dishtowels and they were pumping into the air brooms, mops, squeegees, carpet sweepers, dustpans, toilet brushes, plungers, and so on, chanting Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn, and balancing on their heads plastic buckets and metal garbage cans, strainers and colanders, like pilgrims to Jerusalem bearing offerings of first fruit to the Temple.

  By now, word was already spreading throughout the city of a wondrous procession making its way no one knew where for a purpose no one could say what as they entered the top of Ethiopia Street, past the compound sheltering the great round domed Abyssinian Church, past mysterious gardens heavy with silence behind stone walls, past the house in which Eliezer ben Yehuda, fanatic resuscitator of the Hebrew language, once resided, its historical marker ripped off
yet again by fanatic defenders of the faith offended at the sacrilege of the Holy Tongue deployed for common intercourse, leaving only a gouged-out frame marking the ghostly whisper of a plaque. They veered into the Street of the Prophets, and from there to HaRav Kook Street, pausing at Temima’s command in front of the home of the first chief rabbi of Israel, Abraham Isaac Kook, halting at this spot for personal reasons—to grant Temima a few minutes to focus inwardly in silence on the memory of her baby boy named for this towering Zionist mystic—her baby Kook Immanuel, tucked for so many years now in his tiny cradle blanketed with dirt in the ancient Jewish cemetery of the old city of Hebron.

  Let me not look upon the dying of the child, Hagar cried as she cast her boy Ishmael away from her in the wilderness. A savage cry came out of Ima Temima—she did not know from what depths within her it had come up or how it had escaped her, she did not know if it was a cry of grief or a cry of shame. And then she lost all connection to that cry entirely, she concluded it had not been her cry after all, it had not come from her at all but from outside of her where it was amplified many times and reverberated over and over again as her aperion lurched forward into the moving traffic of Jaffa Road, bringing progress to a dazed halt as this epic caravan from an apocalyptic age lumbered across the road. The cries were coming from every side—from the ululating women of the east running toward them from the Makhane Yehuda market, skidding on rotting fruits and vegetables, cracking sunflower seeds with gold teeth and spitting out the shells, from the shrieking bands of klikushi pouring forth from the Russian Compound, letting out great convulsive fits of lamentation like professional mourners, writhing spasmodically and barking like dogs as if possessed by demons, tearing at their hair and rending their garments. Behind them, riding on broomsticks fashioned from the wood of birch trees, cackling wildly, came the Baba Yagas with long loose ash-colored hair, word having reached them of a great and powerful sister witch making her way in a proud demonstration through the streets of city.