One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (48 page)

Early the next morning the four ex-convicts in their orange prison jumpsuits appeared again pushing a dolly on which was mounted a huge steel vault bank safe weighing several tons. Still without uttering a word, chanting only the mantra of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, You should know that the whole world is a very narrow bridge, they wheeled the safe to the honored spot at the head of the hall where the violated ark had stood. They hoisted and maneuvered it into place, tested the alarm system, checked the security of the tight-fitting door, and handed a sealed envelope to Kol-Isha-Erva containing the code to the combination lock. Three of them then perched on the dolly as on a scooter while the fourth, the giant who had carried the desecrated and befouled ark on his back the day before, pushed his comrades out of the study hall into the street, all of them singing jubilantly at the top of their voices over and over again the chorus affirming the most important point—Not to be afraid at all.

When the four returned again about two weeks later they were dressed in shimmering white, their holiday best, no one would ever have known they had once been in captivity. It was the fifth day of Sivan on the cusp of
summer, the anniversary of the death of Sashia, wife of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, who bore him two sons taken in infancy and six daughters, four of whom survived; therefore he had no heirs and his followers are known as the Dead Hasidim. It was also the eve of the holiday of Shavuot when the liberated Hebrew slaves received the Torah in the wilderness at Sinai—or, as Temima observed referring to the text, at least the men among them received the Torah at Sinai, since it stands to reason that God's command to prepare and sanctify and make themselves pure three days in advance by abstaining from going near a woman could only have been directed to the men. There was thunder and lightning, the mountain was covered in clouds of smoke from God's fiery presence upon it, it trembled violently, the blast of the shofar grew louder and louder. The trumpets blared as the four freed slaves, each one holding aloft a pole attached to a corner of a canopy stretched overhead as in a wedding procession, made their way toward the Temima Shul through streets lined with onlookers. Beneath the canopy other newly redeemed slaves carried the reclaimed Torah scrolls freshly decked out in gleaming white satin mantles and ornate sterling pomegranate finials and lavish high silver crowns like brides, and behind them came more men rejoicing, whirling with all their might and leaping into the air, shouting and blasting their horns, roaring the words of Rav Nakhman, The bride is beautiful, Love is perfect.

Temima, also dressed in white with a heavy white veil over her face, opened the safe-ark with the combination of numbers that equaled three hundred and forty-four totaling
pardes
, the orchard at the heart of which the universe's most dangerous knowledge is guarded. The Torah scrolls were settled inside the ark-safe in their rightful places, the doors were shut, and the white satin
huppa
was taken down from its four poles and hung on a specially designed rod to serve as a curtain over the face of the ark.

Embroidered in gold thread across this curtain were the words, A
MONG
W
OMEN IN
H
ER
T
ENT OF
T
ORAH
M
OST
B
LESSED, THE
R
ABBI, THE
Z
ADDIK, THE
Q
UEEN, THE
A
NOINTED ONE
, T
EMIMA
B
A
'
ALAT
O
V
, D
AUGHTER OF
R
ACHEL
-L
EAH OF
B
ROOKLYN
. This was Elisha Pardes's final gift to her, she knew now for sure that he had set out and was gone. Temima took her place in front of the ark and surveyed the congregation, the women packing the main stalls, overlooking them in the balcony the men including a few of Kaddish's Hasidim who had been swept in with the crowd
and whom she recognized from the
pulsa denura,
conspicuous now for the white gauze bandages wrapped around their heads, arms in casts and splints, black eyes, bruised and swollen faces, leaning on crutches, still groaning in pain days after the battle to reclaim the abducted scrolls, and as she gazed outward she searched within herself for the truth concerning the fate of the beautiful bride once the wedding is over.

Kaddish waited three days from the end of the Shavuot holiday and the Sabbath that followed. On the third night he dispatched his commandos with brushes and pails of flour paste and thousands of new posters still smelling of wet ink to be hung up wall-to-wall screaming in thick black letters that a
herem
is hereby imposed upon the witch known as Temima Ba'alatOv. She is hereby excommunicated from the congregation of Israel. She is to be ostracized and treated as dead. She has no place in the world to come. All God-fearing people are hereby strictly ordered to shun her like a leper lest her defilement rub off on them and contaminate them. Should they unintentionally cross her polluted path or come within four cubits of her contagion they must immediately turn their backs to her and run away, they must stuff their fingers in their ears if she attempts to speak, they must spit three times onto the ground as if to vomit her dreck out of their system and utter the words, Ptui, Ptui, Ptui.

“What does it mean for a woman to be excommunicated, to be put into
herem
?” Temima calmly posed the question to Kol-Isha-Erva who had conveyed the news of this latest assault and then took down the words of her teacher. “Not to be counted in the minyan? Not to be called up to the Torah? Not to be honored with leading the blessing after the meal? To be banned from the study hall? To be isolated and excluded and treated with contempt? To be ignored in public? To be considered unclean and impure? To be regarded as weak and inferior and light-minded? To be kept out of sight and confined to the
harem
? Is it at all surprising that over the centuries no one has really taken the trouble to put women into
herem
? I shall send word to the Oscwiecim pretender that I am honored among women to be singled out for official recognition and, yes, somewhat befuddled as to why he even bothered.”

She dictated to Kol-Isha-Erva her thank you note to be delivered to Kaddish, adding as a helpful postscript the personal suggestion that for
his own sake he might wish to consult the Gemara Sanhedrin page such-and-such, column such-and-such for a discussion of the cut-off age for abusing a child above which pederasty is considered a sin warranting stoning, but if the urge is too overwhelming for him with no convenient outlet she suggested that he take the advice of those sages who ruled that it is not a capital offense to relieve oneself by using one's own member to penetrate one's own anus.

Temima raised no objections when Kol-Isha-Erva indicated she would make this response public. By no means was Temima of the camp that maintained it is preferable to refrain from washing dirty linen in public out of fear of what the goyim might say or from pointing an accusatory finger at a clerical figure who has exploited his position lest the entire congregation of Israel be stigmatized. She fully intended to air out the filth inside Kaddish's house, but her immediate task was to fumigate the courtyard in front of her own. Kaddish's people had appropriated it as if she no longer existed, the logical outcome of the excommunication imposed against her like a death certificate. They laid claim to the vacated estate. Temima ordered her Bnei Zeruya and other supporters to prevent the trespassers from invading the building itself, but for the interim she was tolerating their squatting outside her door.

They transformed the courtyard overlooked by her headquarters into a bazaar bustling late into the summer night. Young boys escaped from stifling schoolrooms to this new attraction to engage in the furious trading of rebbe cards bearing portraits of rabbinical luminaries with their records and rankings—I'll give you nine Teitelbaums for one Feinstein, five Gerrers for one Munkacz—which they would then flip against the wall panting asthmatically in long intense matches. Married men left their study halls where they were serving the nation spiritually through Torah learning to deal in all manner of goods from lottery tickets to cigarettes to ritual objects to diamonds. Old men were parked in the morning in their wheelchairs under the fig and pomegranate trees by female members of their households where they sat until the moon came up and the chill set in peddling single shoelaces and half-used toilet paper rolls that they had secreted out of the house in their pockets, false teeth belonging to the recently departed or plastic bottles of unfinished pills with the labels peeled off. Throughout the day they all ate nonstop, food that did not require the washing of hands and a full grace after the meal. The yard
filled up with the remains, sunflower seeds and peanut shells, wax paper from greasy snacks, candy wrappers, fruit pits and peels, empty soda and juice cans, tea and coffee cups. Cats poked in the rubbish, ravens perched high up on tree limbs, foxes were seen prowling at night.

Scooping up handfuls of this trash they cried out
Schmutz! Dreck! Treyf!
and hurled it at Temima's disciples making their way through this swarming occupied territory to their master's feet undeterred. Nor did Temima in principle alter her comings and goings, pausing at her door in a cocoon of her stalwarts as Kol-Isha-Erva raised her woman's naked voice to order the interlopers off the property at once—The ground you are treading upon is holy, You are banished outside the camp for your sins—which provoked them to turn their backs instantly and scurry to the edges of the garbage-strewn courtyard as far as they could go with their fingers plugged in their ears, muttering Ptui, ptui, ptui! and spitting on the ground. Now and then Temima would deliberately coordinate her departures with their prayers three times a day, as they were immersed in the Eighteen Benedictions of the Amidah with their feet pressed together, forbidden from reacting to any interruption or distraction. While they squinched their eyes shut and murmured to themselves the verses of the silent devotion—May all the heretics perish instantly, Speedily uproot all deliberate sinners, smash them, cast them down, destroy them, humble and humiliate them speedily and in our day—Kol-Isha-Erva would excoriate their master Kaddish as a molester and pervert and pedophile and pederast, and then she would proceed to revile all of them as well for scavenging in this plot, they were like maggots and dung beetles, they were nothing but parasites, and she would order them off the premises immediately if they knew what was good for them. By the time they took three steps backward and bowed their heads three times in three directions and muttered He who makes peace in His heights, Temima and her retinue had passed through their swaying rows, out of the courtyard, and disappeared.

The Bnei Zeruya pleaded to be allowed to break the heads of these pathetic invaders—Come, let us give their flesh to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field—but Temima rejected this brute tactic, rounding her thumb and forefinger into a circlet and gesturing with her fist, an indication to just be patient and wait to see how events will unfold. On the third day she authorized the police to dispatch two officers on horseback
to the courtyard, but she forbade them from doing anything further such as tossing canisters of tear gas into the rabble, a service they had offered to perform, no problem. They were simply to station themselves in the midst of the crowd as a warning, like the queen of England's mounted guard. As the hours passed and no action was taken by these armed men on their lofty beasts, the squatters grew emboldened, calling them Nazis, Gestapo, pogromchiks, Chmielnickis, anti-Semitin', corrupt instruments of the corrupt Zionist state, at other times attempting to reason with them and win them over to their side by stressing the point that, after all, the land they were seizing was vacant as the previous occupant had been officially pronounced dead, it was a land without a people and they were people without land, as the Zionists like to say in their own defense. The children pulled the tails of the horses and dared each other to run under them but the long-suffering animals paid no attention, they stood there stoically and endured, placidly dumping clods of manure onto the ground, contributing to the muck.

Toward evening of the fifth day the police on their horses moved to either side blocking the opening into the street at the same time as Temima's people under the command of the Bnei Zeruya contingent dispersed in the courtyard and jammed the squatters into a huddled mass in the middle facing the doorway of Temima's headquarters. Temima herself emerged with Kol-Isha-Erva at her side. The two women set their feet on the threshold as on a small platform that seemed to be fashioned out of bricks of sapphire, like the essence of heaven in purity.

Kol-Isha-Erva raised her woman's naked voice. “Listen up, guys. Your time is up. The party's over. If you continue to remain here, violating this holy space, you will be condemned to look at the forbidden at mortal peril to your souls.”

Temima then stepped forward. “On this day you will know that I live and that it is I who am speaking,” she declared through her veil. “
Hineini
. I am here.”

She parted her robes. Naked, she revealed herself to them.