One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (56 page)

It was through his endless ramblings, supplemented by my own sleuthing and Internet stalking, that I got full disclosure of his escapades as a blood avenger—not only how many Arab thumbs and big toes he had chopped off, or how many ugly buttocks he had exposed, or how many beards he had half-razored, or how many earlobes he had punctured, for all of which he had already served an abbreviated oddly triumphant jail term flashing his V for victory every time he was hauled out in front of the cameras smiling insanely, but also an exhaustive listing of his more-recent exploits, including shootings through car windows, bombs planted in mosques and discotheques and cafés, buses blown up, packages rigged with explosives, olive groves burned down, wells poisoned, and so on, targeting Muslim extremists and latent jihadists (which, in his world view, encompassed all Muslims), Christian proselytizers, Mormon baptizers of dead Jews, Jews for Jesus, Jewish left-wing intellectuals, homosexuals, Israeli historical revisionists, women rabbis and women wearing prayer shawls or raising their naked voices to cantillate from a Torah scroll at the Western Wall, Holocaust deniers, anti-Semitic European academics posing as anti-Zionists, Zionism-equals-Racism propagandists, international Israel bashers, neo-Nazis, self-hating Jews, women immodestly dressed, the list goes on. The growth curve in his choice of victims was staggering, rendering it exceedingly hard for the authorities to finally figure out that this broad-spectrum violence streak was coming from a single source. For by the time I had given him asylum in my room it was not only the blood avengers who were pursuing him, the law was also on his tail, he was right up there on the top-ten charts
of the most wanted. Still, it was not for me to be a
moseret
or a
rodefet
. For the informers let there be no hope. Excuse me, but I would not be the one to squeal or turn him in.

I suppose it is necessary for me to pause here to tap into my unconscious, drawing on my years of treatment with my amazing hearing-impaired Park Avenue mental health therapist, in order to try to analyze my motivations while in no way justifying or turning into an apologist for my transgressive behavior in sequestering an individual who was so clearly the antithesis of everything I had ever stood for during my entire life—a bigot, racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobe, yaddayadda, never mind an outright murderer, a first-degree criminal and felon, not to mention cruel to animals, which speaks volumes about a person. And not only did I take him in, literally and figuratively, at great personal risk, but in doing so I was also endangering our community and all we had journeyed so long and so hard to accomplish at such heavy spiritual and emotional and material cost. Most importantly, though, I was jeopardizing the reputation of our holy mother, our epicenter, our source, to whom I had devoted, and continue to devote, all of my energy and passion, my very life's breath, whose well-being and interests I place above my own without reservation in every way, for whom I would take a bullet anytime, for whom with no hesitation whatsoever I would throw myself away. HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, Ima Temima, our holy mother, was and remains the overriding and consuming passion of my life, I can never let go of it and I never will because were I to do so, there would be nothing left of me, I would be eviscerated, hollowed out, empty, I would cease to exist. How then can I explain the root cause of such inappropriate and unacceptable behavior on my part?

What I now recognize and acknowledge, specifically with regard to my relationship with Go'el-HaDam and how it impacted me, is that it was subconsciously my way of connecting with Ima Temima who, when he literally dropped into our “leper” colony that Yom Kippur, was more and more turning inward and withdrawing from us, avoiding association with almost all of the established inner core circle with the exception
of the nomad Kadosh-Kadosh. To put it simplistically and, I should add, superficially, when I hooked up with the admittedly somewhat unbalanced and unstable Go'el-HaDam, once again Temima and I were connected through a man as we had been through Abba Kadosh, a'h, in the Bnei HaElohim days in the Judean Desert. Go'el-HaDam was “into” me as once he had been “into” our holy mother. He was the link between us. We formed a triangle, a trinity, a ménage à trois so to speak. I don't want to push this idea any further than is necessary out of respect for our holy mother lest it be misinterpreted as irreverent, coarse, even obscene, though for my part I see it and intend it in purely spiritual terms, a mystical union beyond human understanding, like in the Song of Songs. Whatever my motivations in harboring Go'el-HaDam, they reflect not at all upon the lofty spirit and sacredness of Ima Temima, but rather on my own flawed nature and neediness.

And indeed, when all of this sordid affair involving Go'el-HaDam was winding down to its inevitable miserable smashup, spewing wreckage everywhere and nearly wiping us out, it was our holy mother who got it exactly right and explained me to myself. “The serpent beguiled you,” HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, taught, “and you ate.”

Our holy mother then offered a radical teaching based on the provocative similarity between the words
haya
, animal, beast, and the name given to the first woman
Hava
, mother of all living, the airborne tiny letter
yod
dragged down into the mud and tamed to a
vov
. “When God realized that it is not good for man to live alone, He passed every
haya
and bird of the sky before Adam to choose from and name. According to some sources Adam mated with the female of each kind to try her out, but from none of these did he get satisfaction and he did not find a fitting helpmeet, which obliged God to perform the first recorded surgery to come up with a new and improved model. This one Adam liked, she would serve, and he named her Hava. From Haya to Hava. What do we learn from this?” HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, posed the question. “That a woman is an animal—so she is perceived and so she is used.”

Our holy mother went on to elaborate, in more words spoken aloud than in several months prior, more words by far than we have since been worthy to hear to this day from the sacred source, that the
wilde haya
wild beast is Lilith, Adam's first wife some say referring back to the conflicting double narrative of the creation of woman—Lilith, the woman created at the same time as the man in the image of God like the man, who would therefore not accept a subservient role, rebelled against the missionary position, would not lie still underneath and just take it, but spread her wings and flew off to
yenne welt
, the land of imps and demons, of Asmodeus and Samael, witch and sorceress, disobedient, uncontrollable, a bird of prey, a raptor, a wild horned goddess, a tigress prowling and lusting and wreaking her havoc on lonely men and newborn babies in the night, not a suitable helpmeet. In contrast, Hava, fashioned through Dr. God's cosmetic-surgical intervention from a spare rib of the man created in the image, was a
behaima
, a domesticated animal, cattle, a cow to milk, a sheep to fleece, an ox to pull the cart, an ass to carry the load, a mare to ride upon, a fitting helper doomed to suffer endlessly, cursed with desire for the man who rules over her.

Whether I was the daughter of Lilith or of Hava, whether I was a Lilith
haya
who had been beaten down into a Hava
behaima
, HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, did not go on to specify, nor was it necessary, for both fell prey to the temptations of the flesh, leading to the loss of paradise, shame and death.

O
UR HOLY
mother's chastisement for my passive-aggressive behavior, admittedly so deserved, was delivered to me in the inner sanctum of the chambers in the northern garden to which I had been urgently summoned by Rizpa and then hastily ushered in by Aishet-Lot, who immediately exited the quarters to resume guard duty outside. Ima Temima, unveiled and in a long white robe, was seated at the table against which what looked like a shepherd's staff or crook was propped and upon which the little mother Torah so familiar to me was undressed and only slightly unfurled on the right tree-of-life roller to the opening portion in which the man passes the buck and blames both the woman
who had given him from the tree to eat and God who had given him the woman. So much time had elapsed since I had seen the bare luminous face of our holy mother, its incandescent light like celestial fever, that I was nearly blinded, to the point that I did not at first notice the nomad propped up on pillows in the bed under the quilts, his body from his naked shoulders and upward visible, blotched with a florid rash. “You thought you can hide him, but I know the whole time,” the nomad spoke. “When you go back to little love nest, do not look for lover boy. They already drag him out on his fat ass, maybe you see shit marks on floor. We tell to him that maybe next time he go out on the town, he should be suicide bomber. Anyway, good news is, on way to police car, a stone fall on his head, a nice big stone. Maybe some blood avengers, who knows? I think he not feeling so great no more. Bad news is, he sticked the cat in the freezer for good-bye present to you. We leave it there for now so it don't go soft and mushy and stink up the place. Sorry about cat. Cute little pussy.”

Ima Temima spurted out what sounded like a dry little laugh, and reached for the staff leaning against the table and clasped it, indicating in this way that the fleeting widening of my eyes when I had entered the room and instantly spotted this vaguely familiar sinister object had, not surprisingly, not escaped our holy mother who sees all. “It's all right, Kol-Isha-Erva, don't be afraid, I don't intend to smite you with this rod, merely talk to you.” The beautiful eyes, fully visible, crinkled teasingly and yes, forgivingly, as the holy hand stroked the smooth wood. “Maybe, though, if I let it drop to the floor it will turn into a serpent and bite your heel. Well, as it happens, this staff comes from Gan Eden, from the original tree of knowledge good and evil as a matter of fact. The first couple took it with them when they were expelled, a walking stick to keep them from crawling out on all fours, to aid them in evolving to the upright and human position as they began their wanderings—and they passed it down through the generations. Believe it or not, it's the very same stick that Judah gave to his daughter-in-law Tamar as a pledge when she stood at the crossroads veiled in the manner of a prostitute, to procure her services. Kadosh-Kadosh gave it to me. It was passed down to him from his warrior grandmother Hephzibah.”

Our holy mother bent a gracious eye upon the nomad grinning under the covers, baring his teeth like the wolf in the grandmother's bed in the children's fairy tale, showing his gums spotted with sores. “For it is I who am desired at the end of days,” HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, added enigmatically.

Ima Temima's exposed face turned grave. “For the sake of Zion I shall not be still, for Jerusalem's sake I shall not be silent,” our holy mother declared. Turning decisively to the matter at hand, HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, referencing once again the expulsion of Adam and Hava from the Garden of Eden (as is true for the Torah itself, every repetition by our holy mother also signifies), informed me that when it became known outside the confines of our walls that we have been harboring within our paradise a snake, a notorious wanted criminal and terrorist, a decision was made at the highest spheres of government to reclassify our “leper” colony as occupied territory—specifically, as an illegal settlement outpost to be evacuated within the next forty-eight hours.

Even our holy mother's extraordinary contacts and
protectzia
could not in this instance prevent the forthcoming ethnic cleansing. It had escalated to a matter of extreme diplomatic sensitivity that touched upon the continued support and patronage of the superpowers at the topmost levels who were demanding the evacuation as a point of honor, as acknowledgement of their authority; the pressure was intense, the goodwill of the protectors was far too vital for the state to risk for such an inconsequential and lunatic fringe figure as Go'el-HaDam. What it boiled down to from the point of view of the state was a serious threat to its basic survival if it failed to evacuate the “outpost”; as for the municipality, here was its opportunity to seize the upper hand economically, for it had long had its eye on this exceptionally valuable piece of real estate in the heart of West Jerusalem and would have liked nothing better than to auction off the property to the highest bidder to be developed into luxury apartments for holiday visitors and commercial centers for foreign investors.

As I stood there with head bowed and eyes lowered accepting this justified rebuke for the catastrophe I had brought down upon our people I could only tremble and weep. “I'm sorry, I'm
sorry, forgive me.” My throat was constricted, I could barely squeeze the words out, I had lost my woman's naked voice. All I wanted at that moment was to curl up and die, I felt annihilated, I fell upon my knees and prostrated myself at the feet of our holy mother.

Our holy mother took pity on me, raised my head with the staff, and kissed me on the mouth. I could feel the heat penetrating me and spreading throughout my body like fever as I was comforted by the news that permission had been obtained for a very small nucleus of first-circle adherents to remain within the “leper” colony following the evacuation until they too disappeared through natural attrition as the plague ran its course. Thank God, despite my sins, I was one of the elect.

With overwhelming pride I can report that the evacuation, which began the next day, inspired a brilliantly creative protest from the citizens of our “leper” colony now reclassified as an illegal settlement outpost. The remaining hundred or so of our inhabitants came boldly forth to face the police contingent sent in to carry out the
aktion
. Dressed in striped concentration camp uniforms, with numbers tattooed on their forearms and yellow stars of David imprinted with the word J
UDE
pinned to their breasts or on bands wound above the elbow around their upper arms, some with shaved heads, our brave deportees screamed, Nazis! Stormtroopers! Gestapo! They held up signs, J
UST
F
OLLOWING
O
RDERS
? J
EWS
D
O
N
OT
E
XPEL
J
EWS
! T
HIS
“L
EPER
” C
OLONY
S
HALL
N
OT
B
E
J
UDENREIN
! N
EVER
A
GAIN
!—and so on. The effect was so mind-boggling that the cops withdrew as if whacked with a cudgel, failing to accomplish their assigned mission.