One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (8 page)

A garbage truck was maneuvering past them toward the president's house as the procession now wended its way up Jabotinsky Street headed by Temima in her aperion borne aloft by her four Bnei Zeruya with the four armored policemen mounted on their horses riding two on each side. Kol-Isha-Erva thought she recognized the driver. She thought she had also seen him earlier that day—in the
shuk
of Mea Shearim, sweeping up the stale human refuse with a brush broom, and then later on again in French Square, among the squad of salvagers scooping up the carcass of the dead dog. But she dismissed her ruminations as unworthy. She was stereotyping menials, she admonished herself, they all looked alike to her, she couldn't tell them apart, and even if an injunction against stereotyping did not exist so far as Kol-Isha-Erva knew in either the Written or the Oral Law, as a woman who had started in a secular place and who could not quite purge herself of the common naive values that had formed her, Kol-Isha-Erva was overcome with shame by the baseness of her private associations and prejudices, she shook her head hard now as if to knock them out of her mind like foul water in her ears.

From Jabotinsky the procession swung right, in accordance with Temima's instructions, into David Marcus Street, continuing unimpeded and without further incident past the Jerusalem Theater that was featuring an adaptation of S.Y. Agnon's unfinished novel,
Shira
, moving onward alongside a descending stone wall with strange sealed doors set flush in the masonry evoking Temima's nightmare, following the wall down the hill as they turned left and very soon after came to an abrupt stop on Temima's clipped command to the head of her Bnei Zeruya—
Poh!
—at an iron gate. The huskiest of the policemen accompanying them now alit from his horse, proceeded to the gate, unlocked it with a key he drew flamboyantly out of his pocket, threw the gate wide open, mounted his horse again, and nodded to his companions, at which signal all four swiveled the tails and the great defecating rumps of their beasts toward Temima's congregation and trotted off. Not a soul was surprised by this fanfare of special protection. It merely confirmed yet again how Temima was set apart by an extraordinary endowment of divine personal providence.

There are eight entrances in the stone walls that surround the leper colony in the heart of Jerusalem, but this was the main entrance and it was the grandest, and through it HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv in her aperion and her entire flock entered and left this world.

They marched down the central pathway toward the hospital building rising straight ahead in front of them with the words J
ESUS
H
ILFE
carved into the pediment from the days when the nuns and deaconesses of the order of the Moravians had ministered to the lepers, proffering the help of Jesus with punishing ecstasy. On either side of the path were fruit bearing and shade trees, olive and pomegranate and almond, carob and spruce and palm, and ancient gnarled cactuses, and there was a great stone cistern in which the water had been collected when the colony had been almost entirely self-sustaining and few healthy outsiders were condemned to enter to provide services and be infected. They passed the ruins of the herb and healing gardens with early spring sprouts of poppy, sweet pea, and hyssop, sage and lavender and nasturtium, haphazardly tended in therapeutic programs by youth groups afflicted with physical handicaps and mental retardation after the last lepers had been extruded and put away no one knew where.

They paused in their forward advance to wait politely as two ancient turtles took their time making their way across the path as if in deep
conversation, reminiscing on over a century of lepers who had lived and died in contaminated isolation and quarantine within these walls, taking note, perhaps, that now it seemed the patients were returning after all, but unwilling to tax their constitutions by letting themselves grow too excited about this new development.

Kol-Isha-Erva climbed the steps to the landing in front of the main entrance to the hospital. Standing under the Jesus Hilfe inscription, gazing out over the assembled massed below her made up preponderantly of women, and speaking in the name of HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, she said, “
Ha'maivina tavin
—in other words, She who understands will understand.”

There was a savage scramble as the members of Temima's congregation swarmed in every direction to stake out for themselves the best squatting spaces within the hospital itself, with some of the less enterprising souls in the end forced to find shelter on the balconies or outside in the gardens. Cozbi and Paltiel claimed for themselves, as was their right, a suite of rooms on the ward floor, on the staff's side of the partition still in place that had segregated the patients from those who had cared for them with exemplary pious strictness, since, as we learn in Leviticus, even stones and houses can be stricken with
zora'at
and must undergo purification. Rizpa was allotted a designated room next to the laundry and the kitchen, which, to the wonderment of all that only served to elevate and confirm in their eyes the powers of HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, was already fully stocked with provisions of all sorts to last an indeterminate length of time, as if it were a bomb shelter. No one questioned these miracles. They believed in Temima and the higher forces that hovered in her radiance to protect and provide for her.

In the midst of this frenzy, a hidden chamber on the patients' side of the ward was discovered to be already occupied by a man wearing a keffiyeh on his head flowing down over his shoulders to the middle of his back who would not turn around to face those who stood frozen in the doorway and would not respond when they addressed him—an Arab squatter perhaps, perhaps, even more troubling, a leftover leper; the members of Temima's flock who had stumbled upon him backed out of the entrance and slammed the door. Later, when Temima was apprised of this situation, she commanded with cold severity, “Do not raise your hand against the boy, and do not do anything at all to him”—summoning
the words of the heavenly messenger addressing Father Abraham in the nick of time as he raised the knife to slaughter his son.

Temima Ba'alatOv, meanwhile, was borne onward in her aperion by her four Bnei Zeruya around the hospital building on its left side, along the terraced stairs to the dark secluded garden in the northern corner. From the moment they had entered the leper colony she had closed her eyes, displaying no curiosity at all about the new surroundings she had labored so hard to attain, opening them again only after her aperion had been set down and she had been carried with respectful delicacy out of it by her four Bnei Zeruya and conveyed into the small apartment at the edge of the garden and laid down on the bed that had been prepared for her made up with crisp white linens, tucking in her little mother Torah that she was hugging to her breast like a plush stuffed animal cozily beside her. A Tanakh was already set out for her on the bedside table, and beyond that across the room there was another table covered with a white cloth with a small vase of blood red poppies in the center and a chair for Kol-Isha-Erva to sit on when taking down Temima's words.

She stretched out her hand toward the Tanakh on her nightstand in a gesture as if to claim it, then pushed it away from her. “Blot me out please from Your book that You have written,” Temima said softly. She closed her eyes again in a sign of great physical weakness and exhaustion, and Kol-Isha-Erva looked discreetly away when she noticed the old-lady tears being wrung out from under the creased lids as if from a rag. “The Talmud tells us that there are four categories of people who are considered to be the living-dead,” Temima said, speaking in almost a whisper with her eyes still shut. “A blind man, a poor man, a childless man, and a leper. To that we now add a fifth—a woman. This is not commentary, it is simple logical deduction. I have had the misfortune to enter the Promised Land. Unlike Moses Our Teacher, I have not been spared.”

The Teachings Of HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, Shlita

(May She Live On For Many Good Long Years)—

Recorded By Kol-Isha-Erva At The “Leper” Colony Of Jerusalem

I
N THE
awareness of the Presence and the awareness of the congregation, in the convocation of the heights and in the convocation below, and at the personal behest of our holy mother, HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, shlita, I am privileged to be appointed scribe charged with taking down for us transgressors the teachings of Ima Temima and with recording events of note as they transpire during our sojourn here in the Hansen's Disease treatment center compound of Jerusalem. Every syllable I write is read aloud to Ima Temima for final approval. Thus, I am justly admonished by Ima Temima at the outset for referring to our present place of habitation as the Hansen's Disease treatment center rather than “leper” colony. When I humbly suggest with utter reverence that the term “leper” is no longer acceptable usage and is universally deemed offensive, Ima Temima bestows a wise smile upon me and offers that I am regressing to my pre-enlightenment stage when my woman's voice was clothed rather than naked. “Who
told you that you are naked? The serpent, most naked and wily of all beasts—to shut you out of paradise, and to shut you up.” This is a teaching of Ima Temima in the “leper” colony of Jerusalem.

On the explicit instructions of Ima Temima, this journal is to be called “More Bitter Than Death Is Woman,” a verse from the book of Ecclesiastes—by the author known as Kohelet, the nom de plume, some say, for King Solomon himself, gripped by melancholy and depression. With total reverence, I raise my wily woman's naked voice to speculate on the appropriateness of this title, suggesting with great diffidence that it might perhaps be construed as misogynistic: Full of traps and snares is woman, Kohelet goes on to rant, not even one in a thousand is any good. If it really is Solomon, Ima Temima remarks with a dark laugh, he should know, since he kept in his harem a total of one thousand women, wives and concubines.

Yet very correctly our holy mother goes on to chide me for slipping into the pitfall of conventional self-censorship and excessive concern about public perception. It is then that Ima Temima puts forward a teaching of radical import: Kohelet was a woman. This is evident, Ima Temima demonstrates, not only from the obvious feminine form of her name, but also from the fact that the feminine conjugation of the word “said”—
amrah
Kohelet—is used in attributing this seemingly most woman-bashing of observations, providing the ironic clue to its true authorship and meaning for anyone open enough to grasp it. “Most people simply don't penetrate behind the mask,” Ima Temima elaborates. “Kohelet passes herself off as a prince in the Davidic line, but it's not the first or last time in history that a woman author has been forced to create a masculine persona in order to be listened to, much less to be taken seriously. And who but a self-hating woman can better deploy the voice of a man to be more expressively self-hating than even a self-hating Jew? And how much more so if the self-hating woman is also a self-hating Jew? But once you recognize the voice as the voice of a woman you understand that only a woman would know better than anyone else on earth how bitter we are, yes, more bitter than death—and for good reason.”

O
N THE
morning after our arrival at the “leper” colony, an event occurred that threw the entire camp into great consternation and even inspired a goodly number of doubting souls to take sudden flight through any opening in the walls that would permit them egress, some even clambering over in faithless panic when doors would not yield, to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. That morning, as many members of our flock were strolling the grounds to explore our new headquarters, and as the Daughters of Bilha and Zilpa under the direction of Rizpa, one of Ima Temima's two treasured personal attendants and our domestic management associate, were hauling in the bags of fresh provisions that had been left outside the gate—fruits, vegetables, dairy products, baked goods, as well as the first delivery of supplies for the forthcoming Passover festival—an unusually large and heavy object came flying over the southern wall into our compound, striking the head of our circumcision engineer, Zippi, cherished daughter of Ima Temima by our mutual ex-husband, the late Abba Kadosh, a'h (peace be unto him), knocking her out cold. This was doubly unfortunate as Zippi is the primary health care provider for our community; in cases of illness or accident, it would have been she who would have been called upon to be our server.

A decision was made to defer informing Ima Temima, who in any event at that very moment was engaged in the standing meditation of the morning prayer and could not be disturbed even if the world were coming to an end, God forbid. Rizpa ran for help to the apartment we had all noticed on the western side. This, by all accounts, is the home of a senior-citizen physician, allocated to him and his family as their place of residence in exchange for his on-call service to the “lepers” in nighttime emergencies. He had been granted the right to continue living there for the remainder of his natural life even after the last of his clients had been purged. Rizpa soon came back to report that the apartment was in shambles and abandoned, and she went on to add that the unmistakable ghosts of the bodies of the doctor and his wife were imprinted on their beds like stains in a substance that she likened to a white chalk, as if they had slowly decomposed there.