One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (40 page)

Then came the supreme test to Temima's will—head and shoulders preposterously large and wide for the absurd opening squeezing brutally through the passage, and in their wake the rest of the newborn slithering out with not a sound from mother or child. The senior midwife grabbed the baby, a dark underworld creature matted with fur, encrusted with a white cheese and streaked with red blood, while her junior colleague swiftly cut the umbilical cord within a hairsbreadth of Temima's body and set the newborn loose. Without a word to the mother, not even informing her of the sex of the child she had just expelled into this life, the two women ran out of the room, the elder carrying the baby slippery as a freshly netted fish with the hook still in its mouth, her younger sister scurrying behind clutching the end of the long tail of the umbilical cord like a leash, leaving Temima completely alone. They rushed into the adjacent room, shoved the baby with its cord up between Abba Kadosh's legs stuffing it as high as possible, and along with all the other women assembled there they sang out to him, urging him to push with all his might, Push, holy father, push!

Straining convulsively but emitting no sounds—it was a source of extreme frustration to him not to be able to scream to his heart's content, he never forgave Temima for denying him the full pleasure of the experience as was his due—Abba Kadosh discharged the baby a second time into this world. His chief wife, Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha, caught it in both hands, held it upside down by its ankles, and announced, “It's a Zippora bat Cushi. Thank God, one less trip for me.” She gave the newborn a sharp welcoming smack on the buttocks setting her screaming to clear
her lungs, and the screaming continued at the same heartwarming volume as another woman cut the umbilical cord again, this time as close as possible to the child's navel, the screams subsiding for a short spell only when they set her down on Abba Kadosh's bushy chest with her mouth on his nipple where she foraged in vain until she gathered force again shrieking in furious protest.

In the next room Temima heard the cries and said to herself, as Elijah the prophet had said to the widow of Sidon when he raised her son from the dead, See, your child lives. Abba Kadosh said out loud, “This one will be a handful—we will have to marry her off fast,” and bringing his hand flat up to his chin in a gesture of oversatiation he signaled to the women to peel the kid off his chest and take her away from him for bathing and swaddling and feeding and whatever other maintenance might be required by female support staff now that he had done the man's main job in birthing her; Bnei HaElohim was not an uncivilized hellhole like China, we do not dump even girls on a hilltop to starve to death and be devoured by the carrion-eating birds, we find other ways to recycle them. When the two midwives brought the bundle back into Temima's room for breastfeeding, they instantly spotted the mass on the bed—the placenta, a congealing clot like the pile of an embarrassing accident. The older midwife scooped it up in the ladle of her bare hands and hurried in her zealousness back to Abba Kadosh's room to offer it to him so that he might carry through to its proper end the birthing ritual to holy perfection, but he was already rising from his bed and reaching for his clothing to get dressed. “Give that mess to one of my assistants,” Abba Kadosh said with revulsion. “I don't do afterbirths.”

“Here is your Zippora bat Cushi.” The younger midwife shoved a papoose into Temima's arms. The dark skin of the baby's face was sheathed with a thin mantle of fur the sign of a past life in another evolution, the eyes were sealed shut and puffy, the wide nose flattened, the full lips pursed like a gathering raindrop, the head, when Temima removed the little white cap, pointed and dented from having been squeezed and remolded in its arduous passage through the narrow straits of the birth canal into this life. It had not only been she, Temima, who had labored. This tiny being had also been hurled about in that terrible storm, she had wrestled to make her way out through the narrow dark tunnel to the light. She was heroic. Temima was flooded with tenderness for the valor of this
little warrior, she felt as if her own heart were breaking. Her name would no longer be called Zippora, Temima decided, but Hagar, in memory of Ketura. Father Abraham took another wife after Mother Sarah's death, and her name was Ketura. Ketura is Hagar, mother of Ishmael, the rabbis teach, the degraded woman summoned back to Abraham's tent after her mistress's death having been banished at Mother Sarah's behest. Even the rabbis were troubled by how badly Hagar had been used, even they sought to make amends in their way in accordance with their notions of what women want. Temima gazed at her daughter and remembered Ketura, discarded like waste, and offered restitution through Hagar's happily-ever-after ending.

She settled Hagar at her breast where the child suckled voluptuously for three full years. Over the eighty-day period of ritual impurity strictly adhered to in Bnei HaElohim prescribed after the birth of a girl—two weeks of menstrual infirmity followed by sixty-six days of blood purification—Temima nursed Hagar in Health House. She nursed Hagar in the cave as she resumed her work on Tanakh with Shira, stopping at each of the stations of womanhood, beginning again with Hava created in the image of man as man was created in the image of God, twice removed. Hagar's teeth cut through her gums, she grew, she walked, she talked; still she continued to nurse with gusto. Sometimes she would take her mouth off the breast to contribute her commentary. She was particularly engrossed during the weeks of discussion of the suffering of her namesake Hagar the black Egyptian slave. “She so black she blue,” the child declared solemnly, and she opened her mouth wide and wailed, thin streams of pale milk running down her chin. Another time she pulled her mouth off the breast so abruptly she raked Temima's flesh with her sharp little teeth and exploded into peals of laughter. This happened when Mother Rebekah wrapped her younger son Jacob's smooth arms and neck in the hairy skin of a freshly killed goat to impersonate his brother Esau and trick his father Isaac into giving him the firstborn's blessing—for Jacob really was the eldest according to Rashi the commentator-in-chief, Temima noted with a wry smile as an aside not intended for little Hagar's ears, on the principle of “first in last out,” especially in a narrow passageway with no room for maneuvering. And they actually did succeed in
fooling the old man Yitzkhak with this gorilla suit. So vividly ridiculous to little Hagar was this great comic scene from the Tanakh that she could envision it as in an illustrated book for the amusement of children. With milk spraying from her mouth, she burst into hilarity, barely managing to get out the words, Yitzkhak—what a retard!

Your curse be upon me, my daughter, Temima reflected.

Abba Kadosh was present on that occasion. Now and then he stopped by the cave to amuse himself listening to the biblical exegesis of these two concubines with an expression on his face as if he were observing a pair of macaques doing higher mathematics. “Where's your respect?” he boomed ominously at the child, who was already back to nursing avidly. He glared at Temima. “Sister, it is your duty to rein in your daughter. If you don't, I will.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Temima responded coolly, fixing Abba Kadosh with a warning glare. And she launched into an exposition of the text to defend her child, asserting that, in fact, Father Isaac—Yitzkhak—may indeed have been “retarded,” afflicted with Down Syndrome, maybe he was what they used to call in Brooklyn a Mongoloid, Temima said recklessly to Abba Kadosh. After all, he was the son of an exceedingly old mother, an off-the-charts old mother, Sarah was ninety years old when she gave birth to him, well past her female cycles by her own admission—and it is common knowledge that the chances of having a Down baby increase exponentially with an older mother, not to mention the age of the father at the time of this birth, one hundred years old—And my husband is so old, Temima said quoting Mother Sarah while staring at Abba Kadosh without backing down an inch. Abba Kadosh in turn glared spitefully at the oversized overaged baby still nursing at Temima's breast also no longer in the full glow of its youth, but she pointedly ignored the implication and went on, “Or maybe it was just a case of shell shock, after being sacrificed on the mountaintop by his old man. That would do it. Face it, brother, check out the text—Isaac was a guy who just didn't have a lot to say. And frankly, Abba dear, I don't know why you of all people don't consider Father Isaac a little on the slow side. After all, he was our only patriarch who was monogamous.”

Without giving Abba Kadosh a chance to counter, Temima went on to ask if he by any chance knew how old Isaac was when brought by his father Abraham to be bound to an altar on top of Mount Moriah and
slaughtered. Thirty-seven years old! Temima answered her own question—according to many commentators. How do they figure that? Since the report of Sarah's death comes almost immediately after the account of the binding of Isaac, it is believed by some that his mother had simply collapsed and expired, maybe a heart attack, maybe a stroke, when news reached her of what her old man had been up to this time, it was the last straw. Mother Sarah was one hundred and twenty-seven years old when she dropped dead, she had given birth to Isaac at age ninety, which would have made him thirty-seven when he was sacrificed. And the loopy question he asks as he so docilely tags along with Abraham to the land of the Moriah—My father, here's the fire and the wood, but where's the sheep for the burnt offering?—and how passively he allows himself to be bound onto the altar without a peep of protest, a thirty-seven-year-old man, there must have been something wrong with him, something not so
beseder
upstairs. Temima tapped her temple with her forefinger, and shook her head. Three years later, at the age of forty, he is married off to a wife picked out by his father and delivered from the old country by his father's consigliere, Eliezer of Damascus—Not one of the local Canaanite sluts for my boy Isaac, the old man had said to the Damascene, promise me, place your hand under my testicles and swear. And how old is Rebekah when Isaac marries her? Three!—according to the commentators. How do we learn this? Because her birth is announced immediately after the incident on Mount Moriah, directly before the death of Sarah. So at the age of three, Rebekah waves bye-bye to her father, Betuel, and her brother Laban and with a shiny new gold ring in her nose she is lifted up onto a camel by Abraham's right-hand man Eliezer of Damascus and led away, she crosses over from Aram-Naharayim to the land of Canaan—accompanied by her wet nurse. You have to wonder—What kind of normal man marries a three-year-old?

On the day that Hagar was weaned, at the age of three and one day, Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah, made a great feast for the entire community, as Father Abraham had done when Sarah weaned Isaac. By that point in her studies of Genesis as transcribed by Shira Silver Kedaisha, Temima was preparing to dictate her teachings on the thirty-fourth chapter: And Dina daughter of Leah whom she had borne
to Jacob went out to look over the daughters of the land. Shekhem son of Hamor the Hivite prince of the land saw her, and he took her and lay with her and raped her.

The feast celebrating the weaning was held in the grand pavilion, attended by the entire village, the men and boys separated from the women and girls by a line of blooming plants, bright reds, pinks, vermillion. In the men's section, Abba Kadosh was enthroned on a peacock chair in pluming extravagant display. His daughter, the freshly weaned child he called Zippora bat Cushi, decked out like a bride in a white dress and white headscarf for this special occasion, was seated on his lap under a canopy held up by four men while his chief wife Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha took her place in an honorary position behind him, screened by the flamboyance of the throne. To symbolically mark the separation of mother and child that weaning signified, Temima was seated at the opposite end of the pavilion amid the women on a lesser peacock chair meant for a queen also under a canopy held up by four women. The gospel choir, Kol-Koreh-BaMidbar under the baton of Melekh Sinai, to the accompaniment of Shira Silver Kedaisha's small orchestra in a curtained-off area, performed a medley of tunes, including the spiritual “Oh Mother Don't You Weep” and a hearty rendition of the Hebrew celebratory hymn, “Siman Tov and Mazel Tov,” setting the entire crowd rocking and waving its arms jubilantly.

The dancing and hand clapping and singing of
Siman Tov u'Mazel Tov
continued full force even as Melekh Sinai left his position at the podium in front of the chorus and took his place under the canopy.
Siman Tov u'Mazel Tov
went on throbbing and pulsating as Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha, carrying in her arms Zippora bat Cushi, the child Temima called Hagar gearing up for a tantrum because her face was covered by her white scarf and she couldn't see anything, encircled Melekh Sinai seven times. Since in this instance Abba Kadosh held with the sages of the Talmud who asserted that a girl of three years and one day may be betrothed by sexual intercourse (though prior to that age it would be like sticking a finger in her eye), he now read out loud the marriage contract in full legal Aramaic and recited the seven marriage blessings in Hebrew in the traditional rabbinic style. The cloth was lifted from the girl's face and she was given some sweet wine to sip, which calmed her down. Melekh Sinai slipped a glittery ring on her milk-fattened dimpled finger, which
pleased her very much, and pronounced the prescribed words to Zippora bat Cushi, Temima's daughter Hagar: Behold, you are consecrated to me with this ring in accordance with the law of Moses and Israel. Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah, father of the bride and officiator at this sacrament of matrimony, intoned, May your Yah rejoice over you, as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride. Then Melekh Sinai brought his foot down, stamped on a glass and shattered it. The crowd went wild, roaring
Siman Tov u'Mazel Tov
ever louder and more ecstatically. Melekh Sinai turned to face the congregation, one arm plumbed downward gripping the raised hand of his bride Zippora bat Cushi, Temima's Hagar, happily sticking out her bright red tongue to lick the cherry lollipop that Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha had reached into a pocket to give her. Basking in a shower of
Siman Tov u'Mazel Tov
auspicious signs, good luck and good wishes, the couple stood there under the wedding canopy facing their guests, by the law of Moses and Israel husband and wife.