One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (47 page)

Over the weeks and months that followed, Kaddish and his cadre watched and waited for the powerful spell to take effect. They had full faith that it would succeed, and though they could not predict in what form exactly it would show itself, they knew that the disaster that would soon overtake Temima would be the result of the
pulsa denura
they had planted like a mine.

Reports were delivered to them regularly of the activity at the Temima Shul, the streams of supplicants and petitioners coming and going, men and women, including rabbinical authorities arriving incognito seeking and then taking full credit for responsa to newly urgent questions such as those relating to technology with its God-defying hubris and power for good and evil, like the copper and iron invented by Tubal-Cain and the overreaching of the Tower of Babel. Jews and non-Jews made their way through the upstart Ba'alatOv's quarters, according to the reports of
those who had been sent to spy out the land, among them Arabs emerging as if drugged, cradling precious blessings, hailing miraculous cures, extolling life-altering insights, the meaning of dreams, of past events, of future possibilities, and also students and seekers notable for the hordes of women who packed the sanctuary to hear the words of Torah from the mouth of this so-called holy woman delivered from behind a curtain on the elevated platform of the
bima
or at the great
tisch
over which she presided veiled at Sabbath eve dinners on Friday nights tearing one hallah after another and distributing the pieces to her Hasidim clamoring for a blessed morsel touched by her sacred gloved hands.

There were also many eyewitness accounts of sightings, Temima moving freely through the streets, always veiled, always accompanied by her sidekick, Kol-Isha-Erva, guarded by her Bnei Zeruya phalanx, trailed by assorted acolytes, a sorry band of lost souls and misfits, from Kaddish's aspect. Word reached him of how on one such outing she had removed her gloves and placed her two hands nakedly upon the head of the penitent beggar Yisrael Gamzu, and blessed him ostentatiously as he held out his cup at his usual post on Malkhei Israel Street in front of the pizza store, the upper half of his drastically mutilated body, all that remained of him after his tank exploded in the Sinai during the Yom Kippur War, potted like a surreal rootless growth in his wagon. Immediately Kaddish arranged for posters to be slapped up all over the neighborhood denouncing this brazen woman for her lewd immodesty in touching a man, even one missing all of his lower-level equipment, her shameless flaunting of physical contact between the sexes in a public place.

It was also communicated to Kaddish, despite some trepidation among his Hasidim, that Temima on one of her forays through the streets of Geula and Mea Shearim had encountered his father, the Oscwiecim Rebbe, as he was being taken out in his wheelchair for an airing by Ishmael their Arab houseboy, and of how the old man had greeted her by her childhood name—Tema—grasped both of her hands in his aged liver-mottled claws and in a quavering voice had declared to her that he had been waiting to meet her, he had been prevented from dying until he had the chance to see her once again face-to-face and beg forgiveness from her for ever thinking she was possessed by a dybbuk and forcing her to suffer the humiliation of an exorcism, now by the refracted light of the next life he recognized all she had endured in her childhood, he prayed
she would accept his apologies since only the injured party could forgive a sin between one human being and another, even God could not wipe him clean, he hoped she would grant him full and sincere pardon for the sins he had committed against her so that he could die in peace at last and be allotted a place in Gan Eden when he stood before the heavenly throne to be judged, she was a holy soul put upon this earth for an extraordinary destiny, he recognized that now and bowed his head.

Kaddish dismissed this story entirely. It was not possible to believe some Muslim menial's report that his father with a brain sucked dry like a prune could experience even a moment's lucidity, insofar as such an encounter even if it actually took place could be cited as an example of lucidity. Within the week, however, the old man expired, as if in confirmation of the report that he had been holding out only for the opportunity to be absolved by Temima before throwing off the burdens of this life.

Following all the mourning rituals and a decent interval of thirty days, Kaddish immersed himself in the mikva to purify himself from the taint of death, after which he was declared the new Oscwiecim Rebbe—at the very hour by the clock, as it happened, that his brother Koppel was named the successor in Brooklyn in a private ceremony attended by the mayor and governor and senators of New York as well as other bigshots at which his mother served marble cake and prune compote on real china plates rimmed with gold and cherry heering in genuine cut-crystal goblets. But since Kaddish was in Israel his anointment came first by the world clock, a divine confirmation deeply gratifying, seven hours before his brother's elevation as the earth rotates on its axis seeking the light of the sun.

Yet all this was worth nothing to him so long as he could still see Temima sitting in her palatial house or parading through the streets receiving full honors like royalty. Why was the
pulsa denura
curse he had so painstakingly devised to target this demoness exclusively taking so long to work? Where was his personal God? The veils and cloaks that enshrouded her completely—he could only hope and pray that they were concealing boils oozing pus and inflamed open sores bubbling with worms, rotting white skin shriveling and flaking like scorched parchment off her crumbling bones. It was a comfort to picture the curse festering underneath all those rags, but only a small comfort. Kaddish needed more proof to find peace at last, he had to see with his own eyes.

Draped in black robes from head to toe with a black mesh pane across
his eyes like an Arab matriarch just returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, he entered the Temima Shul on a day a public lecture was announced. He endured the indignity of fighting for a spot in the main study hall in the herd of cows, squeezed in among menstruating females with mouths open like pitchers full of blood drinking in the words of their guru. Apparently, she was giving some kind of talk about Bruriah, the brilliant wife of the Mishna giant Rabbi Meir. Could it be that this witch had the hutzpah to compare herself to Bruriah, practically the only woman in rabbinic history whose moral authority and legal rulings are mentioned, even praised, even on occasion accepted in the pages of the Talmud? Kaddish was horrified. No comparison was possible,
lehavdil elef havdolos
, the two were separated from each other by one thousand separations. But in the end, Kaddish was reminded, Bruriah proved herself to be no less empty-headed than any other woman, despite her arrogant insistence to the contrary, surrendering to the seductions of one of Meir's students who was charged by his teacher, her own husband, with the task of bringing her down for the thrill of winning the argument about the fundamentally unserious and flighty nature of a woman's mind.

When a woman submits to temptation, Temima was offering her sick commentary to this story, it tells you something about her mind. When a man submits, it tells you something about his body.

Kaddish felt sullied by her sarcasm, he needed a bath. In his black shrouds, vile intimate fumes gusting from all the orifices of these females pressing against him, he could hardly breathe. At least Bruriah had the decency to strangle herself afterward, Kaddish reflected, more than could be said for this shameless female up there, she continues to cackle away with her woman's naked voice—about what? About Meir's guilt for destroying a prideful woman? I should be so lucky. Not with hexes and voodoo, Temima was saying, as some among us have been known to attempt to destroy a woman. We shall not name names here because our sages of blessed memory teach that whosoever embarrasses a fellow human being in public has no place in the world to come, it is like spilling blood—But you know who you are. She strained her neck and jutted her chin and swiveled her head as if to cast a hidden seeing eye like the beam of a searchlight over the crowd. How he would have loved to clamp that windpipe of hers with his two hands and squeeze, if only to get her to shut up once and for all. I know you, he heard her calling
out into the congregation. Your spells and black magic and hocus pocus and mumbo jumbo and evil eyes and pagan curses and lashes of fire, they are nothing less than idol worship, plain
avodah zara
. Commandment Number One—I Am the Lord your God. There is nothing else besides I Am. I Am, I Am, I Am.

Bruriah's husband, Rabbi Meir Master of the Miracle, is said to be buried standing up, not out of remorse for his sexual manipulation setting up his wife or his ruthless intellectual competitiveness and condescension, but rather like a sleeping horse positioned to be first out of the gate when the Messiah arrives to awaken him.

The morning after Temima's talk, the fourteenth of Iyar, the anniversary of Meir's death, a warm spring day, Temima with her entire inner circle and protectors left Jerusalem for the north in a caravan of taxis. She performed her
hitbodedut
at dusk on an isolated beach on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Lake Tiberias, not far from the tomb of Bruriah's husband, an albatross circling in the otherworldly refracted light of the sky over the silvery waters of the Kinneret as she cried out to God as to a mother and pondered the question whether it is preferable for a woman to be destroyed out of love or hate.

They climbed by foot westward to Safed where they stopped at the tomb of Hannah mother of seven sons willingly handed over and martyred in sanctification of The Name. From there they hiked through the springs and past the fruit trees and caves of Wadi Amud, ending up on the eighteenth of Iyar, the thirty-third day of the Omer counting from the liberation from the Egyptian bondage of Passover to the acceptance of God bondage forty-nine days later on Shavuot, at the tomb of the purported creator of the Zohar Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai in Meron. Here, along with throngs of other revelers marking the anniversary of Bar Yokhai's death, the happiest day of his life, they celebrated the
hillula
with torches and bonfires, singing and dancing and feasting among the women and bearing witness to the shearing of the heads of three-year-old boys by the men, and Temima discoursed on the subject of the journey from the cold rational cliff of Meir to the steamy mystical cave of Shimon paved along the way with the heads of children offered up as sacrifices.

When the taxis brought them home to Jerusalem a little less than a
week later and they entered the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter, they were struck immediately by the aura of discordance between the familiar arrangement of the sanctuary and study hall, all of its books and benches and tables in place and the eternal light still burning, clashing with the satin curtain draping the ark that they took in instantly out of the corners of their eyes hanging in ragged shreds, as if raked by the teeth and claws of wildcats roaming freely at the end of civilization. When they opened the ark they were sucked into the dark void where all the Torah scrolls had once stood; only Temima's little mother Torah remained, mantled in dust wedged in the blackness of the far corner, forgotten and rejected and branded as a plaything to be dandled by children. The floor of the ark was covered with human feces of various textbook sizes and configurations still steaming.

Even as they were examining the ruins and desecration, four giants entered the building dressed identically in one-piece convict suits in a fluorescent orange synthetic, white crocheted skullcaps drawn over their shaved heads to their eyebrows with two long ringlets flowing down on either side like loose ties that could be knotted in cold weather under their chins that sprouted new beards from a stippling of dark pores. They strode directly up to the ark glancing neither to the right or the left. After removing Temima's little mother Torah and handing it like an ember rescued from the flames to Kol-Isha-Erva, they girded and trussed the ark all around with belts and straps to hold it together and seal its doors shut. The largest among them then bent over as the others lashed it to his back like a wardrobe. They did not utter a single word as they performed these tasks methodically, step-by-step, chanting instead the aphorisms of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, Gevalt, Never give up hope, Because there is no despair here in the world!—raising their voices to a soaring anthem as they made their way out of the sanctuary into the street, hauling the ark and its contents away with them.

“I had to wait for you to return so that you could see with your own eyes—so that you would not simply conclude that the ark had been stolen along with everything inside it.” These were the first words he spoke to her when he came into her private chamber that night. She was lying in the cavern of her bed, her little mother Torah resting in the crook of her arm. His glow pierced the thickness of the curtain pulled closed all around. He parted it and lay down beside her, transparent to the bone,
no longer of material weight, a shaft of light no longer connected to his physical being. “I have heard from behind the veil it said of me as it was said of the apostate Akher, Elisha ben Avuya, Return all of My backsliding children except for Akher,” he whispered in a hoarse voice. “My repentance alone will not be accepted.” From these words Temima understood that this was the last time he would come to her, she would never again see him in this life.

“The greater the thirst, the stronger the pleasure when it is satisfied,” he went on, his lips grazing her ear. “The stronger the desire the greater the obstacles. Within the obstacles, God Himself can be found. Your destiny is a tight bud that has yet to open fully and reveal itself. Not the good wife-mother Sarah-Rebekah-Rachel-Leah to bless girls by. Not the Wise Woman of Tekoa or of Abel-Bet-Ma'akhah saving men from their animal nature. Not even Deborah wife of Lapidot setting up shop on her own under the palm tree, judge and prophet, warrior and poet. Yours will not be any familiar female emanation. What will still happen to me I do not yet know, but of this I am certain—the Messiah will come from me through you.” And he brought his lips down upon her open mouth and kissed her, transmitting to her whatever infection remained in him that he had not yet passed on.