One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (27 page)

Are there truly some things left that have never happened in Israel? That is my question.

Paltiel departed from our “leper” colony that evening. Rizpa followed behind dragging one of his suitcases and a plaid vinyl
bag filled with his favorite dishes in plastic containers that she had prepared for him as he made his way to an exit on the David Marcus Street side where a taxi waited. About a week later a package was found at the door of Ima Temima's apartment in the northern garden. I raised my woman's naked voice to express my concern that it might be a suspicious object, cautioning against handling it lest it blow up in our faces, but our holy mother overrode my security concerns and commanded Aishet-Lot to open it at once. Inside was the mangled shriveled carcass of Abramovich, barely recognizable, poor thing, next to a blackened waxy human ear of indeterminate gender except that from its piercing a long gold earring hung that no one could have mistaken as belonging to anyone other than Cozbi—the same earring that had jangled so prettily in happier times when she had crossed the floor in her three-inch stilettos to open the door on Passover eve to welcome Elijah the Prophet and the prophetess Miriam-Azuva-Snow White to our Seder.

M
ENTION
of Elijah the Prophet moves me at this time under the aspect of the shattering life-cycle events, birth and death, that followed soon after the shocking revelations of the Cozbi case to legato in my thoughts to Rabbi Elijah, the formidable eighteenth-century Lithuanian Talmudic genius known as the Gaon of Vilna. Our own formidable Jerusalem Tanakh genius HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, would on occasion cite the Gaon of Vilna in definitively identifying who among our women could rightly be included in our priestly tribe, in the lineage of Aaron, the first high priest. Such positive ID became a matter of particular sensitivity in our post-modern age, when traces of Aaron's DNA could be found on the Y chromosome of men from Africa to India no matter how alien, automatically conferring upon them the honor of priestly status by virtue of patrilineal descent, the indisputable manifest destiny of genes.

We women, of course, do not possess a Y chromosome, I thank God for this every morning in my prayers—Blessed are You Lord our God King of the Universe Who has not made me a man. Amen. Ah women. In determining who among our
women could rightly be classified as a
kohenet,
therefore, our holy mother ruled according to Rabbi Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna. Surnames such as Cohen, Kahan, Katz, and so on and so forth, were all well and good and might or might not indicate that the individual so called descended from the priestly line. But, as the Vilna Gaon is reported to have decreed, if a person's name was Rappaport, that person was a certifiable priest, conferring upon her not only the extra burden to always be on the best exemplary behavior that is laid upon the back of a daughter of a priest (the harsher punishment of burning, for example, if she is caught in adultery), but also the right to partake of all the privileges and honors accorded to the men of that holy caste (eating the best cuts of meat of sacrificial animals, being called up first of the pack to the Torah).

The majority of our priestesses, maximum four in all remaining at our “leper” colony at that time, were certified to have descended from family trees with Rappaport signatures from either the maternal or paternal branch, including our beloved high priestess Aish-Zara, za'zal, née Essie Rappaport, and also including the nearly senior citizen priestess whose advanced stage of pregnancy I had noticed for the first time the day after we arrived here, when the dead goat came flying like a nostalgic image from a painting by Chagall over the stone wall of our “leper” shtetl. I admit now that I cannot (perhaps due to an extended senior moment of my own) recover the memory of her original given first name, and neither she nor to my deep regret Aish-Zara, za'zal, is with us any longer to enlighten me. In any case, it is sufficient for me to assert at this time that she was a guaranteed genuine Rappaport. As for her first name, when she was initiated into the sacred mysteries of the priesthood she took the name Tahara, with all its complex allusions to purity.

The priestess Tahara Rappaport's birthing travails began in our “leper” colony just a few days after the hideous body-parts parcel was delivered to our holy mother's door. Her water broke on the eve of the Ninth of Av as we began our fasting and lamentations over the destruction of our Holy Temples, two catastrophic blows dealt us by an astonishing coincidence around the same day of the same month half a millennium apart, proof positive
that they could only have been delivered by the hand (anthropomorphically speaking, in the language of human beings) of the Almighty Himself. Tahara's harrowing labor lasted through the night, and by early afternoon of the next day, the Ninth of Av—the day on which some say the messiah is slated to be born and coincidentally the purported birthday of the false messiah Shabbtai Tzvi—the child was delivered. As the first day of the newborn's mortal journey on this earth advanced and darkness descended, our beloved Aish-Zara, za'zal, drew her legs up onto her bed, biblically speaking, took her final breath, let out her final mortal gasp, her agonized death rattle, and was gathered back to her mothers.

On that Tisha B'Av eve, HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, delegated me to preside at our communal recitation of the Scroll of Lamentations composed by my colleague the prophet Jeremiah—Alas, how the city once teeming with people sits solitary, like a widow weeping, weeping through the night, no one to comfort her from among all who once loved her. The divinatory powers bestowed on a personage of such expanded consciousness in such close communion with the spiritual realm as Ima Temima rendered our holy mother's inspiring presence in our midst out of the question that night. Ascending to the heights, our holy mother saw with the certainty of pure inner vision that the precious soul of Aish-Zara, za'zal, would depart from her body within the next twenty-four hours, on the Ninth of Av itself, a day on which so many other calamities befell our people, this one only adding to the list. It was unthinkable—impermissible—for Ima Temima to leave the side of Aish-Zara, za'zal, at such a time, a matter of danger to the soul overriding all other sacred obligations. I accepted my mandate from our holy mother, therefore, and with humility took my place at the head of our mourners of the destruction of Jerusalem sitting on the floor of the great hall of our “leper” hospital in stocking feet, candles flickering in the dark sealed by their own pools of melting wax to the cool stones.

The reader intoned from the Scroll of Lamentations. In the siege of the Lord's wrath, starving women ate their newborn babies. Tenderhearted women with their own hands cooked
their children. (Thank God, at least they cooked them first, I thought to myself; our holy mother has instructed me not to delete this transgressive thought, which is valued as an expression of positive rebellion.) It was soon after we chanted that verse about these desperate acts resorted to by mothers who, as a crucial element of their job description, are merciful, that the first anguished scream of the laboring priestess Tahara Rappaport cut through the reading, jerking every head up from the texts in which they were following along by candlelight.

O
VER THE
next twenty-four hours of Tisha B'Av not only did I not eat, since fasting is required, but I also did not sleep as I shuttled back and forth between birth and death—the room in which Tahara was undergoing her ordeal, the most well appointed in the hospital, in all likelihood once reserved for the Moravian prioresses who held dominion over the “lepers,” only recently evacuated by Cozbi and Paltiel and then promptly claimed by our chief health care provider and circumcision engineer Zippi—and our holy mother's apartment in the northern garden where Aish-Zara, za'zal, was moving irretrievably toward the end.

By this point, Aish-Zara, za'zal, had been lifted up like a baby from her bed in the arms of my prophetess, Aishet-Lot, and set down in the bed of our holy mother. The two old friends now lay side by side under the covers, along with Ima Temima's little mother Torah. As sometimes happens in the final hours of this life, our precious Aish-Zara, za'zal, was blessed with unanticipated moments of alertness and lucidity, during one of which she blurted out that her priestess Tahara Rappaport had always reminded her a little of Mother Sarah-Yiska—a true cynic!—and now she was also, like Sarah-Yiska, about to become a superannuated alter-cocker old mother, a big joke, everyone who hears about it will have a good laugh, haha. At that, she and Ima Temima collapsed into a fit of giggles in each other's arms, like the old high school girlfriends they had once been. I was adjured to come to them as often as possible with bulletins from the birthing room. I must not hold back a single morsel. They did not want to miss a thing.

For the record, I must at this point register my complete disapproval of the birthing facility at our “leper” colony, which was in every respect substandard and unprofessional and, bottom line, especially in this case, irresponsible. Here was a woman by my generous estimate over fifty-five years of age minimum, a
Guinness Book of Records
contender, most likely menopausal and hormonally challenged giving birth for the first time so far as I knew—a primipara, heaven help us. There was no medical support system in place in the event of complications threatening to the life and holistic wellness of mother and / or baby. There was not a single certified obstetrics practitioner present, not even an unlicensed midwife with some experience to assist in the procedure with the curious exception of the centerpiece herself, Tahara Rappaport, who purportedly had medical training as a specialist in infectious diseases, ministering to the plague-and-contagion-ridden expendables of Africa until she gave up in despair or saw the light (often one and the same life-altering event), and returned to the faith to take up her new vocation as priestess. Given her present situation, of course, Tahara was in no position to attend to her own needs, and so the entire show was being run by Zippi armed only with her circumcision kit.

I also feel it is incumbent on me to note here, with no pretensions to self-congratulation and with the full sanction of our holy mother, that twice I raised my woman's naked voice to express my objections to the lack of quality care transpiring right in front of my very eyes; I could not allow myself to remain a silent bystander, I needed to speak truth to power. When I dared to raise my woman's naked voice in the first instance, I regret to say that Zippi did not hesitate to dis me in public in front of everyone present by calling me a dried-up old fossil from a prehistoric age, a bougie from a bourgeois town, and to tell me in no uncertain terms to mind my own bee's wax. This from the very same Zippi who was practically like a daughter to me when her mother and I were among the co-concubines of the late Abba Kadosh, a'h, in his patriarchal kingdom in the wilderness (a reality now so beyond visualization it seems like a dream).

In the second instance, our holy mother conceded that yes,
given the age of the laboring mother, conventional thinking might indeed lead to the conclusion that perhaps it would be more sensible if the so-called “patient” were transferred from our “leper” hospital to another type of hospital. But though there is hardly any description in the Tanakh of women actually giving birth, an activity that is in fact mostly attributed to men in the form of begats, there does exist an honorable mention of the Hebrew midwives Shifra and Puah, aka the mother and sister of Moses Our Teacher, who coped under the most adverse conditions during our enslavement in Egypt, the straits of Mizrayim and the parting of the sea evoking the narrow birth passage from confinement to release, our holy mother declared. We must therefore place our faith in God and in Zippi, both combustible personalities, both with self-esteem issues albeit of different sorts, both quick to anger. Ima Temima turned to Aish-Zara, za'zal, dying in that very bed, and inquired if she happened by any chance to know with regard to her priestess Tahara Rappaport now in her dotage in the throes of parturition who the father of this fetus might be. Aish-Zara, za'zal, the life seeping out of her, raised one skeletal hand and pointed a trembling finger upward in the direction of the heavens above as if to say, God alone knows.

“God the father,” our holy mother nodded, “the usual suspect—also responsible for the miracle birth of that other old lady, Sarah-Yiska.”

It was then that HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, never disappointing, entered into a discourse on the identity of the father of Isaac, offering one of the more radical, some might even say blasphemous, teachings I had ever heard emerging from those holy lips. Calling attention to the incriminating opening verses of Genesis twenty-one—And the Lord
pakad
Sarah as He said He would, and He did to Sarah what He said He would do, and Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to a son for Abraham—our holy mother remarked on the absence of any active participation by Abraham, no mention of Abraham “coming” to Sarah as the generator of Isaac, for example, as he “came” to Hagar for the birth of Ishmael. Our holy mother pushed even further, beaming the full power of the mystical lasers on the meaning of
the word
pakad
—translated traditionally as “remembered” or “noticed,” the word used to describe what it was exactly that the Lord did to Sarah-Yiska. “
PaKaD
,” Ima Temima enunciated precisely. “Scramble it up, replace the
P
with an
F
since they are after all the same letter in Hebrew distinguished only by one little dot to harden or soften them—and what do you get?
DaFaK,
knocked, knocked up—in contemporary usage,
be'laz
, fucked. God literally fucked Sarah-Yiska as He figuratively fucked Tahara Rappaport as He fucks over all of us since time immemorial.”