On the morning of Passover eve, April 1968, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, as Howie Stern was by then already known, scribe and phylacteries maker, joined a group of brash ideologues who had responded with blazing enthusiasm to a small newspaper ad—WANTED, FAMILIES OR SINGLES TO RESETTLE ANCIENT CITY OF HEBRON; FOR DETAILS CONTACT RABBI M. LEVINGER. That morning, Passover eve, eighty-eight yearning souls, men and women, many bundling along their children, made their way in caravans from every corner of the land of Israel to the Park Hotel in Hebron, once the summer resort of choice of the Jordanian upper classes for the cool, dry air of the ancient city. Rabbi Moshe their leader boldly set down on the reception desk an envelope stuffed with cash, advance payment in full to the Arab owner of the hotel for accommodations.
For the remainder of that day the pioneers toiled together in a spirit of common purpose, with an intensity such as Howie Stern had never before experienced even during the euphoric six days of the miraculous war less than a year earlier that had restored the biblical heartland and the holy city of Jerusalem itself to the Jewish people. Making their preparations for the forthcoming festival, they cleaned and scrubbed, they banished every trace of forbidden grains and leaven from the portion of the kitchen allotted to them and stocked it with the Passover supplies they had carted along for this exodus to the pith of the Promised Land.
When night fell, they celebrated their Seder at a spiritual height so exalted all traces of their physical and mortal bonds seemed to have been overcome, rendered meaningless and beside the point. Afterward, the women and children collapsed two or three to a bed in the hotel rooms, while the men found places to stretch out their bodies on the cold floor of the lobby without even a stone to place under their heads for a pillow, such as Father Jacob had when he stopped to rest in nearby Beit El on his flight from his brother Esau to Haran, and in his dream he saw a ladder with angels ascending and descending, and God Himself appeared to him and said, This ground you are lying upon I will give to you and to your offspring.
Two days later, Rabbi Moshe their leader announced to the world that the Jewish people have returned to this ground, never to leave again. This ancient city of Hebron belongs to us, it is the site of the Cave of Makhpela, the tombs of our patriarchs and our matriarchs, which Father Abraham purchased at the going rate of four hundred shekels of silver from Efron the Hittite as a burial place for his wife Sarah. Without haggling, without asking for any special treatment or consideration or favors or deals, Father Abraham purchased it at full price, retail, fair and square; it was the legitimate estate of his descendants in the line of the son he had with Mother Sarah, Father Isaac. We, the Jewish people, have prudently and with commendable foresight kept the receipt, its authenticity available for anyone’s examination in the book of Genesis, chapter twenty-three, verses sixteen through twenty.
Howie Stern, in his new life as Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker now at long last of Hebron, had always been struck by the deep and wondrous implications of the Hebrew word for receipt—kabbala. A follower of the great mystic Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, Howie abided by the teaching that every Jew is holy, and, by extension, everything touched by a Jew is holy—and Jews touched a lot of receipts. But when it came to the receipt for Hebron, its sacred powers were truly kabbalistic, it transported you to a state of breathless ecstasy and selfless willingness to be consumed in the mystical fires.
Howie’s wife, Tema, did not join him in this adventure. She remained at home in Jerusalem, not only because she had serious moral and intellectual reservations about the Hebron offensive, and not only because she did not like living in squalor or roughing it, but also because after nearly twelve years of marriage and a single bout of sexual intimacy with her husband in name only—a copulation episode that may have lasted no longer than a minute in time but felt like an eternity—Tema was in the very last stages of pregnancy. Howie had thrown himself upon her with savagery and violence, screaming, “Hey, I’m fucking you! I’m fucking you! Look guys, I’m fucking her!” His triumphant cries would have been more repellent had they not also struck her as so pathetically comic that she was in danger of insulting him unforgivably by erupting into laughter. Nevertheless, she managed to control herself—taking it like a man—lying there on her back without resisting, her eyes open wide, observing the progress of an oversized juke bug scuttling along the ceiling who didn’t get very far.
She had made a deal with Howie, and she was doing the honorable thing by living up to her part. The deal was—if he instructed her in the skills of a scribe, which no master sofer would risk imparting to a woman, and if he guided her in the writing and completion of a Torah scroll in accordance with the strictest rules and regulations, she would allow him a single shot at possessing her—she would let him “know” her; that was the euphemism in the text she had just written out letter by letter, as if this alone were the portal to complete knowledge and ownership of a woman, with no equivalent or reciprocal knowledge or possession of a man by a woman. That was the bargain she had made with her husband-in-name Howie Stern, who reinvented himself as Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, the penitent who had returned from sinfulness to full faith the minute he learned that the seed he had sown with tears would bear joyous fruit.
When her little mother Torah was completed, from the first word, Bereishit, to the last word, Yisrael, over three hundred thousand letters, each one inscribed painstakingly with a turkey feather quill and specially prepared ink on parchment made from the skin of an unborn calf, one-hundred-percent kosher in every respect except that it had been created by a rogue scribe who was a woman, hopelessly impure no matter how many times she immersed herself in the ritual bath, she did not renege on her agreement. She was a good sport. She lay down on her back and paid up.
Afterward Howie rolled off her, and though entirely spent and panting, managed to inquire, “How come I don’t see no blood?” By way of an explanation, she told him a story about how every day in the springtime when she was a little girl, with her neighbor’s dog Germy locked in his holding cell observing her, lunging at her from the end of his chain and barking madly, she used to climb the trellises bolted to the sides of her family’s garage at the end of the driveway, even in the skirts she was required to wear. She would climb those trellises every day in the spring in order to gather bouquets of roses to bring to her mother and extract a ghost of a smile. And every day when she came down from the trellises her flesh was torn by the thorns and splinters, and blood streamed down her face and arms and legs. That was how she had lost it, she told Howie, that was why there was no blood left.
Now, on this Passover eve, April 1968, standing on the terrace of the apartment her father had bought for them on Ben-Yefuneh Street in the Baka neighborhood of Jerusalem, watching Howie set off in his Peugeot heading into the Judean Hills past the tomb of Rachel Our Mother who had died in childbirth on the road to Efrat, driving onward to join his band of hotheads and reclaim the ancient city of Hebron, she pressed both hands against the massive heaving mound of her womb as she was seized by the insistent force of her first contraction. She recognized that a process had begun that would have to come to completion one way or another. The course had been set. No power on earth could stop it.
Supporting her belly from underneath, she waddled back inside to the small study attached to her bedroom, and sat down with her legs apart on the edge of a straight-backed chair by the window to consider how to proceed. What her father had bought for them was actually two apartments, which they had combined into one by knocking out the dividing wall. Howie had his own bedroom on the other side in what had once been the second apartment, though they kept a proper master suite with the two beds pushed together in a room that the former owners had dedicated as a memorial shrine to their son, killed in the 1956 Suez War. This official conjugal chamber was set up for the sake of public image, to forestall the gossips, and for the same reason she visited the ritual bath every month in compliance with the laws of family purity required of a married woman still in her childbearing years so that the ladies could comment to each other in the market the next morning that they had noticed Mrs. Stern coming home from the mikva last night, may the barren soon rejoice with her sons gathered around her, amen.
Her father would have preferred to buy in the Rekhavia section, which he regarded as more dignified and established, its streets named for distinguished commentators and sages. But Tema had insisted on Baka, with its streets called directly by the names of biblical characters, plain and simple, a few women’s names too. And even though Ben-Yefuneh was not in the section of Baka mysterious with lush gardens and old abandoned Arab stone houses, there was for her a measure of ironic justification in settling on a street named for Caleb son of Yefuneh, whose first name in Hebrew, Kalev, written without vowels, consisted of the same three letters as the word for dog, kelev. Her life had come full circle; once again, she found herself on the street of the dog. Reb Berel Bavli let his daughter have her way with regard to choice of location despite the fact on the ground that he was the one writing the checks because bottom line he was investing not in real estate but in progeny. Whenever he was in touch with her, usually by telephone which, whether the connection was clear or not, required shouting due to the accepted etiquette for long distance, he never failed to boom out across an ocean and a continent, “So-nu? Something cooking in the pot already? What—I didn’t pay for enough rooms for you maybe?”
Now, sitting in the study of her Baka apartment looking out to Ben-Yefuneh Street as the labor pains surged up in shorter intervals and with greater intensity, she reflected on her situation. She was a woman past thirty with a history of five miscarriages all in the first trimester of her previous pregnancies about to give birth to the only baby she had ever carried to term. The sensible course to follow would be to call a taxi at once to convey her to the nearest hospital. Nevertheless, she remained in her place, unable to take action.
To complicate matters, it was the eve of Passover. Almost every Jew in the city was occupied with the frenetic last-minute preparations for the festival. There was no Jew who did not have a Seder to attend. She too had houses that would open their doors to her as another needy soul and welcome her to their table now that her cowboy husband had headed to the hills to resettle the Holy Land with a critically urgent mandate that could not be put off for another minute; his priorities were fixed even with a wife on the perilous cusp of giving birth to his only child. She was aware with grim resignation that already on this day the hospitals must be severely understaffed, and, the longer she waited, the fewer would be the professionals on duty to attend to her. She would end up being delivered by the Arab janitor on the stone floor of the hospital lobby beside a slop pail and a squeegee. How had it happened that she had lived and sustained herself and arrived at this season with no one to turn to? How had it come to pass that she was so utterly alone?
The pains were growing more regular but were still tolerable—and so her thoughts drifted to the preposterous idea of approaching her renowned Jerusalem teacher of Tanakh, Nekhama Leibowitz, in whose classes she shone and whose gilyonot handouts with questions on the Torah portion she wrestled with weekly, coming up with answers so startling and original that they shook even the pedagogic rigorousness of her legendary teacher, at times thrillingly, at other times with horror over the basic assumptions that had been tossed out and the boundaries that had been crossed.
She could picture Nekhama in her tiny apartment at this very moment, with her blind husband settled in his familiar corner, her plain little woolen beret perched at an angle on her head covering her hair, signifying her status as a married woman. Despite the prominence she had carved out for herself as a celebrated teacher of Tanakh to both men and women, territory that had until then been almost exclusively the domain of men, the skin of her hands would still be rubbed raw in the soapy basin, her fingers bloodied from peeling the potatoes, she would scrupulously carry out the menial chores traditionally assigned to women in preparing for the holiday—this was the model she set forth for other women, stepping on the line firmly and publicly, but not, God forbid, overstepping or blurring it.
There was no doubt in her mind that Nekhama in her lovingkindness would make an effort to help her, even with the strict Pesakh deadline looming, from the immutable Written Law itself that could not on any account be put off. But was it truly possible to seek her out now, at such an hour and for such a reason, as Mother Rebekah had gone to seek out and inquire of God when her pregnancy was killing her, crying, Why me? Why me?—a simple human question. Nekhama would ponder the question in her usual circular way, answering with yet another question from the point of view of the commentators: What is so hard here for Rashi? What is troubling Rashbam? What is bothering Ramban? What is Hazal’s problem? And Tema would cry, My teacher, that is not the correct question. The correct question is right in front of your eyes, What is so hard here for Mother Rebekah? What is troubling Tema?
Just picturing this scenario exhausted her, and she made her way heavily into the adjacent room to lie down on her bed. She might have turned to Elisha Pardes, her other teacher, but she knew he was not in Israel at this time because, had he been there, he would surely have summoned her at once to his side. As the Toiter successor he was no doubt at this moment in the Fifth Avenue penthouse preparing for the Passover, with his wife and daughters and his disciples already in mourning over him. The veil had already been lowered over the face of the previous Toiter, and the mittens drawn up on his hands after the still glowing roach of his joint had been prized loose from his fingers. He had been gathered back to his fathers. The first time Elisha came to Israel as the new Toiter, not long after Tema’s own arrival, he dispatched a disciple down to Jerusalem to bring her up to him in Haifa. As the car drew up to his villa on the top of Mount Carmel, she saw him walking toward her from among the pine trees, where he had gone for a session of hitbodedut, to pour out his heart to God in seclusion like a child pleading with his father. His hair and beard had turned shimmering white, he resembled Elijah the prophet coming like a vision out of the Carmel. He had aged devastatingly in so short a time, he looked like a man of seventy years.
Tema turned to her escort and asked, as Mother Rebekah had asked of the servant Eliezer of Damascus who was delivering her to be the wife of his master Abraham’s son, Isaac, Who is that coming toward us from the woods? The answer came, That is my master, the Toiter.
Like Mother Rebekah who had fallen from her camel in a kind of swoon when she first laid eyes on Isaac and had drawn her veil over her face, Tema’s knees grew weak as she stepped out of the car, and she buckled onto the concrete, covering her face with both her hands in mortification.
Elisha the Toiter Rav lifed her by the hands and led her into the villa, to a private room stark white overlooking the sea, with a bunch of red poppies in a crystal vase in the center of the table, and he closed the door. He fell on her neck and kissed her, and raised his voice and wept as Father Jacob had wept with recognition when he first set eyes on Rachel Our Mother, she was so lovely in face and form. She was his sister / his bride, he said to her, she was the Toiter’s shadow, his mirror image, his locked garden, his sealed fountain. Her name would no longer be Tema, he said to her, she would be called Temima—because she was blameless and without blemish, perfection, she was the pure Ima, the holy Mother. He placed his left hand under her head and with his right hand he caressed her. Love is as fierce as death, he said to her—and so they knew one another, and, finally, after all the years of grieving, reborn as Temima, she was comforted for the loss of her mother.
Thereafter, whenever he came to Israel, several times a year, a car would be sent to bring Temima so that she could study at his feet for the duration of his stay, sometimes for as long as a week—an extraordinary privilege and an honor to be singled out in this way by one of the giants of the generation, as she explained to her husband, Howie Stern. In the first years he would arrive by ship to the port of Haifa and never venture out of the Galilee, going as far as Safed or Tiberias but no farther, because, as he told her, more of the Holy Land would be just too much for him, he could absorb it only in small doses. It was like reading the Torah, he elaborated. Often he was obliged to stop at the first words of the third verse—“And God said”—he could not go on, it was too overwhelming; think about it—God said, He spoke, it was more than enough to take in. “But what He said is, ‘Let there be light,’” Temima responded with a laugh, and playfully she switched on the light to reveal their naked bodies, his already sickly and wasted, and she added, “I just wanted you to see for yourself that it’s Rachel this time, and not poor Leah with her bloodshot eyes from too much weeping.”
Later on, when he began to arrive by plane, he would go no farther than Jaffa, where she would stay with him in a specially prepared suite of rooms overlooking the harbor from which the prophet Jonah set sail to Nineveh. His depleted body was already bruised and diseased as if it had been thrashed around in a storm, swallowed up in a darkness like the grave and then exposed to too much sunlight, and like Jonah he would beg to die, and like Job covered with scabies he would declare, Perish the day I was born and the night in which it was announced that a male child had been conceived. Nevertheless, after each of her miscarriages—five in all, all surely sons, since the Toiter can never produce a male successor of his own blood who could survive—he stroked her hair and comforted her with the words of the holy Rav Nakhman, There is no despair here in the world at all, and he set before her a meal of olives and bread and wine and figs, urging her to eat. “Why should we fast?” he would say to her as King David had said after the death of his baby son by Bathsheba, the woman he had stolen from another man. “Can we bring him back again? We are going to him, but he will never come back to us.”
She must have dozed off, because now she started into alertness from a clenching pain and found herself soaked, lying in a wet pool. Her water had broken, liquid was gushing out from between her thighs beyond her control, but the answer had been revealed to her through her ruminations in the realm between here and there. She needed to go find Ketura. It had been Ketura who had taken care of her after each of her five miscarriages, tending to her with blessed devotion and discretion, offering the excuses to Howie that the mistress is indisposed due to female problems—that was sufficient. It was amazing how easily a man could be deceived simply because he did not pay the correct sort of attention, it was a side benefit of not being taken seriously that a woman could count on.
Temima knew exactly where Ketura lived: on El-Wad Road in the shadow of the Temple Mount with its Golden Dome, in an apartment Temima had rented for her. She had been to visit her there on several occasions in recent months since the Old City of Jerusalem had been breached and opened again to Jews, bringing money to Ketura to tide her over after Howie had dismissed her from their service when Temima had conceived from the single time he had flung himself upon her to collect what was owed him. Officially, Ketura was their Arab housekeeper, but soon after she arrived at their home from the Makhane Yehuda market she also began serving as Howie’s handmaid, his pilegesh, the “outlet” that, in their original negotiations in the other Israel—the Israel kosher delicatessen on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn—Temima had vowed to Howie she would provide for him for the sake of his health, to take care of his needs.
Temima had found Ketura begging on the Agrippas Street side of the market with an exquisite mocha-skinned baby swaddled in a towel lying in a discarded grapefruit crate some distance from her by a garbage dump. The baby opened his eyes, a translucent pale color, gray almost blue like ancient glass, and stared at Temima. “I just can’t bear to watch the boy die,” Ketura had whispered when Temima had placed a coin in her hand that day in the market, even in violation of her principles against encouraging women beggars who exploited their children because she had been electrified by the remarkable scar in the shape of a black bird with outspread wings stretched across the face of this cast-off woman. Since there was no justice, at least let there be mercy.
Ketura had just come out of the wilderness, from the patriarchal compound of Abba Kadosh, who had disgorged her with her baby. She left with her child in her arms, calling him Ibn Kadosh because he was his father’s son. The scar that had taken the oracular shape of a bird had been seared with acid onto her face by her father and brothers when she had first dared to brazenly step out on her own. Abba Kadosh had never had a woman so mystically branded. The bird beguiled him, it excited him, it pleased him to trace its outline on Ketura’s face with his finger, its wondrous shape, the wings outstretched across the cheeks emerging from the hump of her soaring refined nose. Howie, on the other hand, avoided looking at it, especially in intimate moments, and deep down he churned with resentment at Temima for this cynical fulfillment of her promise by providing for his needs and his health with damaged goods. Now, ten years later, the boy with skin like brushed sable and eyes like ice and a bearing like an exotic young prince, along with his brutally scarred mother, had been cast out once again.
Temima folded some hand towels and packed them between her legs to absorb the flowing liquid. Wrapping her head and shoulders in a great woolen shawl, with dark glasses masking her eyes and a basket on her arm filled with the Passover macaroons that Ibn Kadosh loved covered with a white cloth napkin, she set out on foot from her apartment on Ben-Yefuneh, east on Yehuda Street, then up Hebron Road in the northward direction, away from Hebron and all of its madness toward Jerusalem and all of its madness, and passed through the great stone walls of the Old City by the portal of the Jaffa Gate.
It was already late afternoon, the air was cool and crisp, traffic had stopped, the streets were silent and deserted as each citizen took shelter inside a warm house with the ghost of a blood smear on the doorpost to protect the firstborns and found a seat at the brightly lit Passover table. Every few steps along the way Temima was obliged to pause and lean against some inanimate support, bracing herself, moaning and massaging the writhing globe of her belly as the spasms gripped her relentlessly, wave after wave. By the time she reached the Via Dolorosa through the winding alleyways of the Old City bazaar, all of its shops shuttered and locked fast, she was doubled over with the pangs of labor, like a film run backward of Miriam mother of Yeshua HaNozri making her way along the street of her boy’s future agony, with no place to give birth and begin the story.
At last she reached Ketura’s apartment on El-Wad Road and collapsed against its door, her wracked body brushing against it as she slumped to the ground—and the Djinn who appeared before her was Ibn Kadosh in his white underpants. He informed her that his mother was not at home, she had a job that night at the King David Hotel—in the kitchen, he stressed, lest Temima assume it was a private commission in the bedroom of a paying guest; she was working the communal Seder on this night for the rich tourists. He asked her what she had brought for him, and sat down on the floor to eat his macaroons.
Within the hour Temima’s baby was born, extracted by Ibn Kadosh in his white underpants with almond and coconut crumbs stuck to his fingertips on the prayer rug of the living room floor, a procedure not so different from the kidding of the goats he tended on the slopes of Silwan, Temima creating much more of an uproar than the other animals, straining and bearing down frantically with sweat streaming down her cheeks flushed bright red, bleating nonstop, Mama, Mama, Mama!
When Ketura returned home at dawn, in a headscarf and long tailored coat over her tight jeans and spangled halter top, she found Temima still sprawled on the floor covered with a fuzzy pink blanket stamped with the image of a Barbie doll that Ibn Kadosh had spread over her. The baby boy, still attached by the umbilical cord, was grazing at her breast. Ketura cut the cord and gathered up the pulpy mass of the placenta. She took it into her small kitchen and sliced off a section, hacking the remainder into two chunks like liver, one to be planted in a pot to bear a life-giving tree, the other to be wrapped in clear plastic and stored in the freezer for future emergencies. The fresh piece of placenta now sitting on her scarred countertop she dumped into a wooden bowl and minced with a chopping knife, then stirred it into a tea with lemon juice, sugar, cinnamon, and mint leaves. She brought this infusion to Temima in a glass even before setting about the task of cleaning up the new mother and her infant, wiping away the blood and mucous.
She squatted on the floor beside Temima and fed her spoonful after spoonful of the tea until the glass was empty. “It is very good for you,” Ketura said over Temima’s squeamish objections. “Yolk-sac tea. It will save you from the sadness of after birth.”
“But is it kosher for Passover?” Temima asked.
“You see?” said Ketura. “Already you are joking.” And she smiled with such pleasure the wings of the bird on her face stretched out even wider as if preparing to take flight.
A week later, Temima woke up in her bed in her Ben-Yefuneh Street apartment after a longer-than-usual undisturbed sleep, her breasts painfully hard like two boulders, swollen and engorged, the front of her nightgown stained with great blots of starch-dried milk and milk still seeping. She wondered why her baby boy, as yet unnamed, had not cried for his usual feeding, and experienced for a moment the pride of a mother with an unusually good child who so considerately sleeps through the night.
The next morning the baby was to be circumcised. Howie had agreed by telephone, after consultation with rabbinical authorities over the fine points of which mitzvah or obligation trumps the other, to tear himself away from their holy mission of settlement at the Park Hotel in Hebron where he and his comrades were still entrenched, and to come to Jerusalem to partake of morning prayers at a nearby synagogue on the eighth day after the birth during which the holy commandment of circumcision, the brit of his first and only son, would be performed and a simple festive mitzvah meal would be offered.
Holding herself very carefully, Temima descended from her bed, her body still tender from the poundings and lacerations of childbirth, and shuffled to the cradle in the corner of her room to check on the baby. Where he should have been lying, she found instead a note from Ketura informing her that, on Howie’s orders, she had taken the boy to Hebron to be circumcised in the Ibrahimi Mosque. “I’m sorry, Temima,” Ketura wrote. “I really need the money.”
Ketura returned late the next day without the child, telling Temima that they had decided it was in the boy’s best spiritual interest to remain with his father at this unprecedented messianic time. She put out both her hands palms upward and shrugged her shoulders and the wings of the bird seared across her face drooped mournfully. There was nothing she could do about it; they were all crazy, she said. The child was being cared for by one of the women in the hotel group who had given birth a month earlier—a convert with long false eyelashes called Yehudit Har-HaBayit, formerly known as Rapture Reed, Ketura had heard, the daughter of Christian evangelicals from Idaho in America, ardent believers in the State of Israel as the herald of the Second Coming. Now Yehudit Har-HaBayit suckled two babies without favoritism, one at each breast, a wet nurse in a sustained state of exaltation.
Ketura herself had not been present at the circumcision that morning, having been requested as an Arab and a Muslim and also as a kind of impure “leper” due to the ominous discoloration of her skin, the bird of prey sprawled across her face, to leave the chamber containing the tombs of Abraham and Sarah while the ceremony took place. She stationed herself instead, as a form of protest, on the seventh step leading up to the mosque that had been erected over the burial cave, which was as far as the Jews had once been allowed to ascend for so many years, peering with longing through a small hole in the masonry at their heart’s desire, the mothers and fathers denied to them. She could hardly see anything at all, but she was able to report that she had heard from conversations around her that the gentleman who had carried out the circumcision was Temima’s own father who had just arrived the day before from Brooklyn to do the job. She handed to Temima a note from Howie in a sealed envelope, which Temima slipped unopened between the pages of her Tanakh, at Genesis, chapter twenty-two.
Her father, Reb Berel Bavli, showed up at Temima’s apartment the next night still high from the audacious event the day before, raving with enthusiasm for the entire resettlement project to which he had already made a substantial financial contribution, announcing that he now intended to establish it as his number-one charity, above even supporting the Oscwiecim Rebbe. Imagine, he cried, the first bris mila in Hebron since the massacre of 1929, when sixty-seven of our people were slaughtered by the Arab murderers, may their names and memory be blotted out, and the rest, Jews who had lived there for hundreds of years, were banished from our second-holiest city. Well, watch out boys, we’re back—believe me, you putzes, we are definitely back, and this time, we’re here to stay! The first bris in Hevron in almost forty years—that we have been kept alive and sustained to reach this day!—and in the Me’aras HaMakhpela no less, by the grave of our forefather Avraham Avinu himself of all places, the very same Avraham who performed the first recorded circumcision in Jewish history, the original mohel. And who of all people is given the honor to perform this one, with his own hands, for his own grandchild, his only male descendant? I’m telling you, Tema’le, tears were running down my face, and you know me—I’m not the type who usually cries because of a little blood. In thirty seconds flat—a new record!—I snipped it right off, good-bye and good riddance, quicker than a wink, faster than you could say Moishe Pipik. The sandek, Rabbi Moshe, the leader of the movement himself, who was given the honor to sit in the chair of Eliyahu HaNavi and hold the baby on a pillow on his lap while I did my business, couldn’t believe it was over—it should go in the Guinness Book of Records for the fastest bris ever, I’m telling you, someone should write to them, even with my jet lag and my reflexes not so ay-yay-yay I broke the record. The baby didn’t know what hit him, he didn’t even have a chance to let out one good holler before I sucked the blood from the cut with my own mouth and spit it out into a cup, and then I wrapped his little schmeckel’e up in a piece of gauze, it was so delicious, a delicacy like a chicken neck, a gorgel, and just as he was getting ready to yell bloody murder I dipped some gauze—a different piece of gauze, needless to say, not the same one I used on his little you-know-what—into the bekher filled with nice sweet wine and stuck it into his mouth, and he sucked away happy as a lambchop. I’m telling you, Tema’le, this is a grade-A baby, and I know from grade-A, believe me. He looks just like his father, the spitting image, also with a pot belly, also bald, all he needs is a beard and they could go on the road together and do a comedy routine in the Catskill hotels, on the borscht belt, Maxi and Mini. Then Howie announced the baby’s name: Pinkhas—Pinkhas Hevroni, may he grow up to Torah, to the wedding canopy, and to good deeds. Hevroni, you know what that’s for, of course, and such an honor it is for him to be the first boy to be circumcised in the Me’aras HaMakhpela in Hevron, he’ll never forget it, he will go down in the history books. And Pinkhas, so that he should be blessed with the balls, the baitzim, you should excuse the expression, to stand up and do the right thing by our people in times of danger, when God is so mad at us for our sins He is ready to wipe us out like a bunch of cockroaches—to stand up like Pinkhas son of Elazar son of Aharon the kohain, who took his spear in his hand and went straight into that tent, he didn’t think for one minute should I / shouldn’t I, he stuck that spear right into those two, that bigshot from the tribe of Shimon, what’s his name?—stuck it into him right there, while his schlang, you should excuse me, was schtupped in a place where it had no business being, in that shiksa from Midian, that temptress who leads men to sin, may her name be erased forever. That’s the kind of boy we want our Pinkhas Hevroni Ba’al-Teshuva to grow up to be—am I right, Tema’le? And afterward, I’m telling you, such a meal we had, a kiddush like you wouldn’t believe, right there in the Makhpela, courtesy of yours truly—super deluxe, catered five stars, one-hundred-percent kosher for Passover, nothing but the best for my grandson, with real tablecloths and napkins and dishes and silverware—no paper or plastic for our young prince, Pinkhas Hevroni Ba’al-Teshuva—and with flower centerpieces and waiters in uniforms, all Arabs by the way, so much for their principles when you wave a few dollar bills in front of their noses, that’s the Arab mentality. I’m telling you, it’s amazing what you can accomplish, even in so-called Occupied Territory, even in the wild West Bank, with a little money and a little hutzpah. Every kind of smoked fish and salad you can imagine we had—twelve stations, meats like you never saw, and I know from meats, wild ox and leviathan just like in Gan Eden—cakes and fruits, mountains of shemura matzah that cost me an arm and a leg, drinks like you wouldn’t believe, hot and cold, including the world’s best kosher wine to toast a leHaim in honor of the occasion, and even two ice sculptures, one molded in the shape of the Holy Temple, may it be rebuilt speedily and in our time, filled with pickled lox, and the other in the shape of the Tomb of the Patriarchs, filled with pickled herring. I’m telling you, Tema’le, you missed an event of a lifetime, I’m sorry to say. You should have been there. That’s where you belong. What kind of mother and wife are you anyways? Your baby is there, your husband is there—what are you doing here, if you don’t mind my asking? Howie tells me he sent you a letter asking you to get off your m’yeh, you should excuse the expression, and come right away—so tell me already, what are you waiting for, the Moshiakh?
Temima listened to all of this without a word. She did not offer her father refreshments, not even a glass of water or a cup of tea. When finally he paused long enough for her to conclude that he had come to the end of his story, she stood up and said, “You must be very tired, Tateh, from your jet lag and from beating the world’s brit record and from dealing with the caterers—and I am in great pain. I gave birth to a baby a few days ago and now they’ve stolen him away from me. My breasts feel like they’re going to explode like bombs”—and she blushed crimson from the ordeal of being obliged, in her urgent desire to end this meeting, to offer her father intimate information about her woman’s body.
At the door, Temima asked after Frumie, and her father made a slicing motion like a karate chop down the front of his chest. “Cancer, very bad. They cut them right off, yup, both of them”—and then he left, without even a light kiss or a fatherly embrace, it would have been too awkward and unseemly after such news about Frumie, and also after being made privy to details about the state of his own daughter’s equipment, all this talk of breasts, even for a man like Reb Berel Bavli whose life’s work with creatures had eviscerated him of every shred of sentimentality about flesh and mortality.
Howie telephoned the next morning on the pretext of informing her of the name he had given to their child. “Pinkhas is not a name I would have chosen,” Temima retorted coldly.
This response provoked from Howie a fiery outpouring on how the land of Israel had just been handed back to the Jewish people on a silver platter, it’s a miracle that only a blind man or a fool would spit at and reject. He then went on to inquire if she had read the note he had sent to her with Ketura. “I’ve already paid with interest for your writing,” Temima replied. “I don’t have time to read any letters from you. I’m sick with fever and sores because you snatched my baby from my breast. What kind of animal are you anyway? Even Hannah was allowed to wean her boy Samuel before turning him over to the corrupt bosses in Shilo. Even that fanatic Abraham allowed Sarah to finish weaning Isaac in the natural course of events, and made a party to celebrate the milestone before he took him up to the Moriah to slit his throat and sacrifice him.” And she slammed down the receiver with a crash to prevent him from hearing her sobs.
She cried for six weeks without pause, even in her sleep she wept in her bed, and in the daytime she wept at the window of her apartment on Ben-Yefuneh Street, looking out as if seeking the one her soul longed for, never leaving the house lest the expected one show up and she not be there to greet him. Yet it was beyond her power to amass the energy and will to rush to his side, sweep him up in her arms, and flee with him to safety. This was a child conceived in a compromising deal with a man she scorned, carried off to a place she could not justify or bring herself to. She who had been forsaken by her own mother, she should have done better by her own child. Maybe she just did not love him enough, poor thing. The best she could offer him was to dress herself in sackcloth, to wail and refuse to be comforted, and go down mourning to the depths of Sheol.
Throughout this time, Ketura did not leave her side. As Ibn Kadosh was dispatched for food and supplies, Ketura squeezed and pumped milk from Temima’s breasts to ease the swelling, at times suckling from them herself but never emptying them entirely, to wean them gradually until they dried out. She placed frozen cabbage leaves over Temima’s breasts to soothe them, rubbed olive oil into the nipples to soften them, brewed teas from sage and peppermint leaves to prevent infection, and she defrosted a portion of the placenta she had saved, ground it up, and stirred it into the food she prepared for Temima, without even notifying her of this added ingredient, to lift the heavy cloud of sadness that crushes the spirit after childbirth. But for a mother whose baby had been torn from her as had been Temima’s lot, Ketura reflected with keen distress, since she herself had been an accomplice, even the garnish of the placentas of half the women of China might not suffice.
When the child was about six weeks old, Howie telephoned again ostensibly to let Temima know that they had moved from the Park Hotel in downtown Hebron to an Israeli military compound overlooking the city. This, of course, was something that Temima was already aware of, as the tortured internal ideological debates of the Hebron settlers who were insisting they would never move from this place in which they had established a foothold at such personal cost and travail seared the news day after day. But not to worry, Howie assured Temima, even though the government considers us a royal pain in the rear, we sealed in cement a major deal with the big enchiladas: first, a new city will be built for us overlooking Hebron, to be known as Kiryat Arba, and then the old Jewish quarter in the heart of Hebron itself, Beit Romano, Beit Hadassah, the Avraham Avinu courtyard, and so on, will be restored to its original grandeur. For Temima’s information, her father, Reb Berel Bavli, had already purchased for them the best villa in Kiryat Arba and the best apartment in Hebron, sight unseen, still only a dream, fully paid-up, no mortgages, no headaches whatsoever. So there was nothing to be concerned about, Howie went on, there was no risk in abandoning our stronghold in the Park Hotel. Hebron is ours now and forever, it is ours in this day as it was then, even if meanwhile we are living in tents on an army base with a communal kitchen and the latrines in the mud. As the Gemara teaches us, the land of Israel is acquired only through suffering. He asked again if Temima had read his note, and when she did not respond, he said, The main thing is, I’m inviting you to come and live with us. This is where you belong—your baby is here, this is your home.
“Is there a Jacuzzi on the army base?” Temima inquired.
Howie groaned. “How come you’re still such a JAP, Tema?”
“Maybe when they put in a Jacuzzi, I’ll think about coming,” Temima said, and she hung up the phone.
She began to venture out of the house, returning to her Tanakh classes with her steadfast teacher, Morah Nekhama Leibowitz, who with a swift, curiously raw female appraisal took note of Temima’s restored trim shape and asked about the baby.
“In Hebron,” Temima said, “with the settlers. His father kidnapped him for his brit and I haven’t seen him since.”
“Ah,” Nekhama said, “already they are sacrificing the children to the Molekh. Avodah zara, idolatry. As the prophet Jeremiah says, ‘The number of your cities has become your gods.’”
And then, in a manner strikingly alien for her, so rigid was she in keeping to her program, in a gesture that Temima appreciated as the fumbling attempt of an incurably formal spirit to comfort a desolate mother with the nearest thing to a touch that she could muster, Nekhama returned to the final portions of the book of Exodus, even though it was already late spring, almost summer, and they had completed those sections months ago—posing a question without even covering herself modestly by channeling it through the male commentators: “If the Holy Temple was created as the permanent dwelling place for the earthly presence of the Master of the Universe, why do you think its artifacts—the ark, the altars, the table, and so on and so forth—continued to have the original design of rings with poles through them for ease of portability, a quick getaway, so to speak, from the days of the Tabernacle when our ancestors were still wandering in the wilderness?” And even more atypically, Nekhama answered her question relying on her own authority rather than that of the sages, even throwing in another colloquialism meant to brighten the face of the stricken mother who had endured such a blow. “Because the heart of the matter has never been land, it has always been Torah. Have Torah, Will Travel, as they say on the great frontier—that is our ticket.”
More and more now, Temima left the apartment on Ben-Yefuneh Street, which had become for her increasingly suffocating and unbearable with remembered pain. This was when she began to take up with intense seriousness and concentration the practice of hitbodedut, which she continued over the years in different forms. In those days, she would throw a shawl over her head and shoulders on the cool Jerusalem nights and seek a solitary place, in the woods or the fields where she could hear, as Rav Nakhman of Bratslav had heard, the unique song of each blade of grass. She would converse with God in her own language and in her own way, supplicating Him, spilling out everything in her heart as to a mother, no matter how shameful or frivolous.
At first she sought out secluded spots in the western part of Jerusalem, parks and gardens, Ein Karem, the Sultan’s Pool, the leper colony, Gehinnom. With time, she ventured alone deep into East Jerusalem, beyond the walls of the old city, along the slopes near what was said to be Absalom’s tomb, by the springs of Gihon and the pool of Shiloah and Hezekiah’s tunnel. She stood alone among the crumbling gravestones on the Mount of Olives one dark night, wild dogs prowling nearby, her arms raised to the heavens, confessing to God yet again with strangled cries the terrible guilt that was churning within her for abandoning her child, for allowing pride and perverse principle to override her maternal responsibilities to this blameless boy, for colluding by her stubbornness in letting go of him so passively.
As she beat her breast in anguished confession again and again, God answered her by sending a gang of Arab boys to fall upon her and throw her to the ground. Their hands began groping at her woman’s body—breasts, belly, buttocks, between her thighs—she who had always felt herself to be set apart and chosen, and yet, in the end, she was no different from other women, the geography of all her hidden places was known to any stranger and imbecile and thug. Her mouth open but no scream issuing forth as in a nightmare, she struggled to detach her spirit from her body and nullify her inconsequential physical self with thoughts of God. This is what a woman who casts away her own child deserves, this is what a woman who wanders alone in such a place in the dark of night deserves, this is what a woman who presumes to take on the spiritual calling of a holy man deserves.
Then, as suddenly as the attackers had descended upon her, they were gone, taking flight like a flock of crows rising from carrion. Coming toward her now she recognized Ibn Kadosh in a white loincloth, brandishing a sword like an epic warrior, braying like a wild donkey, obeying the command of his mother Ketura, who had charged him with following Temima at a distance in her perilous night wanderings. Temima is a holy woman who must be allowed to move freely, Ketura had said to her son, but we her followers must follow her wherever she leads, and guard her in her comings and goings from all evil.
Her wanderings continued through the summer into the fall. She walked the length and the breadth of the city of Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, east and west, by night and by day, her Tanakh in her cloth bag slung across the front of her body like an ammunition bandolier. Now and then she would sit down to rest, on a bench, or a stone parapet, on the ground under a tree, and occasionally in a café where she would order some Turkish coffee or a mint tea and, once in a while, something to eat.
That is how she found herself late one afternoon in early autumn as the High Holidays were drawing near in a café on Ben-Yehuda Street, with her Tanakh open before her at the chapter on the binding of Isaac on the altar on the top of Mount Moriah where the Golden Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque of the Muslims now stood—the chapter that would be chanted very soon on Rosh HaShana—and she decided that the time had come to break the seal and read Howie’s letter. Though he had composed it in the spring at the end of Passover, he began with the Kol Nidre language of Yom Kippur coming soon upon them: All my vows, my oaths, my obligations with which I once pledged and bound myself I now repent of, I deem them absolved and annulled and voided, with no power over me. I no longer will consider you my sister. If you want your child back, you must come to Hevron and live with me as my wife in accordance with the law of Moses and Israel.
Temima folded the letter, slipped it back into its envelope and reinserted it between the pages of her Tanakh, this time at the Second book of Samuel, chapter three. She raised her eyes at a grating noise, followed by coarse shouting, and saw the manager of the café, his face red and glistening with perspiration, scuffling with three young men dressed entirely in white with exceptionally long sidelocks descending from their crocheted white skullcaps in waves down to their waists. She recognized them as the trio of Bratslaver Hasidim who staked out the spot in front of the café, singing and dancing until they brought themselves to a climactic pitch, then passing around a large empty tin can with its Kibbutz Beit-HaMita pickles label still affixed.
“I know these guys,” the manager said to Temima as she approached, a great chrysanthemum of saliva spraying forth from his mouth. “They’ll order every last thing on the menu, then give us a blessing in the name of the Dead Hasidim and walk out the door without paying one lousy grush.”
Temima nodded her head to soothe him with her understanding and sympathy, and assured him he had no cause for worry; let them eat their fill to their heart’s content, they were growing boys, she would cover their costs entirely—and she returned to her seat to continue her studies.
Out of the corner of her eye, she could take in every inch of the surface of the small round table nearby that the three were clustered around filling up again and again with the dishes they had ordered, their sidelocks tucked into their collars so they would not dip into their soup, their heads bent low over their bowls and plates, beaking their noses into their food as they stuffed it into their mouths in voracious heaps, sometimes with utensils, mostly shoving it in with their hands, gesticulating passionately with those very hands, spitting out moist, half-processed gusts as they argued with rising passion and fervor the legal correctness of taking the initiative and blowing up the mosques on top of Mount Moriah, purging the ground in preparation for the Third Temple, scorching the earth and bringing on the redemption. Someone had to do it, the idols had to be smashed, it could not be put off any longer. Maybe it was unfortunate that good people would have to be destroyed along with the bad, but the time had come to get the show on the road, the geula is coming, redemption is at hand, the question was not what but when: We must pose this question to the Toiter Rav, we must ask the Toiter when is the right moment in this apocalyptic time, the Toiter will know, the Toiter is in direct communion with the Master of the Universe—Come on, boys, let’s go, the Toiter is sitting just a few blocks away, thank God, right here in Jerusalem the holy city.
Temima gave out a sharp little laugh. How could the Toiter be here in Jerusalem? He never came as far as Jerusalem, and besides, he was too frail to travel even to Israel, too sick, and even if by some miracle he had been conveyed to Israel, not to speak of Jerusalem, surely she would have been notified—it was ridiculous to think he was in town.
The three Bratslavers stopped eating abruptly, swiveled sharply to face her in unison, and demanded to know what exactly she thought was so funny. Temima stared at them blankly, but they insisted, Don’t deny it, you were laughing, we heard it.
The Toiter is in Jerusalem for the holidays, they went on. The Toiter wanted to go to Uman at this time of year, to the grave of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav of blessed memory near Kiev in the Ukraine because the holy Rav Nakhman has promised whoever visits his grave around the time of Rosh Hashana and gives a coin to charity and recites the ten psalms of the Tikkun HaKlali, that person will be cured of the sin of wasting his seed and nocturnal emissions and keri and polluting the very place of the original covenant, the brit itself, and, by extension, he will be cured of all his other sins as well. But those cursed Russian anti-Semites, they would not let even the holy Toiter into their stinking country, not for all the money in the world, they refused to give the Toiter a visa, those rotten, atheistic communists, may their names and memory be blotted out forever and ever, may their kingdom perish from the face of the earth. And so, instead of to Uman, the Toiter has come here to the holy city of Jerusalem. The Toiter is at the King David Hotel, for your information, in the Royal Suite on the sixth floor, complete with Jacuzzi for the sake of his health.
The three Bratslavers left the café soon after, turning their faces as dusk descended and shading their eyes to look from afar and survey the Old City of Jerusalem and the Temple Mount with its mosques rising above it. Temima got up, paid their bill and her own, and set out for a ritual bath—not the regular mikva she used to visit in her neighborhood to divert the busybodies, but another one entirely to which she had never gone before—where she immersed herself for the first time since giving birth six months earlier.
She returned to her apartment on Ben-Yefuneh Street and removed the drab maternity smock she was still wearing. She dressed herself with great care, in a white silk blouse and a flowing skirt of crimson velvet, a silver belt around her waist, embroidered slippers on her feet, a long pearl in the shape of a teardrop in one ear, kohl outlining her dark eyes, and on her head a diaphanous white veil that came low over her face. She was the vision of a matriarch, Mother Sarah, who passed herself off as her husband Abraham’s sister to save his life from kings wild to possess her for her lambent beauty.
Carrying only her little mother Torah wrapped in a shawl like a baby in her arms, she made her way that night to the King David Hotel, where she announced herself at the reception desk only as Temima; she had an appointment to see Rabbi Elisha Pardes, she said. He knew her, she added; he was expecting her, he had sent his messengers to inform her to come. Within minutes, one of the Toiter disciples robed in luminous white came down and escorted her up to the Royal Suite on the sixth floor.
Temima did not emerge from the private quarters of the Royal Suite of the King David Hotel for more than a month, through the holiday season, commencing with the rise of Rosh HaShana, curving up to its peak on the day of Yom Kippur, and sloping down to trail into the new year with the rejoicing over the Torah. Everything she required in the way of food and drink was left on a tray outside her door, always with a vase of fresh flowers. All of her personal needs were satisfied within. The clothing she arrived in she cast in the depths of the wardrobe. Once a day she would put on the white dressing gown with the gold crown of the King David Hotel crest embroidered over the heart, her long black hair streaming down her back, and she and the Toiter would stand in opposite corners of the room to practice hitbodedut, like Isaac and Rebekah pleading for a child. When the Toiter returned to New York at the close of the holiday season, Temima left the hotel, putting on again for the first time the clothing she had worn when she arrived. She carried her little mother Torah in her arms wrapped now in the talit that Elisha had given her as a pledge, with a neckpiece embroidered in gold and silver threads, and azure fringes, which she sent back to him at the end of ten days together with a note informing him that the father of the baby she is carrying is the owner of this prayer shawl.
Within a week the talit was returned to her with a note pinned to it—HOLD ONTO THIS UNTIL OUR SON IS READY FOR IT. The Toiter also revealed to her that the dynasty would be restored through Temima; moreover, he let it be known to her that, should something happen to him, she would be the Toiter regent until the boy grew up. Meanwhile, he wrote, she must go to Hebron to live with her husband as his wife. Let all the world regard the boy as the son of Haim Ba’al-Teshuva until the moment arrives for him to reveal himself. In that way, perhaps, the angel of death will be deceived.
When the time came for Temima to give birth, the familiar ideological debate sprang up again among the Hebron settlers in the military compound overlooking the ancient city, their numbers significantly increased by supporters from all over the land of Israel who had dropped everything to join the cause and give meaning to their lives. Among the women, the discussion was naturally most heated. On the one hand, the more fiery spirits insisted that, from this time forth, every child should be delivered in Hebron, in the Cave of Makhpela itself optimally, to establish the precedent of the permanence and normalcy of Jewish life cycles on this ground from death to birth to death; there were enough skilled women who could assist, and there was even a licensed midwife practitioner among them, Shifra-Puah, who could handle just about any complication that might arise—and, bottom line, God would help. Even if, in the meantime, the birth itself would have to take place up here in one of the tents of the army camp, it could still be asserted that this child was born in the holy city of Hebron, and thereby the stake of ownership would be dug in even deeper.
Virtually all those who gave birth during this period, even first-time mothers quaking at the unknown, were shamed into having their babies in this way, their women comrades closing a circle around them in the tent, swaying in prayer, waving sprigs of rosemary and myrtle, chanting and beating on drums.
There were, on the other side, a few cooler voices who advocated that they take advantage of the resources available to them through the military. Within half an hour the laboring mother could be transferred to a cutting-edge hospital facility in Jerusalem with the best-trained specialists and top-of-the-line high-tech equipment, conveyed in a cortege of army vehicles mowing down everything in its path, lights flashing, sirens blaring—or she could be transported by helicopter, they could arrive in a great swoop like a spaceship from another planet spiraling down to earth. We may be stuck in Hebron with the toilets in between the olive trees, but we are enlightened Westerners, we are not some kind of uncivilized tribe from a Third World runt of a country.
Especially in Temima’s case, when her time came, the more moderate voices grew stronger and more insistent—not only because Temima was over thirty and had given birth so far to only one child hardly a year earlier under the most primitive conditions, and not only because it looked as if this second baby was coming into this world somewhat prematurely and complications might ensue, but above all because from the moment Temima had arrived in Hebron, she was recognized as a woman set apart by extraordinary powers and gifts who must in every way be protected. Even as she entered the camp that first day there were unmistakable signs. It was nearing the end of October and the rain was pouring down as if all the fountains of the deep had split apart and the windows of heaven had opened. The prayer for rain that had just been recited on Shemini Atzeret, at the end of the Succot festival, had obviously done the job. Giving off a majestic radiance, Temima made her way through the compound to her tent like a queen on a road from which all obstacles had been cleared away as the rain pounded down; everyone was soaked to transparency while she alone remained completely dry, untouched by a single drop. She was hailed at once as the reincarnation of the holy Rebbetzin Menukha Rachel Slonim, the granddaughter of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, founder of the Habad dynasty, who had come to Hebron with her family in the year 1845, blessed with the power to walk between the raindrops, and it was said of her that never once had she been touched by rain.
Now of course this holy woman Menukha Rachel Slonim, who became known as the Matriarch of Hebron, to whom both Jews and Arabs in their need had turned for blessings and guidance and solace, lay in the old Jewish cemetery below, not only drenched by the rain and mauled by all the other natural elements, but her grave crumbling and befouled with garbage and filth, desecrated with all manner of noxious waste, human and inhuman. Yet Temima’s reputation as Menukha’s gilgul acquired even greater force by the next morning after her arrival when it became known that the tent of the Ba’al-Teshuvas had sprung a leak directly over the spot where the entire family slept, yet not a single drop of water had fallen upon them. The simplest solution would have been to move the mattresses, but by pressing in on Temima and huddling under her wing the family was sheltered and kept dry. Temima turned on her side to face the baby her husband called Pinkhas, who lay practically beneath her with his eyes wide open, watchful and on guard, as if to prevent her from ever leaving him again and shield her from all harm, she stroking his head murmuring, I’m here, mommy, it’s okay, no one can hurt me, this is how it is meant to be—while from behind her Howie moved in, raised her nightdress to the level required for his purposes but no higher, and, without any preliminaries, asserted his rights and staked his claim.
From the time of Temima’s arrival in Hebron, the child her husband called Pinkhas would not leave her for a minute. She carried him everywhere in a pack on her back and, when concern was expressed about the burden of the extra weight for a woman in her condition, Temima would place one hand under the child’s rump behind her and the other hand flat on the globe of her taut belly in front of her and respond that she felt herself to be perfectly balanced from both sides.
She was excused from serving her shift with the others in the communal kitchen, the laundry, the nursery, the entire sphere of women’s workplaces, not because she was pregnant—almost every woman of childbearing age was pregnant except, for the most condensed interval possible, those who had just given birth—but due to the general consensus, stunning in that it elevated a woman but not without precedent in Hebron because of the reputation already associated with the celebrated Menukha Rachel Slonim, that a better use of Temima’s powers would be to position her in a place from which she could impart her wisdom to everyone’s benefit. The first thought was to breach the ancient Jewish cemetery of Hebron, abandoned now for forty years since the massacre of 1929, the Tarpat pogrom, even at the risk of inflaming the passions of the local Arabs, to clean up the gravesite of the holy Rebbetzin Menukha Rachel Slonim and to set up a pavilion with a canopy there under which Temima could preside comfortably on a nice lawn chair and receive students and petitioners, but this proposal was rejected because of the danger of the evil eye to a pregnant woman who flaunts the promise and hope of life in a place saturated with death.
Temima herself spurned the concept of the evil eye; she found no support for it in the plain, unmediated text. Not only was it a form of superstition and idolatry, as far as Temima was concerned, but whatever malevolent power it possessed if indeed it existed at all was acquired only through human beings’ collusion with it to their own detriment through misguided belief. Nevertheless, out of deference to those who would have been horrified by the presence of a pregnant woman planted in a graveyard holding court there, she set up her chair on the top of Tel Rumeida, in front of the stone ruins that sheltered the tombs of Ruth the Moabite and her grandson, Jesse, father of King David, alive and everlasting.
For the remainder of her pregnancy, with four armed soldiers surrounding and guarding her at all times—the first emanation of her Bnei Zeruya quartet—Temima sat there almost every day like the prophetess Deborah under her palm tree. When the weather was warm she sat outside in front of the stone archway of Ruth’s tomb, and in the winter months she sat inside beside a small heater attached to a generator in the army jeep, the child her husband called Pinkhas playing quietly at her feet, careful not to disturb lest she grow angry and leave him again.
Men and women, Arabs as well as Jews, would come to the wise woman Temima with their griefs and woes, with all the disappointments and worries that vexed them, and she would illuminate for them who they are and reveal to them their innermost worlds. Then there were those who would simply climb the hill for a respite, to gather at her feet and learn with her. The thread she was drawing out from the texts at that time as her pregnancy advanced in Hebron, the city in which David was anointed and ruled for seven years before consolidating his kingdom in Jerusalem, related to the dynasty that would lead, in the end of days, to the Messiah son of David. Above all, Temima sought to illuminate the line of women—maligned, disgraced, meek, adulteress—who lay down compliantly to receive the seed and pass it on: Leah the unloved, mother of Judah; Tamar, Judah’s harlot, mother of Peretz; the convert Ruth, supplicant at the feet of Boaz the landowner, the great-grandmother of King David in whose aura Temima now sat. And then there was the mother of Solomon through whom the line of David would snake onward into the messianic age culminating in the minister of peace—Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, plucked dripping from her bath and impregnated with a doomed child by David the king, who then marshaled his royal clout to get her husband, Uriah, to sleep with her too so that the cuckold would believe he was the father and take the blame.
With regard to the birth of his child, Temima’s husband, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, was among the strongest advocates for it to take place in the army compound, the closest they could come at this moment in time to the heart of the ancient holy city of Hebron itself. The spiritual honor and privilege of an entry into this world in such a sacred place by far outweighed any advantages that modern science could provide in an approved hospital, in Howie’s view. Besides, he argued, compared to the floor of the hovel in which poor Pinkhas was delivered by an Arab urchin whose hands had been who knows where, the military compound and the loving support of experienced women could only be considered state-of-the-art. Temima was a strong woman, as every Hebron woman was expected to be, she had survived far worse.
Nevertheless, when the time came, he found himself sitting glumly in an army helicopter opposite his wife, the child he called Pinkhas, about fifteen months old, curled up in her lap. Shifra-Puah, the authorized midwife, had expressed concern about the early onset of labor that might necessitate special care for the newborn not available on the military base—no Jewish child could be wasted, especially given the wildly spiking demographics of the surrounding Arabs breeding full time like rabbits. On the basis of Shifra-Puah’s recommendation, the rabbinical authorities that Howie consulted then ruled that danger to life overrides even the mandate to settle the land of Israel.
When they touched ground at the Hadassah hospital, Howie was faced with the humiliating task, in the presence of all the onlookers—doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who had gathered around instantly—of peeling Pinkhas, wailing as if bereaved, out of his mother’s arms as Temima was ushered into a VIP suite. Her father’s shekels, no doubt, Howie reflected bitterly, spoiling and pampering her as usual. He passed the next few hours entertaining the child, mostly in the hospital cafeteria, where the little boy, who had not that long ago evolved into an upright biped, spent most of his time pulling the levers on vending machines that Howie kept feeding with coins spitting forth candies and salted snacks and sugared drinks. When at last they were summoned back into the room, Temima was sitting up in bed against a bolster of cushions, cradling in her arms an infant in a white crocheted cap swaddled in a blue blanket. It is true that this baby was much smaller than Pinkhas had been at birth, weighing just over two kilos, and he was much darker and more wizened, but the expert opinion was that he was sufficiently well formed to thrive without artificial support. Ketura with her savagely burned face was leaning over the bed offering a cup with a straw poking out for Temima to sip from—like a bad omen, Howie felt, another source of embarrassment to him due to the intimate nature of his prior relationship with this Arab handmaid before he had returned in penitence and metamorphosed into Haim Ba’al-Teshuva. What is she doing here in the middle of our nuclear family at such a time anyway? Howie shivered with loathing and disgust.
“It was a hard birth,” Temima reported to Howie. By now, the child he called Pinkhas had found his way into her bed, under the covers, rooting into her side. “Thank God I had Ketura’s hand to hold,” Temima said. And Ketura showed Howie her hands, pierced with the stigmata of Temima’s fingernails, the Braille by which her agony could be read, the glyphs of her travail, the blood that had streamed down drying now in a palette from mud black to mottled orange.
“An extraordinary baby, may the evil eye not befall him,” Howie heard someone say, and he turned his head to take in what appeared to be an older man with a long white beard sitting in a wheelchair in the corner of the room. He had not noticed him until now just as he had not noticed the potted plant, so central was the vision of the mother and child.
“Oh, I’m sorry, Howie, I should have introduced you,” Temima said. “This is my teacher, the Toiter Rav.”
“The Toiter!” Howie rose to his feet and swiveled around breathlessly. “Forgive me—my back was to you. What an honor—such an honor!”
The Toiter smiled gently. “Never mind,” he said. “I’m at the hospital, as you can see,” and he indicated the wheelchair. “I came to bless the child. May he eat butter and honey. May he despise evil and choose good.” He raised both of his hands, which were trembling like Father Isaac when he realized he had blessed the wrong son, passing them in benediction in the airspace over the newborn, and declared, “His true name is Immanuel. I would be honored to perform the brit in the Makhpela.”
Despite the unsteady hands, Howie agreed at once to have the Toiter wield the knife upon his son, so awed was he by the offer from such a mythic holy man. Eight days later, by the tomb of Father Abraham in the Cave of Makhpela, the Toiter performed the circumcision much to the disapproval of Reb Berel Bavli, who on this occasion was demoted to the position of kvatter, handing the baby over to Howie’s father, the waiter from Ozone Park, Queens, Irwin Stern, who sat in Elijah’s chair as sandek with a pillow across his lap upon which Reb Berish deposited the baby as on an altar. The Toiter turned to Howie and said, “With your permission, since the mitzvah is incumbent on the father, I am fulfilling the role of the father.” He raised the skirt of his gold-striped kaftan and swagged it upward, tucking its edges into the gartel around his waist so that it should not impede him as he worked on the infant. Hunching over the baby, in deep concentration, his tongue sticking out from between his teeth, he sliced off the foreskin and, bending in even closer, he placed his mouth over the wound to suck up the blood—“His hands shaking like nobody’s business,” Reb Berish reported later to his wife, Frumie, who was recovering from a hysterectomy at Maimonides Hospital in Boro Park, Brooklyn. “Such a klutz, you should excuse me, I wouldn’t hire him to kill even sick chickens. It took him a year and a Wednesday to get the job done, the baby was hollering bloody murder for five minutes straight, they couldn’t shut him up. Where do they get all their money from anyways, those Toiters? The Oscwiecim rebbetzin says they’re all meshuggeh, and they have some kind of anonymous meshuggeneh donor who supports them, maybe Howard Hughes.”
When the baby was quieted at last, the name was announced—Kook Immanuel son of Haim—may his two-hundred-and-forty-eight body parts and his three-hundred-and sixty-five veins recover fully, by his blood he will live, the sign of the covenant sealed in his flesh.
The good convert Ruth, in front of whose tomb Temima had once presided, is a success story. The boy she gave birth to, Oved son of Boaz, grew up to become the grandfather of King David, but while he was just a baby he was the delight of Ruth’s former mother-in-law, Naomi, who took him to her bosom and became like a mother to him, inspiring the matrons in their Bethlehem village to remark to one another, Naomi has a son again, though between you and me, her daughter-in-law Ruth is better than seven sons. But for Temima in her tent not far from Bethlehem, in the military compound overlooking Hebron during the period following the birth of her son Kook Immanuel, there was no wise mother Naomi at her side to turn to when her baby let out a piercing shriek in his sleep and woke up as if bludgeoned from the nightmare of being born, and there was no trusted mother to confide in when, a week or so after the circumcision, the wound itself having mostly healed, she began to notice blisters and sores breaking out in the area of the covenant, swellings and rashes and inflammations and whitish discolorations such as are described in the chapters in the book of Leviticus devoted to zora’at, what is commonly translated as leprosy, immediately following the section on the uncleanness of a woman who has just given birth.
Temima acknowledged to herself that what she was observing could have been contracted from the mouth of the Toiter in the course of the circumcision when he performed the meziza be’peh to suction up the blood, and she recognized the danger of the public disgrace and defamation that could ensue were she to bring the matter to the attention of the official medical and health authorities. She knew it was necessary to act immediately for the sake of the child, but her first instinct was to cover up—to take the precautions of allowing no other hands but her own to touch the baby, of never changing his diapers in front of the eyes of another, never leaving him for a minute. She slept with him on a mattress at one end of the tent, with Howie, on account of the blood of her post-birth impurity, accepting exile to a separate mattress at the other end of their tent along with the child he called Pinkhas, both babies wailing through the night.
In this way, Temima allowed a period of time to elapse from when she first noticed the eruptions, until one morning, entirely without planning consciously, she slipped her little mother Torah into her cloth sack and her baby Kook Immanuel into a shawl slung like a pouch across the front of her body with his face pressed toward her so that he could nurse at will, and announced to Howie that she was going down to the Makhpela for a session of hitbodedut, to meditate and cry out in solitude.
“But you’re not alone,” Howie retorted, pointing to the baby. “Leave him with me.”
“He’s a body part,” Temima said, and she stepped forth from the tent with Howie following behind carrying the whimpering child he called Pinkhas, as Temima went to find the four soldiers who had stood watch over her from the days when she used to sit on top of Tel Rumeida at Ruth’s tomb. “Where’s your faith, Tema?” Howie demanded. “What do you need those guys to guard you for anyways? It’s safer down there in the Makhpela than in the streets of the Bronx, in case you want to know.”
At the Makhpela, Temima’s security contingent stepped discreetly back to grant her the privacy required for the proper practice of hitbodedut as she approached the cenotaph draped in a heavy cloth embroidered with Arabic calligraphy and lavish Islamic designs marking the spot somewhere in the caves below where Mother Sarah lies. It was to bury his wife Sarah, after all, that Abraham bought this field from Efron the Hittite for the inflated price of four hundred silver shekels. Sarah was living nearby when she died, in Kiryat Arba, which is Hebron, and Abraham came up from Be’er Sheba to take care of the final arrangements.
Temima rested her forearm against the side of the long domed monument that was Sarah’s tomb, pressed her brow into her pulsing wrist, and closed her eyes, awaiting the words that would come pouring out of her mouth like the cries of a daughter to her mother. It seemed to her as she leaned against the stone mound that she could feel the rise and fall of the maternal breast and the lump of the stopped heart behind it, and from its very depths a smothered voice—Oh yes, we were living apart by then, he in Be’er Sheva, I in Kiryat Arba which is Hebron. I would never live with the old man again after he took my son up to the mountaintop to sacrifice him. I should never have let the child out of my sight for one minute, I should never have left him alone with the old man—I’ll never forgive myself. The boy was never the same again. The Isaac who went up that mountain with the old man never came down again. That Isaac was slaughtered, burnt on the altar as an offering. No, I never saw the old man again after that, and the ghost of my Isaac rising from his own ashes, he also never saw the old man again except when he came with his half brother Ishmael to bury him here, somewhere alongside me I’m told—the death ride is mercilessly solo. But at least the old man spent the money to buy this plot. I set my mind on this field and I took it. I am your original Woman of Valor. (Here she gave out a bitter laugh; she was famous for her inappropriate laughter.) He was always hearing voices, the old man—but the true test is to distinguish the voice that is meant to be disobeyed.
Temima opened her eyes and looked around. There was Ketura on all fours with a bucket beside her, swabbing the stone floor around Mother Sarah’s tomb with great flourishes of her rag. From this sign she recognized at once that the voice she had heard was a voice meant to be obeyed, and she understood its message. She signaled her four bodyguards, and instructed them to convey her and the infant, along with this Arab cleaning woman, directly from the Makhpela to Jerusalem. In less than an hour, an armored tank with smoke puffing out of the gun from the soldiers’ Noblesse cigarettes pulled up in front of Temima’s building on Ben-Yefuneh Street. She got out with the infant, followed by Ketura, and entered the apartment.
“You’ve taken the correct steps according to the book,” the Toiter said to Temima when she informed him by telephone of the situation and all that she had done. “Seven days of quarantine outside the camp. After seven days, if there is no spread, wait seven more days, just to be sure he’s clean. Then wash his clothes and return to the camp. Over this entire period of two times seven days, recite nonstop if possible the ten psalms of the Tikkun HaKlali, which are guaranteed to cure all problems related to that troublesome part of the body, adding also Psalm fifty-one, especially verse nine, ‘Purge me with hyssop and I will become pure / Wash me and I will become whiter than snow.’ Also, at the same time, remember to give as much money as you can to charity so that his life’s breath may be mingled with the air of the land of Israel, which is entirely free of the taint of sin.”
“And if it spreads?”
“If it spreads, then it’s the plague of zora’at. You must dress him in rags and let his hair grow wild and tie a mask over the lower portion of his face to cover his mouth and hang a string around his neck with a bell attached that will ring whenever he approaches so that people will know that contagion is coming and they will turn away and shun him. And because he is still only a baby and cannot yet speak and call out for himself, you must pin to his shirt the words he would have been required to cry out to warn others that he is drawing near—‘Impure! Impure!’ The added advantage of this will be that no one will envy him, and the evil eye will not be alerted. This is his fate. He is a Toiter. A Toiter is always afflicted.”
Temima set the telephone down on the bed and stretched out to rest with one arm covering her eyes and the other hand spread out flat on the rising and falling chest of the baby lying on his back beside her as the Toiter went on to describe in detail the ritual that must be enacted when the plague is cured, God willing. Two pure birds are required. Slaughter one of them over an earthen pot on top of running water. Dip into its blood a piece of cedar wood, hyssop, some scarlet stuff, and the living bird. Sprinkle the mixture seven times on the baby to purify him. Then release the living bird to fly free over the fields.
Meanwhile, with the buzz of the Toiter’s voice in the background, Ketura removed the baby’s diaper as he lay on the bed with his mother’s hand resting upon him and concentrated on applying the first of a pharmacopoeia of remedies to the infected area that she mixed from natural ingredients in different combinations and proportions, ointments and creams and lotions she concocted from lemon balm, aloe vera, sage, tea tree oil, the wax from honeycombs, prunella, vitamin C, mushrooms, rhubarb, and parsley leaves. As Ketura continued to experiment over the course of the ensuing days, it became apparent to Temima that Howie had not been convinced by her explanation for her sudden disappearance, though, as it happened, it had been the truth—her claim that she had heard the voice of Mother Sarah at the Makhpela that required her immediate return to Jerusalem. For several hours every day, Ibn Kadosh now stationed himself on the floor in the hallway directly in front of her apartment door smoking green tobacco that he rolled himself into cigarettes and whittling slingshots while running a tape recorder at top volume blasting the voice of the child Howie called Pinkhas lamenting and crying, Ima, Ima, come home! Come home now, Ima! The neighbors were complaining, whatever Howie was paying Ibn Kadosh she knew she could top, yet Temima could not bear to silence the voice of her child even at the cost of allowing herself to be publicly shamed as a bad mother; the least she could do for this child whom she had already wronged so many times in his short life was to let him be heard.
She went out into the hallway and stood with her hands on her hips staring down at Ibn Kadosh sitting on the floor leaning against the wall. She could see that he had grown, dark and lanky and still so handsome, his eyes the color of smoky crystal under rich lashes, a silken gauzy shadow over his top lip. She assured him she would be returning home soon, he could communicate that to Howie, but Ibn Kadosh simply shook his head, continuing to whittle with his knife, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, muttering that the mister had ordered him not to stop blasting the tape outside her door until she came back with him and brought the new baby back too, that was the deal, she could expect him here every day at her door blasting this tape until she was ready to pack up and go.
The chopped placenta had never cheered Temima up, and the elixirs Ketura was brewing and smearing on the baby were creating a mess and having no effect either, so one day soon after Temima bound Kook Immanuel to her chest in the sling of her shawl and crossed the railroad tracks from Baka to German Colony, making her way through the streets of Talbieh to the mysterious door like a cyclop’s eye set flush into the stone wall surrounding the leper colony. The doctor who occupied the apartment inside the wall in exchange for on-call night duty to the lepers opened the door himself to let her in. He was dressed only in a loose pair of khaki Zionist shorts and brown leather Old Testament sandals even though he was expecting her; she had arranged this appointment in advance, giving as her name Miriam Gekhazi, and the baby’s name as Uziyahu, taking this precaution despite the fact that she had been assured he routinely saw patients on the side for a fee who required treatments of a highly confidential and sensitive nature, that he was scrupulously discreet. Temima stared at the sag of the doctor’s bare chest with its curlicues of white hair, and then her eyes were drawn to the long chain with a knob at the end like a torture instrument trailing from his hand. He noticed the trajectory of her gaze and shot her a sly smile. “From our toilet tank,” he explained after a teasing pause. “My wife yanked it off again. Some people just don’t know how to flush with delicacy.”
The back wall of the salon of his apartment in which they were standing consisted entirely of sliding glass doors, and through them Temima could see the small private garden reserved for the doctor and his family, and beyond that the grounds of the leper colony where some sisters in their starched white uniforms were strolling with arms linked on one side of the path, and on the other side, the contorted figures of the inmates making their way, painfully performing the hopeful act of taking their exercise on feet that had been eaten away and that they could no longer feel.
“Nu—so how can I help you?” the doctor said, startling her from this distraction, catching her off guard and almost pushing her over into tears by the offer of help.
She extricated the baby from the shawl, sat down on the divan after telegraphing to the doctor a glance requesting permission, lay the child on his back across her lap, and undressed him. The doctor pulled a pair of spectacles from the pocket of his shorts, set them on his nose where they slipped down until they wedged themselves against the craggy red bulb at the tip, and leaned in to examine the baby’s genitals. After a long interval, during which Temima was heating up to acute apprehensiveness, he stepped back, recognized once again the mother’s existence, and declared, “Healthy, completely healthy!” From a cupboard against the wall he took out some tubes of salve and told her to apply this medication to the infected area four times a day, adding to these instructions the admonition to above all keep the area clean, and then, raising his voice almost to a shout, he lectured her sternly about the danger of constricting the infected area by binding it too tightly—“Such as with that schmatteh you schlep him around in!” the doctor said, pointing to her shawl. “Naked, naked is best of all, like in the Garden of Eden before the snake. Loose and free—natural, nothing is healthier than natural!”
Temima lowered her head and accepted all of his assaults; she was his supplicant, his slave. She drew out of her bag, in which she had already hoarded the tubes of medicine, an envelope with one thousand American dollars in cash as agreed in advance and set it unobtrusively down on the coffee table instead of handing it to him directly so as not to incur the danger of embarrassing him. He picked it up immediately, tore open the envelope and let it flutter to the floor, counted the bills one by one, folded them into his pocket, and pronounced, “Good, nice and green, healthy like lettuce—beseder!”
With the baby in her arms now loosely diapered and bundled, Temima made ready to leave when, as if something else had just by chance occurred to her, she turned to the doctor and asked if he would be willing to take a quick look at one more thing. His expression turned bemused, wily. “If the one-more-thing is on you, then please, with pleasure, no charge for looking.” Temima showed him a nodule on her lip, and a bump on her ear, as well as a spot on her neck, each of which he examined attentively without comment. “Anywhere else?” he asked. So Temima allowed him to look at the others, in the private places, which the doctor inspected closely and lingeringly, pronouncing in the end, “Healthy, completely healthy!”—advising her to eat foods such as spinach and lentils and soybeans rich in the right kind of protein, which would also benefit the baby when it would be piped in through her breast milk. Then, as he was letting her out the door, he switched tone and added gravely, with the entitlement of authority, “This is not coming from heaven, you know—not the disease, and not the cure, not the blessing, and not the curse. You have a choice. Choose life if you want to live—you and your child.”
Over the next few weeks it seemed to Temima that things were beginning to fall into place, that her life was taking on a semblance of control. She was not asking for happiness, happiness was not a guaranteed right to pursue, especially in Israel; she was asking only for the right not to be consumed by the land, she was asking for a normal child untouched by danger. The baby improved day by day, until all signs of the outbreak had disappeared entirely; no one would ever have to know there had even been a stigma. She called the Toiter to report the good news. Together they reconsecrated themselves to the child.
They agreed that she would contact Howie to inform him of her return—that she was using her remaining time in Jerusalem to put the apartment up for sale and arrange for storage of all their furniture and possessions in anticipation of the day in the near future when, God willing, the Kiryat Arba villa her father had bought for them would be ready and they could move out of their tent in the army camp overlooking Hebron. She asked Howie to call off Ibn Kadosh and his tape recorder, to drive him out of the Ben-Yefuneh Street building. With the telephone clamped to her ear by her hiked-up shoulder, the baby naked in her arms reaching out with his pudgy hands to tug at the wire, Temima watched from her window as Ibn Kadosh slowly made his way down Ben-Yefuneh Street toward Bethlehem Road carrying his belongings including the tape recorder in his sack, his mother, Ketura, over whom he now towered, faithfully at his side. She speculated whether, when they arrived at Hebron Road, they would turn left in the direction of the Old City of Jerusalem or right toward Hebron, as she gave Howie the date and time to send the bulletproof car to pick her up and bring her and the child back to the compound. “What do you need a military escort for?” Howie demanded in frustration. “Who do you think you are anyways, Queen Tut? It’s a zillion times safer here than on Coney Island Avenue. You’re coming home to Hevron, Tema—to the Me’arat HaMakhpela, for God’s sakes, the second holiest site in the Jewish world next to the Western Wall.”
The third holiest site is the tomb of Rachel Our Mother. When Temima with her baby Kook Immanuel and her little mother Torah reached this domed shrine by the side of the road as they were traveling in the bulletproof vehicle back to the army compound overlooking Hebron on the appointed day, she asked the driver to stop to allow her to make a brief pilgrimage. Rachel Our Mother was the least maternal of the matriarchs, and yet, of the four, she above all the others had come to most stand for the idea of mother—the voice heard in Ramah, weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, the Jewish Our Lady of the Highways, wailing and crying bitterly for her children as they pass her in fetters trudging off to exile, greeting them from the roadside as they return to their borders dancing the hora.
Temima brought her little mother Torah up to the tomb of Rachel Our Mother and brushed her against it, in a kind of ritual greeting of soul mates. Temima’s mother, Rachel-Leah, lay alone and unvisited in her grave in the Old Montefiore cemetery in Queens, and here was Rachel Our Mother buried alone on the roadside, excluded from the family mausoleum at the Makhpela, the couples’ club. This was her punishment, according to the commentator-in-chief Rashi—to lie alone forever for so contemptuously selling a night lying with Jacob in exchange for a bunch of mandrakes with forked roots that Reuven, the eldest son of her sister and rival-wife, Leah, had pulled shrieking out of the earth, giving off their intoxicating scent redolent of all the possibilities and risks of love and death that enshrouded Rachel Our Mother and those she elected to gather under her veil.
When Temima returned to the military compound a fragrance clung to her, enveloping her like a cloud so intense that people came out to sniff what was in the air. And instantly, as when she had arrived the first time and walked between the raindrops, the sense was renewed and restored of a presence among them endowed with special powers that practically made them bow down as they stood at the entrances of their tents and observed her passage. Soon Temima was holding court again, either up in the army camp itself in the intervals between men’s prayer quorums three times a day inside the tent that had been designated as the synagogue, or down in the heart of Hebron at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, under the vigilant eyes of her four bodyguards, where she presided by the cenotaph of Mother Leah, privileged to lie beside Father Jacob for eternity. Wherever she sat, she was never without her two children—Kook Immanuel on her lap or loosely suspended in a sling on her back or front, Temima’s fingers encircling a chubby ankle or wrist like a shackle, the child her husband called Pinkhas playing quietly on the floor at her feet, pushing a toy army jeep with one hand and, with the other, clutching a handful of her skirt.
At the Makhpela, Arabs and Jews, men and women, made their way to the holy woman reputed to be endowed with mystical powers—seeking her out for blessings, advice, consolation, cures, foreknowledge and self-knowledge, the interpretation of dreams, restoring the memory of what they had once known and forgotten, leading them to the discovery of what they had lost, from a lost earring to a lost child, for, as Temima taught, When you find sixty-nine objects you have lost you will find redemption.
From all over the land of Israel and from outside the land they risked their lives and ventured into this danger zone to the learned woman sage with questions pertaining to ritual or law, renowned rabbis arrived in disguise or secretly dispatched lackeys to seek out responsa they would later claim as their own to questions ranging from artificial insemination to autopsies, soul birth to brain death and all the confusion in between, whether a woman may elect to take on the risks of cosmetic surgery, six months marinating in oils of myrrh and six months in perfumes and female ointments, whether a man may be counted as a member of the minyan for prayer if he had been born as a woman who had undergone a sex change, and so forth. In the synagogue tent of the military compound, learning circles gathered around the great wise woman, forums for rigorous study, not only men and boys in mixed classes but, often at Temima’s specific behest, drawing on her own priorities, women and girls exclusively, which permitted her to nurse Kook Immanuel as she taught with a blanket draped over her shoulder for modesty, and many of her students were breast-feeding their babies too, including the convert Yehudit Har-HaBayit with newborn twins at her breasts, she who had once so joyously offered herself as a wet nurse to the infant Howie kidnapped and named Pinkhas on his circumcision day, from whom the little boy now turned away in alarm whenever she batted her false eyelashes and bared her long teeth to smile and beckon to him, running to Temima and burrowing his face in her lap.
Temima’s recent encounter with Rachel Our Mother by the roadside inspired her to devote these sessions to an exploration of the narrow range of authorized feminine categories a woman can inhabit regardless of who she was as an individual. Borrowing from the methods of her revered teacher, Morah Nekhama Leibowitz, she unfolded the discussions through questions, but rather than questions that perplexed commentators or sages she dwelt on the simple human questions, her own and her students’, evoked by the plain text, with no mandate to manipulate the answer to arrive at an acceptable foreordained conclusion within the constraints of the orthodoxy. Who was Rachel Our Mother as a woman? Temima asked. There’s evidence in the text that she was the beloved of her husband, Jacob, though he spoke cruelly to her when she lamented her barrenness and effectively cursed her with an early death when she stole her father’s little idols. But did she love him in return, was she even attracted to him as he so dramatically was to her, or, in the overall scheme of things, are her feelings irrelevant and beside the point? And who was Rachel Our Mother as a mother—childless for so long that she turned to her husband and cried, “Give me sons or I’ll die,” when what she really might more correctly have said was “Give me sons and I’ll die?” How did it come about that a woman who died in childbirth, leaving behind the newborn, Benjamin, and his brother Joseph, a little boy with a lot of big personality problems, a woman who in the end had engaged in very little actual mothering—how did it happen that she above all other women emerged as the symbol of the ideal mother whose abiding love for her children renders her inconsolable, the mother her children could rely upon to be in the same spot in perpetual grief for their suffering, the mother who always cares?
“Because the best mothers are those who let go of their children,” Yehudit Har-HaBayit answered, her twins now asleep in a double stroller parked outside the tent. Rising from her seat, she continued, “Look at Hagar with her son Ishmael when they were dying of thirst in the wilderness. Only when she lets go of Ishmael and casts him away from her under one of the bushes into God’s hands is the boy saved—hallelujah!” She began to move toward Temima. “You have to learn to let go of your child. That’s what makes you a good mother—like Rachel Our Mother, who let go by dying.” With everyone’s eyes fixed upon her, Yehudit Har-HaBayit planted herself in front of Temima with both arms outstretched—waiting.
The heaviness of the silence bore down in the tent, replacing the air, until the moment that Temima acknowledged what was being asked of her by raising Kook Immanuel ceremoniously like an elevated offering and passing him over into Yehudit Har-HaBayit’s hands open before her, palms upturned to receive the child. It was the first time during the nine months of this baby’s life outside of Temima’s womb not counting his circumcision that she had fully released him into the hands of another.
From across the room as he sat on this alien lap the baby Kook Immanuel would occasionally give out a doleful whimper, or lurch forward toward his mother with longing, but Temima could see from his clear eyes and calm breathing that he was safe and at ease, and after a while the eyes closed and he was sleeping tranquilly in the arms of the stranger. After that day, Temima began to set him down on a blanket in the center of the learning circle, and her eyes would follow him calmly as he crawled off to a corner of the tent before someone would go to scoop him up. When the days were warm, she would occasionally leave him outside in a nursery enclosure with other babies supervised by teenagers responsible and mature much beyond their years, the eldest sisters to dozens of siblings; and more and more frequently, when Temima went down to sit by Mother Leah’s tomb in the Makhpela, she left him in the charge of another woman, usually Yehudit Har-HaBayit, who had illuminated for her the faith of maternal letting go. As the sages commented, From all of my teachers I have learned, but from my students more than from all of them.
Now at last Temima was also able to resume her regular practice of hitbodedut with the luxury of true solitude, seeking an isolated spot on the hilltop overlooking Hebron among the olive trees a safe distance from the perimeter of the military compound even in the dark of night to beseech and converse with God—trusting Howie, before she set out, to watch over the baby, handing over the baby to him along with a bottle of warm milk freshly expressed from her breasts. Just such a bottle covered in blood she found in his stroller on the day her husband, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, with the child he called Pinkhas strapped in a carrier on his back, pushed Kook Immanuel in his stroller at the head of a demonstration along Al-Shuhada Street lined with Arab shops and businesses to reassert sovereignty over what had once been the heart of the Jewish quarter of the old city. Since the blood is the life of the flesh, when the body was prepared for burial the blood-stained bottle was slipped inside the tight swaddling of the blue-and-white Israeli flag with which the stroller at the head of the procession had been bedecked. It, too, was soaked with the blood that had streamed down from the wound when the stone struck the baby’s forehead and sank in and he slumped over. The tiny corpse with all of its bloodied artifacts that had been transformed into body parts was then wrapped by his mother in the talit with its silver-and-gold-embroidered neckpiece and azure fringes, a small package to be shipped into the dark belly of Sheol.
Thousands of people from all over Israel and from outside the land as well poured into Hebron for the funeral of this innocent baby so savagely cut down. They marched in the procession as it snaked its way down from the army compound on the hilltop through the heart of the city and its teeming casbah into the ancient Jewish cemetery breached for the first time since 1929 when the sixty-seven corpses slaughtered in the pogrom of Tarpat were deposited in a mass grave. Brandishing placards on sticks emblazoned with the words KOOK HAI! and NEKAMA!, and blowups of the baby’s face with his bright hopeful eyes and rosy cheeks, wave after wave of raging mourners surged forward. Israeli military personnel heavily armed crouched behind sandbags or stood at alert with their weapons poised along the entire route as helicopters hovered overhead, helpless to halt the advance or to quell the calls for revenge with fists punching the air or to suppress the incendiary cries of the child’s unvanquished spirit living on.
At the head of the procession, the bereaved father, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, was pushed in a wheelchair surrounded by masses of men in knitted yarmulkes with fringes hanging out of their untucked white shirttails. His head bound in a turban of white gauze and his arm in a sling from the wounds inflicted upon him by the stones with which he too was pelted, and from using his body as a shield to protect the child he called Pinkhas riding on his back, Howie cradled in the crook of his uninjured arm the tiny wrapped package of the dead baby, Kook Immanuel, rocking him back and forth and singing over and over the lullaby—“No, no, no, no, we won’t go from here. All of our enemies, all those who hate us, all of them will go from here. Only we, only we, we won’t move from here.”
Behind the throng of men came the multitude of keening women with the stately figure of Temima in front, a long shawl on her head draping over her shoulders and down her back that she clutched together with both hands at her throat, her dry eyes concealed by dark glasses, supported on either side by her students to whom at one point she turned and said, “There is no word in the English language for a parent who has lost a child, but we have one in Hebrew—shakula for a mother, shakul for a father—because we Jews have always needed such a word, the way Eskimos need words for ice.” And she coughed out a hard subversive laugh, like Mother Sarah.
Over the loudspeaker came the eulogies of the rabbis and leaders, their voices cracking, rising and falling in outrage and grief, breaking into shouts and sobs. The Lord gives, the Lord takes, may the name of the Lord be blessed. The little wrapped package containing Kook Immanuel with all of his bloody body parts was lowered into the freshly dug grave that awaited him, and the men dumped shovelful after shovelful of dirt on top of it until there rose an imposing mound. Howie was helped out of his wheelchair and supported on either side as he stood up in order to recite the mourner’s Kaddish for his dead son—Exalted and sanctified is His Great Name. At the far edge of the cemetery Temima could see the cadaverous figure of the Toiter clad in rent white garments with his arms raised to the heavens and his hands clenched into fists, the silent scream drowned out by the mourner’s Kaddish emerging hoarsely from his own lips—He Who makes peace in His heights, May He make peace on us and on all Israel, And now say Amen—and she watched as his body crumpled and collapsed prone on the ground with the arms outstretched, prostrate with grief.
The father of the dead baby, Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, was assisted back into his wheelchair, which was then pushed down the long aisle created by the two rows of men facing each other that had formed like a wake from the vessel of the mound over the gravesite that would ferry the child to the next world. As he made his way forward in his wheelchair down the aisle he received from each of the men on either side the ritual consolation—May the Presence comfort you among the other mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.
The baby’s mother, who one day would be revered and beloved as the holy woman HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Ima Temima, moved forward alone as if floating and entered between the two rows to collect her portion of the consolation. A voice called out, “Men only! Men only!” She heeded it at once, turning back and resuming her place among the women. “He’s right,” Temima said. “We are all Mother Rachels. We cannot be comforted.”