One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  The erev rav have fastened themselves to us now, the mixed multitude, Temima noted, the riffraff, the asafsuf. She accepted the inevitability of this. Maybe she was not at the same level as Moses Our Teacher of whom it is written that there never arose again in Israel a prophet like Moses to whom God had spoken face-to-face—even more intimately, mouth to mouth. Unlike Moses in his old age, the vigor and moist freshness of Temima’s youth had fled her and was gone, it was true, but she too was leading a congregation of obnoxious neurotics and malcontents and complainers from one slavery to another, and to their ranks a mixed multitude of hangers-on and groupies and assorted fans and freaks and misfits with all varieties of baggage were now also attaching themselves as they had to the eternally ripe Moses in his grand exodus from Egypt, as if she didn’t have enough problems already, bringing nothing but more headaches.

  They proceeded into the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall, with this great cast of extras metastasizing wildly on their back, their numbers multiplying every step of the way, more and more fellow travelers joining their ranks like the pilgrims who had once streamed by foot to Jerusalem three times a year to bring their sacrifices on the altar of the Holy Temple. More and more marchers hooked on to them here until the space was packed from end to end, some tagging along out of coarse curiosity and the itch for distraction, it is true, but others also gripped by the hope that periodically seized this superficially Westernized land and threw its inhabitants into spasms that salvation was arriving at last.

  The cacophony of sounds was overwhelming, surging in waves that were practically visible to those with eyes that could see as they passed over the crowd, in volume greater even than at Mount Sinai when the chosen people received the Torah. Whereas at Sinai there were only your standard voices and thunder and a trembling mountain and God Himself calling out from the plumes of fire and smoke, here on Ben Yehuda stretching all the way to Zion Square there was also what amounted to a full symphony orchestra of Russian musicians, including a pianist still banging on the grand he dragged out every morning to the mall for busking purposes, now being pushed along on its wheeled platform behind Temima’s parade followed by the entire string section, including a harpist, the brass, the winds, the percussions, not to mention several bands of varying configurations of Slavic accordion players in authentic folk costumes, as well as klezmer fiddlers and clarinetists decked out in Eastern European vest and cap concepts. Also latching onto Temima’s procession was a clutch of Breslover Hasidim just released for holiday furloughs from prisons and lunatic asylums bedecked in white crocheted skullcaps with pom-poms pulled over their shaven heads down to their eyebrows inscribed with the phrase NA-NA-NAKH-NAKHMAN-FROM-UMAN, which they were also bellowing ecstatically in counterpoint with the official anthem of the parade, Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn. They were followed by half a dozen Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach clones strumming the same three holy chords in a minor key on their untuned guitars, two Elvis impersonators, one with a glossy white satin yarmulke topping his slicked black wig stamped with the words BAR MITZVAH OF SEAN SCHNITZEL, to which were glued iridescent sequins to flash the King’s proud Jewish roots, and also a Bob Dylan impersonator with a harmonica strapped in front of his mouth like an orthodontic torture device who many in the crowd claimed was the actual troubadour Bobby Zimmerman himself going through yet another stage of spiritual crisis and rebirth and accordingly they approached him for his autograph, which he graciously provided.

  Needless to say, more shofars were also added to the tumult—even in this respect Temima’s extravaganza was not outdone by Sinai—blasted for the most part by messiahs in white robes astride white donkeys, and there were, in addition, assorted King Davids, one of them a dwarf, in cardboard crowns covered with tin foil plucking harps and lyres and lutes, which, unfortunately, could barely be heard to sooth the anguished soul in the great din. A Moses with horns on either side of his head—not the useful kind that could be blown to contribute to the medley—also honored Temima with his company, and there were, in addition, a good number of competing Jesus Christs from all corners of the globe resurrected for the season conducting choirs of pilgrims who had descended upon the Holy Land for the Easter holiday singing hymns responsively in a babel of tongues, bearing enormous wooden crosses, the two beams lashed together with duct tape, and flagellating themselves with leather whips still reeking of freshly flayed stray cat purchased for this purpose at full retail payable exclusively in dollars or euros from the shops on the Via Dolorosa in the Old City.

  Reports of all of this churning activity amassing at her rear were relayed to Temima Ba’alatOv on her cell phone by Kol-Isha-Erva at the head of her school for prophetesses and from the high priestess Aish-Zara leading her band of priestesses. I don’t already have enough meshuggenehs of my own? Temima thought to herself, poaching another one of the great Tanakh comic vignettes, the quip of King Akhish when David fled from the manic-depressive King Saul to Gat, disguising himself as a crazy person, scratching at the walls and letting his spit drool down into his beard. If King David could turn himself into madman, why can’t your local psychotic also turn himself into King David?

  Temima accepted all of these developments with resignation, even a level of tolerance. She had anticipated a circus of this nature, but the prospect would not deter her from setting out from the Bukharim Quarter as her life on earth was constricting, to carry out her final intentions purely on her own terms. Through the window of her aperion she followed the movements of hordes of beggars, male and female, who had also attached themselves to her procession and could not be shaken off. They had descended on the mall in their legions that morning to profit from the flood of tourists funneled in by the high Paschal season, working the growing crowd tenaciously.

  Poverty did not confer righteousness; this is what Temima taught. Do not favor the poor in their disputes, the Torah in one of its more progressive passages instructs us in matters of justice. The beggars in their destitution were in principle no holier than the tourists with liquid assets they were scavenging among or than your standard recognizable mall habitués whose ranks also unfolded in great crests in Temima’s wake—the youth groups spanning the entire range of the political and religious indoctrination spectrum, right, left, and center, every one of their members identically hooked up and wired to their equipment like marionettes, yelling into their cell phones and flailing their arms in emphatic gestures, squealing, hugging, bouncing up and down in ritual circles; the tough guys strutting in their tank tops and gold necklaces and natal crease décolletage tearing with their teeth great chunks of kebob off sticks, twitching to their inner trance; the gay Arab boys from Nablus and Jenin, eyes rimmed in kohl, openly holding hands on the sinful side of Jerusalem; the Muslim girls in headscarves and tight jeans lugging overflowing shopping bags; the Hasidic men looking for some action, along with the foreign workers, the Romanians, the Thais, the African slaves imported for the dirty work, all with matching unhealthy skin colors due to excessive self-abuse; and swarms of North American shoppers for souvenirs of little olivewood trinkets and Israel Defense Force knockoffs and silver ritual objects who were filling up to capacity the Jerusalem hotels for the Passover festival, including Mr. and Mrs. Peckowitz from Teaneck, New Jersey, he insisting over her shrill protests that they check out the action, join the parade, this was the authentic Israel they were finally seeing, videoing with his new camera given to him as a going-away present by their son the mob massed in front of them in every stage of its progress through the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall down to the end of King George Street, past the mausoleum of the Great Synagogue evoking the destroyed Temples of Solomon and Herod toward the open space of French Square where the entire procession was alarmingly brought to a dead halt by a phalanx of police mounted on horses in full body armor with rodentlike masks and helmets, at which point Flo Peckowitz screamed, “What did I tell you, Stanley, you schmuck? It’s a terrorist attack! They’re drawing us all to one spot so they can kill every last one of us
in a single stroke, the lousy Nazis. The ingathering of exiles—follow the leader to Israel like lemmings—one great big concentration camp—so we can all be wiped out with one bomb and they can finish the job for Hitler once and for all. That’s what we call efficient—the final final solution! Stanley, you’re such a pathetic schmuck, how many times do I have to tell you?”

  Then came the explosion, and, as if shot from a cannon, the multitude of hangers-on flew off in every direction, to be recycled in the endlessly absorbent crevices and chinks of the stones of Jerusalem, leaving in the street only Temima Ba’alatOv in her aperion borne by her four Bnei Zeruya and her original flock of several hundred who had set out with her that morning in unquestioning obedience and loyalty—We shall do and then we shall listen!—following wherever she would lead.

  Before they could move onward, however, they were held up behind barricades that were swiftly and efficiently erected, with all the steel professionalism of catastrophic expertise, as the sirens brayed and the medical and emergency and security personnel poured in and the area was thoroughly combed for additional bombs for which this first one might have been designed as a diversion. French Square was a particularly sensitive spot—the prime minister’s official residence was nearby, the Women in Black held their weekly vigil against the occupation in this place they had renamed Hagar Square, it was a crossroads where old sins rotted on gallows for all to see and contemplate. In the end, though, it had been a meticulously controlled blast, detonated, as it happened, by Israeli sappers when a lone suicide bomber, girdled in a vest studded with explosive charges with dangling wires visible under a sweatshirt, was observed running in agitated circles in the middle of the square, completely oblivious to the traffic swirling around from all sides and would not listen to reason that might have resulted in a lifesaving defusing. Now the bomber lay alone, the sole casualty, a pulped heap almost exactly in the center of the square as the religious squads arrived in their fluorescent orange vests and rubber gloves to clear away the mortal remains.

  That evening Al Jazeera released to YouTube the martyr’s traditional farewell video. In the history of suicide bombings, it had been a notable and shocking twist when women began to blow themselves up, including mothers of young children, risking the immodest exposure of a recognizable body part when they were ripped apart, damaged goods exalted by the promise of the restoration of their virginity in paradise.

  This time there was an even further variation on the theme. The martyr this time was a dog. According to the narrator of the video, the dog’s name was King George. King George was shown staring straight ahead into the camera with his lugubrious eyes against the background of a black, white, and green Palestinian flag with a Kalashnikov planted on either side, his long, mournful brown head framed by a black-and-white checked keffiyeh folded at the peak like Yasir Arafat’s in the symbolic shape of a full river-to-sea Palestine.

  “King George has chosen his fate willingly and with joy in his heart, with absolutely no tremor of fear and the words Allah hu akhbar on his lips,” the voiceover intoned. “Tomorrow King George will be a shahid. Tomorrow King George will no longer be treated like a dog. Tomorrow the gates of paradise will open up to him without a checkpoint and he will be welcomed inside as a holy martyr by seventy-two virgin bitches at his eternal disposal, but as our imams remind us, the pleasure will not be sensual—it will be spiritual.” The dog, people remarked in the comments below—there were millions of hits—looked exceptionally melancholy, and progressively even more depressed as the narration proceeded and came to its end.

  Afterward, a huge protest surged up from the animal rights delegation against the government of Israel for blowing him up instead of making a greater effort to entice him with a biscuit, while pundits seized on the material to deconstruct the symbolism and rich ambiguities of a dog martyr. Many people who had been on the scene recalled having seen this dog roaming the streets of downtown Jerusalem that morning, dressed in a canine sweatshirt with a hood inscribed with the logo for Yeshiva University of New York, a costume that, in retrospect, appeared exceptionally incongruous in the heat not to mention bulky on a creature who overall gave such a gaunt, neglected, unloved impression. Flo Peckowitz remembered having seen him too, and even if, looking back, she conceded that maybe she ought to have reported the beast as a suspicious object, at the time she had thought his getup was absolutely adorable, and though the dog seemed to be entirely alone with no owner anywhere in sight, Flo nevertheless had asked out loud where she could get a sweatshirt like that for her granddaughter’s puppy Fluffy, and a deep disembodied voice from somewhere in the distance was heard to intone, “The Source of Everything Is Jewish,” as if God Himself had answered her from the mountaintop.

  As government agents and military personnel exited the scene and fanned out into the alleyways to penetrate the populace with the mission of hunting down the late King George’s human handler, who had taken a pit stop with a Moldovan hooker on Pines Street and neglected in the end to trigger the charges from afar, four police officers astride their horses, on highly classified orders from the very top, were detailed to ride alongside Temima’s procession to keep guard over her to wherever her heart’s desire was guiding her.

  Still, it was especially treacherous maneuvering through the protesters camped out in front of the prime minister’s residence, to cut a path between the fors and the againsts on every issue, from territory to religion to reparations to imprisoned spies languishing in terminal stages of horniness, and so on and so forth, through the jungle of signs on poles brandished like paddles, through protesters in chains, in coffins, in cages, in concentration camp costumes, through women in green, women in black, women in white, women in blue and white, through tent cities and shiva-sitters and shofar-blowers and megaphone-screamers and forty-day-hunger-strikers stretched out in sleeping bags. For this purpose the head of state’s official quarters was placed on earth. Who made you lord over us? Korakh demanded, backed up by the collaborators Datan and Aviram, and two hundred and fifty bigshots called up to the tribe—who made you the boss, Moses?

  From within her aperion Temima took all of this in and shook her head. Enough with you already, sons of Levi! It was past noon, she was weary, it was time for her nap, but this was for her a day like no other, a day that was neither day nor night, she had to endure. Still she asked herself again now as had become her habit of late with the advancing years—lifting the curtain to peer out she posed the same question to herself yet again, Is this something I will miss when I am gathered back to my mothers?

  The procession continued along Azza Street and looped into Radak Street on instructions from Temima communicated by cell phone to the four bearers of her aperion, her Bnei Zeruya. This was the route that Temima had laid out in advance for her penultimate journey. She had always liked Radak Street from the days when she had walked the city to establish her exact place in the world after her flight from Abba Kadosh in the wilderness with only Kol-Isha-Erva at her side, just one faithful disciple accompanying her in those days to soak in her words—the canopy of its old trees, the privacy of its old stone houses, the dignity of its old dwellers, the narrowness of its old roadway that now, in her triumphant return passage, swelled with her people from seam to seam, heralded by the four horsemen of her apocalypse.

  She could have chosen a different route. There were other circuitous paths in the new city along which she could have led her people to arrive at her destination, and naturally she had also weighed the instructive value of taking them through the Old City, with all of its biblical visual aids, and beyond its walls to the City of David on the flank sloping down to the Kidron Valley and the pools of Silwan. She could have brought them through the ravine of Gehinnom, where our rebellious ancestors built shrines to their idols Baal and the Molekh, putting their own children to the fires as blood offerings—the Valley of the Slaughter, the prophet Jeremiah called it, hell on earth itself—then up to the plateau atop Mount Moriah where the Ho
ly Temple once stood destroyed for their sins as Jeremiah had foretold, where our righteous forefather Abraham brought his own son Isaac to sacrifice him, bound him to the altar and raised the knife to slit the boy’s throat at the Lord’s command—the closest spot on earth to heaven itself.

  To ascend the Mount, though, they would have been obliged to acknowledge the Western Wall, and this was a site that Temima on principle shunned, not because of the unfair and demeaning partition of space between the worshipping men and the women; under the aspect of the divine, how could that signify? No, she avoided this mosh pit because of the flabbergasting idolatry of praying to stones. Not for nothing does the text make a point of noting that no one to this day knows the exact place where Moses Our Teacher was buried (by God himself, as Rashi the commentator-in-chief notes—or, even better, Moses buried himself, as we all do), lest they turn it into a shrine and prostrate themselves before it. And then Temima, in her bed in the Bukharim Quarter that had become like a prison to her, had the dream that directed her how to go.

  It was a dream in threes, like the dreams of Pharaoh’s head baker and head cupbearer that troubled them one night in the dungeon of the king’s chief steward, the dreams that revealed to them who will live and who will die, interpreted with merciless prescience by their fellow inmate, that show-off, that suck-up, that crybaby, that pretty boy Joseph, possibly a closeted homosexual. In Temima’s dream there was a house with three impossible entrances—one was so low that only a flat cart could fit through, the second was even lower and much narrower to give access only to a small animal, the third was high up with no way to get to it—but there was no door to this house in the expected place of a size or shape that a normal human being could reach or pass through. In her dream Temima was either inside the house trying to get out, or outside attempting to get in—she herself did not know which. Though her form in her dream was that of a fetus, she knew with utter certainty it was she, she never questioned this at all in her dream or even experienced it as strange. Inside the womb of the fetus that Temima recognized as herself was another fetus that she knew was her mother, and within the womb of her mother fetus there nested yet a third fetus, an even more miniature Temima—like matryoshka dolls, homunculi, golems within golems. The skin of all three fetuses was transparent so that Temima could clearly see through them one inside the other. The tiniest fetus was struggling to get out of the mother fetus, who was laboring to get out of the biggest Temima fetus, who was attempting to get out of, or perhaps into, the house—but it was all in vain, they were helpless, as if stunned, paralyzed, again and again they were sucked back into the space they were struggling to escape from as into a vacuum or a black hole.