One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (36 page)

Toward evening of that day the matriarch Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha appeared at the opening of the cave and called to Temima to come out for a moment; there was something of importance that she had been delegated to give to her. Out of respect for this older, enduring woman, Temima rose and stepped forth. Without a word, Em-Kol-Hai handed her a sheet of paper rolled up like a telescope along with a number two pencil. As Temima unfurled it Em-Kol-Hai commented, “Just in case you're concerned, I'm one-hundred-percent okay with this. No problem, honey.”

The document was decorated with an ornate border depicting the emblems on the banners of the ten lost tribes of Israel—mandrake, scale, ass, ship, tent, olive tree, and so on, with the bull, the standard of Abba Kadosh's tribe Ephraim, the largest and most dominant, mounted on top. Within this frame was a brief message in exquisite calligraphy: “Abba Kadosh has the pleasure to invite you to join his household.” Below that were the words “Check One,” followed by three blank boxes, with a single choice next to each—Wife, Concubine, Other. That explains the pencil, Temima figured; another scribe for my sins. Shaking her head in disbelief, she stared with wide open eyes at Em-Kol-Hai while her hands acting independently as if they were not fully attached to her tore the paper into smaller and smaller bits, letting them swirl slowly to the ground, and then she let the pencil drop too. Em-Kol-Hai, heaving a weary sigh, like someone who had lived through this before, a tiresome rerun demanding all the necessary motions once again, squatted down. With the stump of her left arm she pushed the fragments and the pencil together to gather them up more efficiently, then her right hand closed
around the entire heap to grasp it. As she performed this chore she said, “I want to remind you that Bnei HaElohim is part of the Holy Land. We do not desecrate the ground of the Holy Land by littering.” She rose with a groan, her stump massaging her hip, and stuffed the shredded pieces into a pocket of her kaftan. “He will prevail, sweetie,” she said, “he always does. You will find in yourself the correct answer and then you will consent.”

Temima remained standing there watching until the heavy figure of Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha receded into the heart of the village before turning and going back into her cave where Shira Silver Kedaisha was still sitting at the table with a notebook open before her, exactly as Temima had left her when the matriarch paid her call. Shira had arrived soon after the events of the morning to plead with Temima not to leave in the wake of her shock at what she had witnessed in the pavilion. As Temima reentered the cave, Shira said, “You don't have to tell me, I know everything. I'm begging you, Temima, please don't go. It will be the end of me. And we have only just started our work.” The work was a commentary on the Tanakh beginning at the beginning with Genesis,
Bereishit
, which Temima was dictating and Shira was taking down. They had reached the first two words of the third verse,
VaYomer Elohim
, And God said—God's first recorded words. It had been just after Temima recounted to Shira how the Toiter had told her that merely taking in those two words—the Lord speaking!—left him so overwhelmed he could go no further that the matriarch Em-Kol-Hai appeared at the opening of the cave. Now Shira said to Temima, “Maybe those two words
VaYomer Elohim
were too much for the Toiter, but they're not too much for us. We women move on. Forgive me, but the Toiter is a dead end. We are life. I don't say this to hurt you, Temima. I know you loved him.”

Temima closed her eyes. “So. In the beginning there was chaos and emptiness and darkness over the face of the deep and the spirit of the Lord sweeping over the face of the water. And God said, Let there be light. Creation through words. Take words along with you, and return to HaShem.”

Over the course of the next week, at unpredictable times during the day, the entire Bnei HaElohim gospel chorus Kol-Koreh-BaMidbar under the baton of Melekh Sinai would materialize outside the entrance to Temima's cave to woo her in the name of Abba Kadosh, prophet and
messiah, with verses set to music by Shira Silver Kedaisha from the Song of Songs. Behold you are beautiful, my love, your eyes like doves; Like a rose among thorns, this is my beloved among the maidens; You are completely beautiful, my love, without a blemish; With me, from Lebanon, with me my bride, come; You are beautiful my love like Tirza, lovely like Jerusalem.

Temima was in spite of herself amused, in spite of herself flattered, but as it continued day after day with no end in sight she grew more and more drained and defeated, it availed her nothing to call out from inside her cave Shoo, shoo—go away, scram, scoot, get lost. Melekh Sinai was a well-trained soldier and he was just obeying orders handed directly down from Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah. Finally, in full awareness that what she was doing might be interpreted as a softening on her part, the first hint of yielding, she handed him a note to pass along to his master in which she parried with a citation also from the Song of Songs—Do not awaken and do not stir up love until it please.

This move earned her a brief respite, but when nothing more was forthcoming, Melkh Sinai appeared one day minus his backup singers at the entrance to the cave to inquire if there was any further message to be delivered to Abba Kadosh. “The message is,” Temima replied without hesitation, “And the Queen Vashti refused to come at the king's command conveyed by his eunuch.”

The next morning when Temima stepped out of her cave she found gathered there all of Abba Kadosh's wives and concubines, a small crowd, she did not have the heart to count how many, standing in complete silence. Each had her left breast bared over her heart, from the sagging breast of Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha to the small, still-ripe breast of Shira Silver Kedaisha to the promise of a breast flagged only by the bulletpoint of a dark nipple of a little girl four years old at most. The vigil continued for several mornings until Temima could bear it no longer, especially painful to her was the sight of Shira's humiliation. She slipped a note into the pocket of Em-Kol-Hai's kaftan pivoting on a reference to the words of the matriarch Naomi in the book of Ruth. “Shaddai the God of breasts has dealt very bitterly with me.”

Two days later, Abba Kadosh himself ascended the slope to Temima's cave trailed a short distance behind by Melekh Sinai leading an ass laden with gifts—baskets overflowing with fruit and bread and olives, dates and figs and nuts, garments and cloths in brilliant colors and intricate
embroideries, pottery and jewelry. He stood at the entrance and called to Temima. When she emerged reluctantly he slowly and very frankly looked her over up and down, his silver eyes coming to rest at last on her eyes, not taking them off of her for a moment.

“You have been flirting with me, my holy sister Temima,” he said in a playfully chiding tone, his deep voice so soft and intimate she was obliged to move her head subtly forward to absorb his words. “I have heard the true message in your messages, and therefore I have taken the unprecedented step of coming to you instead of you coming to me as by right you ought to have done, as the Queen of Sheba came to King Solomon bearing gifts. I knew the Queen of Sheba in my time, and you are no Queen of Sheba. You're more of an Avigail, the very clever and very handsome wife of Naval the Carmelite with an excellent figure like yours I might add, but even Avigail had the good sense to come to David instead of obliging him to lower himself by coming to her because she foresaw that he was the chosen one and from him would come the anointed line. That was one smart lady, Avigail. She knew what was good for her, sister Temima—learn a lesson from Avigail. For your sake, my holy sister, I am abasing myself and reversing the roles. I have turned myself into a woman for you, sister, I have come to you as a supplicant bearing gifts like Avigail, and I say to you, Leave that worthless, wretched husband of yours, your lowlife Naval, a vile man, a boor, his name tells it all. I am entrusting my fate to you, I am putting myself in your hands.”

He continued in this fashion without pause, opening no space for Temima to insert herself. He was placing himself in her hands, he said, by inviting her on a short excursion; he was offering to take her out of the country for a few days, a very risky step for a man in his position who was regarded as a lethal alien by the rabbis and might not be allowed back in again to the Jewish State. But to show his commitment to her he was prepared to take this risk, to trust in her good will and her connections to protect him from the Who-Is-A-Jew cops. He would take her to Amsterdam, to Holland, to the holy grave of the former Marrano, Rabbi Menashe ben Israel, who believed without a taint of doubt the traveler's report that the Indians of America who had welcomed him over the mountains with the Shema Yisrael, Hear-O-Israel, were the descendants of a lost tribe of Israel. Thereafter, Abba Kadosh said to Temima, the holy former Marrano Rabbi Menashe ben Israel devoted his writing and all of his diplomatic efforts to hasten the dispersal of the Jews throughout
the world, which must precede the ingathering of the exiles and the messianic age, in accordance with Scripture, Even if your outcasts are at the far ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you and from there He will fetch you.

“I will await your response to my invitation, my holy sister Temima—no pressure,” Abba Kadosh said, concluding his case. “Search within yourself, go to the very depths of your being, go down to the lowest place on this earth, go to the Dead Sea below, there your true course will be revealed to you.” He turned, took a few paces away from her, mounted the ass that had been unloaded while he was petitioning Temima, and, with Melekh Sinai walking ahead clutching the rope attached to the halter, rode back to the village.

Down at the Dead Sea, Temima walked all day among the seekers after youth and beauty, bathing in the salt waters, soaking under the sun, the ailing and sick desperate for a cure for their mortal bodies, stricken with consumption, fever, and inflammation, with the boils and hemorrhoids and itch of Egypt, with madness, blindness, and confusion of the heart, with infection at the knees and the thighs, pustules from the soles of the feet to the crown of the head, terrible and lasting plagues, malignant and chronic disease. As the sun was setting over the hills of Judea and Jerusalem she heard nearby a song the Toiter used to sing—The pangs of the Messiah, Here they come, Here they come, Today. She saw a small figure in a wheelchair, agonizingly contorted, covered entirely with black mud, taking the cure, surrounded by men dressed in immaculate white, his attendants. She drew closer; his eyes were focused on the void, as if he were blind. “Elisha?” she asked, but he did not acknowledge her, addressing instead the darkening skies beyond.

“It is the Beginning of the Redemption, daughter,” he said, “
Atkhalta de'Geula
. The black man is the precursor—the Messiah son of Joseph, from the lost tribe of Ephraim. The staff he carries is the staff of the Messiah, passed down from Adam through the generations to the warrior Hephzibah known in the language of strange nations as Hazel who passed it to her son, the black man Messiah son of Joseph of the tribe of Ephraim, who will in turn find a way to pass it on to you. He is fated to suffer a terrible end. You are fated to hasten the end. You are the end. Whatever he tells you, listen to his voice.”

On the only night they spent in Amsterdam, Abba Kadosh took Temima along the canals to the old section of the city near the train station where the prostitutes were on display. They strolled past the narrow buildings packed together as if propping each other up like war casualties, the glass storefronts on the lower levels backlit in visceral red showcasing for sale women for every taste, all sizes and shapes, every color, practically every age. As they window-shopped, he challenged her to put her finger on the G-spot in the Tanakh where prostitution is explicitly prohibited. It cannot be found because it doesn't exist, he declaimed. The harlot was an accepted fact of life, fulfilling a recognized male need. Judah stops off for some necessary recreational relief with a whore by the roadside in Timna, and only later discovers that she happens to be his daughter-in-law, Tamar, who had already buried two of his sons—Er whom the good Lord just didn't much care for, and Onan, whose name has become synonymous with the nasty stuff he thought he was doing in secret. And then there's Rahab the
zona
. The two spies sent by Joshua to check out the land take a little earned break, some R & R on their first stop in Jericho with this ho in the wall, Rahab, completely routine—and the rest is history. And while we're on the subject, how about a round of applause for Gomer daughter of Divlayim, who gets honorable mention by name—the hooker God Himself commanded Hosea to take for a wife as a visual aid to how our people had prostituted themselves.

And speaking of our people, Abba Kadosh went on, in our own holy land of Israel, I'm proud to report, prostitution is a leading growth industry. Percentage-wise, more men in the Holy Land take advantage of this ancient privilege than in any other country on earth, according to the statistics my sources tell me—what with all the stress, the tension, the pressures, religious, political, basic survival, etcetera etcetera, a man needs an outlet, you would expect no less, we Jews are number one as always. Even the uptight rabbis of the Talmud gave the go-ahead to unload in a whore in cases of pent-up horniness; with no outlet short of self-abuse, spilling and wasting your seed like the aforesaid Onan, completely forbidden, naturally, a man could burst apart at the seams. And our whores, by the way, were expected to give tithes from their earnings to the Temple like any working woman, further proof that the business was considered totally normal. His own name, Kadosh—holy, consecrated, separated, set apart—was also relevant to this topic, he declared. The women of
his household could be a holy wife
kedosha
, yes, but from the very same root and just as worthy was a holy concubine
kedaisha
, which some might define as a harlot but to his mind was simply another aspect of the feminine emanation of the divine presence, equally holy. Everything on this earth contains both itself and its opposite, Abba Kadosh said; the
kedaisha
is also
kedosha,
consecrated and set apart. These are the deep, deep thoughts of the Kabbalists, the mystics, the Hasidim—they get it. After the Tanakh, they're my boys.