One Hundred Philistine Foreskins Read online

  YES, TRULY, thank you, Rizpa—and, thanks also to our heavenly mother and father, we lacked for nothing. Bottles of wine were placed conveniently within everyone’s reach, and we were directed by Ima Temima to drink down to the dregs each of our four cups. “It is a mitzvah,” Ima Temima said. “Do not for one second think you don’t deserve it, do not deny yourself.” And Ima Temima taught by example; Aish-Zara and I had the honor and privilege to be the royal cupbearers for the evening, charged with offering the wine to our queenly mother, lifting the lower part of the veil modestly, like a bride’s under the canopy, and tipping each of the four cups to the holy lips until they were drained.

  Also gracing our table were heaps of round shemura matzot, burnt to perfection at the edges, guarded every second, like the dead before burial, at every stage of their production process lest they be exposed to moisture and the danger of fermenting into hametz—strictly supervised from the harvesting of the wheat to the kneading and shaping by hand to the baking in the oven for no more than eighteen minutes, God forbid, to the sale of eight pieces for thirty dollars minimum in a cardboard box barely distinguishable in taste from the matzot themselves. Aish-Zara and I glanced at each other when we noticed one of those emptied boxes with its print in bold black letters. They were Bobover matzahs, produced by the Hasidim of Bobov. Aish-Zara, who had grown up in Boro Park, Brooklyn, very near to Ima Temima’s girlhood home, was the daughter of a Bobover Hasid, and even now with her illness in the incurable terminal stage she was still dealing with many painful unresolved issues concerning her childhood. For a moment I feared that a rush of recovered memories and the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder would seize our Aish-Zara, but, to my great relief, in the joyous spirit of the evening, she leaned toward me, she blessed me with her playful smile that exposed her dark gums with almost every tooth knocked out, and whispered, “At least they’re not Pupa matzahs. Pupa is much more constipating.” Aish-Zara’s ex-husband, the wife-beater and abuser, was a Pupa Hasid.

  In the center of our table there were two tall goblets of equal height, one filled with wine for Elijah the prophet and the other filled with water for Miriam the prophetess. Water was Miriam’s sign, she was an Aquarian—the water over which she stood watch when her baby brother Moses was hidden among the rushes to save him from Pharaoh’s death sentence against all newborn Hebrew boys, the water over which she led the women in song and dance with timbrels and drums when the Israelites crossed the Reed Sea on dry land with the Egyptian chariots in pursuit, the water of the well that, it is said, escorted them in her merit during the forty years of their wandering in the wilderness. There was also a magnificent Seder plate in the center of our table, fully loaded. In addition to the usual shank bone and the bitter herbs and the greens and the egg and the red paste of the haroset to commemorate the bricks our ancestors were forced to make during their enslavement in Egypt—in addition to all this familiar antipasti there was also a piece of gefilte fish (turd-shaped rather than sliced, unfortunately) to symbolize water. “For our Miriam mermaid,” Ima Temima taught, “to whom we dedicate our Seder on this our first Pesakh in the ‘leper’ colony of Jerusalem.”

  Let us now at long last give Miriam some credit, our holy mother declared. Moses, Aaron, and Miriam led us out of Egypt, the prophet Micah said—but Micah was only a minor prophet after all. Miriam—her name contains the word bitter—was on the cutting edge of independent women in that she never married, we were horrified to learn from Ima Temima; there is no explicit mention of her marriage in the plain, unmediated text, Ima Temima taught, an unacceptable omission from the point of view of the sages, and so it was ordained that the wife of Caleb son of Yefuneh, a woman known as Azuva—her name means the forsaken one—was none other than Miriam, broken into wife-hood and submission under an alias. “But for us,” Ima Temima taught, “her name will be neither Bitter nor Forsaken. For us her name will be Snow White—because Miriam-Azuva-Snow White was the noblest ‘leper’ of them all.”

  Gevalt, the teachings about Miriam-Azuva-Snow White that dripped from the holy tongue of Ima Temima in the course of our Seder that night, were like honey, they sweetened the innermost soul and touched upon the most private sorrows and disappointments of each one of us, leaving us breathless. By the time we opened the door to the prophetess Miriam and invited her to cross the threshold into our space along with her escort for the evening, the prophet Elijah, and sip from their cups, it was as if her bitterness and abandonment had been transformed into nectar and we had all become one with her, an exalted band of dancing holy “lepers.” For speaking ill of her brother Moses on the matter of his having taken for himself a “Cushite” woman (no offense intended against African Americans or other people of color, our holy mother was quoting straight from the text), who may or may not have been his wife Zippora the Midianite, Miriam was stricken with “leprosy.” She turned white as snow; it was all about skin color in the end—black and white. For the sin of evil gossip she became like the dead who emerges from her mother’s womb with half her flesh eaten away.

  “Leprosy” is legendary for its contagiousness, Ima Temima reminded us in the most stunning teaching of all—so from whom did Miriam-Azuva-Snow White catch it? The answer is—from her little brother, Moses. And from whom did Moses catch it? The answer to that one is, from the original carrier, God Himself—first, a mild case at the burning bush, then a virulent case that erupted on his face rendering it so alarmingly incandescent he was obliged to cover it with a veil before meeting his public after spending forty days and forty nights without food or drink on the mountaintop in close quarters with the leper-in-chief, the original carrier, who spoke to him mouth to mouth. Mouth to mouth, that will spread it for sure—and who but Moses has ever been so honored in this way? With Miriam the infection was also communicated, for good measure, directly by mouth, when her heavenly father spit in her face—that will also do the trick—leaving nothing but skin white as death, rashes and lesions, nodules and sores, and a Jewish nose hanging by a scab liable any minute to fall right off. Beware the plague of “leprosy,” the text cautions us. Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam on the journey when you left Egypt.

  As we reclined on our mattresses nodding our heads straining to absorb in its full relevance this teaching of Ima Temima, Cozbi threw the door wide open, perched her hands on her hips, and in a clear, strong voice for all to hear greeted our holy guests. “Welcome to leper colony, tovarishchi!”

  “Pour out Your wrath against the nations that never knew You, pursue them in fury and destroy them from under Your heavens,” a few of the more traditional members of our flock chanted to usher in Elijah the prophet, herald of the Messiah. In response, there was only a still, small voice as by the flickering lights of the floating wicks a black shadow seemed to flit into the room and vanish deep within the bowels of the hospital. But by far the greater number of our people rose up clapping and dancing in greeting and lifted their voices fully to welcome Miriam the prophetess with her song, “Sing to the Lord because He has triumphed so mightily, horse and rider He hurled into the sea,” as a white bird flew into the hall through the open door, setting off a panic in the welcoming committee and among many others in our congregation as well, who ducked down, covering their heads, shielding their eyes, swatting at the bird with their hands and napkins and assorted utensils as it whirled disoriented above them. “Rejoice,” Ima Temima said. “It is the spirit of Miriam-Azuva-Snow White. It is the live bird that the high priest sets free when the ‘leper’ is cured.”

  The bird was throwing itself against the walls in confusion and terror as it sought wildly for a way to escape back to the open air from this cell it now found itself trapped in, squirting out the green glop of its excrement and scattering the debris of its white feathers as it smashed into the stone walls again and again and then dropped onto the floor that was also our table, a forlorn little heap in a puddle of spilled wine. Cozbi’s lapdog Abramovich dove out of his mistress’s cleavage
in excitement, panting and leaping and circling comically, scampering with his tongue hanging out toward the deflated morsel now that it had crash landed—only to be frustrated by Rizpa, who swiftly gathered up the throbbing little parcel in both hands and carried it to Ima Temima, setting it down on the very spot on the reclining mattress where she too had sought comfort earlier that evening. Ima Temima stroked the bird exactly as Rizpa had been stroked, and from the depths cried out the prayer of Moses Our Teacher when his sister Miriam the prophetess, the original girl babysitter who had looked after her little brother so faithfully when he was only an infant in a basket drifting on the water, was stricken with “leprosy”: “El-na, refah-na la! I’m pleading with You God, heal her, I beg of You!” The bird raised its head to gaze at Ima Temima with defeated eyes, then lowered it again, tucking it into its own breast, and surrendered. With arms lifted and furious emotion, our holy mother called out to the heavens above to awaken the quality of mercy for all of us lowly and rejected and shunned and despised “lepers” of this earth, echoing with fierce conviction the words of the holy society upon completing the ritual preparation of the dead for burial: “She is pure! She is pure! She is pure!”

  IT WAS close to three in the morning when our Seder came to an end, but, because of the injunction that the more one tells the story of our liberation the more praiseworthy it is, Aish-Zara and I, despite our profound exhaustion, were honored beyond what we might ever have thought we were worthy of to be invited to Ima Temima’s apartment in the secluded garden on the northern side of the “leper” colony to continue the discussion until daybreak, like the five sages in Bnei B’rak who reclined around the Seder table so engrossed in recounting the exodus from Egypt through the night that it required the barging in of their students to remind them the hour for morning prayers had arrived. Ima Temima requested that we bring along with us a few bottles of wine and some glasses to lubricate our conviviality, as wine gladdens the hearts of all people, women not excluded, and, in any case, Ima Temima said, the directive to stop all eating or drinking by midnight or after partaking of the last bit of afikomen matzah, whichever came first, applies only when children are present at the Seder—and there are no children in this perilous place to which we have come.

  Ima Temima was propped up against the cushions in bed in a pale nightdress and a shawl but without a veil, having already been readied for sleep by Cozbi and Rizpa, our holy mother’s two treasured personal attendants. The room was dimly lit with only a few candles, and a second chair had been brought in for Aish-Zara. Immediately we filled our glasses almost to the brim and toasted each other with the blessings of life. As we sat there sipping our wine, in complete love and trust, with Ima Temima breaking the silence now and then to impart yet another holy teaching, I was awestruck once again to find myself on this night that was so different still in the innermost inner circle with such heavyweights the likes of Ima Temima and Aish-Zara, my rebbes and my teachers. It is very much my wish not to speak of my own journey in these pages or to reveal through these words any personal information about myself in all my insignificance that might lead to the stealing of my identity—but for a girl like me, Sherry Silver from Park Avenue, Manhattan, New York City, a dropout from Juilliard, by avocation a seeker, by training a harpist morphed into a thereminist, which so attuned me to sound waves and vibrations, good and bad, seamlessly glissandoing me to my present career as executive director of the school for prophetesses—for such an undistinguished resume to be included at the core of our revolutionary enterprise with two Boro Park girls at the level of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, and the high priestess Aish-Zara, the former Tema Bavli and Essie Rappaport, respectively, from Brooklyn, New York, was more than I would ever have dreamed. I thank God every day for bestowing this gift upon me.

  And most wondrous of all, something I learned for the first time during those early morning hours as we sat in the private quarters of our holy mother after our Seder, Ima Temima and Aish-Zara, despite having grown up within a block of one another, first met only in their junior year of high school and in an entirely different Brooklyn neighborhood—at the Williamsburg branch of Beis Ziburis (the very same girls’ school, by an amazing coincidence, that had its Jerusalem branch across the road from Ima Temima’s former headquarters in the Bukharim neighborhood, from which our holy mother had liberated Rizpa from slavery), though before the year was over, at the age of sixteen, Aish-Zara (known as Essie Rappaport at the time) was pulled out of school by her father and married off to the Pupa Hasid from Mea Shearim, Jerusalem. It was not until many years afterward that Ima Temima and Aish-Zara met again—after the first shock and insult of sexual intercourse which, despite years of reruns, never fully ceased to stun her (Aish-Zara has released me to use her experience for the sake of providing consolation and hope to other women similarly dumbfounded) with a husband who would not have recognized her face if he passed her in the street, after thirteen children, numerous beatings, the loss of her breasts, her womb, her teeth, her hair, the lobe of one ear sliced in two when an earring was ripped out and half the other ear bitten off, the burn marks of cigarettes that had been stubbed out all over her body, after mortal illness and bone weariness and chronic pain to the point of utter exhaustion and indifference as she was being beaten practically unconscious by a squad of men in black returning from prayer when she refused to move to the so-called women’s section in the rear of the Number One municipal bus on its way back from the Western Wall (yes, Aish-Zara is our very own Rosa Parks)—only after becoming a survivor of all this persecution and suffering had Aish-Zara ventured one day into the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter that had always been right there for her in the neighborhood. With both hands, Ima Temima had beckoned to her on that day to approach through the crowd pressing in to soak up the words.

  “Welcome, Essie,” Ima Temima had said. “I’ve seen you many times on the street. I’ve been expecting you. I’ve been waiting for the day when you would come to me of your own accord.”

  It was not long after that reunion that our holy mother had informed her that she would no longer be known as Essie Rappaport. From that day forth she would be called Aish-Zara, the anointed high priestess, rendering by this decree null and void the physical blemishes that would have disqualified her for this office had she been a man, which, according to conventional thinking, were as nothing in the face of the overriding blemish of her femaleness, of her original disfigurement as a nekaiva, derived from the Hebrew root for opening or hole—like all of us, a walking sexual organ under wraps. But aren’t men also intrinsically blemished, Ima Temima asked, mutilated eight days after birth by the covenant, not to mention the deep hole a man is born with that could never be filled from which a rib had been gouged out, fashioned into woman, the gaping void where his lost feminine had resided when he was whole and complete?

  Ima Temima set the wineglass down on the nightstand and called to us to come sit on the bed. But because of the lateness of the hour and all the wine we had consumed, neither Aish-Zara nor I could at first absorb the fact that such an exclusive, extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime invitation was being extended to us even as our holy teacher continued to insist, patting the mattress emphatically to make it all the more clear that we must approach, and drawing back the quilts to communicate that we must also all share the warmth and comfort under the covers. At last Aish-Zara and I got the message. We set down our glasses on the table, slipped off our shoes, and, reeling from the wine and the unanticipated honor, I took Aish-Zara’s arm to assist her and we obeyed the call. Before we could take in the meaning of it all, there we were, the four of us, including Ima Temima’s little mother Torah, under the covers. It reminded me of the pajama parties, the girls’ sleepovers from my childhood, and despite myself I began to giggle as we used to giggle then from fantasies of monsters that seemed so real and the realities of sex that seemed so unbelievable.

  The giggling, as always, was contagious and quickly spread among us so that I fo
r one, already sloshing with all the wine I had taken in and despite being at least a generation younger than my present bedmates, experienced some anxiety about my own personal bladder control as bursts of laughter crested in great waves and then subsided, leaving us gasping and panting. As soon as we had made ourselves as comfortable in the bed as it was possible to be alongside such a luminary of nearly divine proportions—it was as close as we would ever get to “mouth to mouth”—Ima Temima announced that we would be engaging in an experiment. We would test the dictum of the sages that mozi-shem-rah turns you into a mezorah by speaking ill of people, gossiping through the remainder of the night and then checking in the morning light to see if our skin had erupted in “leprosy,” in pustules and sores and turned white as snow and we had become symptomatic (since of course, as Ima Temima had taught, we women were, by definition, already “lepers” in various stages of the disease, from carriers to latency, from virulent to terminal). “You mean you’re actually giving us a heter to talk loshon hara—special permission just for us?” Aish-Zara asked in astonishment—and Ima Temima confirmed that indeed yes, we were being given a dispensation to indulge the evil tongue to our heart’s content. “Uh-oh—L.H.M.F.G,” Aish-Zara sang out in a girlish voice, “Loshon Hara Makes Fire in Gehenna—remember that from Beis Ziburis?” And Ima Temima together with Aish-Zara collapsed in laughter, like sorority sisters reminiscing at a reunion, and even I, who did not attend Beis Ziburis (I went to Brearley, but that is of no account), was drawn in simply by the infectiousness of the mirth.

  At first it was difficult to descend to the level of gossip in the presence of a righteous icon of such world renown, but Ima Temima nevertheless urged us on for the sake of the experiment, helping us to get started by inquiring if we had noticed any couplings at the Seder, given the intimate romantic atmosphere created by the glimmering candles in the darkened hall, the internal temperature-heating properties of the wine, the bodies laid out in a reclining state especially on the polluted mattresses, which might have had the added effect of relaxing the risk-averse with the sense that all was lost anyway like at the outbreak of a decimating war, and, truth to tell, also the awareness of everyone present that Ima Temima’s external vision was limited especially in the dark due to the ravages of senior citizenship (in contrast, I hasten to add, to our blessed teacher’s internal vision, which remains unrivaled among mortals), and therefore our holy mother might not be in a position to see what they were up to. Yes, there had been a lot of that kind of activity going on, we acknowledged—mostly women with women either by sexual preference or due to the dearth of men, but every man present, regardless of how unblessed, had someone, either female or male, and each of the Bnei Zeruya was spoken for—one with my prophetess, EliEli, I recounted, the girl who got so turned on during the Dayenu she nearly set her hair on fire and immolated herself, another with someone I didn’t recognize, and the other two with each other, which is really a big waste, I said, because they are such hunks.