The Teachings Of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Shlita
(May She Live On For Many Good Long Years)—
Recorded By Kol-Isha-Erva At The “Leper” Colony Of Jerusalem
IN THE awareness of the Presence and the awareness of the congregation, in the convocation of the heights and in the convocation below, and at the personal behest of our holy mother, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, I am privileged to be appointed scribe charged with taking down for us transgressors the teachings of Ima Temima and with recording events of note as they transpire during our sojourn here in the Hansen’s Disease treatment center compound of Jerusalem. Every syllable I write is read aloud to Ima Temima for final approval. Thus, I am justly admonished by Ima Temima at the outset for referring to our present place of habitation as the Hansen’s Disease treatment center rather than “leper” colony. When I humbly suggest with utter reverence that the term “leper” is no longer acceptable usage and is universally deemed offensive, Ima Temima bestows a wise smile upon me and offers that I am regressing to my pre-enlightenment stage when my woman’s voice was clothed rather than naked. “Who told you that you are naked? The serpent, most naked and wily of all beasts—to shut you out of paradise, and to shut you up.” This is a teaching of Ima Temima in the “leper” colony of Jerusalem.
On the explicit instructions of Ima Temima, this journal is to be called “More Bitter Than Death Is Woman,” a verse from the book of Ecclesiastes—by the author known as Kohelet, the nom de plume, some say, for King Solomon himself, gripped by melancholy and depression. With total reverence, I raise my wily woman’s naked voice to speculate on the appropriateness of this title, suggesting with great diffidence that it might perhaps be construed as misogynistic: Full of traps and snares is woman, Kohelet goes on to rant, not even one in a thousand is any good. If it really is Solomon, Ima Temima remarks with a dark laugh, he should know, since he kept in his harem a total of one thousand women, wives and concubines.
Yet very correctly our holy mother goes on to chide me for slipping into the pitfall of conventional self-censorship and excessive concern about public perception. It is then that Ima Temima puts forward a teaching of radical import: Kohelet was a woman. This is evident, Ima Temima demonstrates, not only from the obvious feminine form of her name, but also from the fact that the feminine conjugation of the word “said”—amrah Kohelet—is used in attributing this seemingly most woman-bashing of observations, providing the ironic clue to its true authorship and meaning for anyone open enough to grasp it. “Most people simply don’t penetrate behind the mask,” Ima Temima elaborates. “Kohelet passes herself off as a prince in the Davidic line, but it’s not the first or last time in history that a woman author has been forced to create a masculine persona in order to be listened to, much less to be taken seriously. And who but a self-hating woman can better deploy the voice of a man to be more expressively self-hating than even a self-hating Jew? And how much more so if the self-hating woman is also a self-hating Jew? But once you recognize the voice as the voice of a woman you understand that only a woman would know better than anyone else on earth how bitter we are, yes, more bitter than death—and for good reason.”
ON THE morning after our arrival at the “leper” colony, an event occurred that threw the entire camp into great consternation and even inspired a goodly number of doubting souls to take sudden flight through any opening in the walls that would permit them egress, some even clambering over in faithless panic when doors would not yield, to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. That morning, as many members of our flock were strolling the grounds to explore our new headquarters, and as the Daughters of Bilha and Zilpa under the direction of Rizpa, one of Ima Temima’s two treasured personal attendants and our domestic management associate, were hauling in the bags of fresh provisions that had been left outside the gate—fruits, vegetables, dairy products, baked goods, as well as the first delivery of supplies for the forthcoming Passover festival—an unusually large and heavy object came flying over the southern wall into our compound, striking the head of our circumcision engineer, Zippi, cherished daughter of Ima Temima by our mutual ex-husband, the late Abba Kadosh, a’h (peace be unto him), knocking her out cold. This was doubly unfortunate as Zippi is the primary health care provider for our community; in cases of illness or accident, it would have been she who would have been called upon to be our server.
A decision was made to defer informing Ima Temima, who in any event at that very moment was engaged in the standing meditation of the morning prayer and could not be disturbed even if the world were coming to an end, God forbid. Rizpa ran for help to the apartment we had all noticed on the western side. This, by all accounts, is the home of a senior-citizen physician, allocated to him and his family as their place of residence in exchange for his on-call service to the “lepers” in nighttime emergencies. He had been granted the right to continue living there for the remainder of his natural life even after the last of his clients had been purged. Rizpa soon came back to report that the apartment was in shambles and abandoned, and she went on to add that the unmistakable ghosts of the bodies of the doctor and his wife were imprinted on their beds like stains in a substance that she likened to a white chalk, as if they had slowly decomposed there.
Thank God, by this point, Zippi was already opening her eyes and beginning to complain in her own inimitable way that contributes so richly to the diversity of our congregation about all the people who were in her face; the impact of the object that had struck her had been vastly diminished due to the kente-cloth turban she was wearing packed with heavy foam rubber to give it added stature and presence, which, thank God, protected her precious brain from severe trauma like a bicycle helmet. I venture to suggest that perhaps everyone should be required by law to wear a bicycle helmet in this perilous life at all times; this is not necessarily also the opinion of Ima Temima, I hasten to add by way of a disclaimer.
Two of Ima Temima’s bodyguards, from the loyal Bnei Zeruya contingent, soon arrived with a hospital stretcher and bore Zippi off to her designated room attached to her clinic on the staff side of the hospital ward, where she continues the healing process. Blessed be God, day by day.
The missile that had been hurled over the southern wall and that had struck our dear Zippi on the head and landed on the ground with a dull thud was revealed, upon inspection, to be a dead goat. This discovery only served to increase the fright of some of our people, provoking even more of those challenged by a lack of commitment and self-esteem to begin scraping the walls in a desperate effort to flee, though not a soul would have prevented them, God forbid, from following their passion simply by walking out through the gate—we are pro-choice as a matter of principle and policy. The animal-rights supporters and vegetarians among us, with whom I include myself, were horrified by this shocking cruelty and disrespect to the remains of an innocent life created by the Almighty on the sixth day, just a little before He created man, and, as an afterthought, woman. If some mentally challenged individual has something against us, why did he have to take it out on the carcass of a poor goat? Why couldn’t he have thrown something else to make his point—a trash bag stuffed with used condoms or tampons, for example, or a toilet seat?
Some of the more right-wing-inclined witnesses to this event that morning ventured that this goat-o-gram was a threatening message from Arabs living nearby, in East Jerusalem or Abu Tor, or even farther away, in Judea and Samaria where their flocks can be observed grazing on the terraced hills that belong to us, the Jewish people—our birthright, they emphatically declared; it was a signature act of the Arab mentality that needed to be understood for the sake of survival, they insisted—zero regard for human or animal life. There were also those who insisted that this dead goat special delivery was a spiteful act of hostility on the part of the ultra-Orthodox, a hideous warning to us as women for daring to overstep our bounds. It was nothing less than a scapegoat, they declared, laden with the filth of our sins, like the he-goat chosen by lottery that the high priest dispatched on Yom Kippur day with a man designated specifically for this task, to a desolate place where it was cast off a rugged cliff straight to Azazel, to the realm of demons and Djinns, of the anti-God. It followed, then, that those who had flung the scapegoat into our precincts regarded us as the polluted and sin-stained denizens and worshippers of Azazel.
For this reason, because of the possibility that the gruesome present we received that morning involved a priestly rite, our own high priestess, Aish-Zara, was summoned for a consultation. She arrived as quickly as was humanly possible on her two canes, supported by some of her subordinate priestesses, one of whom, a woman practically a senior citizen, I realized for the first time, was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. (I ask her forgiveness here in these pages—it was simply crude ageism on my part to mistake the forthcoming miracle of life for a watermelon-sized uterine fibroid.) Without touching it directly lest she be defiled by death, Aish-Zara leaned forward on her canes and proceeded at once to examine the goat. There was no discernible red woolen string tied to the head of this goat as would have been done with a scapegoat in the days of the Holy Temple, may it be rebuilt speedily and in our time. Nevertheless, on the principle of ruling more stringently in indeterminate situations when there is doubt regarding a commandment originating in the Written Law itself, and in the event that perhaps the red string might have slipped off as the animal was soaring over the wall into our premises, the high priestess Aish-Zara passed her canes to two of her acolytes and raised her hands over the head of our dead goat to recite the words that the high priest would have intoned over the scapegoat before sending it to its doom in the wilderness, after confessing the mad and malicious sins of the people: Please, HaShem, they have erred, they have been iniquitous, they have willfully sinned, I beg of You, please, forgive them.
As the bystanders clustering around the dead goat, in imitation of the example of Aish-Zara, prostrated themselves and fell on their faces crying out, “Blessed is the name of His glorious kingdom forever and ever,” Ima Temima’s son Paltiel, by her first husband Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, accompanied by Cozbi, the other treasured personal attendant of our holy mother, came rushing over, cutting through the crowd that gave way to them as was their due to survey with their own eyes the source of the commotion. They had hastily thrown bathrobes over their bodies, their faces were still puffed and dented by sleep, and on their feet were slippers—Cozbi’s were lustrous red synthetic-satin backless stiletto heels with fuzzy pink pom-poms, which added even further to the disconnect between her impressive height and that of Paltiel, who, even in situations that are not comparative, can be described as vertically challenged. (There is no offense intended here, heaven forbid; with regard to this physical attribute, Ima Temima has requested that I note in these pages that Paltiel resembled our ancestors who were privileged to live during the periods of the First and Second Temple based on the scientific evidence of low-ceilinged domiciles unearthed by archaeologists.)
Cozbi gave the rapidly putrefying and bloated carcass one quick look and announced, “I know goat. She is goat of cheese-maker from Silwan, Ishmael, very cute guy. She is lady goat. See titties? All dried up.” Cozbi went on to explain that the cheese-maker was morbidly superstitious about burying his dead goats in his own pastures lest the bad karma of death curdle the milk of the rest of the flock, and so it was his practice to get rid of the evidence by loading the remains into his truck and dumping them somewhere in West Jerusalem, preferably one of the more posh neighborhoods such as Baka or Talbieh. It was Cozbi’s opinion that the appearance this morning of the cheesemaker’s dead goat on the very valuable real estate of our “leper” colony in the heart of Jerusalem was either sheer coincidence or else something akin to an instant message from the cheesemaker meant for her, a friendly way of just saying hi and reminding her of old times. She did not go on to elaborate, but suggested instead that it would be best to stop making such a fuss over rotting goat flesh or read any deeper meaning into its emanation, either earthly or heavenly, but to bury it at once and forget about it.
“She already stink,” Cozbi said, with great refinement pinching the wings of her nostrils between two exceptionally long ebony-lacquered fingernails. “Get Bnei Zeruya to bury her in garden. She will turn into hummus—make desert bloom.”
Later that day, when a suitable interval arrived in which to inform our holy mother of the events of the morning, Ima Temima plunged into a discourse with eyes closed, as if in private meditation, on the vision of the minor prophet Zekharia of the original flying saucer—a woman representing wickedness packed into a tub of some sort pressed down with a leaden weight being borne by two other women with wings like the wings of a stork soaring on the wind to deposit their load in the land of Shinar, home of the tower of Babel, scene of one of humankind’s first rebellions against God. “Welcome to Bavel. I am Tema Bavli, your official guide.” Our holy mother opened her eyes and added, “The flying goat is the one kid that father bought for two zuzim. We sing her praises at the close of the Pesakh Seder. She is the herald of our redemption. Had Gadya!”
HALLELUJAH! Every soul sings the praises of HaShem. I am thrilled to record that our beloved teacher and the illuminator of our souls, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, our holy mother, Ima Temima, was blessed with the strength by the merciful Master of the Universe to preside over our Passover Seder on the night of the fourteenth of Nisan, four days after our arrival at the “leper” colony.
Mattresses bedecked with brilliantly colored cloths were carried down to the great hall on the first floor, the chosen venue for our Seder, and arranged in a ring for the purpose of allowing us to recline as free women liberated from slavery. Three mattresses were piled one on top of the other for Ima Temima, as befitted the lofty position of our holy teacher. I hasten to note here that the strictures in the Written Law regarding the malignant eruption of plague inside the walls of a house or in any of its furnishings were waived with regard to our mattresses; the “lepers” who had slept upon them for so many years along with their secretions and seepages, the drools and droppings and discharges of all their bodily fluids from all of their orifices, had been exorcised, their mattresses had been purified by the clean and healing air of our holy city of Jerusalem. Nevertheless, when, in the feebleness of my faith, I expressed upon our arrival some concern about contagion or contamination that might have been absorbed by these mattresses (“hazmats,” I called them, in the poverty of my faith), Ima Temima reassured me in scientific terms that we were well-vaccinated and well-immunized by the Creator of the Universe since we as women have all already been stricken.
Everyone arrived to the Seder dressed in their best finery. Ima Temima, in full glory and selfhood, veiled as always like a bride being led to the altar, was robed in a majestic white satin kittel of surpassing elegance, in compliance with the injunction to glorify a mitzvah. In my white Bedouin dress embroidered with blue thread that I had purchased from a nonprofit organization promoting the handiwork of indigent Palestinian women, I was honored to recline on the mattress at Ima Temima’s right that I had covered with a madras cloth over the organic micro-toxin super protection pad. Aish-Zara, in high priestess regalia, including an azure robe with its border of little tinkling bells and pomegranate globes stitched to the hem and a band wrapped around her forehead with the words HOLY TO GOD inscribed upon it reclined on her mattress at Ima Temima’s left. (It is permissible, I am assured by Ima Temima, to note the resemblance between the priestly headband and the hippie headbands so many of us, in our foolishness, tied around our heads a lifetime ago to keep our brains from exploding.) Rizpa, in a dress adorned with Yemenite embroideries, the work of master seamstresses, and Cozbi, in an Armani number with a Russian lapdog, a white Pomeranian she called Abramovich, in her cleavage for warmth, and Jimmy Choo shoes, all gifts from Paltiel, were in attendance.
There were no children present in accordance with Ima Temima’s express orders handed down prior to our departure for the “leper” colony. “We are finished with sacrificing children,” Ima Temima had declared as a teaching. This absence of children, however, led to a minor though unfortunately public sibling-rivalry incident early in the proceedings as to who would be honored with the asking of the so-called Four Questions. As the youngest offspring of Ima Temima, Zippi, our circumcision engineer and primary health care provider, claimed this right by custom and tradition. For his part, as the sole surviving child from Ima Temima’s only legally sanctioned marriage, Paltiel, our chief operating officer who runs the business that contributes so much to the maintenance of our organization, insisted that the honor be accorded to him. Zippi stamped her foot and pouted with her full lips with which she performs the oral meziza ritual, sucking up the blood of the circumcision insult, while Paltiel’s face flashed red as an open wound and he raised his arm as if to strike. Thank God, before the matter could escalate, Ima Temima settled it as the mothers of all mothers do. “Children, you must share,” Ima Temima said, adding as a teaching that sharing does not come naturally to the human animal, it goes against the grain, and therefore must be taught, though, regretfully, it is a lesson that girls learn only too well.
Ima Temima then assigned the Four Questions to Zippi, who belted them out in gospel fashion, riffing on the tune of the emancipated slaves of America, “Glory, Glory Hallelujah,” The Battle Hymn of the Republic, bringing the entire congregation to its feet, swaying and dancing rapturously. Paltiel, in compensation, was accorded the role of the Wise Son of the Four Sons, but because on this night that was so different from all other nights the Four Sons had undergone gender-reassignment therapy and were transformed into the Four Daughters, and also, it may be assumed (with no offense intended), not to be outshone by his half sister Zippi, Paltiel delivered his lines in a shrill falsetto at full screech, which, Ima Temima has permitted me to note in these pages, some in our congregation regarded as a disrespectful caricature and mockery of the naked voice of a woman. Later, in reviewing this matter, Ima Temima recalled the story of how, in order to cure a prince who would not come out from under the table where he sat gobbling because he was convinced he was a turkey, the holy Rav Nakhman of Bratslav crawled under the table and gobbled along with him, declaring that he was a turkey too. Ha’maivina tavin—She who understands, will understand.
On the great white cloths that had been spread on the floor to serve as our Seder table inside our ring of reclining mattresses, tea candles floated in glass bowls filled with saltwater—flickering eyes in pools of tears. Though the effect was otherworldly, entrancing, trippy, I raised my woman’s naked voice with utmost respect to caution against fire hazard, especially at those mystical heights when the holiness would become too much for us, and we would helplessly be seized by the need to worship through dance. Ima Temima only said, HaShem ya’azor—and indeed, during the exultation of the Dayenu, at the verse: If he had just given us their money and not split the sea, that would have been enough for us, the hair of EliEli, one of my prophetesses, a luxuriant cascade (and, I might add, an excess of vanity like a shampoo commercial that I have been after her for some time now to bring under control), began to sizzle and fry as she was swinging it about in all its shining splendor and burst into light like the burning bush as she was transported to another spiritual realm. And God did come to our aid, exactly as our holy mother had foreseen, so that we were able to quickly smother the flames with someone’s poncho, the only residue of the mishap a smell like singed chicken feathers lingering through the night.
It is true that Ima Temima has on occasion commented that we tend to go overboard with candles to manipulate emotion, in Shoah commemorations for example; it is a form of idolatry, Ima Temima has taught, we must reject the intervention of votives, they are the arousal and aphrodisiacal toys of the goyim in their dark caves and naves prostrating themselves in adoration of blood and the agony of sacrificed sons. But with respect to the candlelight at our Seder, Ima Temima was laid-back and mellow, calling it “an elegant touch.” To give credit where it is due, the candles were an expression of the good taste of our dearest Zippi to whom I, too, was like a mother when we all lived together as gatherers in the wilderness under the protection of our hunter-in-chief, the late Abba Kadosh, a’h, our dominant male figure.
I am enjoined to move on to the heart of the matter and achieve closure, but with the full knowledge of the Omnipresent, and with the full knowledge of Ima Temima, I have been given permission to digress yet again, for the sake of moral instruction, by relating one further incident that occurred early in our Seder. As we were lifting the cover off the matzah to expose our bread of affliction and raising our Seder plate like an offering in open invitation to all who are in need to come into our “leper” colony and eat, both Aish-Zara and I, almost simultaneously, noticed that our beloved Ima Temima was in considerable distress, twisting on the elevated pile of mattresses that was like a royal divan as if seeking a more comfortable position to ease a sharp pain. Naturally, I rose at once to the assistance of our holy mother—and thank God, our crisis management rapid-response intervention soon led to the discovery of a dried chickpea under the bottommost mattress of the thick pile of three upon which Ima Temima was reclining, which, the moment it was removed, brought instant relief. Ima Temima was our princess and that was the pea.
“Kitniyot alert!” someone yelled out, no doubt a stickler Ashkenazi member of our congregation for whom legumes are prohibited on the Passover with almost the same force as the five grains of leaven specified in the Torah. Immediately, Rizpa, our domestic management associate, came forward and stood trembling before Ima Temima, as if to take her rightful punishment like a well-drilled soldier for this dishonorable lapse in housekeeping. That is what we all assumed was the explanation for Rizpa’s coming forward, until we discovered, to our astonishment, that she was confessing that it had been she who had deliberately concealed that single little dried chickpea under the mound of mattresses reserved for our holy mother in order to give expression to her Sephardi heritage, in which legumes are permitted on Passover; it had been a private subversive act of identity politics on Rizpa’s part, she had never expected it to be discovered, she had not counted on the ultrafine supernatural antennae, the sensitivity of a spirit such as Ima Temima. Now she was overcome with shame, begging forgiveness for causing even a moment’s discomfort to our precious mother—that had never been her intention, God forbid.
“Kitniyot, shmitniyot!” Ima Temima said, flipping a hand to illustrate how trivial the concern was.
As if a spigot had been turned on full force, fat tears began pouring unchecked down Rizpa’s leathery brown cheeks, surprisingly large and copious for such a tiny woman, as if her entire body were nothing but a sack filled with gallons of tears. “Even some of our rabbis have called the kitniyot ban a stupid law,” Ima Temima went on. “Those are their very words—quote-unquote, ‘stupid law.’” But Rizpa would not be comforted; by now she was letting out great racking sobs, her whole body shuddering.
“Come to me, my holy, holy Rizpa, come lie down beside me, mommy,” Ima Temima said, clearing a space on the mattress for the bereft little woman, who curled up like a lost kitten beside our beloved mother burying her face in the maternal warmth and wept and wept as Ima Temima stroked her head and murmured over and over until her spirit was restored, “You are so good, my holy, holy Rizpa, you have worked so hard, you have suffered so much, how you have suffered, we owe you so much, forgive us for not recognizing you, forgive us for taking the labor of another woman for granted, we should know better, forgive our ingratitude, mommy.”
YES, TRULY, thank you, Rizpa—and, thanks also to our heavenly mother and father, we lacked for nothing. Bottles of wine were placed conveniently within everyone’s reach, and we were directed by Ima Temima to drink down to the dregs each of our four cups. “It is a mitzvah,” Ima Temima said. “Do not for one second think you don’t deserve it, do not deny yourself.” And Ima Temima taught by example; Aish-Zara and I had the honor and privilege to be the royal cupbearers for the evening, charged with offering the wine to our queenly mother, lifting the lower part of the veil modestly, like a bride’s under the canopy, and tipping each of the four cups to the holy lips until they were drained.
Also gracing our table were heaps of round shemura matzot, burnt to perfection at the edges, guarded every second, like the dead before burial, at every stage of their production process lest they be exposed to moisture and the danger of fermenting into hametz—strictly supervised from the harvesting of the wheat to the kneading and shaping by hand to the baking in the oven for no more than eighteen minutes, God forbid, to the sale of eight pieces for thirty dollars minimum in a cardboard box barely distinguishable in taste from the matzot themselves. Aish-Zara and I glanced at each other when we noticed one of those emptied boxes with its print in bold black letters. They were Bobover matzahs, produced by the Hasidim of Bobov. Aish-Zara, who had grown up in Boro Park, Brooklyn, very near to Ima Temima’s girlhood home, was the daughter of a Bobover Hasid, and even now with her illness in the incurable terminal stage she was still dealing with many painful unresolved issues concerning her childhood. For a moment I feared that a rush of recovered memories and the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder would seize our Aish-Zara, but, to my great relief, in the joyous spirit of the evening, she leaned toward me, she blessed me with her playful smile that exposed her dark gums with almost every tooth knocked out, and whispered, “At least they’re not Pupa matzahs. Pupa is much more constipating.” Aish-Zara’s ex-husband, the wife-beater and abuser, was a Pupa Hasid.
In the center of our table there were two tall goblets of equal height, one filled with wine for Elijah the prophet and the other filled with water for Miriam the prophetess. Water was Miriam’s sign, she was an Aquarian—the water over which she stood watch when her baby brother Moses was hidden among the rushes to save him from Pharaoh’s death sentence against all newborn Hebrew boys, the water over which she led the women in song and dance with timbrels and drums when the Israelites crossed the Reed Sea on dry land with the Egyptian chariots in pursuit, the water of the well that, it is said, escorted them in her merit during the forty years of their wandering in the wilderness. There was also a magnificent Seder plate in the center of our table, fully loaded. In addition to the usual shank bone and the bitter herbs and the greens and the egg and the red paste of the haroset to commemorate the bricks our ancestors were forced to make during their enslavement in Egypt—in addition to all this familiar antipasti there was also a piece of gefilte fish (turd-shaped rather than sliced, unfortunately) to symbolize water. “For our Miriam mermaid,” Ima Temima taught, “to whom we dedicate our Seder on this our first Pesakh in the ‘leper’ colony of Jerusalem.”
Let us now at long last give Miriam some credit, our holy mother declared. Moses, Aaron, and Miriam led us out of Egypt, the prophet Micah said—but Micah was only a minor prophet after all. Miriam—her name contains the word bitter—was on the cutting edge of independent women in that she never married, we were horrified to learn from Ima Temima; there is no explicit mention of her marriage in the plain, unmediated text, Ima Temima taught, an unacceptable omission from the point of view of the sages, and so it was ordained that the wife of Caleb son of Yefuneh, a woman known as Azuva—her name means the forsaken one—was none other than Miriam, broken into wife-hood and submission under an alias. “But for us,” Ima Temima taught, “her name will be neither Bitter nor Forsaken. For us her name will be Snow White—because Miriam-Azuva-Snow White was the noblest ‘leper’ of them all.”
Gevalt, the teachings about Miriam-Azuva-Snow White that dripped from the holy tongue of Ima Temima in the course of our Seder that night, were like honey, they sweetened the innermost soul and touched upon the most private sorrows and disappointments of each one of us, leaving us breathless. By the time we opened the door to the prophetess Miriam and invited her to cross the threshold into our space along with her escort for the evening, the prophet Elijah, and sip from their cups, it was as if her bitterness and abandonment had been transformed into nectar and we had all become one with her, an exalted band of dancing holy “lepers.” For speaking ill of her brother Moses on the matter of his having taken for himself a “Cushite” woman (no offense intended against African Americans or other people of color, our holy mother was quoting straight from the text), who may or may not have been his wife Zippora the Midianite, Miriam was stricken with “leprosy.” She turned white as snow; it was all about skin color in the end—black and white. For the sin of evil gossip she became like the dead who emerges from her mother’s womb with half her flesh eaten away.
“Leprosy” is legendary for its contagiousness, Ima Temima reminded us in the most stunning teaching of all—so from whom did Miriam-Azuva-Snow White catch it? The answer is—from her little brother, Moses. And from whom did Moses catch it? The answer to that one is, from the original carrier, God Himself—first, a mild case at the burning bush, then a virulent case that erupted on his face rendering it so alarmingly incandescent he was obliged to cover it with a veil before meeting his public after spending forty days and forty nights without food or drink on the mountaintop in close quarters with the leper-in-chief, the original carrier, who spoke to him mouth to mouth. Mouth to mouth, that will spread it for sure—and who but Moses has ever been so honored in this way? With Miriam the infection was also communicated, for good measure, directly by mouth, when her heavenly father spit in her face—that will also do the trick—leaving nothing but skin white as death, rashes and lesions, nodules and sores, and a Jewish nose hanging by a scab liable any minute to fall right off. Beware the plague of “leprosy,” the text cautions us. Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam on the journey when you left Egypt.
As we reclined on our mattresses nodding our heads straining to absorb in its full relevance this teaching of Ima Temima, Cozbi threw the door wide open, perched her hands on her hips, and in a clear, strong voice for all to hear greeted our holy guests. “Welcome to leper colony, tovarishchi!”
“Pour out Your wrath against the nations that never knew You, pursue them in fury and destroy them from under Your heavens,” a few of the more traditional members of our flock chanted to usher in Elijah the prophet, herald of the Messiah. In response, there was only a still, small voice as by the flickering lights of the floating wicks a black shadow seemed to flit into the room and vanish deep within the bowels of the hospital. But by far the greater number of our people rose up clapping and dancing in greeting and lifted their voices fully to welcome Miriam the prophetess with her song, “Sing to the Lord because He has triumphed so mightily, horse and rider He hurled into the sea,” as a white bird flew into the hall through the open door, setting off a panic in the welcoming committee and among many others in our congregation as well, who ducked down, covering their heads, shielding their eyes, swatting at the bird with their hands and napkins and assorted utensils as it whirled disoriented above them. “Rejoice,” Ima Temima said. “It is the spirit of Miriam-Azuva-Snow White. It is the live bird that the high priest sets free when the ‘leper’ is cured.”
The bird was throwing itself against the walls in confusion and terror as it sought wildly for a way to escape back to the open air from this cell it now found itself trapped in, squirting out the green glop of its excrement and scattering the debris of its white feathers as it smashed into the stone walls again and again and then dropped onto the floor that was also our table, a forlorn little heap in a puddle of spilled wine. Cozbi’s lapdog Abramovich dove out of his mistress’s cleavage in excitement, panting and leaping and circling comically, scampering with his tongue hanging out toward the deflated morsel now that it had crash landed—only to be frustrated by Rizpa, who swiftly gathered up the throbbing little parcel in both hands and carried it to Ima Temima, setting it down on the very spot on the reclining mattress where she too had sought comfort earlier that evening. Ima Temima stroked the bird exactly as Rizpa had been stroked, and from the depths cried out the prayer of Moses Our Teacher when his sister Miriam the prophetess, the original girl babysitter who had looked after her little brother so faithfully when he was only an infant in a basket drifting on the water, was stricken with “leprosy”: “El-na, refah-na la! I’m pleading with You God, heal her, I beg of You!” The bird raised its head to gaze at Ima Temima with defeated eyes, then lowered it again, tucking it into its own breast, and surrendered. With arms lifted and furious emotion, our holy mother called out to the heavens above to awaken the quality of mercy for all of us lowly and rejected and shunned and despised “lepers” of this earth, echoing with fierce conviction the words of the holy society upon completing the ritual preparation of the dead for burial: “She is pure! She is pure! She is pure!”
IT WAS close to three in the morning when our Seder came to an end, but, because of the injunction that the more one tells the story of our liberation the more praiseworthy it is, Aish-Zara and I, despite our profound exhaustion, were honored beyond what we might ever have thought we were worthy of to be invited to Ima Temima’s apartment in the secluded garden on the northern side of the “leper” colony to continue the discussion until daybreak, like the five sages in Bnei B’rak who reclined around the Seder table so engrossed in recounting the exodus from Egypt through the night that it required the barging in of their students to remind them the hour for morning prayers had arrived. Ima Temima requested that we bring along with us a few bottles of wine and some glasses to lubricate our conviviality, as wine gladdens the hearts of all people, women not excluded, and, in any case, Ima Temima said, the directive to stop all eating or drinking by midnight or after partaking of the last bit of afikomen matzah, whichever came first, applies only when children are present at the Seder—and there are no children in this perilous place to which we have come.
Ima Temima was propped up against the cushions in bed in a pale nightdress and a shawl but without a veil, having already been readied for sleep by Cozbi and Rizpa, our holy mother’s two treasured personal attendants. The room was dimly lit with only a few candles, and a second chair had been brought in for Aish-Zara. Immediately we filled our glasses almost to the brim and toasted each other with the blessings of life. As we sat there sipping our wine, in complete love and trust, with Ima Temima breaking the silence now and then to impart yet another holy teaching, I was awestruck once again to find myself on this night that was so different still in the innermost inner circle with such heavyweights the likes of Ima Temima and Aish-Zara, my rebbes and my teachers. It is very much my wish not to speak of my own journey in these pages or to reveal through these words any personal information about myself in all my insignificance that might lead to the stealing of my identity—but for a girl like me, Sherry Silver from Park Avenue, Manhattan, New York City, a dropout from Juilliard, by avocation a seeker, by training a harpist morphed into a thereminist, which so attuned me to sound waves and vibrations, good and bad, seamlessly glissandoing me to my present career as executive director of the school for prophetesses—for such an undistinguished resume to be included at the core of our revolutionary enterprise with two Boro Park girls at the level of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, and the high priestess Aish-Zara, the former Tema Bavli and Essie Rappaport, respectively, from Brooklyn, New York, was more than I would ever have dreamed. I thank God every day for bestowing this gift upon me.
And most wondrous of all, something I learned for the first time during those early morning hours as we sat in the private quarters of our holy mother after our Seder, Ima Temima and Aish-Zara, despite having grown up within a block of one another, first met only in their junior year of high school and in an entirely different Brooklyn neighborhood—at the Williamsburg branch of Beis Ziburis (the very same girls’ school, by an amazing coincidence, that had its Jerusalem branch across the road from Ima Temima’s former headquarters in the Bukharim neighborhood, from which our holy mother had liberated Rizpa from slavery), though before the year was over, at the age of sixteen, Aish-Zara (known as Essie Rappaport at the time) was pulled out of school by her father and married off to the Pupa Hasid from Mea Shearim, Jerusalem. It was not until many years afterward that Ima Temima and Aish-Zara met again—after the first shock and insult of sexual intercourse which, despite years of reruns, never fully ceased to stun her (Aish-Zara has released me to use her experience for the sake of providing consolation and hope to other women similarly dumbfounded) with a husband who would not have recognized her face if he passed her in the street, after thirteen children, numerous beatings, the loss of her breasts, her womb, her teeth, her hair, the lobe of one ear sliced in two when an earring was ripped out and half the other ear bitten off, the burn marks of cigarettes that had been stubbed out all over her body, after mortal illness and bone weariness and chronic pain to the point of utter exhaustion and indifference as she was being beaten practically unconscious by a squad of men in black returning from prayer when she refused to move to the so-called women’s section in the rear of the Number One municipal bus on its way back from the Western Wall (yes, Aish-Zara is our very own Rosa Parks)—only after becoming a survivor of all this persecution and suffering had Aish-Zara ventured one day into the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter that had always been right there for her in the neighborhood. With both hands, Ima Temima had beckoned to her on that day to approach through the crowd pressing in to soak up the words.
“Welcome, Essie,” Ima Temima had said. “I’ve seen you many times on the street. I’ve been expecting you. I’ve been waiting for the day when you would come to me of your own accord.”
It was not long after that reunion that our holy mother had informed her that she would no longer be known as Essie Rappaport. From that day forth she would be called Aish-Zara, the anointed high priestess, rendering by this decree null and void the physical blemishes that would have disqualified her for this office had she been a man, which, according to conventional thinking, were as nothing in the face of the overriding blemish of her femaleness, of her original disfigurement as a nekaiva, derived from the Hebrew root for opening or hole—like all of us, a walking sexual organ under wraps. But aren’t men also intrinsically blemished, Ima Temima asked, mutilated eight days after birth by the covenant, not to mention the deep hole a man is born with that could never be filled from which a rib had been gouged out, fashioned into woman, the gaping void where his lost feminine had resided when he was whole and complete?
Ima Temima set the wineglass down on the nightstand and called to us to come sit on the bed. But because of the lateness of the hour and all the wine we had consumed, neither Aish-Zara nor I could at first absorb the fact that such an exclusive, extraordinary, once-in-a-lifetime invitation was being extended to us even as our holy teacher continued to insist, patting the mattress emphatically to make it all the more clear that we must approach, and drawing back the quilts to communicate that we must also all share the warmth and comfort under the covers. At last Aish-Zara and I got the message. We set down our glasses on the table, slipped off our shoes, and, reeling from the wine and the unanticipated honor, I took Aish-Zara’s arm to assist her and we obeyed the call. Before we could take in the meaning of it all, there we were, the four of us, including Ima Temima’s little mother Torah, under the covers. It reminded me of the pajama parties, the girls’ sleepovers from my childhood, and despite myself I began to giggle as we used to giggle then from fantasies of monsters that seemed so real and the realities of sex that seemed so unbelievable.
The giggling, as always, was contagious and quickly spread among us so that I for one, already sloshing with all the wine I had taken in and despite being at least a generation younger than my present bedmates, experienced some anxiety about my own personal bladder control as bursts of laughter crested in great waves and then subsided, leaving us gasping and panting. As soon as we had made ourselves as comfortable in the bed as it was possible to be alongside such a luminary of nearly divine proportions—it was as close as we would ever get to “mouth to mouth”—Ima Temima announced that we would be engaging in an experiment. We would test the dictum of the sages that mozi-shem-rah turns you into a mezorah by speaking ill of people, gossiping through the remainder of the night and then checking in the morning light to see if our skin had erupted in “leprosy,” in pustules and sores and turned white as snow and we had become symptomatic (since of course, as Ima Temima had taught, we women were, by definition, already “lepers” in various stages of the disease, from carriers to latency, from virulent to terminal). “You mean you’re actually giving us a heter to talk loshon hara—special permission just for us?” Aish-Zara asked in astonishment—and Ima Temima confirmed that indeed yes, we were being given a dispensation to indulge the evil tongue to our heart’s content. “Uh-oh—L.H.M.F.G,” Aish-Zara sang out in a girlish voice, “Loshon Hara Makes Fire in Gehenna—remember that from Beis Ziburis?” And Ima Temima together with Aish-Zara collapsed in laughter, like sorority sisters reminiscing at a reunion, and even I, who did not attend Beis Ziburis (I went to Brearley, but that is of no account), was drawn in simply by the infectiousness of the mirth.
At first it was difficult to descend to the level of gossip in the presence of a righteous icon of such world renown, but Ima Temima nevertheless urged us on for the sake of the experiment, helping us to get started by inquiring if we had noticed any couplings at the Seder, given the intimate romantic atmosphere created by the glimmering candles in the darkened hall, the internal temperature-heating properties of the wine, the bodies laid out in a reclining state especially on the polluted mattresses, which might have had the added effect of relaxing the risk-averse with the sense that all was lost anyway like at the outbreak of a decimating war, and, truth to tell, also the awareness of everyone present that Ima Temima’s external vision was limited especially in the dark due to the ravages of senior citizenship (in contrast, I hasten to add, to our blessed teacher’s internal vision, which remains unrivaled among mortals), and therefore our holy mother might not be in a position to see what they were up to. Yes, there had been a lot of that kind of activity going on, we acknowledged—mostly women with women either by sexual preference or due to the dearth of men, but every man present, regardless of how unblessed, had someone, either female or male, and each of the Bnei Zeruya was spoken for—one with my prophetess, EliEli, I recounted, the girl who got so turned on during the Dayenu she nearly set her hair on fire and immolated herself, another with someone I didn’t recognize, and the other two with each other, which is really a big waste, I said, because they are such hunks.
As another wave of laughter gathered force threatening to engulf us, Ima Temima asked if either of us had observed Paltiel and Cozbi during the Seder. Both Aish-Zara and I understood what was behind that question; Ima Temima suspected that, bottom line, Cozbi, who may or may not have been Jewish—she definitely did not look Jewish—was using Paltiel to further her own career or other ambitions whatever they might be, we didn’t even want to begin to speculate. “Like an old couple,” Aish-Zara reported. “They didn’t look at each other once or say even one word to each other all evening.”
Mention of Cozbi brought to mind the precious little lapdog Abramovich that she had snuggled between her breasts and caressed all evening at our Seder, so to salvage the mood that was beginning to darken with the specter of maternal disappointment, I began jabbering on about the great relief I had felt that my cat, Basmat (named in honor of the daughter of that wild man, Ishmael, and the wife of that caveman, Esau), a feral stray I had rescued from the humane society just before she had been scheduled to be put to sleep, was safely upstairs in my room when Cozbi opened the door and let the bird into the hall. As I was going on with my idle chatter I could picture Basmat’s body stiffening, her back arching, and then it was as if I could actually see her pouncing on the bird, sublime in her ruthlessness. The sequence of images was so vividly and blasphemously ridiculous, considering the burden of signification that had been loaded onto that bird, that I erupted into hilarity again and, I admit to my horror, a small amount of hot moisture, maybe a thimbleful at most, trickled out of me to my eternal mortification. Even as I recall it a screech leaps from my mouth like a cartoon balloon before I can snatch it back as if it were filled with hot air and floated upward on its own.
Ima Temima stroked my head with the same tenderness as she had the bird’s head before me and Rizpa’s head before that, murmuring, “It’s okay, Kol-Isha-Erva dear, it happens. Just try your best not to get any on my mother.” In my confusion I had not even considered such a horrifying possibility. I was among the privileged who knew that every letter of this precious scroll tucked in the bed with us had been inscribed by Ima Temima’s own blessed hand; soiling it in such a way would have been an intolerable calamity for me, life would have lost all meaning.
But, pulling the little mother Torah safely out of harm’s way, Ima Temima immediately went on to comfort me in the words of the kabbalist poet ushering in the Sabbath queen. “Don’t be ashamed, don’t feel disgraced. Why be so downcast, why do you moan?” I beg forgiveness here for focusing so much on myself, but I do so entirely to showcase the powers of our holy teacher, Ima Temima. The truth is, by this point I was well past the giggling stage of grief and it required all my inner strength to hold back the tears. In my heart of hearts, I wanted nothing more at that moment than the privacy to open my mouth wide and to wail and wail.
“They cry out and are not ashamed,” Ima Temima said, paraphrasing from the book of Psalms, as if my inner needs and my longings had been utterly transparent. With not the slightest hint of embarrassment, Ima Temima’s mouth opened wide and great cries came forth. Ima Temima was howling like a jackal in the night right there in that bed we were all sharing in the “leper” colony of Jerusalem. Soon Aish-Zara and I joined in and were howling too, our holy mother had given us permission, we were howling together all three of us at the top of our voices without self-consciousness or shame, purging the dross from our souls, cleansing and purifying our spirits, all sense of time fading. Afterward neither Aish-Zara nor I could pinpoint the moment that Ima Temima had shifted from wordless animal howls to the song of the heavenly seraphim in the celestial vision of the prophet Isaiah, Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, Adonai Zeva’ot, the mantra we also chant in our prayers, Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Hosts. We legatoed into Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, Adonai Zeva’ot, chanting it over and over again without end, Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, until our very selves were blotted out, our personal identities were erased and the dawn came up and our students rushed in crying, Our teachers, the time has come.