One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (10 page)

It is true that Ima Temima has on occasion commented that we tend to go overboard with candles to manipulate emotion, in Shoah commemorations for example; it is a form of idolatry, Ima Temima has taught, we must reject the intervention of votives, they are the arousal and aphrodisiacal toys of the goyim
in their dark caves and naves prostrating themselves in adoration of blood and the agony of sacrificed sons. But with respect to the candlelight at our Seder, Ima Temima was laid-back and mellow, calling it “an elegant touch.” To give credit where it is due, the candles were an expression of the good taste of our dearest Zippi to whom I, too, was like a mother when we all lived together as gatherers in the wilderness under the protection of our hunter-in-chief, the late Abba Kadosh, a'h, our dominant male figure.

I am enjoined to move on to the heart of the matter and achieve closure, but with the full knowledge of the Omnipresent, and with the full knowledge of Ima Temima, I have been given permission to digress yet again, for the sake of moral instruction, by relating one further incident that occurred early in our Seder. As we were lifting the cover off the matzah to expose our bread of affliction and raising our Seder plate like an offering in open invitation to all who are in need to come into our “leper” colony and eat, both Aish-Zara and I, almost simultaneously, noticed that our beloved Ima Temima was in considerable distress, twisting on the elevated pile of mattresses that was like a royal divan as if seeking a more comfortable position to ease a sharp pain. Naturally, I rose at once to the assistance of our holy mother—and thank God, our crisis management rapid-response intervention soon led to the discovery of a dried chickpea under the bottommost mattress of the thick pile of three upon which Ima Temima was reclining, which, the moment it was removed, brought instant relief. Ima Temima was our princess and that was the pea.

“
Kitniyot
alert!” someone yelled out, no doubt a stickler Ashkenazi member of our congregation for whom legumes are prohibited on the Passover with almost the same force as the five grains of leaven specified in the Torah. Immediately, Rizpa, our domestic management associate, came forward and stood trembling before Ima Temima, as if to take her rightful punishment like a well-drilled soldier for this dishonorable lapse in housekeeping. That is what we all assumed was the explanation for Rizpa's coming forward, until we discovered, to our astonishment, that she was confessing that it had been she who had
deliberately concealed that single little dried chickpea under the mound of mattresses reserved for our holy mother in order to give expression to her Sephardi heritage, in which legumes are permitted on Passover; it had been a private subversive act of identity politics on Rizpa's part, she had never expected it to be discovered, she had not counted on the ultrafine supernatural antennae, the sensitivity of a spirit such as Ima Temima. Now she was overcome with shame, begging forgiveness for causing even a moment's discomfort to our precious mother—that had never been her intention, God forbid.

“
Kitniyot, shmitniyot
!” Ima Temima said, flipping a hand to illustrate how trivial the concern was.

As if a spigot had been turned on full force, fat tears began pouring unchecked down Rizpa's leathery brown cheeks, surprisingly large and copious for such a tiny woman, as if her entire body were nothing but a sack filled with gallons of tears. “Even some of our rabbis have called the
kitniyot
ban a stupid law,” Ima Temima went on. “Those are their very words—quote-unquote, ‘stupid law.'” But Rizpa would not be comforted; by now she was letting out great racking sobs, her whole body shuddering.

“Come to me, my holy, holy Rizpa, come lie down beside me, mommy,” Ima Temima said, clearing a space on the mattress for the bereft little woman, who curled up like a lost kitten beside our beloved mother burying her face in the maternal warmth and wept and wept as Ima Temima stroked her head and murmured over and over until her spirit was restored, “You are so good, my holy, holy Rizpa, you have worked so hard, you have suffered so much, how you have suffered, we owe you so much, forgive us for not recognizing you, forgive us for taking the labor of another woman for granted, we should know better, forgive our ingratitude, mommy.”

Y
ES, 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!”