One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (32 page)

By day, Haim Ba'al-Teshuva, aka Go'el-HaDam, continued to sit in a corner of the synagogue tent performing what had now become his day job, the scribe's repetitious task of writing the mandated verses and sacred letters on small pieces of parchment to be folded into mezuzot and tefillin boxes, but the bulk of his spiritual energy was given over to strategizing with his comrades, laying out the plans for their operations and movements of the night, an occupation that flooded him with such excitement that, despite a personal loss that would surely bring him down to
Sheol
in everlasting anguish, he felt almost dizzy with elation at having found new purpose and meaning in life. Sabbaths and holidays he rested along with his surviving boy, Pinkhas, welcomed guests in other people's tents and at their tables where he would sigh and express to these sympathetic ears the thought he considered original to himself, about how unnatural it was for a son to precede his father in death, this was not how it was meant to be in the human order of things.

Over the ensuing months, joined by one more man who called himself Avshalom, the band of self-appointed avengers, like the dagger-wielding Sicarii zealots two millennia earlier cleansing Judea of its Roman occupiers, carried on with what they regarded as their holy mission of sowing dread and unrest in the cities and the countryside of the so-called West Bank—Judea and Samaria, the biblical heartland—with the goal of planting in the guts of its Arab scourge a sense of insecurity and unwelcome in their own homes, which was only right, since after all, this was not their home.

Dressed entirely in black to merge with the darkness, with black stockings drawn over their heads, they set out almost every night except Sabbath and holidays, in Howie's Peugeot or some other vehicle with the license plate obscured, to mete out Old Testament punishment like gods of vengeance, maiming and mutilating for the purpose of causing shame and humiliation, but stopping short of killing outright, at least for the time being. For this reason, with regret, because it was such a time-honored biblical war prize, they rejected the idea of cutting off the foreskins of all the pissers against the wall they could lay their hands
on and bringing them back as trophies, like scalps collected by Indians, because the procedure could take too long and become too messy and lead to unanticipated bleeding and death; in any event, most of the Arabs in the territories were Muslims and already circumcised in the tradition of their progenitor, Ishmael, who had his
brit
at age thirteen by the hand of his own knife-wielding father, Abraham, a nice bar mitzvah present.

Instead, they opted for such actions as snatching any man they could find venturing out in the night, and occasionally they would even enter a house or courtyard that was open and easily accessible. Three of them would hold down the captive while the fourth would pound a nail through his earlobe with a hammer, as was the fate of the Hebrew bondsman who rejected freedom after seven years of indenture. And what were these Arabs anyway but a nation of slaves with a slave mentality, the descendants of a slave mother Hagar? If the man they caught had a beard, they would shave off half of it, and they would slice off half his garments exposing the buttocks, as Hanun king of Amon did to the emissaries of David to mortify them and insult the Jewish king. But their most satisfying specialty was cutting off both thumbs and both big toes of their captives, as the Israelites did to Adoni-Bezek the Canaanite, and as Adoni-Bezek had done earlier to seventy kings who crouched under his table licking up the crumbs, an eternal cycle of retribution.

For nearly six months the gang of four executed their campaign, reports of the incidents filling the press and the media and provoking marches and stone-throwing demonstrations by peaceniks and appeasers, until the night they were stopped for littering by Israeli soldiers when Avshalom threw an emptied bottle of grape Tempo wrapped inside a greasy Bamba bag out of the window of their speeding car. It shattered alarmingly on the road near Nablus, better known as Shekhem, in the shadow of Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, the mountains of the blessing and the curse. Their car was searched, the trunk opened to reveal piles of dried-up blackened fingers and toes, like the waiter's black bowties that used to spring up in the popped trunk of Howie's father's Chevy.

“C'mon guys,” Howie said, draping his arm familiarly over the shoulder of the officer clearly in charge, “we're all Jews here. Gimme a break. It's just some lousy Bamba, it's not a bomb-a. Get it? Israeli junk food, fellahs, Holy Land snacks, no problem. Wait, we even have some more in the car in case you're hungry, you deserve a little nosh—our way of
saying thank you for watching over us against the terrorists and murderers on our God-given turf. Just tear open the bag, take a minute to thank the One Above by saying a little
brakha
, maybe a
Shehakol
, maybe a
Boreh-pri-ha'adamah
, depending on which rebbe you go by, then dig in and enjoy—delicious, yum-yum.”

Despite this generous offer, the four musketeers, already celebrated by some as Maccabim for their bold and original acts of defiance and denounced by others as meshuga'im for their mad and inflammatory exploits, were placed under arrest and taken into custody.

As soon as she heard reports of Howie's detention, almost without thinking, as if moved by a higher force, Ketura made her way along back roads up to the hilltop compound overlooking Hebron, costumed in the knotted kerchief pulled close around her face to conceal her dark skin and alien bird scar, long skirt, and loose tunic of a Jewish settler woman. According to press accounts she had seen, Howie was being held as a suspect in the recent crime rampage throughout the territories but Ketura had no doubt that this was primarily a cynical publicity maneuver on the part of Israeli authorities to placate their superpower patrons and quiet the shrill human rights delegation. It was only a matter of time before he would be released to his own recognizance pending a trial, assuming there would even be a trial, and be hailed upon his return as the anointed hero, a legend about himself that, knowing him as she did, it would not take him long to believe in. Now was her window of opportunity, her only chance to get to Temima. Under no circumstances would Howie in his latest incarnation as stricken father and righteous avenger tolerate her presence anywhere near his tent, this Philistine temptress, this Delilah, this disfigured outcast—not least because she made him squirm in the shadow of his own past carnal sins, but for the moment at least he was officially occupied elsewhere, and Temima, Ketura knew in her heart, needed her now.

Her son, Ibn Kadosh, had long since brought his flock of goats to graze as close to the settler's hill as possible in order to scout out the terrain and pinpoint the precise location of Temima's tent, like a target. Ketura penetrated soundlessly. The darkness and silence inside pressed down like a weight, giving out an otherworldly hum. The space seemed
emptied of all life, until, as her vision adjusted, Ketura noticed a rounded heap of stuff, a mound of what looked like discarded rags piled up on a chair that appeared to be stirring lightly. She approached, and peeling off from the top one piece of cloth after another—headscarves and veils, ten in all—Ketura uncovered the hauntingly impassive face of her friend.

“Temima,” Ketura whispered.

She had withdrawn to her tent after the seven-day mourning period ended for her son, Kook Immanuel, and had remained there in complete seclusion. She abstained from all forms of intercourse with other human beings, no longer colluding in the teaching of Tanakh against the background of evocative settings, or providing legal responsa for eminent rabbis stumped by such questions as whether a man who wears a toupee is also required to cover his head with a yarmulke, or accepting the morally dubious veneration of visits to the holy woman from petitioners seeking blessings or advice or healing or self-knowledge or whatever other desperate intercession.

The care of her remaining child, the boy her husband called Pinkhas, was entirely taken over by Yehudit Har-HaBayit who simply swept him up into her own brood, though out of pity she would allow him to stand alone for an hour or two each day sucking his thumb gazing with longing at his mother's tent, which seemed to many to be giving off rays of light but which he was strictly forbidden to approach or to enter. Temima's extreme isolation was regarded not as a pathological expression of grief but rather as a transcendent form of the practice of
hitbodedut
, revered as the quest for utter solitude to commune with God by a certified holy woman.

When she had risen from shiva on the seventh day she strode through the crowd clustered before her in the women's section of the synagogue tent directly to a complete stranger and rested both of her hands, one on top of the other, on the left breast over the heart of this woman who seemed to have attracted her so powerfully; the very next day the lump that had just been found in the breast upon which Temima had placed the warmth of her two hands had simply melted away, they later learned, a miracle confirmed by the doctors. Turning from this sufferer, Temima made her way back to her own tent trailed by a swarm of bees as if she were their queen, streaming behind her like ribbons of golden tresses, obliging those who witnessed and later gave a full account of this procession
to keep their distance lest they be stung, to allow her to enter unimpeded into the seclusion she required for her holy work separated from other mortals by this celestial escort, like the divine pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that parked itself outside the Tent of Meeting in the wilderness to mark the presence of Moses Our Teacher within in private conference with the Lord Almighty, and all of the Israelites stood at the openings of their tents observing this from afar and bowed down low.

Inside the tent, according to reports from the women delegated to deliver her food and basic needs as unobtrusively as was humanly possible and to provide the minimal care she required, Temima also undertook a whole array of self-mortifications—including the fast of speech such as she had practiced after her mother's death when she was eleven years old, along with the midnight lamentation over the destruction of our Temple, may it be rebuilt speedily and in our time, and also the silent recitation of Psalms and immersion in ice-cold water in atonement for the most basic and primitive libidinous sins of body and mind.

Most radically, she took upon herself an extreme form of the practice of womanly
zni'ut
. In an effort to achieve the highest level of female modesty, akin to the male modesty of Moses Our Teacher who was also veiled, about whom it was boasted that the man Moshe was so modest above any other man on the face of the earth, Temima sought to erase and extinguish herself as a woman. Her womanhood, after all, had been the source of all her suffering and the suffering she had brought upon others, both through the expression of her womanliness and through her efforts to suppress or to rebel against it. But the root was one and the same—her existence as a woman—which she now sought to obliterate by burying herself under every article of clothing she possessed.

By the time Ketura finished undressing her, a service to which Temima submitted without resistance, with the passivity of an invalid, eight skirts had been removed, nine tops, seven shawls or wraps, six pairs of socks from her feet and from her hands three more pairs worn like mittens—all this not including the ten layers of face and head coverings that Ketura had already stripped off at the beginning. Not an inch of skin had been visible, an observance of
zni'ut
that even some ultrastrict rabbis who routinely ordered the blacking out of images of women from newspapers and advertisements and set up separate entrances to public buildings for
women would have deemed excessively severe, primitive even, like those Muslim ladies in their full-body black schmattehs in the marketplace resembling walking sacks of potatoes—not an enlightened Jewish thing that at least allowed the face to show and the hands from the wrist to the fingertips so that the dishes could be washed.

Howie for his part found it oddly comforting to wander in now and then—it was his own tent after all, he was master of the tent—and sit there gazing at that pile of rags that seemed inanimate but reportedly contained his own wife. And thanks to her fast of speech he could talk to his heart's content to this practically inert protuberance on the chair, without interruption, without fear of mockery or scorn, at ease in the knowledge that she would not betray him and she would not answer back as he recounted at length the details of the exploits of the previous nights—so many and so many spikes driven through earlobes, beards half-shaven-off, clothing half-shredded to reveal hairy
tukheses
, thumbs and big toes added to their collection—until the day came that Temima broke her vow of silence and spat out, “You think you're such a big man, Howie? You're just another pathetic American loser trying to get some respect on the West Bank. Don't you realize you're sacrificing the kid all over again for your own glory? It's plain
avodah zara
, good old idolatry. You're using him dead like you used him alive. Asshole!”

After Ketura had removed all the outer garments, letting them slip to the floor in a perverse kind of strip tease, Temima continued to sit there in silence in a loincloth she had fashioned out of a torn-up white sheet, strips of which she also used to bind her engorged breasts as with a bandage—she had still been nursing Kook Immanuel when he was so cruelly wrested from her—squashing them brutally against her rib cage. She was, Ketura saw, more beautiful than ever, tragic and mythic, her dark eyes even larger and her cheekbones even more prominent from the austerity she practiced, her skin flawless like a hothouse specimen, her body so shapely with its tiny waist, the twist on which her entire female form pivoted, it was no wonder she was so dangerous and had to be buried alive.