One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (44 page)

The three women working alongside Temima did not question her actions, they simply followed her lead, putting their complete trust in her higher powers. It required the maximum effort from all four of them heaving together to levitate the rigid, putrefying mass of Frumie's body, whisk away the cloth it was resting upon and replace it with Temima's talit with its fringe torn, no longer usable for prayer. As they were folding the talit over Frumie as if shaping a stuffed cabbage, bundling her to be sent off from the struggle of this world to the void who knew where, Temima pronounced the words, “Frima daughter of Zsuzsi and Rudolf, know that you are dead.” Only then did the body seem truly to expire, to relax and deflate. The face cloth with the broken pieces of earthenware over the eyes and mouth seemed to flutter and they all heard the words, “Thank you, Tema.”

The members of the holy society turned stunned to Temima. One of them dared to inquire. “You know her?”

Temima nodded. “Yes, I knew her. Alas poor Frumie.”

The more flesh, the more worms, Rabbi Hillel was wont to say. In almost the same breath he also used to say, The more women, the more witchcraft. This was the more tolerant sage Hillel, the Hillel of the Golden Rule, the Hillel who did not, as did the more severe Rabbi Shammai, swing his stick in the air to whack the prospective proselyte who had the audacity to demand to be taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot, but answered instead, What is hateful to you do not do to your friend.

The rest is commentary.

As word spread throughout the Jewish Quarter and beyond that the dead women prepared by Temima for the next life invariably raised their
voices in the final moment to thank her, there were those among the living who also raised their voices—to accuse Temima of witchcraft. Conjuring up the dead, consulting familiar spirits and ghosts, the
ov
and
yedonim
—this is a Canaanite abomination strictly forbidden in the Torah, an encounter with the supernatural we are fiercely enjoined to shun, an odious practice we must ruthlessly extrude from the sanctified precincts of the Promised Land along with its idolatrous priestesses.

Temima's response was sharp and absolute. She let it be known that henceforth she would be called Temima Ba'alatOv, Mistress of the Spirits, to honor the woman / witch (here the two words had elided and become synonymous) of Endor who at the behest of King Saul raised from the dead the ghost of Samuel to ask for a prophecy.

You have sinned, God has forsaken you, tomorrow you will die, the prophet said.

You shall not let a sorceress live, the Torah says. “It depends how we define ‘live,'” said Fish'l Sabon, leader of the movement in the Jewish Quarter against Temima. “In that golden age when the Messiah comes, speedily and in our day, God willing, when the Holy Temple is restored on its Mount and the Torah is once again the law of the land, a witch will be put to death by stoning, the same as a person who has had sexual intercourse with an animal. Meanwhile, in these dark and profane times, we shall not let her live in peace.”

Out of pity for Fish'l Sabon, Temima tolerated his harassments for nearly a full year. In a sad way, she felt a strange kinship with him. The story was that he too had taken his name—Sabon,
soap
—in a spirit of defiance reminiscent of how she herself had assumed the mantle of Ba'alatOv, in his case to spit in the eye of the arrogant Zionist powers who, with such disdain for what they regarded to be the sheep-to-the-slaughter passivity of Diaspora Jews, had called the victims of the Shoah
sabon
since, as rumor had it, soap was what the fat of their bodies had been processed into by the Nazi psychopaths. You call us Sabon, you obnoxious Zionist snobs? Fish'l in effect was saying. Henceforth, that will be my name, my badge of honor, I wear it with pride.

Of course, Fish'l had not been recycled into soap himself, but he was a survivor—as Temima taught, Who in this life is not a survivor? Orphaned before the age of ten, he wandered alone in perpetual terror somewhere in Eastern Europe, hiding due to the ineradicable scar of Jewishness on
his male flesh, joining a band of partisans in the woods where, because of his small stature and undernourished size, he was used to plant explosives on railroad tracks. After the war he was smuggled by Zionist activists out of a displaced persons camp, arriving in pre-state Israel singing the “Hatikva” at the top of his lungs and dancing a hora, then forcibly turned away by the British occupiers to Cyprus. There Fish'l, by then already a young man nearly twenty years old, along with his fellow survivors, was herded yet again, to the everlasting shame of the entire so-called civilized world, into another prison camp behind barbed wire.

No one knew how he eventually made it back to Israel to settle permanently. There were some, it is true, who maliciously and it is generally agreed falsely maintained that Fish'l had never actually been in the war at all or even a bit player in its theater—that he had never even been out of the Holy Land in his entire life, that he was a ninth-generation descendant of a family that sustained itself on alms from the Diaspora and begging from pilgrims in the alleys and arcades of the Old City of Jerusalem, and that his true name was Yonah Seif. For this version of the story, there is very little authoritative support.

One thing is certain, however. Until his public emergence as Fish'l Sabon, as if fully formed like Adam himself the first man without the tenderizing benefit of childhood or youth or for that matter a mother soon after the Six Day War of 1967, very little is known about Fish'l Sabon except that he had been a constant presence at the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann six years earlier as evidenced by the repeated capturing of his unmistakable image in the background of news photographs and television footage from that historic event. No one even knew how he had made a living until he came out fully and definitively in that triumphant messianic year, 5727 from the creation of the world, though there were some who asserted that he was the mysterious author known as 202500, widely admired and revered as the writer and illustrator of a series of booklets that brought to public attention in painful detail the terrible sadistic sexual tortures of the Nazis, may their name and memory be erased.

For Fish'l, Israel's stunning victory in the Six Day War against such impossible odds was an irrefutable sign that the redemption was underway and the messianic age at hand. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to recognize the mighty hand of God in such an obvious miracle, Fish'l
insisted, or damaged even more hopelessly, in the very pith of your soul. It was around this time that Fish'l assumed the title Baba, an acronym heralding the imminent arrival of the Messiah,
B'mhera B'yamenu Amen
, Speedily and in our Time, Amen. Baba Fish'l Sabon burst into the public consciousness by establishing himself as a fixture at the redeemed and repossessed Western Wall, declaring himself its official janitor. Every night he could be seen with a squeegee and a bucket, mopping the stones of the plaza in front of the wall, and once a week, after the Sabbath, when three stars appeared in the darkened sky and the blessing dividing the sacred from the profane was recited with sprigs of fragrant rosemary wafted in the air, Baba Fish'l would come out with a long rubber hose and aim a powerful stream of water full force at the stones of the wall, sending the piteous
kvittlakh
and petitions stuffed in their crannies pouring down in rivulets like copious tears, which he swept up with a brush broom into plastic garbage bins and dumped.

Everyone agreed that the fissures and clefts had to be regularly cleared out to make room for the next batch in the endless flood of pain and supplications, but there were those who were troubled by Baba Fish'l's seeming callousness and sacrilege in discarding with such casual disrespect and hardheartedness these poignant letters many of them doubtless inscribed with the name of God as the addressee, therefore rendering them holy fragments requiring eternal preservation through burial in a designated cache. To these benighted souls, Baba Fish'l coolly pointed out, “A retaining wall, nothing more,” with a contemptuous shrug of a shoulder toward the massive stones bolstering the western side of the mountain. “An exterior wall, a prop, a casing, like a pita bread,” Baba Fish'l added. Raising his eyes to indicate the plateau protruding above the wall overlooking the plaza with its two domed Muslim edifices, like two invasive tumors, he said, “Up there—that's the big falafel.”

Not for a single minute did Baba Fish'l lose sight of this prize. It infuriated him that the Zionist government had so cravenly handed over control of the Temple Mount to the imams of the Muslim Waqf after the war in June of sixty-seven, an unforgivable suicidal multi-culti concession to stroke and make nice to the gentile world that loathed us even more for our imbecile simpering fawning and obsequiousness. Every one of Baba Fish'l's thoughts and actions from that day forth was focused on reclaiming this old threshing floor of Arauna the Jebusite, which David
our king who is alive and everlasting had purchased for fifty silver shekels fair and square for the purpose of erecting an altar up there to stanch the plague that was consuming the Jewish people in those days—and, in our own day, too, Baba Fish'l hastened to add, is still eating us up alive.

To build an altar up there once again, to restore the Holy Temple erected on this site by David's son Solomon in all of its splendor so unparalleled that he who had never seen it had never seen beauty in his life—this was the goal to which Baba Fish'l now dedicated himself. To reach this height, he publicly declared himself a Nazir, asserting that he would faithfully adhere to his Nazirite vow of asceticism until the Temple Mount was reclaimed. It was this Nazirite path that rendered the particular offense of Temima's communion with the dead, her necromancy, even more profoundly distressing to him than her all-around witchcraft, which in and of itself was already bad enough. He declared himself a Nazir very soon after he came to the wall as its self-styled custodian in his quest to discover the divinely ordained path from this peripheral station to the Holy of Holies at the summit. Standing in front of the wall with a cadre of fellow seekers he declared, “The first
kvittel
I pluck out from between these stones will reveal to me the way to the top.” He inserted his hand, pulled out a precisely folded note torn from a pad with a letterhead that indicated it had come from a law firm in Washington, D.C., and read aloud these words: Dear G-d, Please don't let me go bald. Thank you in advance. Sincerely, Mervin Zupnik, Esq.

In a flash, Baba Fish'l recognized that this was the sign he was seeking. The most distinctive feature of the Nazir, the way in which a person who has taken the Nazirite vow can instantly be recognized, is his hair that he is forbidden to cut, like Samson, because it is in his hair that a man's life force and vital strength reside, it is his crown and glory that he dedicates to the Lord. A razor may not touch the head of a Nazir; the fullness of his growth of hair is the outward mark of his vow as its inward expressions are his abstinence from eating grapes in any form wet or dry, intoxicating or not—the blood of the grape—and his avoidance of all contact with a dead person, even his closest relative, mother or father, sister or brother, son or daughter. With these three strictures the Nazir sets himself apart as holy to God throughout the specified duration of his vow, in certain respects even holier than the high priest himself who can sip his wine while getting a haircut. Extracting from the lawyer Zupnik's note the
divine sign he was seeking intended for him alone, Baba Fish'l immediately announced that he was taking upon himself the yoke of the Nazir, sanctifying himself to God for a designated period of time, which, Baba Fish'l affirmed, would be the day on which he would be able to mark the fulfillment of his vow by offering up the requisite sacrifices on an altar on top of the Temple Mount.

Several times a year, without any advance notice, Baba Fish'l and his band of followers would attempt the ascent up the Temple Mount carrying a one-year-old unblemished male lamb for a burnt offering, an unblemished ewe lamb in its first year for a sin offering, a ram without blemish for a peace offering under which he hoped to burn his shorn-off hair upon ending his Nazirite term as is required, plus a basket of unleavened cakes with their libations as well as a portable altar and all the other prescribed accessories and gear. One way or another, with varying degrees of savagery and derision, the pilgrims were always halted in their ascent and prevented from attaining their hearts' desire. Most likely there was a traitor or a mole or a double agent planted in his inner circle, Baba Fish'l suspected. They were blocked not only by the Muslim interlopers and trespassers, as might have been expected from such barbarians, but, far more troubling, by the Israeli authorities themselves, their own brothers and sisters, the vaunted holy nation, the kingdom of priests, who cut them off with astonishing ruthlessness and shocking mockery.

In his most spectacular attempt to end his Nazirite period with the mandated sacrifices, which exploded in banner headlines in all the newspapers not only in Israel but in the nations of the world as well, Baba Fish'l and his comrades loaded the animals and all the other supplies including the porta-altar onto a helicopter paid for by a billionaire American evangelical from Florida and sought to land on top of the Temple Mount, only to be viciously apprehended and placed under arrest by a security force welcoming committee made up of Arabs and Jews, united for the first time in history for this disgraceful purpose.

As the years passed and he persisted without success in his efforts to bring his Nazirite vows to an end by performing the required sacrifices on top of the Temple Mount, Baba Fish'l's hair, which he was not permitted even to pass a comb through lest he break a strand in violation of his ascetic commitment, grew into a wildly tangled ash-colored mass with the coarseness of sackcloth stuffed with straw, ending in long tassels of
fused-together locks, the tips so dry they seemed to give off a crackling sound like kindling as he moved about the vicinity of the wall carrying out his self-imposed duties, a small, withered holy man upon whose head the dark mass of a threatening sludge-brown cloud seemed to have settled and would never lift. For a Nazir, it's all in the head, Baba Fish'l taught—not only the hair on top, but also the hole in the face known as the mouth through which he abstains from taking in the fruit of the vine, and the two little holes of the nose through which he avoids even breathing in the secondhand smoke of death by rigorously shunning all proximity and contact.