One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (24 page)

Temima's recent encounter with Rachel Our Mother by the roadside inspired her to devote these sessions to an exploration of the narrow range of authorized feminine categories a woman can inhabit regardless of who she was as an individual. Borrowing from the methods of her revered teacher, Morah Nekhama Leibowitz, she unfolded the discussions through questions, but rather than questions that perplexed commentators or sages she dwelt on the simple human questions, her own and her students', evoked by the plain text, with no mandate to manipulate the answer to arrive at an acceptable foreordained conclusion within the constraints of the orthodoxy. Who was Rachel Our Mother as a woman? Temima asked. There's evidence in the text that she was the beloved of her husband, Jacob, though he spoke cruelly to her when she lamented her barrenness and effectively cursed her with an early death when she stole her father's little idols. But did she love him in return, was she even attracted to him as he so dramatically was to her, or, in the overall scheme of things, are her feelings irrelevant and beside the point? And who was Rachel Our Mother as a mother—childless for so long that she turned to her husband and cried, “Give me sons or I'll die,” when what she really might more correctly have said was “Give me sons
and
I'll die?” How did it come about that a woman who died in childbirth, leaving behind the newborn, Benjamin, and his brother Joseph, a little boy with a lot
of big personality problems, a woman who in the end had engaged in very little actual mothering—how did it happen that she above all other women emerged as the symbol of the ideal mother whose abiding love for her children renders her inconsolable, the mother her children could rely upon to be in the same spot in perpetual grief for their suffering, the mother who always cares?

“Because the best mothers are those who let go of their children,” Yehudit Har-HaBayit answered, her twins now asleep in a double stroller parked outside the tent. Rising from her seat, she continued, “Look at Hagar with her son Ishmael when they were dying of thirst in the wilderness. Only when she lets go of Ishmael and casts him away from her under one of the bushes into God's hands is the boy saved—hallelujah!” She began to move toward Temima. “You have to learn to let go of your child. That's what makes you a good mother—like Rachel Our Mother, who let go by dying.” With everyone's eyes fixed upon her, Yehudit Har-HaBayit planted herself in front of Temima with both arms outstretched—waiting.

The heaviness of the silence bore down in the tent, replacing the air, until the moment that Temima acknowledged what was being asked of her by raising Kook Immanuel ceremoniously like an elevated offering and passing him over into Yehudit Har-HaBayit's hands open before her, palms upturned to receive the child. It was the first time during the nine months of this baby's life outside of Temima's womb not counting his circumcision that she had fully released him into the hands of another.

From across the room as he sat on this alien lap the baby Kook Immanuel would occasionally give out a doleful whimper, or lurch forward toward his mother with longing, but Temima could see from his clear eyes and calm breathing that he was safe and at ease, and after a while the eyes closed and he was sleeping tranquilly in the arms of the stranger. After that day, Temima began to set him down on a blanket in the center of the learning circle, and her eyes would follow him calmly as he crawled off to a corner of the tent before someone would go to scoop him up. When the days were warm, she would occasionally leave him outside in a nursery enclosure with other babies supervised by teenagers responsible and mature much beyond their years, the eldest sisters to dozens of siblings; and more and more frequently, when Temima went down to sit by Mother Leah's tomb in the Makhpela, she left him in the charge of another woman, usually Yehudit Har-HaBayit, who had illuminated
for her the faith of maternal letting go. As the sages commented, From all of my teachers I have learned, but from my students more than from all of them.

Now at last Temima was also able to resume her regular practice of
hitbodedut
with the luxury of true solitude, seeking an isolated spot on the hilltop overlooking Hebron among the olive trees a safe distance from the perimeter of the military compound even in the dark of night to beseech and converse with God—trusting Howie, before she set out, to watch over the baby, handing over the baby to him along with a bottle of warm milk freshly expressed from her breasts. Just such a bottle covered in blood she found in his stroller on the day her husband, Haim Ba'al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, with the child he called Pinkhas strapped in a carrier on his back, pushed Kook Immanuel in his stroller at the head of a demonstration along Al-Shuhada Street lined with Arab shops and businesses to reassert sovereignty over what had once been the heart of the Jewish quarter of the old city. Since the blood is the life of the flesh, when the body was prepared for burial the blood-stained bottle was slipped inside the tight swaddling of the blue-and-white Israeli flag with which the stroller at the head of the procession had been bedecked. It, too, was soaked with the blood that had streamed down from the wound when the stone struck the baby's forehead and sank in and he slumped over. The tiny corpse with all of its bloodied artifacts that had been transformed into body parts was then wrapped by his mother in the talit with its silver-and-gold-embroidered neckpiece and azure fringes, a small package to be shipped into the dark belly of
Sheol
.

Thousands of people from all over Israel and from outside the land as well poured into Hebron for the funeral of this innocent baby so savagely cut down. They marched in the procession as it snaked its way down from the army compound on the hilltop through the heart of the city and its teeming casbah into the ancient Jewish cemetery breached for the first time since 1929 when the sixty-seven corpses slaughtered in the pogrom of Tarpat were deposited in a mass grave. Brandishing placards on sticks emblazoned with the words K
OOK
H
AI
! and N
EKAMA
!, and blowups of the baby's face with his bright hopeful eyes and rosy cheeks, wave after wave of raging mourners surged forward. Israeli military
personnel heavily armed crouched behind sandbags or stood at alert with their weapons poised along the entire route as helicopters hovered overhead, helpless to halt the advance or to quell the calls for revenge with fists punching the air or to suppress the incendiary cries of the child's unvanquished spirit living on.

At the head of the procession, the bereaved father, Haim Ba'al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, was pushed in a wheelchair surrounded by masses of men in knitted yarmulkes with fringes hanging out of their untucked white shirttails. His head bound in a turban of white gauze and his arm in a sling from the wounds inflicted upon him by the stones with which he too was pelted, and from using his body as a shield to protect the child he called Pinkhas riding on his back, Howie cradled in the crook of his uninjured arm the tiny wrapped package of the dead baby, Kook Immanuel, rocking him back and forth and singing over and over the lullaby—“No, no, no, no, we won't go from here. All of our enemies, all those who hate us, all of them will go from here. Only we, only we, we won't move from here.”

Behind the throng of men came the multitude of keening women with the stately figure of Temima in front, a long shawl on her head draping over her shoulders and down her back that she clutched together with both hands at her throat, her dry eyes concealed by dark glasses, supported on either side by her students to whom at one point she turned and said, “There is no word in the English language for a parent who has lost a child, but we have one in Hebrew—
shakula
for a mother,
shakul
for a father—because we Jews have always needed such a word, the way Eskimos need words for ice.” And she coughed out a hard subversive laugh, like Mother Sarah.

Over the loudspeaker came the eulogies of the rabbis and leaders, their voices cracking, rising and falling in outrage and grief, breaking into shouts and sobs. The Lord gives, the Lord takes, may the name of the Lord be blessed. The little wrapped package containing Kook Immanuel with all of his bloody body parts was lowered into the freshly dug grave that awaited him, and the men dumped shovelful after shovelful of dirt on top of it until there rose an imposing mound. Howie was helped out of his wheelchair and supported on either side as he stood up in order to recite the mourner's Kaddish for his dead son—Exalted and sanctified is His Great Name. At the far edge of the cemetery Temima could see
the cadaverous figure of the Toiter clad in rent white garments with his arms raised to the heavens and his hands clenched into fists, the silent scream drowned out by the mourner's Kaddish emerging hoarsely from his own lips—He Who makes peace in His heights, May He make peace on us and on all Israel, And now say Amen—and she watched as his body crumpled and collapsed prone on the ground with the arms outstretched, prostrate with grief.

The father of the dead baby, Haim Ba'al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, was assisted back into his wheelchair, which was then pushed down the long aisle created by the two rows of men facing each other that had formed like a wake from the vessel of the mound over the gravesite that would ferry the child to the next world. As he made his way forward in his wheelchair down the aisle he received from each of the men on either side the ritual consolation—May the Presence comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

The baby's mother, who one day would be revered and beloved as the holy woman HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, Ima Temima, moved forward alone as if floating and entered between the two rows to collect her portion of the consolation. A voice called out, “Men only! Men only!” She heeded it at once, turning back and resuming her place among the women. “He's right,” Temima said. “We are all Mother Rachels. We cannot be comforted.”

The Teachings Of HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, Shlita

(May She Live On For Many Good Long Years)—

Recorded By Kol-Isha-Erva At The “Leper” Colony Of Jerusalem

I
N THE
awareness of the Presence and the awareness of the congregation, in the convocation of the heights and in the convocation below, and at the personal gentle admonishment of our holy mother, HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, I beg forgiveness for neglecting my duty to set down for us transgressors the teachings of Ima Temima, and for putting off my task of recording events of note that have transpired over these past months here in the “leper” colony of Jerusalem. Over the course of this difficult period of adjustment during which I have been so remiss in my responsibilities as scribe and collector of recovered memories, our numbers have diminished relentlessly. Through the grinding attrition of impoverished faith and weak commitment, our general population has declined to a census of fewer than one hundred, mostly women assessed at thirty silver shekels apiece between the ages of twenty and sixty, ready to bear arms for battle. Of the two senior women in our ranks above the age of
sixty, valued at ten silver shekels a head, our elders before whom we are enjoined to rise and whose aged faces we are bidden to glorify as the Torah commands us, Ima Temima alone remains, increasingly frail in body but still a towering presence in spirit and mind.

Now during the haze and stagnation of our sluggish Jerusalem summer days, Ima Temima continues to privately delve into the mysteries of the text within the cool stone walls of the secluded apartment, the sacred inner sanctum to which only the chosen few are given access, among whom I am honored far beyond what I deserve to include my unworthy self. Yet there are some warm, blessed evenings when the entire remnants of the congregation, the embers rescued from the blaze, are still privileged to soak in the teachings at the feet of our veiled holy mother presiding above us from the wheelchair pushed by our domestic management associate, Rizpa, into the dark northern garden outside the door of the private quarters and planted beside the fresh mound of the grave as yet unmarked with a headstone under the ancient oak tree of our other esteemed elder, our high priestess, Aish-Zara, za'zal, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing—a brutal loss. Ima Temima, for reasons too profound for us to grasp, has forbidden us to mourn, and so I along with all others of lesser understanding are still suspended in the first of the five stages of grief—denial and disbelief—unable to move on and get past it and achieve closure.

Aish-Zara, za'zal, was lowered into the ground with only a talit wound over her shrouds, without even a coffin, the wasted form, the tumors and craters of her punished body thinly mummified for all to behold. Yet despite our holy mother's ban against mourning, on one of those warm summer evenings, while sitting in the garden recounting for us the
midrash
about the sealed casket in which Mother Sarah, alive and breathing, was transported to conceal her radiant beauty by her husband, Abraham, across the border to Egypt when a famine devastated the land of Canaan, Ima Temima gazed down at the fresh mound of earth of the grave, still soft and fragrant, and cried out, “Essie, Essie, why did you leave me?”