One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (18 page)

When her little mother Torah was completed, from the first word,
Bereishit
, to the last word,
Yisrael
, over three hundred thousand letters, each one inscribed painstakingly with a turkey feather quill and specially prepared ink on parchment made from the skin of an unborn calf, one-hundred-percent kosher in every respect except that it had been created by a rogue scribe who was a woman, hopelessly impure no matter how many times she immersed herself in the ritual bath, she did not renege on her agreement. She was a good sport. She lay down on her back and paid up.

Afterward Howie rolled off her, and though entirely spent and panting, managed to inquire, “How come I don't see no blood?” By way of an explanation, she told him a story about how every day in the springtime when she was a little girl, with her neighbor's dog Germy locked in his holding cell observing her, lunging at her from the end of his chain and barking madly, she used to climb the trellises bolted to the sides of her family's garage at the end of the driveway, even in the skirts she was required to wear. She would climb those trellises every day in the spring in order to gather bouquets of roses to bring to her mother and extract a ghost of a smile. And every day when she came down from the trellises her flesh was torn by the thorns and splinters, and blood streamed down her face and arms and legs. That was how she had lost it, she told Howie, that was why there was no blood left.

Now, on this Passover eve, April 1968, standing on the terrace of the apartment her father had bought for them on Ben-Yefuneh Street in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem, watching Howie set off in his Peugeot heading into the Judean Hills past the tomb of Rachel Our Mother who had died in childbirth on the road to Efrat, driving onward to join his band of hotheads and reclaim the ancient city of Hebron, she pressed both hands against the massive heaving mound of her womb as she was seized by the insistent force of her first contraction. She recognized that a process had begun that would have to come to completion one way or another. The course had been set. No power on earth could stop it.

Supporting her belly from underneath, she waddled back inside to the small study attached to her bedroom, and sat down with her legs apart on the edge of a straight-backed chair by the window to consider how to proceed. What her father had bought for them was actually two apartments, which they had combined into one by knocking out the dividing wall. Howie had his own bedroom on the other side in what had once been the
second apartment, though they kept a proper master suite with the two beds pushed together in a room that the former owners had dedicated as a memorial shrine to their son, killed in the 1956 Suez War. This official conjugal chamber was set up for the sake of public image, to forestall the gossips, and for the same reason she visited the ritual bath every month in compliance with the laws of family purity required of a married woman still in her childbearing years so that the ladies could comment to each other in the market the next morning that they had noticed Mrs. Stern coming home from the mikva last night, may the barren soon rejoice with her sons gathered around her, amen.

Her father would have preferred to buy in the Rekhavia section, which he regarded as more dignified and established, its streets named for distinguished commentators and sages. But Tema had insisted on Baka, with its streets called directly by the names of biblical characters, plain and simple, a few women's names too. And even though Ben-Yefuneh was not in the section of Baka mysterious with lush gardens and old abandoned Arab stone houses, there was for her a measure of ironic justification in settling on a street named for Caleb son of Yefuneh, whose first name in Hebrew, Kalev, written without vowels, consisted of the same three letters as the word for dog,
kelev
. Her life had come full circle; once again, she found herself on the street of the dog. Reb Berel Bavli let his daughter have her way with regard to choice of location despite the fact on the ground that he was the one writing the checks because bottom line he was investing not in real estate but in progeny. Whenever he was in touch with her, usually by telephone which, whether the connection was clear or not, required shouting due to the accepted etiquette for long distance, he never failed to boom out across an ocean and a continent, “So-nu? Something cooking in the pot already? What—I didn't pay for enough rooms for you maybe?”

Now, sitting in the study of her Baka apartment looking out to Ben-Yefuneh Street as the labor pains surged up in shorter intervals and with greater intensity, she reflected on her situation. She was a woman past thirty with a history of five miscarriages all in the first trimester of her previous pregnancies about to give birth to the only baby she had ever carried to term. The sensible course to follow would be to call a taxi at once to convey her to the nearest hospital. Nevertheless, she remained in her place, unable to take action.

To complicate matters, it was the eve of Passover. Almost every Jew in the city was occupied with the frenetic last-minute preparations for the festival. There was no Jew who did not have a Seder to attend. She too had houses that would open their doors to her as another needy soul and welcome her to their table now that her cowboy husband had headed to the hills to resettle the Holy Land with a critically urgent mandate that could not be put off for another minute; his priorities were fixed even with a wife on the perilous cusp of giving birth to his only child. She was aware with grim resignation that already on this day the hospitals must be severely understaffed, and, the longer she waited, the fewer would be the professionals on duty to attend to her. She would end up being delivered by the Arab janitor on the stone floor of the hospital lobby beside a slop pail and a squeegee. How had it happened that she had lived and sustained herself and arrived at this season with no one to turn to? How had it come to pass that she was so utterly alone?

The pains were growing more regular but were still tolerable—and so her thoughts drifted to the preposterous idea of approaching her renowned Jerusalem teacher of Tanakh, Nekhama Leibowitz, in whose classes she shone and whose
gilyonot
handouts with questions on the Torah portion she wrestled with weekly, coming up with answers so startling and original that they shook even the pedagogic rigorousness of her legendary teacher, at times thrillingly, at other times with horror over the basic assumptions that had been tossed out and the boundaries that had been crossed.

She could picture Nekhama in her tiny apartment at this very moment, with her blind husband settled in his familiar corner, her plain little woolen beret perched at an angle on her head covering her hair, signifying her status as a married woman. Despite the prominence she had carved out for herself as a celebrated teacher of Tanakh to both men and women, territory that had until then been almost exclusively the domain of men, the skin of her hands would still be rubbed raw in the soapy basin, her fingers bloodied from peeling the potatoes, she would scrupulously carry out the menial chores traditionally assigned to women in preparing for the holiday—this was the model she set forth for other women, stepping on the line firmly and publicly, but not, God forbid, overstepping or blurring it.

There was no doubt in her mind that Nekhama in her lovingkindness
would make an effort to help her, even with the strict Pesakh deadline looming, from the immutable Written Law itself that could not on any account be put off. But was it truly possible to seek her out now, at such an hour and for such a reason, as Mother Rebekah had gone to seek out and inquire of God when her pregnancy was killing her, crying, Why me? Why me?—a simple human question. Nekhama would ponder the question in her usual circular way, answering with yet another question from the point of view of the commentators: What is so hard here for Rashi? What is troubling Rashbam? What is bothering Ramban? What is Hazal's problem? And Tema would cry, My teacher, that is not the correct question. The correct question is right in front of your eyes, What is so hard here for Mother Rebekah? What is troubling Tema?

Just picturing this scenario exhausted her, and she made her way heavily into the adjacent room to lie down on her bed. She might have turned to Elisha Pardes, her other teacher, but she knew he was not in Israel at this time because, had he been there, he would surely have summoned her at once to his side. As the Toiter successor he was no doubt at this moment in the Fifth Avenue penthouse preparing for the Passover, with his wife and daughters and his disciples already in mourning over him. The veil had already been lowered over the face of the previous Toiter, and the mittens drawn up on his hands after the still glowing roach of his joint had been prized loose from his fingers. He had been gathered back to his fathers. The first time Elisha came to Israel as the new Toiter, not long after Tema's own arrival, he dispatched a disciple down to Jerusalem to bring her up to him in Haifa. As the car drew up to his villa on the top of Mount Carmel, she saw him walking toward her from among the pine trees, where he had gone for a session of
hitbodedut
, to pour out his heart to God in seclusion like a child pleading with his father. His hair and beard had turned shimmering white, he resembled Elijah the prophet coming like a vision out of the Carmel. He had aged devastatingly in so short a time, he looked like a man of seventy years.

Tema turned to her escort and asked, as Mother Rebekah had asked of the servant Eliezer of Damascus who was delivering her to be the wife of his master Abraham's son, Isaac, Who is that coming toward us from the woods? The answer came, That is my master, the Toiter.

Like Mother Rebekah who had fallen from her camel in a kind of swoon when she first laid eyes on Isaac and had drawn her veil over
her face, Tema's knees grew weak as she stepped out of the car, and she buckled onto the concrete, covering her face with both her hands in mortification.

Elisha the Toiter Rav lifed her by the hands and led her into the villa, to a private room stark white overlooking the sea, with a bunch of red poppies in a crystal vase in the center of the table, and he closed the door. He fell on her neck and kissed her, and raised his voice and wept as Father Jacob had wept with recognition when he first set eyes on Rachel Our Mother, she was so lovely in face and form. She was his sister / his bride, he said to her, she was the Toiter's shadow, his mirror image, his locked garden, his sealed fountain. Her name would no longer be Tema, he said to her, she would be called Temima—because she was blameless and without blemish, perfection, she was the pure
Ima
, the holy Mother. He placed his left hand under her head and with his right hand he caressed her. Love is as fierce as death, he said to her—and so they knew one another, and, finally, after all the years of grieving, reborn as Temima, she was comforted for the loss of her mother.

Thereafter, whenever he came to Israel, several times a year, a car would be sent to bring Temima so that she could study at his feet for the duration of his stay, sometimes for as long as a week—an extraordinary privilege and an honor to be singled out in this way by one of the giants of the generation, as she explained to her husband, Howie Stern. In the first years he would arrive by ship to the port of Haifa and never venture out of the Galilee, going as far as Safed or Tiberias but no farther, because, as he told her, more of the Holy Land would be just too much for him, he could absorb it only in small doses. It was like reading the Torah, he elaborated. Often he was obliged to stop at the first words of the third verse—“And God said”—he could not go on, it was too overwhelming; think about it—God said, He spoke, it was more than enough to take in. “But what He said is, ‘Let there be light,'” Temima responded with a laugh, and playfully she switched on the light to reveal their naked bodies, his already sickly and wasted, and she added, “I just wanted you to see for yourself that it's Rachel this time, and not poor Leah with her bloodshot eyes from too much weeping.”

Later on, when he began to arrive by plane, he would go no farther than Jaffa, where she would stay with him in a specially prepared suite of rooms overlooking the harbor from which the prophet Jonah set sail
to Nineveh. His depleted body was already bruised and diseased as if it had been thrashed around in a storm, swallowed up in a darkness like the grave and then exposed to too much sunlight, and like Jonah he would beg to die, and like Job covered with scabies he would declare, Perish the day I was born and the night in which it was announced that a male child had been conceived. Nevertheless, after each of her miscarriages—five in all, all surely sons, since the Toiter can never produce a male successor of his own blood who could survive—he stroked her hair and comforted her with the words of the holy Rav Nakhman, There is no despair here in the world at all, and he set before her a meal of olives and bread and wine and figs, urging her to eat. “Why should we fast?” he would say to her as King David had said after the death of his baby son by Bathsheba, the woman he had stolen from another man. “Can we bring him back again? We are going to him, but he will never come back to us.”

She must have dozed off, because now she started into alertness from a clenching pain and found herself soaked, lying in a wet pool. Her water had broken, liquid was gushing out from between her thighs beyond her control, but the answer had been revealed to her through her ruminations in the realm between here and there. She needed to go find Ketura. It had been Ketura who had taken care of her after each of her five miscarriages, tending to her with blessed devotion and discretion, offering the excuses to Howie that the mistress is indisposed due to female problems—that was sufficient. It was amazing how easily a man could be deceived simply because he did not pay the correct sort of attention, it was a side benefit of not being taken seriously that a woman could count on.