One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (34 page)

Along the way they encountered no signs of human life except for one girl, perhaps thirteen years old, jumping rope while a little boy crawled around on the ground nearby stuffing fistfuls of dirt into his mouth. Em-Kol-Hai stepped up to her, whispered something in her ear, then gave her a sharp smack on the behind, at which the young girl scooped up the child, straddled him on her hip, and ran off into one of the tents. It was only then that Temima noticed that Em-Kol-Hai's left hand was missing; she had whacked the girl with her stump.

They continued on past the hub of the village climbing a short distance until they came to the opening of a large cave in the mountainside. “Our
VIP quarters, our superdeluxe suite,” Em-Kol-Hai said. “Your reputation has preceded you. Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah, regards you as something like a colleague. He has given specific orders to treat you like visiting royalty, like the Queen of Sheba.”

This was where Temima was to be accommodated, and there was nothing she lacked. The floor was covered with deep burgundy Bokhara rugs, the walls lined with tapestries depicting in sequence the story recounted in the first chapters of the book of Genesis—the six days of creation and the seventh of rest, a black Adam and Hava in the Garden of Eden, the serpent and the expulsion, the tragedy of the first brothers Cain and Abel—drawn in a delightful primitive style in vivid primary colors with all of the human figures garbed in fur pelts like prehistoric cave dwellers.

Books, writing materials, linens and clothing modest but suitable for the hot climate, proper lighting, everything was provided for Temima's comfort, she could leave the cave at will for her pleasure, but all of her necessities were brought to her like room service. Three times a day her meals were delivered by one of several young girls between the ages of eleven and fourteen, Temima estimated, often carrying in a pouch on her back a little boy no older than three whose hair had not yet been cut. One day she complimented one of them on how nicely she took care of her little brother. The girl opened her eyes wide as if incredulous that there could be in this world someone as uninformed as Temima, and said, “He's not my brother. He's my husband.”

This was confirmed to Temima by Shira Silver Kedaisha, her designated lady-in-waiting, on one of the many walks and hikes they took through the stark wilderness terrain and the wadis down to the Dead Sea, excursions during which over time the two women grew increasingly close. Shira had been working as a nature guide in the area when she first encountered Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah. She held Temima's hand as they climbed the steep cliffs and explored the caves, she named the birds soaring overhead or perched on crags—buzzards, falcons, pelicans, once even a golden eagle, the hoopoe, the bulbul—lizards underfoot, everywhere the ibex. She gathered wild flowers and braided them into wreaths with which they crowned one another as they descended the rocky bluffs past the salt marshes, the mountains of Edom and Moab a twilight purple in the distance on the Jordanian side, and bathed naked in secluded freshwater springs she found for them, or lay on their backs
floating on the saltwater bed four hundred meters below sea level, silent and inward in each other's company for hours and now and then talking.

Hadn't Temima wondered about the striking scarcity of young men in Bnei HaElohim? Shira asked. There were in fact very few men in general in the village; it was populated primarily by women and girls ruled over by the patriarchs, the exclusive circle of older men from the original exodus of liberated black slaves who had arrived with Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah. Some, like Abba Kadosh himself, came with first wives, such as the matriarch Em-Kol-Hai, a Jewish woman from the Bronx known then as Hedda Minsky, a lawyer trained at Fordham night school who had gotten Abba Kadosh out of Yazoo City and into Israel, claiming her rights under the Law of Return, and spiriting all of them under her Jewish skirts into the Promised Land where they have remained ever since as illegal squatters here in this remote and inhospitable corner of the universe not far from the desert canyon where the Romans starved out the band of Bar-Kokhba rebels, the caves of Ein Gedi where the bipolar King Saul pursued the young godfather David, the cataclysmic ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, the suicide rock of Masada. To this very day the inhabitants of Bnei HaElohim were not officially recognized by the government of Israel as Jews but were classified as a cult or sect, they had no rights as citizens. So much for the ingathering of exiles.

As for the absence of young men in the village, Shira told Temima, it did not take Abba Kadosh long to realize that in a patriarchal community very few patriarchs are required to propagate the seed. Just a handful was needed—in fact, the fewer the better to retain reproductive supremacy and sustain the line. Young men were threatening, they were dangerous rivals for receptive females, they were rogue elements who had to be subordinated or eliminated. It was a situation not so different, Shira said, from the mating strategies of other animal herds in the wild ruled by a dominant male figure.

Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah, and the old men who accompanied him here on the middle passage were committed to surviving as the main breeders, the dominant males. And so, when a child was born, if it was a girl, she was allowed to remain in the community. All of the girls were called Zippora bat Cushi. No offense intended by Cushi by the way, which for some people has a connotation kind of like the n-word, Shira put in hastily; here in Bnei HaElohim, though, it stands for black
pride, she took pains to elaborate. Most of these Zipporas bat Cushis were given at a very young age to one of the old men as either a wife or a concubine—whom she was given to and her destined status in the household always determined by the powers of spiritual penetration of Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah. You could think of it as a kind of variation of the droit du seigneur theme. A few of the girls, however, were allowed to reach puberty unclaimed until they were married off to a much younger boy who, upon his birth, based on Abba Kadosh's mystical insights into the baby's nature, had been granted the right to stay within the community, a privilege that could of course at any time be revoked depending on the character traits he manifested as he developed, the male aggression factor. This was something you could think of as a variation on the eunuch theme, a beta male. All of the boys, those who were kept and those who were unloaded, were called Zephania ben Cushi. That was the name of the prophet Zephania's father—Cushi—as Temima surely knew, it's straight from the text, maybe he was from the land of Cush, maybe he was black.

In any event, before a Zephania ben Cushi who was selected to remain reached the age of three, as soon as he was old enough to pronounce correctly the words
Harei-at-mikudeshet-li
, one of the Zipporas set aside for this purpose was given to him in marriage. Thereafter, as the wife consecrated to him, this Zippora was charged with tending to him until he grew up as a way of gaining practice and hands-on experience in the care of a husband—feeding him, changing him, cleaning him, playing with him, nursing him when he was sick, and so on. These were the girls carrying their husbands on their backs who served Temima in her cave. But the majority of the Zephanias by far who were born in the village were judged to be budding alpha males, unfit for a patriarchal lifestyle, with incipient wild and disruptive and rebellious and competitive tendencies evident to Abba Kadosh immediately from birth. Every newborn son throw into the Nile, and every daughter let live, as Pharaoh commanded the midwives in Egypt concerning the Hebrew slaves. Within the first year of their lives these Zephanias were taken away and deposited in adoption agencies in Panama or Puerto Rico by Em-Kol-Hai, who as an authorized Jew with the rabbinical stamp of approval could leave the country and return at will; several times each year, she would travel back and forth for this purpose, to unload the latest crop of dangerous black baby boys. This
had been the fate of Shira's own baby, her Zephania ben Cushi, she told Temima, taken from her arms and transported to an orphanage in Latin America—“And I did nothing to prevent it,” Shira wailed. She raised her voice and wept so loud that a male ibex stopped in his tracks and pricked his ears stiffly upward as she howled, great tears rolling down her cheeks, adding to the salt of the sea.

After she lost her Zephania ben Cushi, Abba Kadosh stopped bothering her. This was the word he used for the act—bothering—since he taught that according to the Torah woman possessed no will or desire of her own and if she did seem to possess a will or desire it was illusion and emptiness, of no consequence. A woman did not choose but was chosen; she was the property first of her father and then of her husband, to be disposed of as they saw fit, she was merely a vessel for use by a man, like your neighbor's house or his ox or his ass or anything at all that belonged to your neighbor, a possession you were forbidden to covet as stated explicitly in the tenth commandment. Not that Abba Kadosh ever exactly forced himself on a woman, he merely believed the act of bothering to be an expression of the male will, initiated by the man. “I will stop bothering you because you are too sad, you depress me,” he had declared to Shira one day. The man's decision to stop bothering, Shira explained, was in essence the only form of birth control practiced in the village—that, and breastfeeding for as long as humanly possible.

By now Abba Kadosh had already stopped bothering legions of women, Shira went on, including some time ago his head wife, Em-Kol-Hai, a mother of ten, because, as he said, she no longer turned him on, she was too old and too fat and with each passing year more and more resembled a man, she had a beard of stiff bristles on her chin that she didn't even have the decency to pluck and a dark brooding mustache that revolted him. To tell the truth, Shira said, Em-Kol-Hai seemed very relieved not to be bothered anymore, and since then this woman, who was already such a force, has truly come into her own, effectively running every aspect of the entire Bnei HaElohim operation with, you might say, one hand tied behind her back. Temima had surely noticed her missing right hand. It was cut off when she assaulted an Israeli government official inspecting the village as part of the campaign to get them evicted who had dared to raise a fist to strike Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah. Em-Kol-Hai did not hesitate for one minute—she went straight for his testicles. This
is explicitly forbidden in the Torah. In such cases, even if the woman is standing up for her man, you must cut off her hand, the Torah commands this. You must show no pity—those are the words of the Torah.

As for Shira herself, the musical concubine whom Abba Kadosh had once called his
Pilegesh
of Oud, she was now in charge of the voices; she was the choir director, thanks to her Juilliard training. It was a gospel chorus made up of the beta boys whose voices had not yet changed, and other assorted surviving males for the lower registers. Mostly they sang Negro spirituals or verses from Scripture set to music that Shira composed accompanied by a small orchestra of women sitting behind a curtain playing ancient biblical instruments. Shira herself also conducted from behind this screen while Melekh Sinai stood at the podium waving his arms around pretending to be doing the job and getting all the credit. They performed throughout the country to packed houses, they were very popular, up there on the charts, very much in demand, they even made some records that sold very well and contributed substantially to the income of the community. Hadn't Temima ever heard of them? She should step out of her cave on her own one day into the sunlight and face the music.

But what is the attraction of this man, this Abba Kadosh, that he could exercise such power over you? This is what Temima wanted to understand from Shira. How is your beloved better than another, most fair of women? How is your beloved superior to another that you have sworn yourself to him in this way? They were lying naked in the shade of a tamarisk tree in a secluded corner of the oasis of Ein Feshkha, near the pool of spring water in which they had just bathed. Shira was basking in the memory of how Temima had called her My Batsheva as they washed in the pool; surely the meaning of this was deeper than a reference to Bathsheba abducted from her bath. Shira wanted to reflect on this, but the question Temima had just posed sprang into life between them and would not be still. She sat up, folding her pale lean body, wrapping her arms around her drawn-up legs and lowering her forehead onto the caps of her knees so that her long red hair, wet and curly, cascaded forward. She raised her head, smoothed back her hair with both hands, and looked at Temima through pale lashes. “He is whole, complete, his inner peace and self-assurance are like nothing else I've ever experienced, it's what I've been searching for all my life, it flows out of him to me, to all of us,
all of his women, yet he still makes me feel as if I'm the only one, I feel no jealousy, I feel calm, serene, at peace for the first time in my life, he gives me everything I need, he makes me feel as if my life has meaning, for the first time in my life I feel I'm not just matter, I feel I matter.”

All this was delivered rhapsodically, as if on a single sustained breath. Shira turned to look behind her at a pillar of salt petrified in an anguished formation—Lot's wife?—nameless, voiceless. “Self-realization by surrender to a higher force,” Shira pushed on, groping for the words to explain, convince. “For me, he is the end, the ultimate, like the messiah. Maybe you think I'm brainwashed, but what it is really is the purity of surrender. I am like clay in the hands of the creator—he can shape me any way he wants. Into his hands I entrust my spirit—and with my spirit, my body. He is a force of nature, he can take me where I want to go—carry me straight up to the heights.” She gave Temima a rueful smile, coughed out a little laugh as if tuning an instrument, squeezed her eyes shut, then lifted her arms palms upward, opening up in song, letting her voice be heard as if everything that preceded had been recitative and now came the aria—Lord get me high, Get me high, Get me high, Lord get me high, Get me high. Higher and higher, Higher and higher, Lord get me high, Get me high.