It is a matter of record that certain living creatures, feeling the end of life squeezing them in, make one last desperate attempt to break free and do exactly what they want to do and express themselves exactly as they wish to be understood, on their own terms, without consideration of the desires or pressures or disapproval of family and other enemies, or of any being at all who claims ownership over them.
As she readied herself to carry out such an action, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, the renowned Jerusalem Bible teacher and beloved guru revered as Ima Temima by thousands of disciples, called to mind the case of the most godlike of all mortal creators, the writer Lev Tolstoy, who in a grand final gesture took flight from the unbearable materialism and vulgarity of wife and other hangers-on and bolted from his estate Yasnaya Polyana in search of the purity he preached and needed—yes, he had to have it right now, he could not put it off another minute, this was his last chance, his final statement—only to be reduced by an old man’s illness in the once insignificant train station of Astapovo, where he died the ignoble but fitting death of a holy fool.
Tolstoy was a Russian, as everyone knows, but under the same heading of striking out at the last moment in a pure gesture of unrestrained, desperate fidelity to self, as Temima was preparing to make her own radical statement on this order, she also called to mind a German—a German Shepherd to be precise, her gentile neighbor’s dog known as Germy from the earliest chapter of her life when she was a girl growing up in the ultra-Orthodox Boro Park section of Brooklyn and was known in those days as Tema. Howling raggedly day and night, lunging at the end of his rope inside his wretched cage of a yard due to the surrounding Jews’ fear-of-dogs gene, Germy’s fur thinned and faded as Tema bore witness year after year until one day, when they both turned twelve and Tema was legally and halakhically considered a woman accountable for her own sins, and Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer, the principal of the girls’ school she attended, maneuvered his member into her mouth to her wonderment that such a curious idea could even be contemplated—Germy finally shut up once and for all. Casting off his chains with the recklessness of nothing more to lose, he leaped wildly through the gate, staggered down the alley that separated their two houses straight into the street to keep his appointment with the oncoming truck driven by Itche the junkman, which smashed into him, killing him instantly, leaving nothing but a pulped and liquefied mess.
From dead dogs Temima’s thoughts glided seamlessly to her area of universally acknowledged expertise, the Hebrew Bible—Tanakh—with her specialty, its difficult women, problems one and all, coming to rest on one of her dearly beloveds, her pet, the majestic Queen Jezebel—in Hebrew, Izevel, island of garbage, female spam—who, as the very strict prophet Elijah the Tishbite had foretold, was recycled first into dog food and then, in the natural course of bodily processes, into dog shit in the fields of Jezreel. Jezebel was the model to whom Temima now turned as she made her preparations for a public demonstration that would finally bring clarity to all who took note of it. Nothing remained of that proud old queen but a skull picked fleshless, a pair of inedible feet, the palms of her idolatrous hands—leavings that even the dogs had spurned. The bitch got what she deserved—Jezebel, a name translated on the tongue of posterity to harlot, but oh how noble and true to herself she was in her final hour, Temima could only bow her head awestruck. Staring straight into the eye of her doom without a speck of self-deception or self-pity, her murderer already at her door, even so this proud old dowager makes him wait, takes her regal time, applies her eye makeup like war paint slowly and artfully for this last battle, the outline of black kohl punctuating her death mask, she helmets her hair as befits a warrior queen, she arranges herself at the upper story window of her palace as for a royal audience—and from that elevation she talks down to the killer of her sons and her own designated assassin—Traitor! Usurper! Murderer! Her eunuchs arrayed behind her take stock of the situation, consider their options, give the old lady a little push, flick her out the window, skirts flying up to expose the withered queenly jewel box, blue blood splattering all over the walls, the absurd indignity of that tough old carcass splayed on the ground to be mashed under the hooves of her executioner’s mount.
Her eyes rimmed with black kohl expertly applied by Cozbi, one of her two full-time personal attendants, the unwholesome glow of her skin calmed with white powder, Temima Ba’alatOv sat at her window that morning in her private chambers on the upper floor of her house in the Bukharim Quarter of Jerusalem, gazing down on the street below. Her richly embroidered white silk yarmulke was pulled low over her nearly hairless skull, her phylacteries box from the morning prayers was still affixed to her forehead, the tefillin straps still wrapped around her slack arm, her great talit draped over the shoulders of her loose white robe. Women at windows were never good news, she reflected, they never came to a happy end, you didn’t need the Bible for that insight. The women for sale in the storefronts in the municipal whore market in Amsterdam, for example, each a different piece of goods depending on the depths of your fantasy and your pocket. She had been window-shopping that night so many years ago with Abba Kadosh, blinded by too much light, and he was explaining to her softly, in his intimate voice that forced her to lean in closer, in his spiritually enlightened mode, how each of these women in the storefronts was an aspect of the feminine emanation of the divine presence, the holy Shekhinah, and by offering herself so generously to the broken vessels of the shattered male spirit, each of these beautiful, holy, holy ladies in sheer synthetics and leather studded with nailheads and gelatinous smears of lipstick was performing an act of unparalleled loving-kindness and tikkun olam, world repair, for which the reward would be incalculable and the redemption hastened.
What had been leaving Temima transfixed and breathless during that entire trip was her knowledge that Abba Kadosh almost never left his compound in the Judean Desert where he had recreated a patriarchal community with himself as the number one patriarch, but for her sake, for the sake of swaying her to join him as either one of his wives or a concubine, he had taken her on this educational junket to the red-light district of Amsterdam at great personal risk to himself. She was dazed with flattery beyond anything she could have anticipated, like the most simple and inexperienced of girls, she had considered herself above such primitive seductions but in the end she was swept away. She was thirty-five years old when Abba Kadosh became her impresario, but her thighs were still like globed jewels the work of an artisan, her navel like a round goblet, her belly like a heap of wheat, her breasts like two fawns, her neck like a pillar of ivory, her eyes like the pools of Heshbon, her nose like the tower of Lebanon looking to Damascus, her head like a camel, her hair like purple streamers in which the king is entangled—people said of her that her beauty was surreal. She was still ravishing, still smoldering, still desirable despite seven pregnancies, five miscarriages and two live births, both of whom, including the baby buried in the ancient cemetery of Hebron and the little boy not even three years old, she had abandoned along with her husband of over fifteen years, Howie Stern of Ozone Park, Queens, reinvented as Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker in the holy city of Hebron in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, known to the alien world as the West Bank—Occupied Territory.
In Judea and Samaria, between Bethel and Ramah, the ferocious Deborah, wife of Lapidot, sat under a palm tree and prophesized, belting out her victory song after the battle against the Canaanites, gloating over her conjured-up image of the mother of the enemy general Sisera sitting at her window, gazing into the distance, awaiting the return of the chariot of her triumphant son—in vain, in vain. How long are you going to sit there waiting at that window, Sisera’s mom? Your boy is already dead. The savage Yael, wife of Hever the Kenite, in whose tent he had sought refuge, refreshed him with milk, warmed him with her mantle, offered him so selflessly who knows what other acts of lovingkindness to repair his broken vessel, and when afterward he had immediately fallen asleep, as men tend to do, snoring with supreme entitlement, she drove the stake of her tent through his temple and into the floor, pinning him like a trophy beetle spread under glass.
Maybe the time has come for women to stop looking out of windows, Temima concluded. What are we hoping to see? What are we expecting? What are we waiting for? Abba Kadosh had a mother too, the late Mrs. Hazel Clinton of Selma, Alabama, and Arad, Israel. Temima supposed that she owed Abba Kadosh’s mother a debt of gratitude simply for sticking it out and not running off and abandoning the oiled black boy she had called Elmore, who, when in the fullness of time he had anointed himself as Abba Kadosh, prophet and messiah, affirmed her mastery of Tanakh and forced her finally to surrender to her destiny.
Cozbi had carried the lumpy root-vegetable weight of the earthly corpus of her mistress to the window with the assistance of Rizpa, the second live-in personal attendant. They settled Temima in the saggedout scoop of her capacious ivory wingchair where she presided as upon a throne overlooking the Bukharim Quarter, awaiting the delivery of the brilliant conveyance from which she would offer her final and boldest teaching as she was transported to her personal Astapovo, her fatal encounter with the junkman, the bitch queen’s showdown at the gates with her assassin.
She had stopped walking entirely at an appointed hour some years earlier, and without offering any commentary as to whether or not she still was able to, had simply declared one day that she had walked far enough, she refused to take another step, leaving it to her followers to draw from this mysterious abstention whatever wisdom they were capable of, each at her own level. From that time forward, all of her business was conducted in this room, most of it from the vast high bed that was its centerpiece, where she would recline propped up against a bank of white satin cushions under mounds of white satin bedclothes. In her white silk skullcap that bulged with the mortal nodes and knobs of her head, the discolorations and spots on her face concealed by the makeup expertly applied by Cozbi and over which she wore a veil such as masked the blinding flush of Moses Our Teacher, Ima Temima six nights a week presided over her following gathered around the great raft of her bed at least three deep with mouths open to suck in her wisdom. The seventh night, Friday, the bed was transformed into a table, a tisch to usher in the Sabbath, a great banquet-sized white damask cloth spread across it, the holy woman HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv enthroned as if at its head leaning against the bolster of her white cushions tearing with hands gloved to conceal the mottled, loose skin underneath one hallah after another set out by Rizpa, her Hasidim, like ravenous birds to whom the old lady tosses some crumbs, stampeding savagely for the smallest blessed leavings touched by Ima Temima and cast out as shirayim.
All of this would come to an end this morning, thank God, Temima thought—it had become tainted, idolatry. Her body had grown flaccid and scaly from age, grotesque like a vermin. Somewhere along the way it had happened; as she herself noted, No one escapes. Yet she had not let her inner self go, she was preparing herself—the shells and klippot were being peeled away to expose to those with true vision her purest self contracted to the essence of her all-knowing soul still unborn; she had undergone a kind of divine constriction—zimzum—reconfiguring herself into the Place that withdraws to leave some space for others. In the same ironic way, though her outward physical presence had swelled and sagged with lumps and ruts, the physical space she now occupied was condensed to this chamber from which she had not emerged in years. The pot was carried in and the pot was carried out by tiny Rizpa, in her past life the cleaning woman Mazal Shabtai of Rosh HaAyin, Israel, brown and wizened like an old shoe. She was bathed and dressed and groomed and made up and then veiled on the changing table of her bed—by Cozbi, the former masseuse Anna Oblonskaya of Tverskaya Street, Moscow, six feet tall without the three-inch stiletto heels she always wore. Anyone who desired intercourse with her—responsa, exegesis, advice, a blessing, a cure, prophecy, prayers, above all the truth about themselves that Ima Temima possessed and selectively dispensed, the meaning of their troubling dreams, what would happen to them, where to find what they had lost, how to remember what they had forgotten—came and petitioned for access from her gatekeeper, her damaged boy, the son she called Paltiel, the child she had abandoned in Hebron who, in his manhood, had found his way through the woods back to his mother, the only male member permitted unrestricted entry into her innermost-inner court.
Behind her, rimming the upper floor of this stately old Jerusalem stone house bequeathed to her by a benefactor whose name was too dangerous to pronounce out loud, room after room with lofty vaulted ceilings and floor tiles stenciled like Turkish carpets that had once comprised her living quarters opened up in a balcony arc overlooking the study hall and synagogue below. She could scarcely believe now that there had ever been a time when she had felt the need for so much space. This was the morning when she would remove her presence from her dwelling place, but she would not fold it up and carry it off to the next station like the God of the Testament with his Tabernacle, she would not bear its contents away with her on long poles always in place for portability, ready to travel; she would not blow it up or burn it down, foxes would not be seen prowling among its scorched ruins. Whether she lived in it or whether she left it, whether she wanted it or whether she wanted nothing more than to be rid of this earthly yoke, the house was hers, it was her eternal possession, that was the deal—those were the terms the mentor with hidden face had laid out, addressing her from behind a mask, backlit with fever.
When she vacated it this morning in a public demonstration of great moral consequence, articulating exactly how she meant to be understood in a form that could not be misinterpreted, Paltiel would simply in the natural course of events complete his takeover. The house would be her reparations to him, to erase from her life book the frozen frame that still screeched in her memory—the child following behind her and weeping as she made her way to the car where one of Abba Kadosh’s retainers was awaiting her, Paltiel stumbling after her along the path sobbing, Ima, don’t go, please don’t go, Ima, until his father, the husband she still called Howie, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, took his hand and said, Come home now, and carried him away. Still, there he would always be, fixed ever after, the little boy branded eternally into her memory as Paltiel, walking and crying, walking and crying, like Paltiel son of Layish when he was forced to give up his beloved Mikhal daughter of the paranoid King Saul to that mafia don and bandit, David son of Jesse, anointed in Hebron and soon to consolidate his kingship in Jerusalem over all of Israel, who had first seigneurial rights on the woman because he had bought her from her father for the bride-price of one hundred Philistine foreskins, he had the receipt.
I’ve been expecting you, Paltiel, were Temima’s words to him that day when, as was inevitable, the wounded and bereft boy came back to her with his dark beard tipped with silver and a bald patch on his head, small and soft-paunched, a grown man in outer appearance only. She appointed him her chief of staff on the spot, number one shammes, and gave him full rights and privileges over the property as her authorized squatter. From shreds of chatter gleaned through acolytes who congregated at her bedside each night to drink in her teachings she had heard that he had appropriated the living quarters behind her chamber, converting a portion of it into a private apartment for himself and Cozbi who towered over him, not to mention allocating a room of one’s own convenient to the kitchen and laundry for Rizpa, and turning the rest into an administrative complex with banks of computers and other high-tech equipment, everything cutting edge and top of the line, from which he oversaw their entire operation.
The operation, as it happened, was constructed out of air and silken strands, but even so, from what she had been told (she personally collaborated in shielding herself from such matters) the money it brought in had substance. It was a website called MaTov. Paltiel derived touching creative pride from what he considered to be the cleverness of the brand name, a play, on one level, on the intended curse morphed into a blessing that spurted out of the mouth of the pagan prophet Bilaam son of Be’or as he overlooked the goodly tents of Jacob, the dwelling places of Israel spread out in their wilderness encampment in one of the many great comic scenes of the Tanakh, this one featuring a talking donkey. If words could be put into the mouth of an ass, why not also into the mouth of a human dummy by the great ventriloquist above? And what Paltiel was selling in MaTov was her, his own Good Ma, Ima Temima. In lovingkindness she was obligated to repair his vessel that she herself had broken; even as she found his dealings to be squalid she could not deny herself to him yet again, she owed him.
It was all clarified on the website, though Temima herself, of course, had never physically even laid a hand on one of those machines much less, God forbid, worshipped at a screen as at an icon in its designated corner of the room. There was, however, from what she had gleaned, a sliding fee scale, depending on what you were willing or able to spend, ranging from Bronze Standard to Silver Select to Gold Superior to Platinum Premium to Diamond Exclusive—from having your email petition, once it was paid for with your credit card number and your expiration date, printed out and deposited at the foot of the holy woman’s bed with heaps of other standard petitions in a white plastic laundry tub or black trash bags depending on how many had come in that day, to having it placed with a number of select others under one of the holy woman’s pillows, to having it set on her tray in a fan of superiors where her eyes might fall upon it, to having it read out loud to her with full premium urgency, and, for an added cost, arranging for her blessing or oracular utterance to be communicated back to you in an email reply. The mere proximity to the holy woman of your petition was bound to improve your self-knowledge and your fortune, and the chances of success were exponentially increased if you paid to have your request brought into her aura more than once, with special package deals for auspicious numbers of times—four, seven, ten, thirteen, eighteen, or any combination of eighteen (thirty-six, fifty-four, and so on), forty days and forty nights—all variations on four or forty were deemed incredibly potent. Fees were also calibrated depending on the request, which, Paltiel discovered, since the clientele consisted mostly of women, fell generally under two very broad headings, Ma and Ov—maternal and gynecological. Petitioning that you might finally find your soul mate, for example, was costly, naturally, but not nearly as expensive or as complicated or as resistant to cure or consolation as anything related to the troubles that derived from the womb you came out of or the sorrows that touched upon what went into your own womb and what came out.
It had, of course, not escaped Temima’s notice, as a native English speaker though living in Israel more than three-quarters of her lifespan by now, that a playful deconstruction of her name Ba’alatOv could lead to the hermeneutics Mistress of the Ovary, an especially tempting twist because so many of the lessons she drew were derived from and applied to women—Ovum Ovarum, Sanctum Sanctorum. But the fact was, when she had taken the name Ba’alatOv, she had meant it as a respectful nod to yet another of her dearly beloved Tanakhi women, the despised necromancer, the Woman of Endor, mistress of the ov and yedonim, with the power to raise familiar spirits and ghosts. And a secondary benefit of this name was that, with it, Temima was also sticking a finger into the eyes of the establishment religious leaders, all men, who considered her an aberration and an abomination, a freak and a menace—a witch and a sorceress—placing their bans and herems upon her, the way King Saul had done on all mediums and wizards and magicians and possessors of talismans. Yet Saul in his desperation had sought out the Woman of Endor anyway—just like those ossified and inflated rabbis whose names she could mention if she were so inclined who had come to her in secret and disguise like the johns prowling the red-light district of Amsterdam, and then gone away to take full credit for her brilliant interpretations of the texts to guide them in their perplexity and her responsa to such questions as whether an hermaphrodite should pray on the women’s or men’s side of the partition at the Western Wall. And doesn’t the book tell us in black and white that the Woman of Endor actually succeeded in raising the cranky prophet Samuel from his freshly dug grave in Ramah? Such powers did exist after all—and this witch possessed them. You had to hand it to her, the hag, the crone, she knew her business, she delivered, she was a professional. But that was not why Temima loved her. Temima loved her and honored her, could only bow her head, marvel, and practically weep at how, after all the bad news for the future of the royal line came spilling like worms out of the spectral mouth of Samuel the prophet, and the beset King Saul collapsed, passed out in her kitchen, the good witch would not even think of letting him out of her house after he was revived until first he ate something. Eat something first—then I’ll let you go. What do we learn from this? Ima Temima would pose the question to her students. The answer is: All women are witches.
Before the computer operation installed by Paltiel, Temima had of course helped many people in the old-fashioned way, with basic human raw materials, one-on-one, hands on, so to speak. Not only with her teachings, for which students gathered from the four corners of the earth to the Temima Shul to absorb her wisdom, hanging with raw fingertips from the windowsills even in the dead of winter until they were discovered frozen and buried under the Jerusalem snows, but also, in those simpler times, the sufferers would come to her door on their own, or stop her on the street in those days when she made her way boldly already veiled, stop her with their needs and sorrows and struggles and losses, and she would listen and dispense as necessary. In some such way she had found Cozbi on a cold night in an alley off Sabbath Square, makeup congealed on the cheekbone blades under her slanted Slavic eyes, loose platinum-colored hair giving off dull glints of light, chandelier earrings dangling forlornly, in her trademark stilettos, long legs and narrow hips and tight buttocks shrink-wrapped in low-slung red pants, a clinging gold halter top with cleavage and midriff bared, smoking something or other as she slumped against the wall beside a yellow poster enjoining the daughters of Israel not to arouse the feelings of neighborhood residents by dressing immodestly. A young man with a sparse beard and a great cupola of a black velvet yarmulke, the blood rushing to his face, was whipping her in a frenzy with the rope gartel he had unsnaked from around the waist of his lustrous black kaftan, lashing and yelling Pritzeh! Pritzeh! Harlot! Slut! What, you think this is a stable?—pausing only to amass fresh gobs of spit to aim at her. And she didn’t even stir, she didn’t flinch or cringe, she just went on dragging on her cigarette or bidi or joint or whatever it was she was smoking, as if all of this disturbance and spectacle had nothing to do with her.
Temima, a formidable if notorious figure in the neighborhood—as much as you disapproved of her you definitely did not want to risk starting up with her—trailed by a band of her students, including her Cherethites and Pelethites, her kraiti and plaiti, four husky male acolytes who had become the designated bodyguards she called her Bnei Zeruya, paused in her processional and inquired of the beater and the spitter, “So tell me, Reb Yid, how do you know this is not Elijah the prophet you are assaulting?”
“Eliyahu HaNavi? What kind of idiocy, what kind of shtoos? Heresy, apikorsus! The Messiah a woman? A whore—a zona?”
“Like Rahab the zona,” Temima nodded with galling calm, “purveyor of mazon—nourishment—as Rashi the commentator-in-chief spins it. Which may, after all, be the definition of whore. On the other hand, the Talmud tells us that the mere mention of the name of Rahab the whore of Jericho was enough to bring men to climax.”
They took Cozbi home with them that night, her hips thrust forward like a roast on a tray, grinding in intentional provocation as she staggered the entire distance up Yekhezkel Street back to the Temima Shul in the Quarter of the Bukharim.
And not only Cozbi, but Rizpa too arrived on her own at Ima Temima’s in her need without the help of a computer in those more primitive and intimate times. To be more precise, in Rizpa’s case, she was delivered, levitated from the Satmar girls’ school Beis Ziburis across the road between two married ladies, teachers at this ultra-ultra school most likely, with their shaven skulls tightly wrapped in black scarves, in their loose, boxy suit jackets over perpetually pregnant bellies, long skirts, thick black stockings and lace-up shoes, and the severe tight-lipped expression on their scrubbed faces as they deposited their burden in front of Temima and declared, “This one is your type—another lost soul for your collection. Her name is Mazal—but she’s not so lucky, poor thing, not so beseder.” They spoke mostly in Yiddish, mixed in with granite Hungarian—the Holy Tongue, Loshon Kodesh, was not meant to be tainted by daily use in the manner of the insolent and accursed Zionists—but now and then they inserted some Hebrew words they had picked up through osmosis despite themselves from the commerce in the air, such as when they said beseder, and to illustrate, in case Temima did not get the point as it related to Mazal, each of them, with her free hand, rotated cuckoo spirals at her temple.
As it happened, the behavior over the course of the last few days of this wretched Mazal they were hauling between them had attracted even Temima’s attention from across the street, who could not but notice her coming out onto the upper balcony of the Satmar girls’ school Beis Ziburis with a squeegee and a bucket splashing with a dark sudsy liquid, and she would mop furiously, screaming shrilly the whole time, “Schmutz, schmutz, this place is stinking with schmutz, must get rid of all this schmutz,” using, oddly enough, though she was Sephardi from the Arabian Diaspora, the Yiddish word for dirt, filth. She would overturn the bucket on the stone parapet of the balcony, dumping the slop and contagion onto the street below, onto the head of whoever was passing by; with any luck it would merely be a woman, but it could also be a man, ranging from a schnorrer with his hand out begging for a shekel to a rabbi of great reputation with his hand out making a point, a sage before whom everyone rose when he stepped into a room, from the top of the black hat you couldn’t tell who was who—she did not discriminate but continued dumping the offal in this way until she was dragged back inside the school building. After an interval, when she reckoned no one was looking, her eyes darting in this direction and that, she would come out again with her squeegee and her sloshing pail and start her whole routine all over again, yelling, “Schmutz, schmutz!”—swabbing the floor and dumping the fetid liquid on unfortunate heads, male and female, young and old, Arab and Israeli, Jew and gentile, holy and unholy, passing below, never looking up as they ought to have done.
“She claims that we Satmar Hasidim stole her babies from their hospital bassinets after she gave birth to them and told her they were dead,” one of the righteous matrons said to Temima in Yiddish. “I’m not saying yes, I’m not saying no. But just between us, it would not have been such a bad thing for these poor dark kinderlakh to be handed over to families that would raise them in the proper religious way. Sometimes extreme measures are necessary in the name of the Master of the Universe.”
Temima said, “Leave her here with me. I will call her Rizpa.”
“Rizpa—very nice. It means ‘floor’ in Loshon Kodesh—no? Good. She mopped our floors, so now she’ll mop yours.”
In Beis Ziburis across the street, as Temima knew only too well, they instructed the girls in how to kosher a chicken and the laws of niddah relating to menstrual impurity and ritual bath procedures, all the rules and regulations regarding getting rid of the blood, the chicken’s blood, the woman’s blood, and so on and so forth, that was education enough for them. Why should Temima have expected them to recognize this reference to the concubine of King Saul, Rizpa daughter of Aya, whose two sons were impaled on the mountainside in a political deal to appease the enemy? Spreading her sackcloth over the rock by the mountainside, Rizpa sat guard there from the beginning of the barley harvest until the rains came pouring down, and she would not allow the birds of the sky to touch the bodies of her sons by day, or the beasts of the field at night.
So here was another womb made crazy by the important affairs of men. Ima Temima ordered that Rizpa be put to bed and that simple, familiar Yemenite foods be carried in to comfort her until she regained her strength, sweet mint teas and malawah breads. And once in a while, in those pre-computer days when she still moved from room to room, Temima herself would come and sit at her bedside and listen to her stories about her life in Rosh HaAyin as one of the four wives of the revered teacher Baba Rakhamim, and about all the hens in her backyard with only a single cock who ruled over them, bothered them day and night, wore them out so utterly that, one after another, the hens came right up to Rizpa, then known as Mazal, in her kitchen and willed her to slaughter them and dump them in the soup. But Paltiel had informed his mother that, now, with the far-reaching tentacles of his computer network, they were beginning to make headway in learning the fates of Rizpa’s babies; the graves in which they were supposed to have been buried had been opened and discovered to be empty, for one thing, and there was now also an army of Sephardi activists and hotheads ready to grab by force if necessary swabs of DNA from the insides of the mouths of extra dark Satmar Hasidim with extra corkscrewed sidecurls and more refined physiques briskly walking down the streets of Mea Shearim and Bnei B’rak in Israel, Williamsburg in Brooklyn, or Monroe in New York State, bizarrely speaking and gesticulating in Yiddish, and match this evidence against the genetic map of the eternally bereft and inconsolable mothers. Even if the Satmars didn’t believe in DNA and regarded it as idolatry, the authorities had faith in science, which in the end mattered, it mattered on this earth.
And not only that. Thanks to the powers of his computers, Paltiel was now happy to report he believed they were also closing in on the pimp who went under the name Stalinsky who had trafficked Cozbi to Tel Aviv in the days when she was known as Anna Oblonskaya with the promise of a job as a childcare provider in the home of an oligarch living in a guarded compound of stupefying ostentation near Herzliah, robbed her of her passport, drugged her, raped her, beat her, and then sold her into prostitution in the Monopol Hotel in Tel Aviv on the corner of Allenby Street and HaYarkon. “In this day and age,” as Paltiel explained to his mother, “one-on-one is just no longer cost-effective.” One-on-one had to be reserved only for the clients of MaTov who chose the Diamond Exclusive option, which for an undisclosed fee entitled them to a private audience of maximum thirty-minutes duration with the world-renowned master teacher and guru, the charismatic wise woman and reputed miracle worker, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, who revealed to them many things about themselves that they both knew and did not know—rendering it all the more imperative, as Paltiel reminded her repeatedly, that she no longer indulge in spontaneous personal ministrations with any single individual, including (and especially since she no longer went out anymore) any of the followers who gathered around her bed to soak in her vibrations night after night. Such simple human encounters were a luxury of the past, Paltiel stressed, they would fatally drive down the market value of the Diamond Exclusive if word got out that the same product could be gotten free of charge if you came to the nightly Torah salon at Ima Temima’s bedside and snatched an unguarded opening to lean over and steal what others paid for, deposit into her ear the burden of your troubles and be healed.
Now when the purchasers of the Diamond Exclusive option arrived they would be ushered up the stairs behind Cozbi in full distracting motion and conducted to one of the benches on the balcony that constituted the rear portion of the second floor of the building beyond the living quarters, and that, in the old days, had served as the men’s prayer section. There they would sit obediently waiting to be summoned into Ima Temima’s bedchamber for their appointment, gazing down at the women’s section below, the long narrow sanctuary and study hall with its rows of dark wooden benches and tables and stacks of worn volumes and its satin-sheathed ark housing the holy scrolls and the podium from which the exalted and universally renowned HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Ima Temima, may she live on for many good long years, had presided and taught through her veil lest her audience be blinded by her light until she had willingly and deliberately contracted her world to a single room upstairs where she was now sitting at the window, preparing to shed even this paltry four cubits for her final and most instructive stop before the grave.
And while we’re on the subject of women at windows and all the troubles this position has brought down upon them, let us also not neglect to mention King Saul’s daughter, the princess Mikhal, for whom that extravagant show-off David had actually overtipped with two hundred Philistine foreskins though the asking brideprice for her, true, had been the bargain rate of the mere one hundred at which her value had been assessed. Two hundred Philistines for a yield of two hundred foreskins, think about it, maybe circumcised after they were killed, maybe while they were still alive like Dina’s rapist Shekhem and all the men of his town, a major bloodletting, a wild scalping, but David liked to do things big, he liked to make a splash, and Mikhal, after all, was a princess, a Jewish princess, worth every foreskin.
Mikhal, whose loins must have once throbbed for that irresistible bad boy David so that she even betrayed her father to save him, letting him down out of the window of their bedchamber to escape the assassins the old man had sent after him and tucking idols (What? Another Tanakhi lady, like Rachel Our Mother, who could not bring herself to part with her teraphim?) in the bed with an absurd tuft of goat hair sticking up on top to trick the pursuers in another of the Bible’s great comic interludes. How much bitterness and loathing and alienation must have encrusted the heart of this degraded woman as she stood years later at the window, a prisoner of the harem, staring down at David in his triumph, observing him as he whirled and leaped half-naked in the street like a lunatic in front of all the riffraff and lowlife, despising him in her heart as he led the processional bearing the Ark of God back to Jerusalem.
Temima let out a sharp, caustic laugh, like a bark, the first sound she had emitted all morning not counting her prayers, which launched Cozbi and Rizpa straight to the window. There below, turning into the Bukharim Quarter and propelling himself toward them, was a small man girded only in a loincloth and a fringed garment threaded with azure strings and a snug-fitting white crocheted openwork skullcap drawn low over his head, spinning ecstatically like a Sufi or a dervish and singing with such fervor that rills of drool snaked down from his mouth, matting his beard, chanting more than singing, over and over again, the refrain, “Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn.”
“It is Paltiel,” Cozbi said. “They are coming. We better get ready.”
Forgive me, Paltiel, Temima beseeched him in her heart—not denying, as had Mother Sarah, her indiscretion of laughing at some masculine absurdity. Inwardly she begged him to pardon her. Her laugh that to some ears might have sounded contemptuous had just burst out of her in an unforgiving flash before she had recognized him as her own son, in the fraction of a second when she had seen him coldly through a stranger’s eyes.
At the head of the great throng that began streaming into the Bukharim Quarter behind Paltiel, heavy with women and girls, but also including multiple kosher prayer quorums of tens of men, surging forward to the front of her shul, dancing, stamping their feet, twirling, clapping their hands, swaying, many bearing musical instruments, drums, tambourines, rattles, bells, roaring, ululating, whooping, chanting the Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn mantra, she now also easily spotted her eighth and last child, the daughter Zippi she had with Abba Kadosh. Temima’s eyes even in the dimness of age were instantly snagged by the bright yellows and reds of the African kente cloth turban that wrapped the mass of Zippi’s dreadlocks and the coordinated robe that cloaked her matronly form, the solid protruding bolsters of breasts and buttocks. In each of her upraised pumping fists Zippi waved a tool of her trade—a double-edged knife in her right hand, a shield to hold back the prepuce in her left. She was a mohel, a circumciser, like her namesake Zippora, the reputedly black-skinned wife of Moses Our Teacher, the blood groom too busy having visions and saving the Jewish people to attend to his own sons, forcing her to do the job and sacrifice their boys herself. The third tool of Zippi’s trade were her own plump lips, with which she performed the meziza, sucking the blood from the wound, and with which she now was chanting Te-Tem-Ima along with the swelling congregation packing the entire area in front of the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter, snaking around the corner to Yekhezkel Street with no end in sight.
It had been because of this child Zippi, now a grown woman, not only already a mother in her own right but also a grandmother, that Temima had finally broken with Abba Kadosh and fled his patriarchal kingdom in the Judean Desert, followed out of the wilderness by Shira, another one of his concubines, who had started life as Sherry Silver and now went by the name Kol-Isha-Erva. The former lead singer and instrumentalist of the once-popular band Jephta’s Daughters, which performed for audiences of women only, Shira had been living on a trust fund in the Nakhlaot section of Jerusalem and working part-time as an ecological nature guide when she surrendered to Abba Kadosh, who was madly turned on by her vibrato. Temima now spotted Kol-Isha-Erva easily in the crowd, a thick twisted rope girdling her waist, its trailing length encircling the waists, one behind the other, of the women who were her students in her school for prophetesses, some of them blowing long sustained blasts followed by pulsing beats on upraised shofars, others flinging their arms in the air, their shoulders twitching, ecstatic utterances coming from their lips in an ancient, mystical tongue that no one but fools and children could any longer decipher—the spirit of God had settled upon them so that if anyone wondered what had come over these girls, it could be said of them that they too were among the prophets.
Kol-Isha-Erva had taken her name around the same time and in the same spirit of defiance and revelation as Temima when she had recast her own name to honor the Woman of Endor. A woman’s voice is nakedness, you say? Well then, that is how I shall be known—Woman’s-Naked-Voice, Kol-Isha-Erva. She tilted back her head to look up to Temima’s window, and even through the veil they knew their eyes linked instantly. The two women were closer in spirit than twin sisters still in the womb in body. Kol-Isha-Erva was to Temima Ba’alatOv as Rav Nosson of Nemirov was to Rav Nakhman of Bratslav. She was Temima’s scribe and the recorder for posterity of all her stories and wisdom since, like Rav Nakhman, Temima never wrote anything down herself, she regarded writing to be a crime, and as Temima herself used to say, Were it not for the voice of Kol-Isha-Erva, no one would ever hear me and nothing of me would remain.
As Kol-Isha-Erva and her band of student prophetesses were prodded forward by the surging crowd, she flicked her head sideways in a signal to Temima to look in the direction she was indicating. The aperion borne by her four bodyguards, her Bnei Zeruya, was turning the corner and coming into view, preceded by her white-robed knot of priestesses led by Aish-Zara, Temima’s girlhood friend from Boro Park, Essie Rappaport, in the tall white mitre of the high priestess and with an Urim and Tumim jewel-encrusted breastplate hanging from a heavy chain around her neck that Paltiel had ordered on the Internet from the Yale University website. Taking her halting and excruciating steps leaning on two canes, the pain of her metastasized cancer creeping along her spine through her hips down her legs, fortified by a fierce inner will, Essie had insisted upon undertaking this arduous final passage in the procession accompanying her beloved Temima. Under no circumstances would she even consider accepting the invitation to be transported beside her teacher in the aperion, which now approached the Temima Shul in the very center of the crowd, like the Tabernacle with its ark and cherubim, its Holy of Holies, in the wilderness surrounded and shielded by the priests and the Levites and the twelve tribes in prescribed formation, the heart at the heart. The four Bnei Zeruya carried it on poles high above the heads of the assembled. They were big men, from their shoulders and upward taller than all the people; the poles went through rings attached to the sides of the palanquin and extended to rest on their shoulders elevated above the throng pressing in on all sides. They passed through the opening into the courtyard to reach the door of the Temima Shul, and set it down ceremoniously on the ground to await her arrival.
King Solomon made an aperion for himself out of wood from Lebanon. Its posts he made of silver, its top gold, its seat rich purple cloth, its interior inlaid with love by the daughters of Jerusalem—the first recorded traveling orgone box. That was your high-end aperion model, and those were the luxury features, fully loaded. When his mother informed him it was her wish to be conveyed through the streets of Jerusalem to the place to which she now intended to go in a palanquin such as King Solomon had made for himself as specified in lyric detail in Song of Songs, Paltiel’s job as her chief of staff was to make this happen.
Where in the world could a Solomonic aperion be found in this day and age, even in Jerusalem, the center of the earth where all things converged? To import some sort of equivalent conveyance made out of bamboo or rattan and festooned with colored baubles from an alien and distant place like India or China, and maybe also a white elephant to accessorize it upon whose back the contraption could ride, would be entirely inappropriate for the culture and mentality of the Middle East, which was more camel and donkey oriented. And to build such an aperion from scratch, with the designated precious materials, would be an outlay prohibitively beyond their resources, and would require craftsmen of divine endowments long vanished from the guild—a Bezalel, an Ahaliav, a Hiram of Tyre, an artisan of the skill and genius attributed to Solomon himself. Paltiel had almost despaired, but then, by a stroke of great good luck, while goofing sullenly around on the Internet, his second favorite pastime, he came upon an outfit almost in the neighborhood—in a hilltop trailer settlement outpost in Samaria—that specialized in authentic reproductions of biblical artifacts, garments, incense, musical instruments, vessels, coins, celestial azure dye, and so on, including among its offerings a full Old Testament wedding with the bride conveyed to the canopy by four bearers in what they actually called an aperion, with the appropriate verse appended to the luscious product description.
Accompanied by Cozbi, Paltiel went out to the headquarters in Samaria of this for-profit to personally check out the merchandise. They both agreed, upon close inspection, that it was a depressingly antique heap, a battered crate, resembling more a sedan chair that had seen far better days than what they imagined a royal aperion might be like, gussied up a bit with scrollwork and friezes, arabesques and filigrees to give it a generic Levantine look, but that, bottom line and considering the kind of time pressure they were under, it would serve. They stepped inside to examine the seat, a bench really—a bit worn, a bit hard, the purple cloth some sort of frayed glossy synthetic. Nevertheless they sat there for a while and exhaled in relief, mission accomplished, the close darkness and love veneer applied by the daughters of Jerusalem putting them in the mood. On the plus side, they noted, it was exceptionally solid—sturdy enough to carry five brides at once to a Moonie wedding, and Temima was a woman of great bearing and distinction, a flimsy contraption just would not do, Paltiel did not, God forbid, want any embarrassments.
They speculated that perhaps a century and a half ago a conveyance of this type might have been new, used perhaps to transport a well-fed personage of substance and heft around the country, up and down the hills of the Holy Land, an English baron or lord, a Montefiore or a Rothschild, for example, whose manicured hand with its blinding diamond ring and starched white shirt cuff with gold links would extend out the window and drop coins for the beggars and cripples scrambling in his wake. The windows, they noted approvingly, were thickly curtained, a great advantage in Temima’s case, affording her privacy from unseemly stares, not only of spectators who would inevitably be lining up along her route, but also of journalists, photographers, and other assorted rabble and gawkers and predators. After some perfunctory haggling, they signed the rental lease at an extortionist price, which Paltiel wrote off as a donation to the biblical restoration venture. This was the aperion that was now parked at the threshold of the Temima Shul, gently and reverentially lowered by the four Bnei Zeruya who ducked out from under the rods that had rested on their shoulders as they maneuvered it to its reserved spot. They proceeded inside the building and up the stairs, dizzied by Cozbi leading the way to the men’s balcony where they were directed to sit down and wait as final preparations were completed for Temima’s departure, when they would be summoned to carry her down in a dignified fashion and settle her comfortably inside her chariot.
As they bore her down the stairs, Temima’s heart filled with pity for these four overgrown boys she called her Bnei Zeruya though she never really took pains to get to know them; they were not related to each other as far as she knew, she had never troubled to etch into her mind their individual names. It was entirely on account of their mothers that she felt such an ache for them; to her eyes, though they were so muscular and sleek and inscribed with such beguiling tattoos, and, on the surface at least, in the prime of health, they nevertheless seemed to her pathetically mortal, like every mother’s son. Yoav ben Zeruya, Avishai ben Zeruya, Asa’el ben Zeruya—these were the sons of Zeruya in the book of Samuel. It made no difference at all to Temima that Zeruya had only three sons; for her purposes, her four bodyguards and bearers were Bnei Zeruya. Zeruya was their mother, Temima taught. Where else in the text did you find sons, and especially sons of such extravagantly wild belligerent instincts, such testosterone sons, identified by their matronymic? They definitely were not mama’s boys, Zeruya’s sons. Jesus son of Mary was another such case that came to mind, but that was a different story, another personality type entirely with a paternity issue too complicated to go by his patronymic. What was his father’s name anyway?
They ferried her down the steps with almost choreographed delicacy and caution in a special transfer chair that had been devised for this purpose as befitted her stature in the world. Temima gazed sorrowfully at her four Bnei Zeruya through the veil with which Cozbi had covered her face, which was glowing alarmingly like the face of Moses Our Teacher as if infected by a fatal disease contracted from God in the thin air of the mountaintop. Speaking through this veil she requested that, before being brought outside and placed in the aperion to embark on the journey that would be her ultimate statement, she be set down for the last time on the bima in front of the ark of her sanctuary where her priestesses led by Aish-Zara, hooded in their great white prayer shawls and in their stocking feet, had on so many occasions bestowed upon the worshippers the priestly blessing dictated to Aaron in God’s name, raising their hands over the assembled who obediently shielded their eyes from the blinding mystery of it all. This was where Temima herself had taught and preached for so many years to her congregation of women in the main sanctuary and to the men sitting up in the balcony until she had retired definitively to her chamber. This departure moment, her last moment in this holy place, would be especially auspicious for a prayer for the healing of all humankind, she believed, for the sick and the soon to be sick, for the mortality of these Bnei Zeruya decaying in front of her eyes, asking for mercy in the name of their mothers.
Cozbi and Rizpa drew back the maroon satin curtain draping the ark, which, when exposed, revealed itself to be a fireproof steel safe, an authentic bank vault of great weight and thickness, donated by the anonymous benefactor following an act of savage vandalism and pillaging perpetrated by an antagonist who, it was believed by many in the neighborhood, had acted out of a justifiable sense of righteous outrage against this brazen hillul HaShem, this intolerable desecration of the Name, committed daily by this female upstart who called herself HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, the abhorrent liberties she took with all that was sacred and pure and forbidden to her as a woman. The massive doors of the ark were opened with the combination entrusted to the memories of Cozbi and Rizpa, who then, from either side, assisted their mistress out of her portable chair. After positioning her securely upright to keep her steady with her hands clutching the ledge behind which the Torah scrolls were arrayed, they stepped respectfully back a few paces to allow her these final private moments with her girls.
That’s what she always called them—My girls. There they were all lined up like debutantes at a ball in their fancy velvet and satin dresses trimmed with gold and adorned with silken embroideries and their soaring ornate silver crowns. On the Sabbath, in the synagogues of her childhood, some man would ask one of them to dance, take her out, give her a spin around to show off his trophy that everyone else reached out to stroke, to fondle, to kiss—lay her down, undress her, open her up, gaze at her, find her place, read her, know her, and when he was finished with her, raise her up and exhibit her exposed—the largest and strongest man would exult in displaying her open at her widest—then dress her again before taking her around for one more whirl now properly decent and placing her back with the other girls to await the next time she would be asked out again. The best moment for Temima, a moment she savored even when she was herself a young girl, had always been when they dressed her again after having undressed her and entered her—when they gave that little tug, such an awkward gesture for a man, the gesture of a father who is not often called upon to dress his little girl, to straighten the bottom of her mantle skirt so that it would not ride up.
Temima inserted her head deep within the ark, inhaling the fragrance of dust and moldy plush, then turned her eyes to the far corner where she knew the wallflower was wedged—the smallest and plainest girl, the one who was never taken out except on the festival of Simkhat Torah, when Temima alone would rejoice and dance with her in the days when she was still dancing. This was the Torah that Temima herself had written secretly, with a quill on parchment and repeated ritual bath immersions in anticipation of inscribing the ineffable name. She had undertaken this radical task in order to know Torah intimately, to penetrate its mysteries letter by letter down to the tiniest thorn of the tiniest yod. Later, when she had a synagogue of her own, she bestowed her Torah upon her congregation in honor of her mother who had died when Temima was eleven; only the innermost core of her innermost circle could identify the scribe of this least prepossessing little Torah in the lineup as Ima Temima herself. On its blue mantle the inscription was embroidered in gold thread now frayed and faded: “To the precious soul of Rachel-Leah daughter of Hannah, Rosalie Bavli, may her memory be a blessing, mother of Temima Ba’alatOv, may her candle shed light, may she live on for many good long years.”
Temima loosened one hand from the ledge of the ark against which she was supporting herself and extended her arm to stroke the poor little reject. “I still haven’t forgiven you for deserting me, Mama,” Temima said in English inside the safe. Behind her, Cozbi and Rizpa could hear her muffled voice though they could not decipher the words, and in any case they did not understand the language, but when they noticed that she was beginning to sway and totter, they shot forward to catch her. Temima stopped them with a shake of the head and, speaking clearly in Hebrew so that they could make out every syllable, she said, “Remember what happened to Uzzah when he thought the Ark was slipping off the wagon and he dared to put out his hand to steady it.”
Neither Rizpa nor Cozbi could remember, or, for that matter, ever even knew, what had happened to Uzzah, but they figured it was probably not something good. Temima, instead of revealing to them the well-meaning Uzzah’s cruel fate, just let go of her ark-safe entirely and stood there unassisted with her back still turned to them. She was recalling how, for almost the entire year after her mother’s death, she did not speak a single word except on Sundays, when she would take two trains and a bus out to the cemetery in Queens where her mother was buried still without a gravestone to mark the plot, and she would talk to her mother all through the afternoon, telling her mother everything that had happened to her and everything she had thought and felt that week and who had hurt her feelings and who had humiliated her, and she would cry and cry until she would pass out from grief and longing.
But this time Temima did not collapse. She turned around and faced her long synagogue and study hall with its rows of benches, as she had so many times in the past to preach and teach. One arm encircled the shriveled body of her little mother Torah, its insides the handiwork of a woman and therefore blemished and unkosher and impure, its blue velvet dress threadbare and filmed with cobwebs, its crotch and bottom lightly straddling her hip as if she were carrying a child. With her other hand she pulled the top rim of the great prayer shawl that encircled her shoulders over her head like a hood, drawing it forward so that her veiled face disappeared inside the talit as if into the far depths of a tunnel. With her shrunken little mother in her arms, she walked on her own down the aisle of her synagogue, past Cozbi and Rizpa guarding her anxiously, past her four Bnei Zeruya gallantly awaiting her with the porta-chair, and, without looking back, she stepped out of the door of her shul and through the door of her aperion, their two openings now aligned like capsules docking in space so that it was impossible to distinguish where you were coming from in the world and where you were going.
The transition was executed fluidly, as if she had just been ushered into the next room, and yet Temima’s breathing expanded with the sense that she had been released from a black pit like the hole into which Joseph was cast by his brothers, crawling with snakes and scorpions, in which she had been held until sold into the slavery of her position in the world, as if she had just escaped a life sentence. It had been a very long time since she had simply been outside in the free blowing air—years, she thought.
Through the curtained window of her aperion she could feel the dear morning breeze and the sweet warmth of this early spring day. It was the tenth of Nisan, the biblical first month of the year. In four days’ time, if she lived, she would sit down to preside over her Passover Seder in the place to which she was now leading her flock, a destination she had not yet revealed to them. She had purposely chosen this day to carry out her wishes exactly as she conceived of them, with no discussion or consultation or opportunity afforded for anyone to dissuade her or modify her plans in any shape or form, because by Temima’s calculations, this was the day, in the fortieth year of the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness, that Moses’ sister, Miriam, died. The fact is mentioned in passing, Miriam’s death, practically a footnote to their itinerary—arrival at the wilderness of Zin in the first month, stopover in the city of Kadesh, and by the way, Miriam died and was buried there—immediately after a detailed discussion of the rituals of the eradication of impurities with the specially mixed ashes of a perfect red heifer. In contrast, Miriam’s other brother Aaron the high priest, creator of the golden calf, dies some verses after on a mountaintop in a ceremonial rite of priestly passage, and is given full honors, with thirty days of mourning and universal lamentation. What do we learn from this? Temima would pose the question to her students. That in the great scheme of things, a woman’s place is somewhere between two kinds of cows.
By scheduling her radical action on Miriam’s yahrzeit, Temima sought to correct this slighting of a woman who had always tried her best to do the right thing. One year to the day after Miriam’s death, also on the tenth of the first month as it happened, the Israelites, led by Moses’ successor, Joshua son of Nun, crossed the Jordan to the Promised Land, the waters piling into a great heap at the moment the priests leading the way bearing the ark dipped their feet into the edge of the river. Like the priests at the head of Joshua’s hordes crossing the Jordan on this day more than three millennia ago, Temima in her aperion with her deflated little mother Torah in her lap intended to ride at the head of her liberated congregation, hundreds strong, to show them the way. She made this point categorically to Paltiel, she would not bend on it, she would not countenance being swaddled in the middle of the swarm like a queen bee, or protected in any way as Paltiel and the others had at first insisted. Nevertheless, they had devised a kind of makeshift seatbelt for her, which she now also rejected, actually uprooting it and tossing it out the window like a spoiled child, punctuating what she had already told them. “This time I’ll be transported my way. Next time you carry me I’ll be flat on my back with my nose in the air—and you can do it any way you want, I won’t stop you.” The only prop she accepted was a cell phone with which to communicate her orders, since she alone knew how they would be going; the route as in any fumbling human journey would be winding, it would not be direct, and only she knew where they would end up.
She pressed the autodial to signal the chief of her bearers, the head Bnei Zeruya. “Sah!” she ordered.
There was an unexpected lurch as they set off that caused her to almost drop her wasted mother Torah, a calamity that could have mandated a penitential fast of forty days—followed by an exhilarating gust of buoyancy as they raised her in her aperion into the air and sailed forth, cutting through the crowd that parted to allow her to pass to its head. As they swung into Yekhezkel Street and proceeded down to Sabbath Square, Temima leaned back. She was on her way. She closed her eyes to penetrate the deepest levels of inward concentration and connection to the divine as she recited the traveler’s prayer while already in motion. Save us from the hands of every enemy and ambush and bandits and wild beasts along the way, and from all the varieties of punishment and suffering that agitate to gather on this earth.
When the first rock struck the side of her aperion, Temima’s eyes shot wide open. She strained forward to peer through the curtains of her Solomonic palanquin. They were entering the heart of Mea Shearim just before the point where the street narrows. It was precisely in that direction, into the most narrow and choked straits of pious conviction and certitude, that she intended now to march her flock, even if their course would be lengthened and circuitous and lurking with peril and drag on for forty years—in order to purge them of the mentality of slaves, in order to assert her rights and stake her claim.
Everywhere she looked, black-clad men and women in wigs and housecoats and thick rolled-up stockings were scurrying frantically in and out of stores, shopping desperately as the merciless Passover deadline approached. Against the walls bearded men in white shirts stretched by too much kishke were positioned with blowtorches to fire oven racks and stovetops to a glow, removing every trace and memory of leaven. Temima spotted some joker in a blowtorch queue awaiting his turn with a toaster. Maybe it had been another joker who had thrown that first stone, but then she picked them out in their multitudes, shifting through the masses, boys mostly, some as young as five by her estimate, few older than sixteen with patches of new beard, on holiday from the long hours in the study halls, burning with pent-up indignation, quivering with excitement, their faces flushed and glistening, some with arms already raised, poised for the signal to begin the bombardment. Everywhere there was rumbling and hissing, and above it all a speaker mounted on top of a car thrusting out and amplifying invectives against Temima and her followers. “Impermissible! Desecration of the Name! Blood and Fire and Pillars of Smoke! Worse than the sodomites who were prepared to parade through our streets flaunting their abominations to defile our holy city!”
Against the horn on the car rooftop saturating the airwaves, drowning out every rational thought, Temima had no way to raise the full nakedness of her woman’s voice. All she had was her cell phone. She reached Paltiel. As soon as her Bnei Zeruya step foot on the narrow portion of Mea Shearim Street, Temima instructed her son, the road ahead of them will empty entirely, like the river Jordan. She herself, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, will be stationed aloft in her aperion at the top of the street for the whole time as her congregation streams by as Moses stood on the hilltop with his arms held up in the air by Aaron and Hur in the battle against Amalek. When all of her people pass before her and proceed down the street and arrive at the great synagogue of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav on the other side of the Mea Shearim shuk, Temima said, she will go forth to join them. They were to await her coming there at the Bratslaver shul. It was also Paltiel’s responsibility to remind them to gather up as treasures as many of the stones that are thrown at them as they can carry. These will form our monument. The stones meant to strike us will be made to speak for us.
Drawing up the collars of their black jackets to mask the lower portion of their faces, and with cries of Harlots! Whores! Sluts! Jezebels! Vashtis! Delilahs!—the stone-throwers were winding up and hurling their missiles. Streetlights were smashed. Tires were set aflame. Burning dumpsters were overturned. Great plumes of smoke looped up into the air. Ima Temima in her aperion borne by her four Bnei Zeruya advanced to the top of Mea Shearim Street and took her position there like the pillar of cloud that had moved from in front of the Israelites and stationed itself behind to screen them as they crossed the Reed Sea and confounded their Egyptian pursuers. And just as Temima had foretold, the narrow street in front of them was emptied of people; the only signs of human life that remained was the trash—the plastic bags and the wax paper from falafels and bourekas and knishes of every variety, kasha and potato, wafting in the breeze and plastering themselves with their own grease like some kind of installation art against the metal grates that had just been slammed down over the shop fronts.
With cries of Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn her congregation flowed past her aperion into Mea Shearim Street—Paltiel and Cozbi and Rizpa, the ecstatic band of prophetesses tethered along their rope pulled by Kol-Isha-Erva, the ailing high priestess Aish-Zara and her consecrated knot of priestesses, and the hundreds of others, with Zippi, her daughter by Abba Kadosh, circulating among them, wiping away blood, wrapping gauzes around heads, applying antiseptic to wounds, dispensing bandages from her circumcision kit. Their numbers stretched across the entire width of the street, spreading luxuriantly in the emptied roadway as if it were the Sabbath and all traffic had rested, onto the narrow sidewalks as if they had the right of way. They could pass freely just like men, they were not obliged to step submissively off the curb to give way to a man striding briskly toward them, insulating him from the distraction and temptation that their physical existence signified.
When the last of her followers passed through, Temima set forth in her aperion borne on poles on the shoulders of her four Bnei Zeruya down the deserted street, alone and unaccompanied, with hundreds of eyes upon her peering through shop grilles and, above the shops, through slightly parted curtains of apartment windows. Like an empress on an unfurling red carpet Temima went forth to meet her flock awaiting her alongside the great white synagogue of the Dead Hasidim on Salant Street, near the entry to the shuk of Mea Shearim. There through her spokeswoman Kol-Isha-Erva she commanded her followers to file behind her into the marketplace—and as they proceeded, she ordered them to place one by one the individual stones that had been hurled at them and that they had salvaged onto a heap as a remembrance of what had occurred on this day—like the stones that had been gouged out of the Jordan riverbed and erected in Gilgal after Joshua and the Israelites had crossed over, an eternal commemoration, like the stones set on top of a grave as a sign that you were there, you are still alive, they tried to kill you but you’re not dead yet. “When the Messiah comes and Rav Nakhman returns to take his rightful place in his empty chair that awaits him inside this shul,” Kol-Isha-Erva raised her voice speaking for Temima Ba’alatOv, “he will gaze at this memorial and kiss each stone. He will bless each obstacle that has brought us closer to our redemption.”
Inside the shuk they were confronted by yet another obstacle placed before them, because, as Rav Nakhman himself taught, God is found in the obstacles, which obliged them to halt there to await its overcoming on the road to the fulfillment of their desire. An old man dressed in tattered and threadbare oatmeal-colored yellow-stained long underwear such as could only be seen in public in Mea Shearim hanging rigid as if electrocuted from clotheslines, was staggering back and forth screaming, No, no, I won’t! I don’t want to! I don’t want it! No, you can’t make me! Oy,Oy,Oy! His long white beard was flying, the sparse white hair rimming the bald and mottled crown of his head wild and streaming. He had escaped from his deathbed in one of the apartments above the market, a fruit stall owner explained to a member of Temima’s congregation—and the news swiftly spread. He had been screaming like that up in his apartment for three days already—Oy, Oy, Oy!—howling, howling nonstop. He was driving the whole neighborhood crazy with his unbearable screams, he was inconveniencing everyone, he was taking much too long to die, it was indecent.
Temima and her people stopped there frozen as the old man darted back and forth flailing his arms, shrieking No! No! No! within a gradually constricting circle, as if he were being sucked down a hole that was inexorably drawing him in. In her aperion Temima was singing from the one-hundred-and-sixteenth Psalm, The cords of death have encircled me, and the straits of the underworld have found me. She was sending her message along the waves of the air to this old father, Run, my heart, run Reb Lev, flee, escape, get away from them! Chasing after him were three younger men all with dark beards, all of them crying out, Tateh, Tateh, Tateh, one of them waving a large black velvet yarmulke, yelling, “Tateh, how can you go outside without your koppel on your head?”—the second crying, “Tateh, Tateh, your little schmeckel’e is popping out from your gotchkes, it’s not dignified for a man your age to let people see his whole business hanging out in the street, it’s not becoming”—the third racing after their ancient father with a wheelchair as if to scoop him up in a net like a writhing fish already bloodied by the hook.
It was astounding how long it took them to catch the dying old man so fired was he by his last exalted struggle—long enough for a delegation from among Temima’s followers toward the rear of the crowd not in a position to witness in its full misery this futile resistance at the last barricade, the group that called itself the Daughters of Bilha and Zilpa, to enter the hardware store with its goods spilling out into the market square and buy up every single cleaning implement they could lay their hands on—so that once the old man was finally trapped and restrained with ropes and bungee cords and the gartel belts from his sons’ kaftans in the wheelchair still screaming Oy, Oy, Oy, No I won’t, I don’t want to! No, You can’t force me! and speeded away in all his unseemliness out of sight and out of hearing forever and the aperion set off again followed by the throng out of the shuk and up the hill toward Ethiopia Street, throughout the moving mass, women, including Temima’s own Rizpa, now had their heads wrapped in turbans made of cleaning rags and dishtowels and they were pumping into the air brooms, mops, squeegees, carpet sweepers, dustpans, toilet brushes, plungers, and so on, chanting Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn, and balancing on their heads plastic buckets and metal garbage cans, strainers and colanders, like pilgrims to Jerusalem bearing offerings of first fruit to the Temple.
By now, word was already spreading throughout the city of a wondrous procession making its way no one knew where for a purpose no one could say what as they entered the top of Ethiopia Street, past the compound sheltering the great round domed Abyssinian Church, past mysterious gardens heavy with silence behind stone walls, past the house in which Eliezer ben Yehuda, fanatic resuscitator of the Hebrew language, once resided, its historical marker ripped off yet again by fanatic defenders of the faith offended at the sacrilege of the Holy Tongue deployed for common intercourse, leaving only a gouged-out frame marking the ghostly whisper of a plaque. They veered into the Street of the Prophets, and from there to HaRav Kook Street, pausing at Temima’s command in front of the home of the first chief rabbi of Israel, Abraham Isaac Kook, halting at this spot for personal reasons—to grant Temima a few minutes to focus inwardly in silence on the memory of her baby boy named for this towering Zionist mystic—her baby Kook Immanuel, tucked for so many years now in his tiny cradle blanketed with dirt in the ancient Jewish cemetery of the old city of Hebron.
Let me not look upon the dying of the child, Hagar cried as she cast her boy Ishmael away from her in the wilderness. A savage cry came out of Ima Temima—she did not know from what depths within her it had come up or how it had escaped her, she did not know if it was a cry of grief or a cry of shame. And then she lost all connection to that cry entirely, she concluded it had not been her cry after all, it had not come from her at all but from outside of her where it was amplified many times and reverberated over and over again as her aperion lurched forward into the moving traffic of Jaffa Road, bringing progress to a dazed halt as this epic caravan from an apocalyptic age lumbered across the road. The cries were coming from every side—from the ululating women of the east running toward them from the Makhane Yehuda market, skidding on rotting fruits and vegetables, cracking sunflower seeds with gold teeth and spitting out the shells, from the shrieking bands of klikushi pouring forth from the Russian Compound, letting out great convulsive fits of lamentation like professional mourners, writhing spasmodically and barking like dogs as if possessed by demons, tearing at their hair and rending their garments. Behind them, riding on broomsticks fashioned from the wood of birch trees, cackling wildly, came the Baba Yagas with long loose ash-colored hair, word having reached them of a great and powerful sister witch making her way in a proud demonstration through the streets of city.
The erev rav have fastened themselves to us now, the mixed multitude, Temima noted, the riffraff, the asafsuf. She accepted the inevitability of this. Maybe she was not at the same level as Moses Our Teacher of whom it is written that there never arose again in Israel a prophet like Moses to whom God had spoken face-to-face—even more intimately, mouth to mouth. Unlike Moses in his old age, the vigor and moist freshness of Temima’s youth had fled her and was gone, it was true, but she too was leading a congregation of obnoxious neurotics and malcontents and complainers from one slavery to another, and to their ranks a mixed multitude of hangers-on and groupies and assorted fans and freaks and misfits with all varieties of baggage were now also attaching themselves as they had to the eternally ripe Moses in his grand exodus from Egypt, as if she didn’t have enough problems already, bringing nothing but more headaches.
They proceeded into the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall, with this great cast of extras metastasizing wildly on their back, their numbers multiplying every step of the way, more and more fellow travelers joining their ranks like the pilgrims who had once streamed by foot to Jerusalem three times a year to bring their sacrifices on the altar of the Holy Temple. More and more marchers hooked on to them here until the space was packed from end to end, some tagging along out of coarse curiosity and the itch for distraction, it is true, but others also gripped by the hope that periodically seized this superficially Westernized land and threw its inhabitants into spasms that salvation was arriving at last.
The cacophony of sounds was overwhelming, surging in waves that were practically visible to those with eyes that could see as they passed over the crowd, in volume greater even than at Mount Sinai when the chosen people received the Torah. Whereas at Sinai there were only your standard voices and thunder and a trembling mountain and God Himself calling out from the plumes of fire and smoke, here on Ben Yehuda stretching all the way to Zion Square there was also what amounted to a full symphony orchestra of Russian musicians, including a pianist still banging on the grand he dragged out every morning to the mall for busking purposes, now being pushed along on its wheeled platform behind Temima’s parade followed by the entire string section, including a harpist, the brass, the winds, the percussions, not to mention several bands of varying configurations of Slavic accordion players in authentic folk costumes, as well as klezmer fiddlers and clarinetists decked out in Eastern European vest and cap concepts. Also latching onto Temima’s procession was a clutch of Breslover Hasidim just released for holiday furloughs from prisons and lunatic asylums bedecked in white crocheted skullcaps with pom-poms pulled over their shaven heads down to their eyebrows inscribed with the phrase NA-NA-NAKH-NAKHMAN-FROM-UMAN, which they were also bellowing ecstatically in counterpoint with the official anthem of the parade, Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn. They were followed by half a dozen Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach clones strumming the same three holy chords in a minor key on their untuned guitars, two Elvis impersonators, one with a glossy white satin yarmulke topping his slicked black wig stamped with the words BAR MITZVAH OF SEAN SCHNITZEL, to which were glued iridescent sequins to flash the King’s proud Jewish roots, and also a Bob Dylan impersonator with a harmonica strapped in front of his mouth like an orthodontic torture device who many in the crowd claimed was the actual troubadour Bobby Zimmerman himself going through yet another stage of spiritual crisis and rebirth and accordingly they approached him for his autograph, which he graciously provided.
Needless to say, more shofars were also added to the tumult—even in this respect Temima’s extravaganza was not outdone by Sinai—blasted for the most part by messiahs in white robes astride white donkeys, and there were, in addition, assorted King Davids, one of them a dwarf, in cardboard crowns covered with tin foil plucking harps and lyres and lutes, which, unfortunately, could barely be heard to sooth the anguished soul in the great din. A Moses with horns on either side of his head—not the useful kind that could be blown to contribute to the medley—also honored Temima with his company, and there were, in addition, a good number of competing Jesus Christs from all corners of the globe resurrected for the season conducting choirs of pilgrims who had descended upon the Holy Land for the Easter holiday singing hymns responsively in a babel of tongues, bearing enormous wooden crosses, the two beams lashed together with duct tape, and flagellating themselves with leather whips still reeking of freshly flayed stray cat purchased for this purpose at full retail payable exclusively in dollars or euros from the shops on the Via Dolorosa in the Old City.
Reports of all of this churning activity amassing at her rear were relayed to Temima Ba’alatOv on her cell phone by Kol-Isha-Erva at the head of her school for prophetesses and from the high priestess Aish-Zara leading her band of priestesses. I don’t already have enough meshuggenehs of my own? Temima thought to herself, poaching another one of the great Tanakh comic vignettes, the quip of King Akhish when David fled from the manic-depressive King Saul to Gat, disguising himself as a crazy person, scratching at the walls and letting his spit drool down into his beard. If King David could turn himself into madman, why can’t your local psychotic also turn himself into King David?
Temima accepted all of these developments with resignation, even a level of tolerance. She had anticipated a circus of this nature, but the prospect would not deter her from setting out from the Bukharim Quarter as her life on earth was constricting, to carry out her final intentions purely on her own terms. Through the window of her aperion she followed the movements of hordes of beggars, male and female, who had also attached themselves to her procession and could not be shaken off. They had descended on the mall in their legions that morning to profit from the flood of tourists funneled in by the high Paschal season, working the growing crowd tenaciously.
Poverty did not confer righteousness; this is what Temima taught. Do not favor the poor in their disputes, the Torah in one of its more progressive passages instructs us in matters of justice. The beggars in their destitution were in principle no holier than the tourists with liquid assets they were scavenging among or than your standard recognizable mall habitués whose ranks also unfolded in great crests in Temima’s wake—the youth groups spanning the entire range of the political and religious indoctrination spectrum, right, left, and center, every one of their members identically hooked up and wired to their equipment like marionettes, yelling into their cell phones and flailing their arms in emphatic gestures, squealing, hugging, bouncing up and down in ritual circles; the tough guys strutting in their tank tops and gold necklaces and natal crease décolletage tearing with their teeth great chunks of kebob off sticks, twitching to their inner trance; the gay Arab boys from Nablus and Jenin, eyes rimmed in kohl, openly holding hands on the sinful side of Jerusalem; the Muslim girls in headscarves and tight jeans lugging overflowing shopping bags; the Hasidic men looking for some action, along with the foreign workers, the Romanians, the Thais, the African slaves imported for the dirty work, all with matching unhealthy skin colors due to excessive self-abuse; and swarms of North American shoppers for souvenirs of little olivewood trinkets and Israel Defense Force knockoffs and silver ritual objects who were filling up to capacity the Jerusalem hotels for the Passover festival, including Mr. and Mrs. Peckowitz from Teaneck, New Jersey, he insisting over her shrill protests that they check out the action, join the parade, this was the authentic Israel they were finally seeing, videoing with his new camera given to him as a going-away present by their son the mob massed in front of them in every stage of its progress through the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall down to the end of King George Street, past the mausoleum of the Great Synagogue evoking the destroyed Temples of Solomon and Herod toward the open space of French Square where the entire procession was alarmingly brought to a dead halt by a phalanx of police mounted on horses in full body armor with rodentlike masks and helmets, at which point Flo Peckowitz screamed, “What did I tell you, Stanley, you schmuck? It’s a terrorist attack! They’re drawing us all to one spot so they can kill every last one of us in a single stroke, the lousy Nazis. The ingathering of exiles—follow the leader to Israel like lemmings—one great big concentration camp—so we can all be wiped out with one bomb and they can finish the job for Hitler once and for all. That’s what we call efficient—the final final solution! Stanley, you’re such a pathetic schmuck, how many times do I have to tell you?”
Then came the explosion, and, as if shot from a cannon, the multitude of hangers-on flew off in every direction, to be recycled in the endlessly absorbent crevices and chinks of the stones of Jerusalem, leaving in the street only Temima Ba’alatOv in her aperion borne by her four Bnei Zeruya and her original flock of several hundred who had set out with her that morning in unquestioning obedience and loyalty—We shall do and then we shall listen!—following wherever she would lead.
Before they could move onward, however, they were held up behind barricades that were swiftly and efficiently erected, with all the steel professionalism of catastrophic expertise, as the sirens brayed and the medical and emergency and security personnel poured in and the area was thoroughly combed for additional bombs for which this first one might have been designed as a diversion. French Square was a particularly sensitive spot—the prime minister’s official residence was nearby, the Women in Black held their weekly vigil against the occupation in this place they had renamed Hagar Square, it was a crossroads where old sins rotted on gallows for all to see and contemplate. In the end, though, it had been a meticulously controlled blast, detonated, as it happened, by Israeli sappers when a lone suicide bomber, girdled in a vest studded with explosive charges with dangling wires visible under a sweatshirt, was observed running in agitated circles in the middle of the square, completely oblivious to the traffic swirling around from all sides and would not listen to reason that might have resulted in a lifesaving defusing. Now the bomber lay alone, the sole casualty, a pulped heap almost exactly in the center of the square as the religious squads arrived in their fluorescent orange vests and rubber gloves to clear away the mortal remains.
That evening Al Jazeera released to YouTube the martyr’s traditional farewell video. In the history of suicide bombings, it had been a notable and shocking twist when women began to blow themselves up, including mothers of young children, risking the immodest exposure of a recognizable body part when they were ripped apart, damaged goods exalted by the promise of the restoration of their virginity in paradise.
This time there was an even further variation on the theme. The martyr this time was a dog. According to the narrator of the video, the dog’s name was King George. King George was shown staring straight ahead into the camera with his lugubrious eyes against the background of a black, white, and green Palestinian flag with a Kalashnikov planted on either side, his long, mournful brown head framed by a black-and-white checked keffiyeh folded at the peak like Yasir Arafat’s in the symbolic shape of a full river-to-sea Palestine.
“King George has chosen his fate willingly and with joy in his heart, with absolutely no tremor of fear and the words Allah hu akhbar on his lips,” the voiceover intoned. “Tomorrow King George will be a shahid. Tomorrow King George will no longer be treated like a dog. Tomorrow the gates of paradise will open up to him without a checkpoint and he will be welcomed inside as a holy martyr by seventy-two virgin bitches at his eternal disposal, but as our imams remind us, the pleasure will not be sensual—it will be spiritual.” The dog, people remarked in the comments below—there were millions of hits—looked exceptionally melancholy, and progressively even more depressed as the narration proceeded and came to its end.
Afterward, a huge protest surged up from the animal rights delegation against the government of Israel for blowing him up instead of making a greater effort to entice him with a biscuit, while pundits seized on the material to deconstruct the symbolism and rich ambiguities of a dog martyr. Many people who had been on the scene recalled having seen this dog roaming the streets of downtown Jerusalem that morning, dressed in a canine sweatshirt with a hood inscribed with the logo for Yeshiva University of New York, a costume that, in retrospect, appeared exceptionally incongruous in the heat not to mention bulky on a creature who overall gave such a gaunt, neglected, unloved impression. Flo Peckowitz remembered having seen him too, and even if, looking back, she conceded that maybe she ought to have reported the beast as a suspicious object, at the time she had thought his getup was absolutely adorable, and though the dog seemed to be entirely alone with no owner anywhere in sight, Flo nevertheless had asked out loud where she could get a sweatshirt like that for her granddaughter’s puppy Fluffy, and a deep disembodied voice from somewhere in the distance was heard to intone, “The Source of Everything Is Jewish,” as if God Himself had answered her from the mountaintop.
As government agents and military personnel exited the scene and fanned out into the alleyways to penetrate the populace with the mission of hunting down the late King George’s human handler, who had taken a pit stop with a Moldovan hooker on Pines Street and neglected in the end to trigger the charges from afar, four police officers astride their horses, on highly classified orders from the very top, were detailed to ride alongside Temima’s procession to keep guard over her to wherever her heart’s desire was guiding her.
Still, it was especially treacherous maneuvering through the protesters camped out in front of the prime minister’s residence, to cut a path between the fors and the againsts on every issue, from territory to religion to reparations to imprisoned spies languishing in terminal stages of horniness, and so on and so forth, through the jungle of signs on poles brandished like paddles, through protesters in chains, in coffins, in cages, in concentration camp costumes, through women in green, women in black, women in white, women in blue and white, through tent cities and shiva-sitters and shofar-blowers and megaphone-screamers and forty-day-hunger-strikers stretched out in sleeping bags. For this purpose the head of state’s official quarters was placed on earth. Who made you lord over us? Korakh demanded, backed up by the collaborators Datan and Aviram, and two hundred and fifty bigshots called up to the tribe—who made you the boss, Moses?
From within her aperion Temima took all of this in and shook her head. Enough with you already, sons of Levi! It was past noon, she was weary, it was time for her nap, but this was for her a day like no other, a day that was neither day nor night, she had to endure. Still she asked herself again now as had become her habit of late with the advancing years—lifting the curtain to peer out she posed the same question to herself yet again, Is this something I will miss when I am gathered back to my mothers?
The procession continued along Azza Street and looped into Radak Street on instructions from Temima communicated by cell phone to the four bearers of her aperion, her Bnei Zeruya. This was the route that Temima had laid out in advance for her penultimate journey. She had always liked Radak Street from the days when she had walked the city to establish her exact place in the world after her flight from Abba Kadosh in the wilderness with only Kol-Isha-Erva at her side, just one faithful disciple accompanying her in those days to soak in her words—the canopy of its old trees, the privacy of its old stone houses, the dignity of its old dwellers, the narrowness of its old roadway that now, in her triumphant return passage, swelled with her people from seam to seam, heralded by the four horsemen of her apocalypse.
She could have chosen a different route. There were other circuitous paths in the new city along which she could have led her people to arrive at her destination, and naturally she had also weighed the instructive value of taking them through the Old City, with all of its biblical visual aids, and beyond its walls to the City of David on the flank sloping down to the Kidron Valley and the pools of Silwan. She could have brought them through the ravine of Gehinnom, where our rebellious ancestors built shrines to their idols Baal and the Molekh, putting their own children to the fires as blood offerings—the Valley of the Slaughter, the prophet Jeremiah called it, hell on earth itself—then up to the plateau atop Mount Moriah where the Holy Temple once stood destroyed for their sins as Jeremiah had foretold, where our righteous forefather Abraham brought his own son Isaac to sacrifice him, bound him to the altar and raised the knife to slit the boy’s throat at the Lord’s command—the closest spot on earth to heaven itself.
To ascend the Mount, though, they would have been obliged to acknowledge the Western Wall, and this was a site that Temima on principle shunned, not because of the unfair and demeaning partition of space between the worshipping men and the women; under the aspect of the divine, how could that signify? No, she avoided this mosh pit because of the flabbergasting idolatry of praying to stones. Not for nothing does the text make a point of noting that no one to this day knows the exact place where Moses Our Teacher was buried (by God himself, as Rashi the commentator-in-chief notes—or, even better, Moses buried himself, as we all do), lest they turn it into a shrine and prostrate themselves before it. And then Temima, in her bed in the Bukharim Quarter that had become like a prison to her, had the dream that directed her how to go.
It was a dream in threes, like the dreams of Pharaoh’s head baker and head cupbearer that troubled them one night in the dungeon of the king’s chief steward, the dreams that revealed to them who will live and who will die, interpreted with merciless prescience by their fellow inmate, that show-off, that suck-up, that crybaby, that pretty boy Joseph, possibly a closeted homosexual. In Temima’s dream there was a house with three impossible entrances—one was so low that only a flat cart could fit through, the second was even lower and much narrower to give access only to a small animal, the third was high up with no way to get to it—but there was no door to this house in the expected place of a size or shape that a normal human being could reach or pass through. In her dream Temima was either inside the house trying to get out, or outside attempting to get in—she herself did not know which. Though her form in her dream was that of a fetus, she knew with utter certainty it was she, she never questioned this at all in her dream or even experienced it as strange. Inside the womb of the fetus that Temima recognized as herself was another fetus that she knew was her mother, and within the womb of her mother fetus there nested yet a third fetus, an even more miniature Temima—like matryoshka dolls, homunculi, golems within golems. The skin of all three fetuses was transparent so that Temima could clearly see through them one inside the other. The tiniest fetus was struggling to get out of the mother fetus, who was laboring to get out of the biggest Temima fetus, who was attempting to get out of, or perhaps into, the house—but it was all in vain, they were helpless, as if stunned, paralyzed, again and again they were sucked back into the space they were struggling to escape from as into a vacuum or a black hole.
It was so horrifying that Temima squeezed out a stifled scream that brought Cozbi and Paltiel, in bedclothes hastily thrown over their naked bodies, flying to her room to cut the cord and liberate her from this nightmare. But in the last second before she woke up, through the transparent skin of the largest fetus that was herself, Temima could see the heart beating, with its blood vessels lit up in red and blue like the street map of a city. This was the map on which Temima traced the route she was destined to follow on this day.
When she arrived now at the vanguard of her procession to the end of Radak Street and the house of the president of the State of Israel was revealed as if on a stage before them, Temima received the final confirmation that she had chosen the correct path. They had reached the third major station on their road, the last preordained stop before she would come to her destination, when, at one and the same moment, she would enter and exit.
For the first time in her journey that day Temima poked her head fully out through the window of her aperion, to the great exultation of her people whose cries of Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn grew even more rousing at this glimpse of her craning her head out to try to view for herself, as much as was possible through her clouded eyes and the veil fluttering in front of her face and the talit hooding her head, the events unfolding before them that Kol-Isha-Erva at the head of her school for prophetesses was reporting from the scene into Temima’s cell phone bulletin by bulletin.
The president’s wife is standing on the upper story balcony of the house, leaning against the parapet, Kol-Isha-Erva was reporting. Her face is blotched, puffy, bags under her eyes, hair in curlers, wearing only a lacy bra. She’s screaming, “I can’t take it anymore, I can’t take it!” She’s sobbing. People are coming out of the house behind her, moving toward her very slowly. She’s climbed over the parapet now. She’s sitting on the ledge with her legs dangling down—fresh pedicure, pink panties—crying, shoulders heaving. Now she’s screaming again, “I’m jumping, I’m going to jump!” A bunch of kids are standing outside the gate. They’re yelling, “Jump, lady—go on, your majesty, jump!” The people behind her are getting closer, very carefully it looks like, creeping up, no sudden movements, don’t want to alarm her. They’re talking to her. She’s turned around now, maybe to hear what they’re saying, her back is to us. Now she’s sliding down from the parapet, holding on with both hands, she’s hanging there from the ledge over the ground below, the lower half of her body is swinging, rolls of fat between bra and panties, significant cellulite. She’s let go with one hand now. Now she’s let go the other. She’s dropping, she’s falling, can’t tell how many meters to the ground. They’re waiting for her down there—it looks like almost the whole staff is gathered there, holding out plastic trash bins. Thank God, they’ve caught her—she’s saved. She’s in a dumpster, she’ll be recycled. They’ve put on the lid.
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 JESUS HILFE 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.”