One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (11 page)

I
T WAS
close to three in the morning when our Seder came to an end, but, because of the injunction that the more one tells the story of our liberation the more praiseworthy it is, Aish-Zara and I, despite our profound exhaustion, were honored beyond what we might ever have thought we were worthy of to be invited to Ima Temima's apartment in the secluded garden on the northern side of the “leper” colony to continue the discussion until daybreak, like the five sages in Bnei B'rak who reclined around the Seder table so engrossed in recounting the exodus from Egypt through the night that it required the barging in of their students to remind them the hour for morning prayers had arrived. Ima Temima requested that we bring along with us a few bottles of wine and some glasses to lubricate our conviviality, as wine gladdens the hearts of all people, women not excluded, and, in any case, Ima Temima said, the directive to stop all eating or drinking by midnight or after partaking of the last bit of afikomen matzah, whichever came first, applies only when children are present at the Seder—and there are no children in this perilous place to which we have come.

Ima Temima was propped up against the cushions in bed in a pale nightdress and a shawl but without a veil, having already been readied for sleep by Cozbi and Rizpa, our holy mother's two treasured personal attendants. The room was dimly lit with only a few candles, and a second chair had been brought in for Aish-Zara. Immediately we filled our glasses almost to the brim and toasted each other with the blessings of life. As we sat there sipping our wine, in complete love and trust, with Ima Temima
breaking the silence now and then to impart yet another holy teaching, I was awestruck once again to find myself on this night that was so different still in the innermost inner circle with such heavyweights the likes of Ima Temima and Aish-Zara, my rebbes and my teachers. It is very much my wish not to speak of my own journey in these pages or to reveal through these words any personal information about myself in all my insignificance that might lead to the stealing of my identity—but for a girl like me, Sherry Silver from Park Avenue, Manhattan, New York City, a dropout from Juilliard, by avocation a seeker, by training a harpist morphed into a thereminist, which so attuned me to sound waves and vibrations, good and bad, seamlessly glissandoing me to my present career as executive director of the school for prophetesses—for such an undistinguished resume to be included at the core of our revolutionary enterprise with two Boro Park girls at the level of HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, and the high priestess Aish-Zara, the former Tema Bavli and Essie Rappaport, respectively, from Brooklyn, New York, was more than I would ever have dreamed. I thank God every day for bestowing this gift upon me.

And most wondrous of all, something I learned for the first time during those early morning hours as we sat in the private quarters of our holy mother after our Seder, Ima Temima and Aish-Zara, despite having grown up within a block of one another, first met only in their junior year of high school and in an entirely different Brooklyn neighborhood—at the Williamsburg branch of Beis Ziburis (the very same girls' school, by an amazing coincidence, that had its Jerusalem branch across the road from Ima Temima's former headquarters in the Bukharim neighborhood, from which our holy mother had liberated Rizpa from slavery), though before the year was over, at the age of sixteen, Aish-Zara (known as Essie Rappaport at the time) was pulled out of school by her father and married off to the Pupa Hasid from Mea Shearim, Jerusalem. It was not until many years afterward that Ima Temima and Aish-Zara met again—after the first shock and insult of sexual intercourse which, despite years of reruns, never fully ceased to stun her (Aish-Zara has released me to use
her experience for the sake of providing consolation and hope to other women similarly dumbfounded) with a husband who would not have recognized her face if he passed her in the street, after thirteen children, numerous beatings, the loss of her breasts, her womb, her teeth, her hair, the lobe of one ear sliced in two when an earring was ripped out and half the other ear bitten off, the burn marks of cigarettes that had been stubbed out all over her body, after mortal illness and bone weariness and chronic pain to the point of utter exhaustion and indifference as she was being beaten practically unconscious by a squad of men in black returning from prayer when she refused to move to the so-called women's section in the rear of the Number One municipal bus on its way back from the Western Wall (yes, Aish-Zara is our very own Rosa Parks)—only after becoming a survivor of all this persecution and suffering had Aish-Zara ventured one day into the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter that had always been right there for her in the neighborhood. With both hands, Ima Temima had beckoned to her on that day to approach through the crowd pressing in to soak up the words.

“Welcome, Essie,” Ima Temima had said. “I've seen you many times on the street. I've been expecting you. I've been waiting for the day when you would come to me of your own accord.”

It was not long after that reunion that our holy mother had informed her that she would no longer be known as Essie Rappaport. From that day forth she would be called Aish-Zara, the anointed high priestess, rendering by this decree null and void the physical blemishes that would have disqualified her for this office had she been a man, which, according to conventional thinking, were as nothing in the face of the overriding blemish of her femaleness, of her original disfigurement as a
nekaiva
, derived from the Hebrew root for opening or hole—like all of us, a walking sexual organ under wraps. But aren't men also intrinsically blemished, Ima Temima asked, mutilated eight days after birth by the covenant, not to mention the deep hole a man is born with that could never be filled from which a rib had been gouged out, fashioned into woman, the gaping void where his lost feminine had resided when he was whole and complete?

Ima Temima set the wineglass down on the nightstand and called to us to come sit on the bed. But because of the lateness of the hour and all the wine we had consumed, neither Aish-Zara nor I could at first absorb the fact that such an exclusive, extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime invitation was being extended to us even as our holy teacher continued to insist, patting the mattress emphatically to make it all the more clear that we must approach, and drawing back the quilts to communicate that we must also all share the warmth and comfort under the covers. At last Aish-Zara and I got the message. We set down our glasses on the table, slipped off our shoes, and, reeling from the wine and the unanticipated honor, I took Aish-Zara's arm to assist her and we obeyed the call. Before we could take in the meaning of it all, there we were, the four of us, including Ima Temima's little mother Torah, under the covers. It reminded me of the pajama parties, the girls' sleepovers from my childhood, and despite myself I began to giggle as we used to giggle then from fantasies of monsters that seemed so real and the realities of sex that seemed so unbelievable.

The giggling, as always, was contagious and quickly spread among us so that I for one, already sloshing with all the wine I had taken in and despite being at least a generation younger than my present bedmates, experienced some anxiety about my own personal bladder control as bursts of laughter crested in great waves and then subsided, leaving us gasping and panting. As soon as we had made ourselves as comfortable in the bed as it was possible to be alongside such a luminary of nearly divine proportions—it was as close as we would ever get to “mouth to mouth”—Ima Temima announced that we would be engaging in an experiment. We would test the dictum of the sages that
mozi-shem-rah
turns you into a
mezorah
by speaking ill of people, gossiping through the remainder of the night and then checking in the morning light to see if our skin had erupted in “leprosy,” in pustules and sores and turned white as snow and we had become symptomatic (since of course, as Ima Temima had taught, we women were, by definition, already “lepers” in various stages of the disease, from carriers to latency, from virulent
to terminal). “You mean you're actually giving us a
heter
to talk
loshon hara
—special permission just for us?” Aish-Zara asked in astonishment—and Ima Temima confirmed that indeed yes, we
were
being given a dispensation to indulge the evil tongue to our heart's content. “Uh-oh—L.H.M.F.G,” Aish-Zara sang out in a girlish voice, “
Loshon Hara
Makes Fire in Gehenna—remember that from Beis Ziburis?” And Ima Temima together with Aish-Zara collapsed in laughter, like sorority sisters reminiscing at a reunion, and even I, who did not attend Beis Ziburis (I went to Brearley, but that is of no account), was drawn in simply by the infectiousness of the mirth.

At first it was difficult to descend to the level of gossip in the presence of a righteous icon of such world renown, but Ima Temima nevertheless urged us on for the sake of the experiment, helping us to get started by inquiring if we had noticed any couplings at the Seder, given the intimate romantic atmosphere created by the glimmering candles in the darkened hall, the internal temperature-heating properties of the wine, the bodies laid out in a reclining state especially on the polluted mattresses, which might have had the added effect of relaxing the risk-averse with the sense that all was lost anyway like at the outbreak of a decimating war, and, truth to tell, also the awareness of everyone present that Ima Temima's external vision was limited especially in the dark due to the ravages of senior citizenship (in contrast, I hasten to add, to our blessed teacher's internal vision, which remains unrivaled among mortals), and therefore our holy mother might not be in a position to see what they were up to. Yes, there had been a lot of that kind of activity going on, we acknowledged—mostly women with women either by sexual preference or due to the dearth of men, but every man present, regardless of how unblessed, had someone, either female or male, and each of the Bnei Zeruya was spoken for—one with my prophetess, EliEli, I recounted, the girl who got so turned on during the
Dayenu
she nearly set her hair on fire and immolated herself, another with someone I didn't recognize, and the other two with each other, which is really a big waste, I said, because they are such hunks.

As another wave of laughter gathered force threatening to engulf us, Ima Temima asked if either of us had observed Paltiel and Cozbi during the Seder. Both Aish-Zara and I understood what was behind that question; Ima Temima suspected that, bottom line, Cozbi, who may or may not have been Jewish—she definitely did not look Jewish—was using Paltiel to further her own career or other ambitions whatever they might be, we didn't even want to begin to speculate. “Like an old couple,” Aish-Zara reported. “They didn't look at each other once or say even one word to each other all evening.”

Mention of Cozbi brought to mind the precious little lapdog Abramovich that she had snuggled between her breasts and caressed all evening at our Seder, so to salvage the mood that was beginning to darken with the specter of maternal disappointment, I began jabbering on about the great relief I had felt that my cat, Basmat (named in honor of the daughter of that wild man, Ishmael, and the wife of that caveman, Esau), a feral stray I had rescued from the humane society just before she had been scheduled to be put to sleep, was safely upstairs in my room when Cozbi opened the door and let the bird into the hall. As I was going on with my idle chatter I could picture Basmat's body stiffening, her back arching, and then it was as if I could actually see her pouncing on the bird, sublime in her ruthlessness. The sequence of images was so vividly and blasphemously ridiculous, considering the burden of signification that had been loaded onto that bird, that I erupted into hilarity again and, I admit to my horror, a small amount of hot moisture, maybe a thimbleful at most, trickled out of me to my eternal mortification. Even as I recall it a screech leaps from my mouth like a cartoon balloon before I can snatch it back as if it were filled with hot air and floated upward on its own.

Ima Temima stroked my head with the same tenderness as she had the bird's head before me and Rizpa's head before that, murmuring, “It's okay, Kol-Isha-Erva dear, it happens. Just try your best not to get any on my mother.” In my confusion I had not even considered such a horrifying possibility. I was among the privileged who knew that every letter of this precious scroll
tucked in the bed with us had been inscribed by Ima Temima's own blessed hand; soiling it in such a way would have been an intolerable calamity for me, life would have lost all meaning.

But, pulling the little mother Torah safely out of harm's way, Ima Temima immediately went on to comfort me in the words of the kabbalist poet ushering in the Sabbath queen. “Don't be ashamed, don't feel disgraced. Why be so downcast, why do you moan?” I beg forgiveness here for focusing so much on myself, but I do so entirely to showcase the powers of our holy teacher, Ima Temima. The truth is, by this point I was well past the giggling stage of grief and it required all my inner strength to hold back the tears. In my heart of hearts, I wanted nothing more at that moment than the privacy to open my mouth wide and to wail and wail.

“They cry out and are not ashamed,” Ima Temima said, paraphrasing from the book of Psalms, as if my inner needs and my longings had been utterly transparent. With not the slightest hint of embarrassment, Ima Temima's mouth opened wide and great cries came forth. Ima Temima was howling like a jackal in the night right there in that bed we were all sharing in the “leper” colony of Jerusalem. Soon Aish-Zara and I joined in and were howling too, our holy mother had given us permission, we were howling together all three of us at the top of our voices without self-consciousness or shame, purging the dross from our souls, cleansing and purifying our spirits, all sense of time fading. Afterward neither Aish-Zara nor I could pinpoint the moment that Ima Temima had shifted from wordless animal howls to the song of the heavenly seraphim in the celestial vision of the prophet Isaiah,
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, Adonai Zeva'ot
, the mantra we also chant in our prayers, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Hosts. We legatoed into
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, Adonai Zeva'ot
, chanting it over and over again without end,
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh,
until our very selves were blotted out, our personal identities were erased and the dawn came up and our students rushed in crying, Our teachers, the time has come.