The Teachings Of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, Shlita
(May She Live On For Many Good Long Years)—
Recorded By Kol-Isha-Erva At The “Leper” Colony Of Jerusalem
IN THE awareness of the Presence and the awareness of the congregation, in the convocation of the heights and in the convocation below, and at the personal gentle admonishment of our holy mother, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, I beg forgiveness for neglecting my duty to set down for us transgressors the teachings of Ima Temima, and for putting off my task of recording events of note that have transpired over these past months here in the “leper” colony of Jerusalem. Over the course of this difficult period of adjustment during which I have been so remiss in my responsibilities as scribe and collector of recovered memories, our numbers have diminished relentlessly. Through the grinding attrition of impoverished faith and weak commitment, our general population has declined to a census of fewer than one hundred, mostly women assessed at thirty silver shekels apiece between the ages of twenty and sixty, ready to bear arms for battle. Of the two senior women in our ranks above the age of sixty, valued at ten silver shekels a head, our elders before whom we are enjoined to rise and whose aged faces we are bidden to glorify as the Torah commands us, Ima Temima alone remains, increasingly frail in body but still a towering presence in spirit and mind.
Now during the haze and stagnation of our sluggish Jerusalem summer days, Ima Temima continues to privately delve into the mysteries of the text within the cool stone walls of the secluded apartment, the sacred inner sanctum to which only the chosen few are given access, among whom I am honored far beyond what I deserve to include my unworthy self. Yet there are some warm, blessed evenings when the entire remnants of the congregation, the embers rescued from the blaze, are still privileged to soak in the teachings at the feet of our veiled holy mother presiding above us from the wheelchair pushed by our domestic management associate, Rizpa, into the dark northern garden outside the door of the private quarters and planted beside the fresh mound of the grave as yet unmarked with a headstone under the ancient oak tree of our other esteemed elder, our high priestess, Aish-Zara, za’zal, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing—a brutal loss. Ima Temima, for reasons too profound for us to grasp, has forbidden us to mourn, and so I along with all others of lesser understanding are still suspended in the first of the five stages of grief—denial and disbelief—unable to move on and get past it and achieve closure.
Aish-Zara, za’zal, was lowered into the ground with only a talit wound over her shrouds, without even a coffin, the wasted form, the tumors and craters of her punished body thinly mummified for all to behold. Yet despite our holy mother’s ban against mourning, on one of those warm summer evenings, while sitting in the garden recounting for us the midrash about the sealed casket in which Mother Sarah, alive and breathing, was transported to conceal her radiant beauty by her husband, Abraham, across the border to Egypt when a famine devastated the land of Canaan, Ima Temima gazed down at the fresh mound of earth of the grave, still soft and fragrant, and cried out, “Essie, Essie, why did you leave me?”
My thought patterns at that moment naturally legatoed to my ex-student, EliEli, who turned out in the end to be a false prophetess, it pains me to report. EliEli, of the lustrous, swinging hair that nearly consumed her in flames like the incinerated altars of the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel when she danced so rapturously during our Passover Seder, is among those who now are no longer with us, but in her case it was not a voluntary departure. Holding aloft in defiance a splintering wooden cross, the two beams lashed together with bandages, she was unceremoniously expelled from our compound mounted on the shoulders of one of the four Bnei Zeruya, the very one with whom she had been observed engaging in inappropriate behavior after the Dayenu—and the gate was shut fast against both of them. It grieves me to add on good authority that she did not even have the decency to cover her private parts with undergarments for her disgraceful exit, her legs clamped around the neck of her bearer. Nevertheless, I consider it my duty, with the sanction of our holy mother, to report this gross detail. She was cast out of the “leper” colony as the “leper” is cast out of the city; there is not much lower you can sink.
On those rare occasions now when Ima Temima requires to be borne aloft by four strong men, the place in the Bnei Zeruya quartet of EliEli’s accomplice is taken by one of my prophetesses, a woman weighing in at over one hundred kilos whom we call Aishet-Lot, whose specialization is visions of the past rather than the future. That alone signifies that she can carry a load. Aishet-Lot has never been heard to speak a single word, however, so extreme an observance of a fast of speech has she taken upon herself that I have at times worried if she is in reality verbally challenged or perhaps afflicted with a case of post-traumatic stress disorder due to the insult of the sages’ injunction against excessive conversing with a woman that had plunged her into a lifelong state of oral paralysis. Yet, contrary to popular belief, such extreme silence is an attribute to be prized in a prophet just as being hearing impaired ought to be prized in a mental health provider. (With apologies for this personal digression, which I permit myself only to honor such differently abled individuals as Aishet-Lot, my own amazing therapist wore a hearing aid when I first became his client at age six; by the time my treatment ended at age nineteen when he declared me fully cured, he was completely hearing impaired—i.e., “deaf.”) As for Aishet-Lot, she has found many creative ways to express herself without words in delivering her brand of past prophecies. Of course, there is the added benefit that her muteness assures utter discretion in confidential spheres, and so, due to severe staff cutbacks, she has also been selected to assist our petite Rizpa as personal attendant to our holy mother, above all with the heavy lifting, an interim arrangement that was made permanent after the night that Cozbi disappeared for the last time.
As it became increasingly unavoidable to face the fact that I had a problem on my hands with EliEli, our holy mother, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, directed me once again to the fundamental text of chapters thirteen and eighteen of the book of Deuteronomy in which the identifying features of a false prophet are laid out. There was no question that EliEli fit the bill—a possessed dreamer of dreams, speaking in the name of the Master of the Universe, even shocking us now and then by pointedly dropping His forbidden name “Yahweh” as if He were a celebrity pal of hers with whom she was on a first name basis, offering signs and portents some of which given the odds even on occasion came true, all for the purpose of enticing our people to follow and worship other gods that they knew not and to test us to see whether or not we truly and exclusively love the Lord our God with all our hearts and souls and everything we have.
Nevertheless, Ima Temima allowed me to find my own way to the resolution of this challenge and at my own rhythm, never undermining my authority as executive director of the school for prophetesses by invading my space and handing down peremptory orders from above as to how to manage this infestation on my turf. Instead, to help guide me, our holy mother offered a subtle teaching concerning the seven women in the Tanakh whom the rabbis of the Talmud classify as true prophetesses. First among the Talmud-designated prophetesses is Sarah, whom Ima Temima calls Yiska—from the root sakha, she gazed—because of her penetrating visionary powers, her ability to look directly at what was what without deceiving herself. Yiska, who in the text is identified as one of the daughters of Haran, Abraham’s brother who died in Ur of the Chaldees, is none other than Sarah, the Talmud states. And though some sages had their doubts about this, and especially given the added complication that it would have made Abraham her uncle as well as her husband (not to mention also her half brother as he confesses later on), Ima Temima always refers to Sarah as Yiska in homage to this clear-eyed, sophisticated realist.
The other six prophetesses in Israel, according to the Talmud, are Miriam (our very own Lady of the “Lepers”—Miriam-Azuva-Snow White), Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Hulda, and Esther. In the plain text of the Tanakh, however, Ima Temima taught, there are only four women explicitly labeled as prophetesses—Miriam, Deborah and Hulda (both called nasty names by the Talmud sages for their alleged arrogance in their dealings with men), and Noadia. Noadia is only a bit player, with a cameo mention when Nehemia implores God to keep in mind for retribution how this prophetess, among others on his revenge hit list, had unduly alarmed and vexed him.
With respect to how my apprentice prophetess EliEli fits into this food chain, I will say in my defense that I had at first assumed, perhaps too hastily, that the somewhat self-important and presumptuous name she had chosen for herself was a reference to the opening verse of the song of David in Psalm twenty-two—Eli Eli (My God, My God), why have You forsaken me? I now realize that in her personal brain pan, the main ingredient was the “My” rather than “God.”
I must have been in a willed state of denial because, looking back, I can no longer repress my memory of the night I came upon her sitting by a bonfire in a far corner of our “leper” colony, in a clearing encircled by dry tangled brambles and nettles, the leaping flames a true hazard to our community, liable to spread as wildly as her dangerous proselytizing and ignite a conflagration. As EliEli sat by the fire along with several co-conspirators, members of her support group, none of whom is any longer with us, in a high state of ecstasy the source of which I now openly acknowledge to have been not entirely spiritual, she chanted over and over again the seventeenth verse of that same psalm from which her name is derived—Psalm twenty-two—in a bizarre free translation I had never before heard: “Dogs surround me, evil ones encircle me, they pierce my hands and feet.” Pierce my hands and feet? Where did she get pierce from in that verse? Was she talking stigmata?
Yes, I admit that the horrifying thought did pass through my mind then and there that her chosen name EliEli was not after all a reference to the song of David, but to the reported final cry in Aramaic of the false messiah Yeshua HaNozri, dying on the cross, ripping us off to his very last breath. I am abashed to confess it did occur to me even then there might be a false prophetess in our midst, but in my own defense I must point out that at the time, with our beloved Aish-Zara, za’zal, suffering so unendurably and with each passing day drawing this dear soul further and further away from us to the next life, I felt I just simply did not have the energy to deal with issues related to a borderline personality like EliEli.
Then one night, as I was sitting by the bedside of our precious Aish-Zara, za’zal, strumming an oud and riffing a tune to the words of the prayer for the sick recited during the Torah reading—Oh God, bless Essie daughter of Pessie (unfortunately, I did not know the name of the mother of Aish-Zara, za’zal, and so I simply grooved with the rhyme) with soul healing and body healing along with all of sick Israel—and Aish-Zara, za’zal, was lying on her bed with her mouth open and dry lips drawn back rendering her face even more skull-like, rattling in her throat and wheezing through the black holes of her nostrils having drifted for this interval into a pocket of relief from pain thanks to the marijuana tea I had brewed and fed to her with a teaspoon, Rizpa announced her presence with a considerate padded knock, pushed open the door, and informed me that she would take over death and dying palliative care hospice duties while I went to Ima Temima, who had summoned me to appear without delay.
It was well past midnight when I arrived at the sacred apartment. My prophetess Aishet-Lot was sitting in the garden outside the door keeping guard, knitting on automatic by moonlight at a frenetic clip with fat needles and thick rough yarn white as salt, a frothy puddle of woolen matting rising at her feet like sand falling in an hourglass.
With a slight nod, Aishet-Lot granted me entry. I found our holy mother already in bed as would be expected at that hour alongside the cherished little mother Torah, which seemed to have grown a few feet longer judging from the bulge under the blanket defining its form, the upper portion of the scroll with its two wooden tree-of-life rollers protruding like the horned pigtails of a child who had just had a nightmare with the cover drawn securely up to her chin.
“Kol-Isha-Erva,” Ima Temima said with eyes closed when I entered the room, one hand clutching a roller of the mother Torah as if to pick up its pulsing message in the transmission of a cryptic oracle, “my sources tell me that you must find your prophetess EliEli at once and root out the abomination. Whatever she says to you, you must not believe. It is a sadistic religion. In its intercourse between men and women, there is no such thing as brother and sister.”
I will not defile these pages devoted to the teachings of the holy HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, and to instructive tales from our journey here in the “leper” commune of Jerusalem by setting down in full detail what I witnessed when I entered the den of my ex-prophetess EliEli. Suffice it to say that those Christian theologians who advocated castration for self-flagellants as a safeguard against sexual arousal while engaged in this perverse activity had a point. The erotic tension in that room was constricting, like a bulge in the throat, it vibrated like instruments with every string drawn too tightly liable any minute to snap as the whips lashed and the blood flowed in an orgy of self-scourging and penitential mortification, men and women flogging their own lacerated naked backs and occasionally the raw proffered backs of others.
EliEli, as if in a trance in another realm, red in the face, slick with sweat, saw me at last standing in the doorway taking all of this in. She approached as if floating on an ozone layer cloud and held out to me her bloodied whip to use for my own penance, saying to me, “With this you too can do the will of My Father in heaven and be my mother.” Frankly, about the last thing in the world I wanted was to be the mother of this mixed-up girl—that’s all I needed for my sins. Sweeping the tail of her whip in the general direction over the writhing self-help group in the room, including the member of the Bnei Zeruya whom she had enabled with her enticements, all of them aware of nothing but the rhythmic stings of the whip and their own ecstatic self-mutilation, EliEli added, “Just as they do His will and therefore are my brothers and sisters.” She was paraphrasing from the gospel of Matthew—the New Testament!
At that point all I could do was remain in my place without raising my woman’s naked voice to answer a word to this spiritually disabled child in her altered state. I could only silently bow my head—not just in an effort to dodge the furious arcs of the flailing whips, but above all in awe at this further testament to the powers and divine energy of our holy mother, Ima Temima, who had once again foreseen and understood everything.
IN THE spirit of full disclosure, and with the unqualified approval of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, I have already described the brazen departure from our “leper” colony of the pollution of my mutinous false prophetess EliEli and her loathsome sect. It is now my burden to move onward with the task of laying out a complete account of the mysterious disappearances and reappearances of our holy mother’s personal attendant Cozbi, the former masseuse, Anna Oblonskaya of Moscow, Russia, which began the day after our Passover Seder and climaxed with her final vanishment shortly before the passing of our beloved high priestess, Aish-Zara, za’zal, revealing evidence that annihilated all hopes for her return. The matter is of particular sensitivity, not only because of the suspicion of foul play involved in every sense of the word, and not only because of the confidential and privileged position in which Cozbi had served in relation to our holy mother, but above all because of the way in which it impacted the fragile spirit and self-esteem and life choices of Paltiel, the son about whom Ima Temima openly admits to feelings of guilt, fist pounding heart, with regard to the traumatic and scarring maternal abandonments he was forced to endure as a very young child for the sake of our holy mother’s divinely ordained mission.
When Paltiel awoke in the early afternoon on the first day of Passover, the place beside him in the bed usually occupied by Cozbi was empty. Only the imprint of her long naked form remained on the stale sheets along with the vapors of her perfume and the stains of her female effluvia. These details of the Cozbi case that I offer here, however distasteful, have been garnered from several sources, including Paltiel. Our holy mother has commanded me to give a full and uninhibited account of what happened, to relate it as if it were a story, someone else’s once-upon-a-time-in-a-faraway-land.
Paltiel did not think much of Cozbi’s absence that afternoon, assuming she had risen earlier to attend to her duties at his mother’s side. The only irregularity was that her lapdog, Abramovich, was gone too, and he knew that his mother in general abided by a no-pets policy in the private quarters because of the sacredness of the texts handled there and because of a trauma suffered as a young girl in relation to dogs in particular, he could never remember the details. But he figured that Cozbi had taken Abramovich along this time for some fresh air—the dog had lapped up more than its share of wine at the Seder the night before—either tying it with a rope to a tree stump in the northern garden outside his mother’s door (not to stereotype, but based on personal experience, Russians do not seem to be overly solicitous of animals, including human animals) or tasking someone else to care for the dog, as she occasionally did. Paltiel spent most of that day lounging and napping in his room, bone-weary from the late hour at which the Seder had ended, with heavy limbs and pounding head from all the wine he too had consumed and constipated from going overboard on the matzot. Maybe Cozbi should have cared enough to take him out for an airing too, he commented bitterly to me later.
The next morning, he awoke earlier than the day before. Cozbi was still not there. He dressed and went outside, where he came upon the entire congregation gathered in front of the “leper” hospital. Above the crowd, on the landing leading to the entrance under the words JESUS HILFE carved into the pediment, was Aish-Zara, za’zal, and all her priestesses, draped and hooded in their long white prayer shawls, bestowing their priestly blessing with hands raised palms downward and fingers parted so that God Himself could peer through the lattices to fulfill their prayer to bless and be gracious to and watch over and grant peace to and shine His face upon His flock, whose backs were turned from this awesome spectacle lest their vision be seared by its white-hot holiness. But as for Paltiel, he personally did not turn his eyes away from the sight, thinking, as he later remarked to me before his final departure from the colony, It’s only a bunch of females up there with a bloody gash, a stinking koos between their legs. For the sake of our holy mother, let us glide over this crude misogyny of the son. I must note here with sadness that this was the last public appearance of Aish-Zara, za’zal, before she withdrew to focus her energies on full-time dying, which required all of her remaining strength.
Afterward, the congregation dispersed, many to bring a version of the Passover sacrifice on improvised altars of small stone mounds, offering up instead of the Paschal lamb mostly pigeons they had bagged in the “leper” colony and slaughtered, a priestess standing by to collect the trickle of pink blood in a paper cup. Paltiel wandered about the grounds inquiring if anyone had seen Cozbi’s little doggie, Abramovich, since the night of the Seder. This was the approach he had devised to save face; he had processed it as an insult to his masculine self-image, a form of neutering, to allow it to be publicly known that he could not account for the whereabouts of his woman, so, God forgive him, he used the dog as a surrogate. Nobody could remember having seen Abramovich lately, but one or two people did mention that they thought they had heard his distinctive shrill yip, somewhat muffled, but maybe that was just an auditory illusion because the dog barked so much and at all hours of the day and night, it was as if his grating sound lingered on the airwaves like an irritating tune that had been played so relentlessly in the background you could not shake it out of your head. In any event, if Abramovich were around, one woman conjectured, the smell of roasting flesh on the altar barbeques would have launched him off of his satin cushion and sent him scampering over for a bite, drooling like his Russian cousins, Pavlov’s dogs. There was not a single expression of sorrow or regret that Abramovich might be lost. Clearly, this hound was not a favorite in the camp, regarded by many as more privileged than some of the humans, which was not news to Paltiel who also shared a similar feeling in his own way, especially when he allowed himself to compare the pittance of affection that Cozbi occasionally doled out to him with the way she doted every second on the puny rodentlike mutt.
As Paltiel went about our “leper” colony continuing to inquire after Abramovich, several of our members also mentioned that, by the way, they had not seen Cozbi either since the Seder—nor, as it happened, had anyone noticed her either leaving the “leper” compound or entering it. Naturally, as he admitted to me later, it did cross Paltiel’s mind that he could get the information he was seeking most directly and efficiently simply by going to his mother’s apartment to which he was granted unrestricted access—perhaps Cozbi was working an extended shift, for example. But for self-empowerment reasons he elected not to involve our holy mother until the very end, which, from my personal point of view, was all to the good as Ima Temima was progressively caught up as the days and weeks passed in the agony of the dying of our beloved Aish-Zara, za’zal. Instead, after making the rounds in the wake of Cozbi’s first disappearance under the guise of searching for Abramovich, Paltiel found his way to the kitchen where he liked to drop in now and then for a little nosh even when we had been headquartered at the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter. The Daughters of Bilha and Zilpa under the supervision of Rizpa, our nurturing domestic management associate, were busy crushing matzot and cracking eggs for a matzah brie lunch. As Paltiel reached for a coconut macaroon, Rizpa drew close to him and with her characteristic discretion whispered into his ear, “Where is Cozbi? Not since the Seder do we see her. She is sick?”
The next morning, when Paltiel awoke and opened his eyes, Cozbi was there in her usual place in the bed beside him, her long naked body blotched with bruises, giving off a rank odor as if it had risen from the swamps or the sewers.
This was the pattern that continued over the ensuing months. Paltiel would wake up to find Cozbi gone, and then a few days later, when he opened his eyes in the morning, there she would be again, her sleeping body twisted in the soiled linen, skin splotched and discolored and ravaged, reeking of the nether-world, Abramovich stuffed like a rag between her breasts. When in his frustration he could muster up the nerve to probe where she had gone off to, which was, he insisted, his right, she would gaze at him through lowered lids smeared with mascara and eyeliner as if he were not quite in focus or not quite present and flip him some words—Vampire. Dracula. Baba Yaga. Gypsy. Werewolf. Alien. Satan. Djinn.
She hardly had the energy to toss out even those syllables much less to fulfill her responsibilities to our holy mother, passing the intervening days between disappearances mostly in bed as if recovering from a near-fatal illness. Our saintly Rizpa, in addition to her other duties, which now also included ministering to Aish-Zara, za’zal, in the terminal stage, would come to Cozbi when she could with some puréed food and tenderly feed her suffering sister against whom she passed no negative judgment spoonful by spoonful with little success, giving up in the end and setting down the bowl on the floor for Abramovich to finish off.
“Another kidnapped soul,” Rizpa said to Paltiel on one of those occasions, her heart brimming with pity in contrast to the anger-management issues he was dealing with after each disappearance stunt—and, of course, Paltiel grasped the reference to this little woman’s enduring bereavement, from the days when he had channeled the Internet in the service of finding her nut-brown babies who had also disappeared, abducted from their cradles.
The strain on Rizpa was becoming unbearable, and so, at the request of our holy mother, who by this time had ordered that Aish-Zara, za’zal, be conveyed in her death bed to the inner sanctum of the northern apartment in order that she might be escorted to the gates of the next life by her closest friend who loved her profoundly, I detailed my prophetess Aishet-Lot to Cozbi’s slot as Ima Temima’s second attendant. One exceptionally clear night at the height of summer, at the end of the month of Tammuz during the three weeks of mourning beginning with the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by the Romans in the first century of the Common Era and climaxing in the tragic destruction of our Holy Temple, may it be rebuilt speedily and in our time, as Rizpa and I sat in the private chamber of our holy mother, Aish-Zara, za’zal, sleeping fitfully on her back, our two senior wise women holding hands across the gap that separated their beds, Ima Temima turned to Aishet-Lot who was knitting furiously under the window, a bright crescent moon floating in the sky behind her. “Tell me where Cozbi disappears to,” HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, said to my prophetess. Aishet-Lot turned around and looked back, pointing with her fat knitting needle to the open parenthesis of the crescent moon with one star in its dip framed in the window behind her. “Yes,” Ima Temima said, “it is as I thought.”
The waning moon also shone through the window of Paltiel’s room that night, and for the first time in all those months he dared to reach out his hand to Cozbi whose back was turned to him in their bed and stroke her flank, only to be informed, in more words than she had managed to string together during that entire period, that their relationship had been downsized to brother-sister status. By morning Cozbi had gone missing again. It was then that Paltiel finally turned to his mother.
Walking and sobbing, walking and sobbing, Paltiel made his way to his mother’s chambers in the northern corner of our “leper” commune and plunked down with implicit entitlement on the bed. In reviewing this moment with me later, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, made reference to the one-hundred-and-twenty-sixth Psalm, the Song of Ascent often chanted before the grace after a meal, in which those who sow in tears walk along weeping, carrying their bag of seeds. “How terrible it is if one must walk while crying, the need to cry must be so unbearably overwhelming,” our holy mother taught. “For crying, one should at least be given the grace to stop, not to be forced to go on, as on a death march. This is the most painful kind of crying.” But then Ima Temima noted, with a mother’s tender heart, the happy ending—the walking-crying bearing bundles of ripe sheaves, reaping with joy.
Moreover, in recalling the encounter, our holy mother, accentuating the positive, pointed to an unexpected and in some measure a gratifyingly therapeutic streak of acting-out on Paltiel’s part when he settled himself on the bed and described his last confrontation with Cozbi. Mimicking her heavy cigarette voice in a provocatively exaggerated way and dropping his articles in mockery of her Slavic accent, Paltiel reported that she had announced to him, “You are brother to me, mama boy. I am sister to you.” He went on to inform his mother that as far as he was concerned, with respect to this vulgar slut Cozbi, he was now left with two options—either to dump her or to kill her. Ima Temima recommended the former, counseling him to leave our “leper” colony to assert his own dignity and self-respect, and to return to the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter from where he could continue to run the operation and from which Cozbi would be strictly barred by designated enforcers.
As for the second option, in discussing the exchange with me afterward, Ima Temima wondered out loud if the boy’s father, Howie Stern, reinvented as Haim Ba’al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker of Hebron, whom she seemed to have always regarded as mentally challenged, was actually some kind of variation on an “idiot” savant, as demonstrated by his prescience in naming the boy Pinkhas. For the man who had entered our holy mother’s quarters walking and weeping brokenhearted like Paltiel son of Layish when his beloved Mikhal was wrested from him and reclaimed by her husband, King David, as his property rightfully acquired with the payment to her father King Saul of her price tag of one hundred Philistine foreskins plus a big tip of an extra one hundred thrown in for good measure—that same man went forth like the zealot Pinkhas son of Elazar son of Aaron the high priest who had raised his spear and rammed it through the guts and groins of the fornicators, Zimri son of Salu, a chieftain of the tribe of Shimon, and the idol-worshipping shiksa, Cozbi daughter of the Midianite elder Zur.
Pinkhas son of Elazar son of Aaron the high priest has his fade-out in the Tanakh at what must have been a phenomenally old age in the closing chapters of the book of Judges, as strict as ever. By the end of his days he is high priest in Beit El, where the Ark of the Covenant was then housed. Speaking for the Lord as His oracle, he rallies the Israelites to battle against their brothers of the tribe of Benjamin, perpetuating a bloody civil war in which thousands are slaughtered and Benjamin is nearly wiped off the face of the earth. With her finger pressed to these verses, my prophetess Aishet-Lot rose from amid the heaps of white wool streamers she had knitted that encircled her like a salt mine and brought the open book of Judges over to our holy mother after Paltiel left. Ima Temima nodded in complete understanding, and with noble generosity praised my prophetess Aishet-Lot with the words, “I see you have enlarged your vision from the past to the future.”
The verses that Aishet-Lot was pointing to in which Pinkhas takes his farewell bow are in the middle of what it pains me to say is one of the most offensive sections of the Tanakh—the story of the concubine of Gibeah. This poor pilegesh is violently raped all through the night by a gang of men in Gibeah in the territory of the tribe of Benjamin where she and her master had stopped in their travels. When the Benjaminites of Gibeah are finished with her, they dump her at the door of the only house in town in which the travelers could find hospitality, her hands clawing the threshold. In the morning, her master loads her lifeless body onto his ass and hauls it home. He carves her up into twelve parts with his knife, hacking through the bones, dispatching the pieces of his violated property throughout the borders of Israel with the message, Take heed, Take counsel, Such things have never happened in Israel.
Are there truly some things left that have never happened in Israel? That is my question.
Paltiel departed from our “leper” colony that evening. Rizpa followed behind dragging one of his suitcases and a plaid vinyl bag filled with his favorite dishes in plastic containers that she had prepared for him as he made his way to an exit on the David Marcus Street side where a taxi waited. About a week later a package was found at the door of Ima Temima’s apartment in the northern garden. I raised my woman’s naked voice to express my concern that it might be a suspicious object, cautioning against handling it lest it blow up in our faces, but our holy mother overrode my security concerns and commanded Aishet-Lot to open it at once. Inside was the mangled shriveled carcass of Abramovich, barely recognizable, poor thing, next to a blackened waxy human ear of indeterminate gender except that from its piercing a long gold earring hung that no one could have mistaken as belonging to anyone other than Cozbi—the same earring that had jangled so prettily in happier times when she had crossed the floor in her three-inch stilettos to open the door on Passover eve to welcome Elijah the Prophet and the prophetess Miriam-Azuva-Snow White to our Seder.
MENTION of Elijah the Prophet moves me at this time under the aspect of the shattering life-cycle events, birth and death, that followed soon after the shocking revelations of the Cozbi case to legato in my thoughts to Rabbi Elijah, the formidable eighteenth-century Lithuanian Talmudic genius known as the Gaon of Vilna. Our own formidable Jerusalem Tanakh genius HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, would on occasion cite the Gaon of Vilna in definitively identifying who among our women could rightly be included in our priestly tribe, in the lineage of Aaron, the first high priest. Such positive ID became a matter of particular sensitivity in our post-modern age, when traces of Aaron’s DNA could be found on the Y chromosome of men from Africa to India no matter how alien, automatically conferring upon them the honor of priestly status by virtue of patrilineal descent, the indisputable manifest destiny of genes.
We women, of course, do not possess a Y chromosome, I thank God for this every morning in my prayers—Blessed are You Lord our God King of the Universe Who has not made me a man. Amen. Ah women. In determining who among our women could rightly be classified as a kohenet, therefore, our holy mother ruled according to Rabbi Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna. Surnames such as Cohen, Kahan, Katz, and so on and so forth, were all well and good and might or might not indicate that the individual so called descended from the priestly line. But, as the Vilna Gaon is reported to have decreed, if a person’s name was Rappaport, that person was a certifiable priest, conferring upon her not only the extra burden to always be on the best exemplary behavior that is laid upon the back of a daughter of a priest (the harsher punishment of burning, for example, if she is caught in adultery), but also the right to partake of all the privileges and honors accorded to the men of that holy caste (eating the best cuts of meat of sacrificial animals, being called up first of the pack to the Torah).
The majority of our priestesses, maximum four in all remaining at our “leper” colony at that time, were certified to have descended from family trees with Rappaport signatures from either the maternal or paternal branch, including our beloved high priestess Aish-Zara, za’zal, née Essie Rappaport, and also including the nearly senior citizen priestess whose advanced stage of pregnancy I had noticed for the first time the day after we arrived here, when the dead goat came flying like a nostalgic image from a painting by Chagall over the stone wall of our “leper” shtetl. I admit now that I cannot (perhaps due to an extended senior moment of my own) recover the memory of her original given first name, and neither she nor to my deep regret Aish-Zara, za’zal, is with us any longer to enlighten me. In any case, it is sufficient for me to assert at this time that she was a guaranteed genuine Rappaport. As for her first name, when she was initiated into the sacred mysteries of the priesthood she took the name Tahara, with all its complex allusions to purity.
The priestess Tahara Rappaport’s birthing travails began in our “leper” colony just a few days after the hideous body-parts parcel was delivered to our holy mother’s door. Her water broke on the eve of the Ninth of Av as we began our fasting and lamentations over the destruction of our Holy Temples, two catastrophic blows dealt us by an astonishing coincidence around the same day of the same month half a millennium apart, proof positive that they could only have been delivered by the hand (anthropomorphically speaking, in the language of human beings) of the Almighty Himself. Tahara’s harrowing labor lasted through the night, and by early afternoon of the next day, the Ninth of Av—the day on which some say the messiah is slated to be born and coincidentally the purported birthday of the false messiah Shabbtai Tzvi—the child was delivered. As the first day of the newborn’s mortal journey on this earth advanced and darkness descended, our beloved Aish-Zara, za’zal, drew her legs up onto her bed, biblically speaking, took her final breath, let out her final mortal gasp, her agonized death rattle, and was gathered back to her mothers.
On that Tisha B’Av eve, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, delegated me to preside at our communal recitation of the Scroll of Lamentations composed by my colleague the prophet Jeremiah—Alas, how the city once teeming with people sits solitary, like a widow weeping, weeping through the night, no one to comfort her from among all who once loved her. The divinatory powers bestowed on a personage of such expanded consciousness in such close communion with the spiritual realm as Ima Temima rendered our holy mother’s inspiring presence in our midst out of the question that night. Ascending to the heights, our holy mother saw with the certainty of pure inner vision that the precious soul of Aish-Zara, za’zal, would depart from her body within the next twenty-four hours, on the Ninth of Av itself, a day on which so many other calamities befell our people, this one only adding to the list. It was unthinkable—impermissible—for Ima Temima to leave the side of Aish-Zara, za’zal, at such a time, a matter of danger to the soul overriding all other sacred obligations. I accepted my mandate from our holy mother, therefore, and with humility took my place at the head of our mourners of the destruction of Jerusalem sitting on the floor of the great hall of our “leper” hospital in stocking feet, candles flickering in the dark sealed by their own pools of melting wax to the cool stones.
The reader intoned from the Scroll of Lamentations. In the siege of the Lord’s wrath, starving women ate their newborn babies. Tenderhearted women with their own hands cooked their children. (Thank God, at least they cooked them first, I thought to myself; our holy mother has instructed me not to delete this transgressive thought, which is valued as an expression of positive rebellion.) It was soon after we chanted that verse about these desperate acts resorted to by mothers who, as a crucial element of their job description, are merciful, that the first anguished scream of the laboring priestess Tahara Rappaport cut through the reading, jerking every head up from the texts in which they were following along by candlelight.
OVER THE next twenty-four hours of Tisha B’Av not only did I not eat, since fasting is required, but I also did not sleep as I shuttled back and forth between birth and death—the room in which Tahara was undergoing her ordeal, the most well appointed in the hospital, in all likelihood once reserved for the Moravian prioresses who held dominion over the “lepers,” only recently evacuated by Cozbi and Paltiel and then promptly claimed by our chief health care provider and circumcision engineer Zippi—and our holy mother’s apartment in the northern garden where Aish-Zara, za’zal, was moving irretrievably toward the end.
By this point, Aish-Zara, za’zal, had been lifted up like a baby from her bed in the arms of my prophetess, Aishet-Lot, and set down in the bed of our holy mother. The two old friends now lay side by side under the covers, along with Ima Temima’s little mother Torah. As sometimes happens in the final hours of this life, our precious Aish-Zara, za’zal, was blessed with unanticipated moments of alertness and lucidity, during one of which she blurted out that her priestess Tahara Rappaport had always reminded her a little of Mother Sarah-Yiska—a true cynic!—and now she was also, like Sarah-Yiska, about to become a superannuated alter-cocker old mother, a big joke, everyone who hears about it will have a good laugh, haha. At that, she and Ima Temima collapsed into a fit of giggles in each other’s arms, like the old high school girlfriends they had once been. I was adjured to come to them as often as possible with bulletins from the birthing room. I must not hold back a single morsel. They did not want to miss a thing.
For the record, I must at this point register my complete disapproval of the birthing facility at our “leper” colony, which was in every respect substandard and unprofessional and, bottom line, especially in this case, irresponsible. Here was a woman by my generous estimate over fifty-five years of age minimum, a Guinness Book of Records contender, most likely menopausal and hormonally challenged giving birth for the first time so far as I knew—a primipara, heaven help us. There was no medical support system in place in the event of complications threatening to the life and holistic wellness of mother and / or baby. There was not a single certified obstetrics practitioner present, not even an unlicensed midwife with some experience to assist in the procedure with the curious exception of the centerpiece herself, Tahara Rappaport, who purportedly had medical training as a specialist in infectious diseases, ministering to the plague-and-contagion-ridden expendables of Africa until she gave up in despair or saw the light (often one and the same life-altering event), and returned to the faith to take up her new vocation as priestess. Given her present situation, of course, Tahara was in no position to attend to her own needs, and so the entire show was being run by Zippi armed only with her circumcision kit.
I also feel it is incumbent on me to note here, with no pretensions to self-congratulation and with the full sanction of our holy mother, that twice I raised my woman’s naked voice to express my objections to the lack of quality care transpiring right in front of my very eyes; I could not allow myself to remain a silent bystander, I needed to speak truth to power. When I dared to raise my woman’s naked voice in the first instance, I regret to say that Zippi did not hesitate to dis me in public in front of everyone present by calling me a dried-up old fossil from a prehistoric age, a bougie from a bourgeois town, and to tell me in no uncertain terms to mind my own bee’s wax. This from the very same Zippi who was practically like a daughter to me when her mother and I were among the co-concubines of the late Abba Kadosh, a’h, in his patriarchal kingdom in the wilderness (a reality now so beyond visualization it seems like a dream).
In the second instance, our holy mother conceded that yes, given the age of the laboring mother, conventional thinking might indeed lead to the conclusion that perhaps it would be more sensible if the so-called “patient” were transferred from our “leper” hospital to another type of hospital. But though there is hardly any description in the Tanakh of women actually giving birth, an activity that is in fact mostly attributed to men in the form of begats, there does exist an honorable mention of the Hebrew midwives Shifra and Puah, aka the mother and sister of Moses Our Teacher, who coped under the most adverse conditions during our enslavement in Egypt, the straits of Mizrayim and the parting of the sea evoking the narrow birth passage from confinement to release, our holy mother declared. We must therefore place our faith in God and in Zippi, both combustible personalities, both with self-esteem issues albeit of different sorts, both quick to anger. Ima Temima turned to Aish-Zara, za’zal, dying in that very bed, and inquired if she happened by any chance to know with regard to her priestess Tahara Rappaport now in her dotage in the throes of parturition who the father of this fetus might be. Aish-Zara, za’zal, the life seeping out of her, raised one skeletal hand and pointed a trembling finger upward in the direction of the heavens above as if to say, God alone knows.
“God the father,” our holy mother nodded, “the usual suspect—also responsible for the miracle birth of that other old lady, Sarah-Yiska.”
It was then that HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, never disappointing, entered into a discourse on the identity of the father of Isaac, offering one of the more radical, some might even say blasphemous, teachings I had ever heard emerging from those holy lips. Calling attention to the incriminating opening verses of Genesis twenty-one—And the Lord pakad Sarah as He said He would, and He did to Sarah what He said He would do, and Sarah became pregnant and gave birth to a son for Abraham—our holy mother remarked on the absence of any active participation by Abraham, no mention of Abraham “coming” to Sarah as the generator of Isaac, for example, as he “came” to Hagar for the birth of Ishmael. Our holy mother pushed even further, beaming the full power of the mystical lasers on the meaning of the word pakad—translated traditionally as “remembered” or “noticed,” the word used to describe what it was exactly that the Lord did to Sarah-Yiska. “PaKaD,” Ima Temima enunciated precisely. “Scramble it up, replace the P with an F since they are after all the same letter in Hebrew distinguished only by one little dot to harden or soften them—and what do you get? DaFaK, knocked, knocked up—in contemporary usage, be’laz, fucked. God literally fucked Sarah-Yiska as He figuratively fucked Tahara Rappaport as He fucks over all of us since time immemorial.”
I must at this juncture interject that I was simultaneously stunned and thrilled by the language used by our holy mother; it was not language I imagined the girls at Beis Ziburis were exposed to (though it was quite common in the enriched program at my high school, Brearley), but Aish-Zara, za’zal, did not blink. A feeling of liberation exalted me from this teaching; it was as if I were suspended above the ground in midair with my fists punching furiously at the heavens.
“No wonder Abraham is so upset when he’s forced by Sarah-Yiska to kick out his son Yishmael,” Ima Temima went on to clarify. “But the old man doesn’t even flinch in the next chapter when the Lord commands him to return His son Isaac as a burnt offering. He rises up early the next morning to get the job done, saddles the asses, even gives the kid the wood to carry up to the mountaintop for his own immolation on the altar there; let the boy dig his own grave—just following orders. Even when an angel is dispatched to demand a stop to the madness in the nick of time, the old man pleads, Just let me wound this naked boy a little to squeeze out a drop of blood—or so says Rashi the commentator-in-chief.”
HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv paused at this point, digging no deeper to penetrate the heretical implications of this extreme teaching, simply putting it out there like a ticking bomb. Summoning my prophetess Aishet-Lot who had been knitting unperturbed at her usual ferocious rate in her seat under the window throughout this head-reeling teaching, our holy mother whispered some words into her ear. Aishet-Lot turned immediately and lumbered out of the sacred quarters on what was clearly an urgent mission. “HaShem ya’azor,” Ima Temima assured me with respect to my objections to conditions in the birthing room as soon as Aishet-Lot was dispatched. “God the father will help. But as a backup, there will also be a midwife. I have just made arrangements.”
TAHARA RAPPAPORT was placed naked in an ancient metal tub that had been found somewhere in the hospital, possibly used at one time for washing the clothing of the “lepers” or, even more alarming (no offense intended), bathing their diseased bodies. The tub was filled with warm water to ease the transition for the newborn from forty weeks of cushioning afloat in amniotic fluid. The child would be born in water in emulation of the second birth of Moses Our Teacher set afloat in the river among the reeds. The first thing baby Moses’ eyes saw when he opened them was a naked woman, Pharaoh’s daughter at her bath. Tahara Rappaport was also regarded as a king’s daughter, as are all Jewish women, all of us princesses whose entire honor is interior. Tahara the princess was also naked inside her tub of water set in the center of a magical circle that had been chalked onto the stone floor of what was now officially the headquarters of our health care provider, Zippi. The entire room was soothingly lit with candles in aluminum cups, strewn with rosemary and myrtle and other fragrant herbs, the doors and windows thrown wide open as a symbolic invitation for easy entry or exit, depending on your perspective. The women of our community who had given themselves permission to get in touch with their inner female in the service of this birthing were stationed along the circumference of the mystical chalk circle encompassing the laboring mother to offer their spiritual and emotional support and embrace. Most of them were clad only in white shifts like nightgowns, a few were naked, generally the younger and firmer goddesses, all had their hair loose and uncovered, every knot and tie in hair and garments undone to encourage through the power of suggestion full openness without any obstructions for the passage of the new life. From each woman’s neck a charm or talisman hung—the open hand of a hamsa or a cameo amulet inscribed with the ineffable Name, the Tetragrammaton, along with the names of powerful first-tier angels to ward off evil spirits, especially the winged demoness Lilith who preys upon women in childbirth and targets newborns with deadly spite. Since the mourning of the Ninth Day of Av precluded music, the women in the circle were limited to pounding with the palms of their hands on the stretched sheepskin tops of small clay drums they held in the crooks of their arms, speeding up the rhythm and banging with greater urgency at increased volume as Tahara’s contractions gained force and her screams grew louder. To these rhythms, some women gyrated and shimmied their pelvises and stomachs in circular movements like belly dancers, and there were even a few who took it upon themselves to mirror vicariously Tahara’s contortions with each spasm and to echo her cries, as if they too were in labor. But most of the women by far spent the hours intoning Psalms nonstop over and over again to the doleful chant used for the recitation of the Tisha B’Av book of Lamentations—especially Psalm twenty, May the Lord answer you in times of trouble; Psalm one-hundred-and-eighteen, From the straits I cry out to You, O Lord; Psalm one-hundred-and-twenty-six, Those who sow in tears will reap in joy; Psalm one-hundred-and-thirty, From the depths I call to You, O Lord—Lord, listen to my voice.
The voice of the priestess Tahara Rappaport was hopelessly lost after seventeen hours of screaming—from animal cries to otherworldly shrieks, from yelling curses at God the father to roaring Shut up, for God’s sake, just shut up, you witches! at the women chanting psalms or banging drums or belly dancing with tinkling bells, screeching Cut it out, you ridiculous primitives! with particular fury at the ones who were sympathetically mimicking her every contraction. And then there were her general all-purpose howls—You’re killing me! Knock me out, knock me out! Give me an epidural! What am I doing here? Get me to a hospital, you idiots! Get me out of here! Writhing and twisting as she screamed, she struggled to break through the webbing of cords wrapped around the tub swaddling her in place, leaving free only the great round dome of her taut belly with the navel popped out, her pendulous, veined breasts with their darkened, créped nipples, her head thrown back with her long grizzled gray hair streaming over the side. The cord that kept her in place had been obtained at mortal peril by one of the women who had set out without even an armed escort to Bethlehem right in the neighborhood of the seething Dheisheh Arab refugee camp, to the burial place of Rachel Our Mother who died in childbirth, where she encircled Rachel’s tomb seven times with the cord that she brought back to bind Tahara in the tub during labor for good luck.
Two strong women, soaked to the skin, were stationed by Zippi on either side of the tub to keep it from tipping over as Tahara thrashed about, while two others were assigned the task of refilling it as the water splashed over the sides from Tahara’s wild flailing. Zippi herself, like the captain of the ship with a periscope, peered now and then into the birth canal for signs of emerging underwater life. Once, she even tried to insert a cherry-flavored lollipop into Tahara’s mouth remarking, “My mama says it’s okay even on Tisha B’Av, because today is your special day,” which Tahara promptly spat out and sent flying like a projectile. But Zippi’s main task during this stage, as she defined it, was to massage Tahara’s belly, kneading it in spiraling circles with both hands each time a contraction came on, crested like a wave, and subsided, all the while exhorting huskily, “Breathe, Tahara baby, breathe—hee-hee-hoo, hee-hoo-hee!” panting along rhythmically by way of example.
In this fashion Zippi offered her services as she envisioned them until the spasms gripped Tahara so relentlessly and so close together with no respite or relief that she yelled Shut up, Zippi! and toppled her tormentor onto her rear end with legs cycling in the air by sliding the tub from within upon its slick of water and crashing it into Zippi bending over to coach her. In the same desperate maneuver, the priestess Tahara Rappaport also finally succeeded in tearing the cords with which she was trussed like a turkey and broke free at last, as if it were she herself who was being born out of a caul. It was at this point, I am pleased to report (and, I might add, her mother was also so pleased to hear), that our health care provider Zippi displayed the good-natured sweetness that I have always known she possessed buried deep down somewhere within her that I remembered from when she was just a little girl. She collected her dignity, pulled herself up from the wet floor with no signs of embarrassment or resentment, readjusted the lofty white turban on her head, smoothed down her dress, and said, “Lord, girl, the way you’re carrying on, you’d think you’re the first one in the history of mankind to ever give birth.” She gazed good-humoredly at Tahara who was now on all fours in the center of the circle, her breasts and belly hanging down pendulous like great wrinkled overripe melons the gatherers had passed over. Squatting in front of her, Zippi tenderly parted the rumpled gray hair that concealed Tahara’s face like a shaggy dog’s, and tucked a hank behind each ear. “No need to check out the other end, Tahara girl,” Zippi said. “I can see from your eyes you’re ready to roll.”
As if on cue, the midwife strode into the room at that moment, just as the cervix of the priestess Tahara Rappaport had dilated to ten centimeters and the baby’s head began to crown between the old mother’s legs like the dark furry center of a sunflower. Strikingly tall and slender, covered from head to toe in a black burqa, only the eyes of this midwife, liquid and beautiful with long rich dark lashes, were teasingly visible through the shadowed panes of a rectangular mesh patch. I must say that at first I was a bit dazed by our holy mother’s decision to enlist a Muslim midwife to deliver this Jewish child, but it was not an issue I could afford to probe, and certainly not at that critical moment; I accepted the wisdom behind the choice as only one more mystery beyond my grasp. I suppose I should add that it also troubled me to see that the midwife’s hands were already encased in the sterile white latex disposable gloves, especially because those hands were carrying the birthing stool of dubious hygiene, a battered contraption smeared with decaying organic matter composed of two cinderblock-like stones connected by two planks with a space between them—think your basic crude outhouse toilet. Ignoring Zippi entirely, the midwife brushed past her as if she were invisible, not even a player, setting the birthing stool down on the floor beside Tahara frozen on all fours like a terracotta animal on a lawn in sensationally bad taste, pausing to stare in open wonderment at the immodesty of the naked belly dancers and goddesses of the drumming circle.
By then Tahara had already lost her woman’s naked voice and could no longer scream. The coming of the midwife cast her even further away into another realm entirely; she became subdued and docile as if under an enchantment more powerful than any chemical anesthetic, submitting without resistance to being helped up onto the birthing stool and surrendering. The priestess Tahara Rappaport sat obediently on the birthing stool, her bottom positioned to disgorge downward through its opening, her back hunched over, elbows on parted knees, head in hands, her face scarlet and streaked with perspiration as the midwife chanted hypnotically in an unearthly falsetto, Push, Vashti, push! We all simply assumed it was Tahara whom the midwife was addressing as Vashti, the name of the spurned Persian queen who had flatly refused to appear before the king with the substance abuse problem and his drinking buddies, thereby paving the way for our salvation via the sumptuous beauty pageant queen Esther. But everybody knows that Vashti is also one of the most common names given to cows in the State of Israel. So, speaking for myself, I must confess that I was somewhat offended by this Arab’s demeaning characterization of Jewish women. Nevertheless, I understood that this was not the time to raise my woman’s naked voice in protest. Maybe this midwife that our holy mother had sent us for reasons beyond my comprehension was actually a veterinarian, it was not a decision for me to question. I trusted that the deeper meaning of our holy mother’s message would in good time be illuminated.
The priestess Tahara Rappaport continued to sit on the birthing stool, pushing and straining, her pelvis jerking in spasms as if in orgasmic throes until everything that had been loosened inside her came gushing out—the baby along with all of the birth junk from the uterus itself not to mention all the fecal matter and fluids from the two nearby orifices.
Oblivious to all the excrement and muck, the midwife deftly caught the infant and held her up in the air head downward, one hand, now ungloved, pinioning both of her ankles like a chicken about to have its neck slit and with the other hand smacking her resoundingly on the scrawny tight buttocks, setting her crying lustily for good reason. Even through the smears of blood and the coating of cheesy white film, the dark spots on her pale skin and the protrusion above her natal crease were plainly visible. Here was our very own Vashti—a “leper” with a tail. This was the real explanation, some sages say, for the queen’s refusal to obey the king’s summons to appear at court for a command performance and display herself like a trophy wife in front of all the carousers. It was not some sort of legendary feminist rebellion; she just didn’t like the way she looked, a feeling we women can truly appreciate.
The midwife spoke for the first time. “If a kid like this is born where I come from, we smash its head against a rock right away.” The voice was the voice of a man, and the hands were the hands of a goatherd.
I made my way back to Ima Temima’s quarters to report on the final outcome of the birthing experience. Though as a general rule our holy mother was in the habit of spending large portions of the day in our “leper” colony sitting up in a chair, either inside the apartment praying and grappling with the texts, or on rare occasions if the weather was mild in the garden under the oak tree meeting by appointment with spiritual seekers, I found our two senior wise women that Tisha B’Av afternoon still lying side by side in the bed. In an act of supreme lovingkindness, Ima Temima had elected to remain as close as possible in earthly space to Aish-Zara, za’zal, separated only by the thin fabric of their nightdresses and the skin of their physical beings throughout the dying woman’s agony for the sake of offering comfort to the struggling soul laboring to be released from the straits of the mortal coils, a kind of reverse birth. Gazing upon these two entwined sisters, I recounted, “The first thing we all noticed when the midwife held the baby up were the two defects—the spots and the tail.”
A profound silence followed as our holy mother took this in, channeling it through attributes of wisdom even the existence of which I could not venture to fathom. “Kol-Isha-Erva,” Ima Temima spoke at last, “think carefully. Were these two things truly what you noticed first?”
It was my turn to draw deeply from whatever impoverished well of cognitive awareness I possessed. Finally I said, “I guess the very first thing I truly noticed were the genitals. Isn’t that what one always looks for first? I took note that it was a girl. Then the spots and the tail.”
“Three birth defects then,” our holy mother responded. “Three damning stigmas.”
IT IS not for me to presume how much of this teaching was absorbed by the consciousness of Aish-Zara, za’zal, as she lay in that bed beside our holy mother with eyes sealed, her breaths vibrating in thin rasps. But I can testify that before her final passage our beloved high priestess was blessed with one more moment of what as executive director of the school for prophetesses I would with no hesitation whatsoever call end-of-days prophetic vision. It occurred at twilight on that Tisha B’Av day as I joined the vigil in our holy mother’s chambers reading psalms along with Rizpa and Aishet-Lot—Even when I walk in the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil because You are with me, Your rod and Your staff they will comfort me.
As if she were startled by a stunning realization she had been grasping for all her life, the cavernous eyes of our high priestess Aish-Zara, za’zal, flashed open and she cried out, “The Queen the Messiah, here she is!” Mustering the last shreds of her strength she clasped Ima Temima around the neck with both arms and kissed our holy mother passionately on the lips. Utterly spent, her arms dropped, her head sank onto Ima Temima’s breast, and she remained in that position, her depleted upper body splayed across Ima Temima as our holy mother stroked her back, singing softly in an aged voice, deep and gravelly, a Yiddish lullaby, Sleep, sleep my dear little bird, ay-lululu-lu-lu-lu. Over and over again Ima Temima sang this simple melody, caressing and rocking Aish-Zara, za’zal, for an hour at least as we sat there silent privileged witnesses until the words of the Shema rang out from the lips of HaRav Temima Ba’alat Ov, shlita—“Hear, O Israel, Adonai is our God, Adonai is One,” and, after a haunting pause, the acceptance of the death sentence, “Blessed is the True Judge.”
A long tear crept down the sides of our holy mother’s face from the corner of each eye. Rizpa and Aishet-Lot approached the bed diffidently and lifted the body of our high priestess Aish-Zara, za’zal, off of our holy mother and laid her gently on her back in her own bed, her released soul still hovering in midair seeking the open window like an agitated bird desperately searching for a way out. The two personal attendants assisted Ima Temima onto a chair, which was drawn up close to the bed. The hands and feet of Aish-Zara, za’zal, were already bloating and growing waxy, an organic smell of sweet rot was beginning to radiate from her, her nearly toothless mouth hung down open and slack. Our holy mother reached for the Tanakh on the bedside table and wedged it under the chin of Aish-Zara, za’zal, to prop up the jaw and close the mouth. Then HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, pulled the cover over the vacated face that no longer truly resembled our high priestess Aish-Zara, za’zal, her essence no longer present, and said, “In keeping with the mitzvah to honor the dead I take it upon myself to serve as the shomeret.”
Instantly, with no prior consultation, the three of us came forward as one to offer ourselves in place of our holy mother as guardians over the body. We were overcome with concern that the task of sitting up all night beside Aish-Zara, za’zal, keeping watch over the remains so they would not be left alone even for a second would be too taxing, frail with age and desolated by this loss as Ima Temima was, and especially after a twenty-four-hour period of fasting. But HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, would not hear of it, refusing absolutely to cede to anyone else this service of lovingkindness to the dead, or even to compromise by agreeing to shifts in which we would each take a turn as shomeret. The only concession our holy mother made was to eat something from the tray of salads and fruit that Rizpa had already set out in the front room while my prophetess Aishet-Lot and I during this brief break sat watch over the withered corpse decomposing on the bed. It was a tiny body, yet even so it was too large to stuff into the refrigerator in the apartment for preservation purposes, and, despite the irrefutable holiness of Aish-Zara, za’zal, we were bewildered to discover that her remains were so quickly giving off a rancid stench even on that musty Jerusalem night, though not one of us would dare to dishonor the dead by making reference to it either in words or by facial expressions or by, God forbid, the gesture of placing a hand discreetly under our noses.
Within ten minutes Ima Temima returned from the brief repast, resuming the role of dedicated watchwoman, companion to the dead, even as the three of us also remained through the night, listening in awe as our holy mother intoned all one-hundred-and-fifty psalms entirely from memory in a remarkably young and strong voice. After the verse “Although my father and mother have abandoned me, the Lord will take me in” from Psalm twenty-seven, Ima Temima reminded us that, although Aish-Zara, za’zal, had been cut off by her family for what were judged to be heretical activities impermissible to a woman warranting complete shunning when she left them to join our flock, and although she was regarded as dead by her husband and children who had already sat shiva over her for seven days of mourning, it was nevertheless our responsibility to find a way to inform her thirteen children, ten sons and three daughters, of the actual passing of their only mother and of the funeral and burial that would take place the next day here at our “leper” colony as well as of their obligation to sit shiva again, this time for true and proper cause. “What they decide to do with this knowledge once we have fulfilled our duty to pass it on to them is their choice, God help them,” our holy mother said. The task of dispatching a member of the Bnei Zeruya with the mandate to seek out at least one of the children of Aish-Zara, za’zal, to deliver the news and to spread it to the others was delegated to me, a commission I welcomed with gratitude. After that, Ima Temima did not interrupt the recitation of Tehillim again until Psalm one-hundred-and-thirty, arriving at the verse, My soul longs for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, watchmen for the morning. Here, our holy mother paused and declared, “When morning comes, I will oversee the tahara.”
From these words we understood that HaRav Temima Ba’alat Ov, shlita, was yielding to us the actual performance of the purification rites involved in the tahara process in favor of a supervisory role, and in my heart I thanked God for this. It must surely have been an extremely painful decision for our holy mother to refrain from active participation in what is considered to be among the highest acts of lovingkindness one person can perform for another, a thankless task, and especially in this case the sacrifice must have been doubly hard, since the recipient of this hessed would be Ima Temima’s soul mate, Aish-Zara, za’zal. Moreover, I can personally attest to our holy mother’s extraordinary skill at preparing the dead for burial, from the days when the two of us came out of the patriarchal compound in the wilderness of the late Abba Kadosh, a’h, and Ima Temima quickly became known throughout the land of Israel as a one-woman holy society, traveling anywhere day or night to perform a tahara, especially for women who had no one, the nameless and marginalized. But this time, to my immense personal relief, there was an implicit acknowledgment of the limitations that come with age. Now, under the scrupulously demanding eye of our holy mother, the hard labor and heavy lifting involved in the tahara were to be left to us, to Rizpa, Aishet-Lot, and myself, joined by a fourth woman, Zippi, who strode into the room and promptly let out a loud Phew!—clapping her hands against her nose and shaking them out as if they had accidentally dipped into some foul pool. In the spirit of special indulgence of one’s own child our holy mother overlooked this outburst possibly disrespectful to the dead had the spirit of Aish-Zara, za’zal, heard it, and opened the proceedings at once by paraphrasing from that great depressed authoress Kohelet, “As she came out of her mother’s womb naked so must she go—as we wash a baby at the beginning so we wash her at the end.”
The wasted and ravaged body of our precious high priestess Aish-Zara, za’zal, was laid out naked under a white Sabbath tablecloth on a wooden bench, the feet pointed toward the door, the hands arranged palms upward in a gesture of supplication. “Essie daughter of Sarah-Yiska,” the four of us recited in unison (since we did not know the name of the mother of Aish-Zara, za’zal, this was the name HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, instructed us to use), “we of the holy burial society ask your permission to perform this tahara on you. We beg your forgiveness for any disturbance we might cause you or for any mistake we might make.”
We proceeded to wash the body with water ladled from a pail, exposing only the section we were working on to protect the dignity of the dead like a surgeon performing an operation, barely able to gaze out of pity at the cavernous webbing of scars where the breasts had been gouged out, the savage gash through which the womb had been eviscerated, the evidence of beatings and cigarette burns that had been inflicted upon her. We combed the sparse white hair remaining on the head of Aish-Zara, za’zal, we cleaned out all of the orifices, the ears, the nostrils, the mouth, and so on and so forth, all the holes down the body front and back and packed them with sand, we cut her nails and scraped under them with a toothpick, bemused to discover the remains of a glossy mother-of-pearl polish on her toenails, which we were instructed to remove. As we labored our holy mother sat in the chair directing us, closely monitoring our every move, all the while chanting from the Song of Songs—Her head is like the finest gold, Eyes like doves, Cheeks like beds of spices, Hands like golden rods, Thighs like marble pillars, Her mouth is sweet, She is completely delicious, This is my beloved, This is my darling, daughters of Jerusalem.
The two heftiest women in our group, Aishet-Lot and Zippi, raised the naked body of Aish-Zara, za’zal, and stood it up on its feet holding her rigid form steady in that position as Rizpa and I carried out the actual purification ritual of tahara, pouring water from buckets in a continuous stream down her head and body like a shower for a total immersion as in a ritual bath, and afterward we dried her thoroughly. We covered the bench she had been resting upon after drying it too, spreading the great white talit over it in which Aish-Zara, za’zal, used to wrap herself to bless our congregation, first tearing one of its fringes to render it unusable for any future holy service.
We dressed her in her plain white linen shrouds sewn by hand by the women of our “leper” colony—the cap, the veil, the trousers, the socks, the mittens, the tunic, the jacket, the sash wound around the waist knotted in the shape of the three-pronged pitchforked letter shin for one of God’s aliases, Shaddai—“Like the white garments donned by the high priest only once a year on Yom Kippur day to enter the Holy of Holies,” Ima Temima said. Here at last was an outfit tailor-made for Aish-Zara, za’zal. Honey, I was tempted to say, With all due respect, this is you! Ima Temima sent Aishet-Lot outside into the northern garden of our “leper” colony to collect some dirt from the Holy Land, which we sprinkled over the eyes, heart, and private parts of Aish-Zara, za’zal, who now totally clad in her white shrouds at last truly took on the ultimate aura of a high priestess. We drew up the edges of the great talit she was resting on and folded it over her completely, tucking in its corners, wrapping her in a tight, neat little bundle as Ima Temima cried out with intense feeling, “She is pure! She is pure! She is pure!”—and we lit a memorial candle at her head.
“Aish-Zara, za’zal,” we intoned repeating after Ima Temima, “we beg your forgiveness if in any way we have offended your dignity as we carried out this tahara. We have now completed our task according to custom and tradition.”
“Thank you,” a muffled voice responded in a whistling note followed by a sharp little bray of a laugh—all four of us can testify that we heard this, it was a miracle—and a small brown bird that had been perched on the sill of the open window fluttered its wings and flew off.
THE FUNERAL was held soon after, on that very same morning, the tenth of Av before noon to escape the stifling heat of the day. Every member of our community gathered in the dark shaded northern garden of the “leper” colony outside the door of Ima Temima’s apartment where the grave had been readied under the ancient oak tree to receive Aish-Zara, za’zal, in the winding sheet of her talit. It had been dug with somber devotion by Aishet-Lot and the three remaining Bnei Zeruya, who were also given the honor of pallbearers, carrying Aish-Zara, za’zal, out on her bench and setting her down beside the shocking hole in the ground of her open grave. Our holy mother, cloaked and hooded in a prayer shawl and completely veiled, accompanied by the little mother Torah tucked securely into the corner of the wheelchair like a beloved stuffed animal without which a small child will refuse to go anywhere, followed behind in the procession to escort the dead, pushed by Rizpa who was helpless to suppress the sobs that gripped her. Though proximity to the impurity of the dead except in the case of the closest relatives is forbidden to a member of the priestly caste, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, had ruled that Aish-Zara, za’zal, was like a mother to our priestesses, and so they too were present, their white prayer shawls draped over their heads, three priestesses in all remaining to us now in our “leper” colony, including Tahara Rappaport who had risen from her bed and was breast-feeding her tightly swaddled baby under her talit.
Our numbers had been reduced over our sojourn in the “leper” colony approaching extinction, it is true, but on that morning of the funeral of Aish-Zara, za’zal, they were vastly multiplied by the added presence of by my estimate well over one hundred (a Jew is forbidden to count other Jews directly) members of the family of our cherished high priestess—children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—who stood some distance from us separated by gender, the men and boys on one side, women and girls clustered in a tighter space on the other side close to but not touching the stone walls. It was a dizzying sea of black hats and long black kaftans, wigs and headscarves and loose dresses brushing the ankles, but that was not the most striking feature that set them apart, nor were the white surgical masks they all wore over the nose and mouth, presumably as a precaution against exposure to the pollution of “leprosy” rather than anxiety about contaminating us. What was most striking about them above all was how large they all were, almost without exception, even the youngest among them, not only well above average in height but also big-boned and heavy, some bordering on the plus-sized; it defied the imagination to absorb the facts on the ground that these specimens had emerged from that hollowed-out little white package lying there on the bench. The only logical explanation was that the Pupa abuser who begat them was a giant, which rendered the visual of him ramming a raw fist into such a small creature as Aish-Zara, za’zal, even more intolerable.
By all accounts he himself was not there that morning. It was possible, however, to distinguish among this throng a few who were the actual children of Aish-Zara, za’zal, by the obligatory mourning rent in their garments close to the heart, and so I approached one of them, a daughter naturally, since I knew from mortifying experience that none of the men would be willing to speak to a woman, and would, in fact, simply look right past me as if I were invisible if I attempted to address him. After expressing my sympathy for her loss, I inquired of this daughter, a large matron with a brown mustache and matching wig, if she could tell me the name of the mother of Aish-Zara, za’zal. Once again the celestial powers of Ima Temima were stunningly affirmed for me when this daughter informed me in Yiddish that she in fact had been named for her mother’s mother, for her maternal grandmother, Sora—our very own Sarah-Yiska, precisely as Ima Temima had foreseen. I was then able to insert this name in its proper place when I sang for all the assembled the El Maleh Rakhamim, which was the honor given to me thanks to the training I had received at Juilliard before dropping out—God full of mercy, grant a proper rest at the highest levels of the most holy and most pure to the soul of Essie daughter of Sarah—and it did not faze me in the least that every single male member of the family of Aish-Zara, za’zal, had his fingers plugged into the depths of his ears and was droning in a monotone as I sang lest he God forbid sin by hearing my woman’s naked voice.
The eulogy was delivered by HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, at first in tones so soft and intimate that all the assembled were obliged to lean in to hear. I pictured the crowd as if from above, resembling a copse of trees all bending in one direction from the gust of a mysterious squall lashing them from behind.
“My darling Essie,” our holy mother began, addressing Aish-Zara, za’zal, directly, as if they were alone in a room, as if it were a personal conversation to which we were only by chance fortunate to be privy, “my dearest friend, my teacher, my rebbe”—and our holy mother went on to speak achingly not of all the suffering and injustice endured by this tiny creature now lying blotted out on the bench at the lip of her grave, not of all the humiliation and contempt and sheer dismissal of the terms of her very existence inflicted upon her, but rather our holy mother recalled the monumental courage and defiance this little heroine had displayed. “When you assumed your rightful place as our high priestess and took on the name Aish-Zara,” Ima Temima said, “we recognized immediately that for you no name could be more fitting. Because you are like the strange-fire, the aish-zara, that the two elder sons of the high priest Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, brought to the altar in the sanctuary on the incense pan. Like them you served God in your own way. For their boldness God consumed them in an instant flash of flames, just as moments earlier He had lapped up with fire the burnt offering and the fat parts of the ox and the ram. Nadav and Avihu were just another ox and ram to God, another sacrifice, our God has a taste for blood and fire, and so their father Aaron was forbidden to mourn—Aaron was silent, the Scripture reports. We too shall refrain from mourning, mommy, we too shall remain silent, but we shall honor you by continuing to serve God in our own way, following in your path wherever it leads.”
Our holy mother then turned away from Aish-Zara, za’zal, raising both arms to the heavens and in powerful tones, bold and young, taking on God Himself. “We know You exist because You created our world in Your image. You are a cruel God and it is a cruel world—but I have no fear at all. I shall not move from this place, I shall not leave this ‘leper’ colony, until You put an end to all the injustice and oppression, until you call a stop to all the sorrow and suffering. Yitgadal Ve’yitkadash Shemai Rabbah. Even if my protests incite You to grow more savage and furious, to heave up the entire universe and turn it back to water, to astounding emptiness and void, I shall not move from this spot until You swallow up death forever and wipe away the tears from every face. Exalted and Sanctified May Your Great Name Be.”
There was more, but in the interest of full disclosure I must insert at this point that I was unable to hear every precious word of our holy mother’s eulogy and was obliged to reconstruct the entirety of the message afterward by consulting with others to obtain the complete transcript that I have yet to fact-check. It was a great personal loss for me, this goes without saying, but a necessary one since early on in the course of Ima Temima’s talk I detected restless murmurings in the crowd coming from the direction of the family of Aish-Zara, za’zal. As a precautionary measure, therefore, sensing the danger of brewing violence, I moved unobtrusively to a corner, pulled out my cell phone, and dialed automatically the number programmed in to alert our friends in high places of impending trouble. As our holy mother was drawing the comparison between Aish-Zara, za’zal, and the sons of Aaron the high priest, shouts rang out from the crowd—Apikorsus, Heresy, Hillul HaShem, Desecration of the Name, and so on and so forth, the usual garbage flung at us over the years. By the time Ima Temima came to the plea to our cruel, savage God, a few stones were thrown, mostly pebbles, mostly by the children in training, I observed with sadness, the pebbles they happened to bring along with them in their pockets as they must have been forewarned against touching anything of ours, all of it saturated with contamination and impurity, which is probably why no one was hurt, thank God. It might have escalated in some way, however, these things can sometimes spread faster than “leprosy,” but before that could happen we heard the thumps of a loping four-legged creature though the trot was clearly not that of the police horses I might have expected.
Charging into the crowd at that moment came an Arab astride a huge bellowing camel baring its teeth. His long robes were flowing, his red-and-white checked keffiyeh was drawn across his entire face except for the eyes, he was riding as if through the drifts of a sandstorm on the desert dunes, one hand grasping the camel’s reins and the other cutting through the air with a glittering saber, slashing at the wind while ululating shrilly as he drove the entire crowd of masked strangers to the exits and pursued them out of our “leper” compound, disappearing along with them just as the sirens could be heard and the police wagons drew up.
All that was left to remember our guests by were steaming piles of hoo-ha nuggets dropped by the camel, which I can only conjecture are not particularly beneficial to the soil for organic fertilization purposes since the desert is not as a rule known to bloom except through the sheer force of willpower of Zionist pioneers, though our creative domestic management associate Rizpa did later gather up the dung to use for cooking fuel. It remained for us, the embers salvaged from the blaze, the last inhabitants of our “leper” colony, to bury our dead.
As we stood there in reverent silence, Aishet-Lot descended into the grave and the body of Aish-Zara, za’zal, was passed with the utmost delicacy and respect into the safety of her arms by the three Bnei Zeruya working in a relay like rescuers at a fire. Aishet-Lot laid our dear high priestess down lovingly at the bottom of the grave like a baby in its cradle, and ascended. For a few seconds it seemed to us as we gazed into the depths of that pit that our poor Aish-Zara, za’zal, swaddled in her white talit like a receiving blanket was stirring in distress, as if struggling to find a more comfortable position, and then it was as if she had found her place, as if she let out a low sough of relief at the prospect of never having to be bothered again, and she gave herself over to sleep.
A shovel filled with dirt was placed in the hands of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, whose chair had been brought up to the very rim of the grave. The honor of being the first to cover Aish-Zara, za’zal, with the earth from which she had come was given to our holy mother, who tipped the shovel downward, letting the dirt spill slowly into the grave onto the body nestled below. Then we all took turns with the shovels and spades that had been supplied, thrusting them into the piles of dirt that rose on either side of the grave and emptying them on top of the unresisting body of Aish-Zara, za’zal, until the grave was filled and a soft fragrant mound rose above it into which a temporary handwritten marker was sunk—ESSIE DAUGHTER OF SARAH-YISKA, AISH-ZARA, ZA’ZAL, with a simple drawing as if outlined by a child of two hands raised in blessing, thumbs arcing, middle and ring fingers separated, to indicate the resting place of a priest. In a year’s time, God willing, we shall unveil a suitable monument over the grave of Aish-Zara, za’zal. Our three remaining priestesses to whom Aish-Zara, za’zal, was like a mother chanted the mourner’s Kaddish standing in for her own children who had fled—exalting, sanctifying, glorifying, blessing the Name of the Holy One, praising God despite everything.
That very evening I was summoned to the quarters of our holy mother. I expected to find Ima Temima already in bed after these strenuous days filled with so much stress and loss, but was surprised and I must add reassured instead to see our holy mother sitting in a chair drawn up to the table on which the Tanakh was open to Leviticus, chapter twelve. There were no signs of mourning in the room, not even a memorial candle, and Ima Temima made no reference at all in the course of our conversation to the passing of Aish-Zara, za’zal, or to any of the incidents that had occurred during the purification and burial rites that had taken place that very morning. Pointing to the text spread open on the table, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, reminded me that this was the section of the Torah devoted to the impurities of skin eruptions commonly classified under the heading of “leprosy.” But the portion begins with the strictures relating to the impurities of a woman who has just given birth. If a woman gives birth to a boy, she is considered to be in the untouchable state of a bleeding niddah for seven days followed by thirty-three days of a secondary degree of impurity, our holy mother reminded me; if it is a girl, the untouchable menstrual niddah stage lasts fourteen days, followed by sixty-six days of generalized uncleanness. Why the difference? Ima Temima asked. Because the baby girl, a female like her mother, is herself also a sack of blood, and doubles the impurity.
Turning now to the subject of the baby girl who had just been born to the priestess Tahara Rappaport only the day before, our poor little Vashti, Ima Temima noted that the child already has three counts against her, possibly even four, because in addition to being a female leper with a tail it was very likely that she was also a “bastard,” a mamzer, a devastating label slapped upon an innocent soul mandating extreme forms of discrimination and ostracism. This, I knew, was a subject that our holy mother had probed very deeply and was acutely sensitive to, as Zippi, the daughter that Ima Temima had borne in the wilderness to our mutual husband, the late Abba Kadosh, a’h, had been publicly classified by some mean-spirited authorities as a mamzeret.
Having laid all these cards out on the table like a Tarot reader, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, gave me my orders. My mission was to go at once to the priestess Tahara Rappaport and inform her that in fourteen days’ time from the day she had given birth, at the completion of her first period of extreme bloody pollution in accordance with the strictest interpretation of the text, on the twenty-second day of Av, she must pack her bags and take her baby, Vashti, with her and leave our “leper” colony forever. “Inform her that you will give her some bread and water on that morning and send her on her way with her girl child,” HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, shlita, commanded with a finality that left no opening for argument or discussion. “You may also want to add that my personal advice based on what awaits the child in this life is that she take her into the wilderness and lay her on a rock, abandon her there like a superfluous newborn Chinese girl. Tell her to expose the daughter to the elements for her own good, and to the birds of the sky.”