You must wrestle through the night until the break of dawn to discover your true name, the name that unlocks your destiny, Temima said to Shira when they came out of the desert, it’s a fight for your life that leaves you forever mangled and crippled, it will pulverize your hip, it will cost you dear. Names give you away, Temima went on, repeating a basic tenet she had taught over the years, which is why God conceals His so that uttering even the aliases is so dangerous and charged, but for us in this life it is a matter of uncovering the one that signifies, insisting on who we are.
During that first year after they left Abba Kadosh’s patriarchal compound deserting the child bride Hagar ruined for the outside world like a deliberately mutilated infant condemned to a life of beggary, as they wandered the streets of Jerusalem to find their ordained path, Shira’s name was the first to be revealed, then Temima’s.
When they came out of the wilderness they took up residence at first in the Royal Suite of the King David Hotel, the Toiter’s base while in Jerusalem. Impeccably trained management and staff did not betray with even a sniff or flinch any sense that something bizarre or out of the ordinary was unfolding before their eyes as word spread that a holy wise woman healer had established herself in their historic hotel from where it was reported she was performing miracles every day. The grotesquely disfigured and the putridly contagious in all their unseemliness came out of their holes in the ground and streamed through the stately gilded lobby of the hotel like an invasion of locusts and boarded the elevators with their pustules and tumors alongside the aghast guests paying full price and ascended to the sixth floor desperate for a cure. Temima would greet her supplicants with the words, It is not I but God who will see to your well-being, yet she offered comfort, palliative care, temporary relief from all the pain of this life. God is your healer, Temima said, but she at least would do no harm.
Taking direction from the incident described in the book of Exodus when the Hebrews arrived at the oasis of Marah in the wilderness and complained about the bitterness of the water, which Moses then sweetened by throwing into it a piece of wood equally bitter, Temima applied a homeopathic method based on the principle of like curing like to effect healing. She created a personalized distillation of the disease tailored to each suppliant, diluted it in living water, and gave it to the sufferer to drink in order to restore the vital physical and spiritual energy and balance unique to each individual. For a person afflicted with intestinal agonies, for example, Temima might encapsulate the disease by writing out on a piece of paper the verse from the book of Chronicles describing King Jehoram smitten in the gut until his bowels fell out. She would fold the paper as small and compact as a pill, drop it in a glass filled with fresh living spring water, and as the patient drank this potion to the dregs she would chant the words that Doctor God spoke at Marah, All of the diseases I brought upon Egypt I will not bring upon you, for I am the Lord your healer. In a similar fashion, for the supplicants tormented by skin diseases and rashes and sores and eruptions all over their bodies like Job and rot and pollutions and infestations of all varieties, she might drop into the pure water a totemic verse pill projecting one of the Tanakhi lepers, Naaman or Gekhazi or Uzziyahu and also her punished Miriam.
More and more of the wretched and cursed poured into the aristocratic old hotel as Temima’s reputation spread through the city and radiated beyond among Jews and Arabs until the order came down from top corporate headquarters for the doormen to direct these instantly identifiable unsightly specimens and human blights to the service entrance of the building; let them follow their pocked and inflamed noses to the stench of the overflowing dumpsters and the reeking sewage outlets and then up the freight elevator assigned to menials and the invisible. Temima was outraged and offended on behalf of her petitioners—I will bring healing to you and cure you of your wounds because they called you an outcast, said the prophet Jeremiah speaking for the Lord—though not as outraged or offended as the Polish head of state with a nose like a kiel-basa when he and his entire drunken retinue with flaming red faces were ordered late one night to the dark side of the hotel by a nobody, an Arab hooligan decked out in a uniform with gold epaulets and tassels on his shoulders.
Soon after, Temima with Shira clinging faithfully to her side relocated to the Old City of Jerusalem within the massive Suleimanic walls, taking up residence on the Street of the Kara’im next door to the underground Karaite synagogue in the Jewish Quarter undergoing exuberant restoration in the wake of its reconquest in the Six Day War. Here she remained for more than a decade. It was here that her renown and her following grew, here she solidified her reputation throughout the land as the illustrious guru and Tanakhi luminary, HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv—Ima Temima.
She fixed on the Street of the Kara’im intentionally in order to confront head-on the charges that her approach to Tanakh in its emphasis on the literal text, on p’shat, and rejection of rabbinics as the sole and definitive authority was essentially a variation on the Karaite heresy. It is true that Temima was a great believer in text, in p’shat. She insisted first upon a literal reading of text without the intervention of commentary and interpretation, exegesis and hermeneutics, pilpul and midrash, often tendentious and agenda-driven—at times ameliorating, at times exacerbating. This is what she taught. Only by facing the text head-on, without partisan constraints and orthodoxies, can we recognize in the relevant passages the truth about how woman is regarded and valued in the basic scheme of things—and in the face of that recognition perhaps nevertheless not jump off a cliff, make our choice, seek out how to justify the ways of God to women, consider not rejecting it all, man and God.
By settling in the Street of the Kara’im she sought to nullify the lethal accusations that she was an undercover Karaite as she nullified physical illness by dissolving its toxic essence in clear water, like a vaccine containing the weakened pathogen of the very illness it was designed to prevent. You may consider me a Karaite if it serves your purposes to think of me in that way to mock and marginalize me, was what Temima was in effect declaring, since I subscribe to the principle of the Karaite founder Anan ben David, Search the Torah thoroughly on your own and do not rely on my opinion—even if Anan may not exactly have had me or any other woman in mind when he enunciated this principle. Even so, I too have opinions, I too am open to new forms of interpretation and oral law not restricted exclusively to the Talmud and the authorized rabbis, especially in reading the text as it applies to the inescapable reality of how contemptuously we women are viewed and how cheaply valued. But no, I am not in the camp of Anan or the other Karaite or Samaritan fanatics in their strict fundamentalist adherence to scriptural law. I do not sit in the dark for the entire Sabbath because of the injunction against lighting a fire on the day of rest. And I do not refrain from sexual intercourse on the Sabbath because of animal husbandry—the prohibition against plowing.
To Temima’s new quarters on the Street of the Kara’im flocked the seekers of Torah enlightenment and the yearners for self-knowledge, also the ailing in body like the afflicted who had been drawn to the King David in their numbers, and increasingly more and more souls racked with mental and emotional anguish, gripped like King Saul by an evil spirit from the Lord, cursed with an unquiet, agitated heart, disappointed eyes, a despondent and despairing spirit, their lives hanging perilously before them, terror day and night, utter loss of faith in themselves, in the morning longing for evening and in the evening wishing it were morning. Sitting knee-to-knee face-to-face with these tormented souls Temima would clutch both of their hands in her own and with her thick-lashed, frank, penetrating eyes gaze silently and deeply through their layers of veils until their personal healing word would rise up or their true name would manifest itself, which she would then guide them in absorbing in an inward flow of acceptance to soothe their spiritual wretchedness.
But most comforting for these souls sunk in the depression of hopelessness and misery like the depths of a black pit crawling with snakes and scorpions, the slough of despond, were the two exercises she instructed them in to be performed simultaneously and in complete privacy even in the most crowded of settings bringing a measure of healing to the chronic human condition of physical and spiritual emptiness. Physical emptiness was relieved through an exercise known in the outside world as the Kegel designed to awaken and strengthen the walls of the lower orifices, two openings for men and three for women, all of these holes and hollows exposed and known before His throne of glory, a technique that involved conscious contractions of the muscles of the pelvic floor surrounding these cavities.
At the same time, spiritual emptiness could be relieved through an exercise known to the inside world as the Silent Scream of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, a meditation technique that involved summoning up in the mind the visual image of the black hole of the mouth rounded into a scream and the aural sensation of the sound of a scream coming out of that black hole until you are actually screaming full time inside your head in a still, small voice that no one can hear, though occasionally a faint cry might escape from you just as a small trickle might leak out while squeezing the muscles of one of your nether apertures. It did not take long before men and women in public and private places all over Jerusalem and disseminating throughout the Holy Land, from the Knesset to the kiosks to the kitchens, were furiously kegeling down below and silently screaming up above, and no one saw or heard them, and no one knew.
Trailed by bands of wrecked kegelers and wasted silent screamers, along with other assorted seekers and believers, surrounded by an early incarnation of her Bnei Zeruya security contingent, with Shira sutured to her side, accompanied on occasion also by Ibn Kadosh in a red-and-white keffiyeh with a goat slung over his shoulders and a herder’s crooked staff in his hand, Temima set out almost every day from her residence on the Street of the Kara’im to find her place in the world in anticipation of her full anointment. She bedecked herself for these excursions very deliberately in the full regalia of a grand rebbe—long satin kaftan of striped silver or gold or brocade like a dressing gown, girdled around the waist with a black rope gartel to divide the upper spiritual portion of the body, heart and mind and breath and spirit, from the grossness below, on her head the giant wheel of a shtreimel, its ring of thick dark fur fashioned out of hundreds of tails of sable, all of her rich black hair tucked under its black velvet hubcap with the exception of two long ringlets corkscrewing down in peyot on either side of her face, and fastened to her chin with a string a false beard symbol of royalty like those shown on the clean shaven faces of the pharaohs made of hammered gold, spade-shaped, jutting forward as depicted also on the statues and sphinx of the mighty queen Hatshepsut.
Garbed in this fashion she strode at the head of her procession through the Old City of Jerusalem, engaging as she walked in intense discussion in the gesticulated tradition of a master with disciples like the strict Rabbi Hillel or the even more strict Rabbi Shammai surrounded by their warring factions or the late-bloomer messianic martyr Rabbi Akiva with his twenty-four thousand squabbling students debating the fine points of Torah—discoursing on a range of topics, on the fleshpots and other temptations of Egypt, on the eunuch minister Potiphar buying the ravishing seventeen-year-old slave boy Joseph for personal sodomy, on Joseph losing his striped shirt to Potiphar’s wife burning with lust as her kitchen maids watched from behind a curtain cutting artichokes down through their bones, their fingers dripping blood so dazzled were they by the boy’s beauty. Temima posed the question pointedly, Where in the Tanakh do we find a Jewish woman expressing sexual desire in all of its rutting intensity and feverish urgency like Potiphar’s wife? The idealized boilerplate Jewish woman, she is stripped of all eroticism, Temima said. Charm is false, beauty is vanity, the God-fearing woman, she will be praised.
As she continued to offer her radical teachings on these and other subjects, Temima led her flock through the ghetto of the Jewish Quarter ignoring the taunts of bystanders—Hey, what’s with the beard, Queen Tut? So you wanna be a rebbe, Rabbi Kook-Kook? Immersed in Torah talk they made their way through the newly laid plazas and arched passages of the restored Jewish ghetto into the Armenian and Christian and Muslim Quarters also enclosed within the walls of the Old City of Jerusalem, their dark narrow streets of ancient stones worn slick from centuries of traffic by humans and other mortal beasts of burden. At the head of her flock she meandered through the labyrinth of the shuk and bazaars, past men straddling low stools in cultivated idleness at the entrances to shops, fingering their beads, smoking green tobacco, absentmindedly scratching their privates, brazenly following her passage, undressing her with their eyes. Never mind her monumental learning, she was naked to them, never mind her apotheosis in the vestments of a holy man, her nakedness was on full display before them, every female part in its predictable place, a familiar piece of goods, no different from any other woman—her femaleness, all you needed to know.
They violated her with their eyes, their dirty thoughts rose visibly like gassy cartoon bubbles out of their heads, but they were absurdly insignificant to Temima. They were as beneath her notice as the intrusion along her path of the vulgar idolatrous symbols of the three faiths battling over the same dismal patch of blood-soaked turf—the hodgepodge sinking lean-to of the Holy Sepulchre church, the Golden Dome and the Al-Aqsa Mosque flaunting their biceps like bullies in the arena of the Temple Mount, the pathetic Western Wall wringing perverse pride from weeping and wailing. She swept past all of these disturbances in the aura without a glance or a nod or a teaching. She led her congregation out of the garrison of the walled city through the Dung Gate and turned eastward for the ascent to the Mount of Olives, wild dogs prowling among the shattered and crumbling gravestones, Arab boys squatting on their haunches against gnarled tree trunks observing their approach through slitted eyes, picking their teeth.
Signaling with a hand to indicate to her followers to halt so that she might proceed on her own to engage in the practice of hitbodedut, she set forth in solitary walking meditation among the rows of graves, searching for the burial place of Rabbi Hannah Rachel Verbermacher, the Maiden of Ludmir, the shocking woman rebbe whose body had been laid to rest in this ancient cemetery almost a century earlier but whose soul now resided in Temima. Temima was the Maiden’s gilgul, like the Maiden learned and devout, charismatic and mystical, ostracized and motherless, the Maiden’s incarnation. Like the Maiden, Temima had also stubbornly refused to marry, the marriages that each of these women had acceded to in the end under duress were nothing but sham and pretense. Even so there was true issue from Temima as there was from the Maiden, contrary to received opinion. The Maiden’s daughter was Temima, a pariah like her mother. Temima searched for her mother among the graves, she sought the one her heart loved, she sought her but could not find her.
She took her congregation through the Zion Gate without a glance toward the ghoulish abbey outside the city walls where Miriam the preposterously virgin mother of Yeshua HaNozri had fallen into her final ecstatic trance and was raptured up to paradise. Nor did she manifest any interest at all in the complex of buildings housing the chamber in which Miriam’s son ate his last meal before his crucifixion, icons of his grim apostles flashing eerily one after the other like frames in a movie through the long slitted windows as she moved forward. She passed with equal disinterest the yeshiva for the lost boys of the Diaspora strumming their guitars, more tuned out than the stuporous stones of Jerusalem themselves. With similar disdain she rejected David’s sepulcher in which almost no sane person believed the king was buried if only because sane people believe David king of Israel is alive and everlasting—like Enoch and Elijah whom God spirited away and they are no more, like some immortal rabbis of surpassing holiness on temporary leave from this life, destined to return in messianic splendor, the Toiter, the Maiden, there were already those who whispered in future days Temima herself. Joined on Mount Zion by Ibn Kadosh with his herd of goats coming up from Silwan, she shepherded her flock southward down into the Valley of Hinnom, Gehinnom, the vale of earthly hell, the ancient garbage dump for all of Jerusalem’s bad dreams, receptacle for carcasses and corpses, rotting animals, human sinners stoned, burned, stabbed, strangled, tongues of flame darting into the sky day and night to incinerate the offal, pools of blood saturating the earth until it could absorb no more, the valley of the slaughter where fathers and mothers brought their children as offerings on the altars of the Molekh.
Shira said to Temima, “My band Jephta’s Daughters once gave a concert here—at midnight, for women only.” Temima thumped her fist against her chest over her heart. “I have sacrificed all my children here,” she cried. “O my daughter, I opened my mouth to God and could not take it back.”
Or she led her people out through the colossal portal of the Jaffa Gate taking them through the streets of the city along the Jaffa Road through the commercial center of western Jerusalem, the new city. A village really, Temima thought as she moved onward, ugly, provincial, shabby, primitive, greasy plastic streamers hanging in restaurant entryways, porters crossing the road bent over like mules, pianos and wardrobes lashed to their backs, peddlers with their wares spread out on a rag on the pavement—a few rusted hairpins, a dented saucepan, Q-tips with yellow earwax on the cotton bulbs—everywhere rubbish, filth, reeking human and animal waste, the earthly Jerusalem. You must lift your eyes to the heavenly Jerusalem, was Temima’s teaching as they proceeded through the streets, Ben Yehuda, King George, Radak, Jabotinsky. Look up, it is stretched out like a bright canopy above, like a luminous hologram pitched over our heads. Truly there is a God in this place but I did not know it. How awesome this place is. It is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate to heaven. Mah norah ha’makom ha’zeh, the congregation sang out in response, Shira’s strong voice ringing out above all the others. They chanted with palms uplifted, arms pumping heavenward toward the grandeur of the Jerusalem above as their feet trod through the squalor and muck of the Jerusalem below, Shira’s voice penetrating the intoxicating, overrich atmosphere in wave upon wave, drowning out the chorus of bystanders providing commentary and gloss along the parade route. The Jerusalem Syndrome strikes again, it’s a virus in the air! Messiahs and saviors, an epidemic, God help us, nutcases and crackpots! Take a look at her—a lady decked out like some weirdo rebbe, another crazy for our collection, just what we needed in this city! Just listen to them—yelling verses from the Bible at the top of their lungs, another tribe of loonies let out of Egypt!
Shira continued to take upon herself the holy task of pitching her sonorous vocal cords to neutralize the enemy whose ranks grew in number and strength every day as Temima brought her people more and more regularly directly into the heart of the most calcified piety as if snaking through its blood vessels to her destined place, which was approaching clarification. From the Street of the Kara’im they would make their way out of the Jewish Quarter through the arcades of the Muslim and Christian Quarters lined with tourist shops like hives stuffed with artifacts and souvenirs, the proprietors honeying you in just for a look, into the narrow lanes swarming with locals hunting and gathering, sheepsheads on iron hooks dripping blood in butcher store windows, cushiony brassieres in bright flesh-colored synthetics strung up on pegs, then out of the walled city through what the Arab Semites called the Damascus Gate and the Jewish Semites the Gate of Shekhem depending on where you are going, arriving finally into the constricting artery of Mea Shearim Street, marching under banners admonishing female visitors to respect the sensitivities and uncontrollable urges of the residents by refraining from dressing immodestly, a warning Temima’s people abided by in any case on their own terms out of personal choice.
Nevertheless, immediately upon their appearance cries went up of Beged Ish! Beged Ish! They pointed to the male apparel of Temima in her rebbe’s costume, accusing Temima of violating the injunction explicitly stated in the book of Deuteronomy against women wearing masculine garments, the prohibition against cross-dressing, an abomination to the Lord. Shira would then be inspired to raise her voice to declaim in a kind of recitative between full-blown arias or more familiarly for this congregation a cantor’s liturgical chanting between discrete tunes, she would sing out her counterpoint that maybe it is actually the rebbes themselves who have been going around in drag all these years. Since when has a long silk bathrobe tied with a sash and a giant fur pillbox hat and white leggings and black pumps been designated a man’s outfit? Maybe the rebbes are the ones who have been committing a transgender violation abhorrent to God by decking themselves out like the opposite sex. At which a roar went up even more furious, Kol Isha! Kol Isha! punctuated by a hailstorm of stones. How dare a woman raise her voice in public, how much more so, in song? Kol Isha Erva, they screamed, the voice of a woman is nakedness, she might as well just go ahead and take off all of her clothing in the public square in front of everyone as open up her pisk like that and actually sing, allow her naked voice to be heard out loud and bring nearly half the neighborhood to orgasm.
As Temima’s people ducked for shelter behind cars and inside the doorways of shops, Shira placed herself in front of her mentor and teacher to shield her from the assault and sang out even louder above the voices of her harassers, “Yes, Kol Isha Erva. That’s me. From now on that will be my name.”
Temima raised her head in a show of support for her bodyguard, rendering herself a visible target, she clamped her two hands on either side of Shira’s waist like a dance partner about to lift her up and twirl her in the air, she nodded as if she were the ventriloquist throwing her voice, projecting the words directly into the mouth of the golem she had created in her image out of mud as God created man in His image out of earth. “Because if I am silent now at a time like this,” sang Kol-Isha-Erva moving her lips definitively with Temima’s face rising above her like the sun, “salvation and deliverance will come from somewhere else, and I and my people will be lost. And who knows if it was not for a moment like this one that I have reached this place?”
The powerful vibrations of Kol-Isha-Erva’s naked voice now faded as she craned her head to attend with her trained ear to a sound that seemed to be audible to her alone in her state of acute sensitivity and receptiveness. She made a large summoning gesture with her two hands, calling together all of Temima’s followers from their places of refuge. She set out at their head with clear purpose and direction, Temima gladly taking her place as one of the congregation, in her wisdom as a leader deferring to Kol-Isha-Erva’s authority, a disciple in the throes of visionary inspiration.
Without doubt or wavering, Kol-Isha-Erva led them through the maze of alleys and lanes, between piles of dilapidated structures propping each other up, blocks of cramped, festering apartments held together as if by clotheslines, attending to the sounds beckoning her that at first only she could discern. But as they moved deeper and deeper into the dark and suffocating hidden cells of the interior the cries began to reach the others as well—Their cries have reached Me, I have seen how they are oppressed. When they burst in through the door of the fetid rooms reeking of stale Sabbath stew and soiled diapers he was beating her with his shoe, his rage materializing down his beard in runnels of white foam. Her cries cut off instantly. “It’s me, I deserve it, it’s coming from me, the smell, I stink very bad,” she called out to them from her degradation curled up on the floor, one hand tugging her headscarf forward to conceal every strand of her hair, the other shielding her face, slashed and swollen. “Go away, it’s nobody’s business,” her words pumped out in bleats. “There are ten children to marry off.”
The voice of my sister’s blood screams out to me from the ground, Kol-Isha-Erva sang out. Yet over the period of time that she was gripped by these illuminations, this was not the only woman to refuse rescue for the sake of public image and the family’s survival, the perpetuation of the myth of peace in the household behind every door at whatever cost. Kol-Isha-Erva was always the first to hear the moans, nearly always she could pinpoint the source with supreme accuracy and assurance as if guided by an unseen beam straight to the rank black hole—a woman battered and beaten with fists and straps, choked and burned in the presence of her mute children, pregnant women stomped and kicked in the stomach. She was practically driven mad by the sights her eyes were seeing.
Now and then, it is true, the source of the cries would elude her as if she were a false prophet. Later she would insist to Aish-Zara that she had heard her cries too and had followed them until they had faded away like a ghost. “You did not allow yourself to be found then out of misguided pride,” Kol-Isha-Erva chided Aish-Zara only half playfully. “People almost stopped believing in me.” But there were also those times when the spirit would come to rest on a woman taken in the tribulation of ravaging violence. She would rise up from the lowest point, her nose bashed in, teeth knocked out, eyes puffed shut, black and blue, bleeding, stagger out with them in her housecoat and slippers and kerchief, leave everything behind and throw in her lot with Kol-Isha-Erva, loop herself in a loop of the rope of the school for prophets and transform herself into a prophet so that it could be said about her that she too is among the prophets.
Temima did not restrain Kol-Isha-Erva’s visionary ministrations, she did not begrudge her. To the contrary, she drew a portion from the spirit that was in herself and bestowed it upon Kol-Isha-Erva. If only all of God’s people would become prophets, Temima declared as had Moses Our Teacher. If only God would put His spirit into all of them, Temima proclaimed.
It was said of Temima that during this period of preparing herself to come out in her full radiance as a towering leader in Israel there was not a single instance when she refused a call to assist in the ritual preparations of a dead woman for burial, no matter the time of day or night or the distance to be traveled or whatever the obstacles in her path, and especially if the deceased was utterly alone with no one else in the world. This, as everyone knows, is regarded as a supreme mitzvah, since under the circumstances there can be no expectation of gratitude from the beneficiary, not even a simple thank you.
Yet it was also reported and attested to by every single woman of the holy society who had ever worked at Temima’s side in a team of four performing these final ministrations that, without exception, in the last moments, as the veil was drawn down over the face of the corpse lying there in her white shrouds just before being swaddled in her winding sheet, the words Thank You always came out of her mouth packed with sand without spilling a grain, as if emanating from her agitated soul still hovering like a moth rubbing its wings together on her lips before taking flight. They all heard it, they were startled the first times it happened, but then they came to expect it almost as a point of good manners; they recognized that it was meant not for them but for Temima alone, and they bowed their heads in awe. But Temima’s head swung back sharply as if struck each time the words shot out of the mouth of the corpse, it was always a blow. The highest mitzvah for everyone else was not available to her, she was not worthy, she performed this service with an excess of pride disguised as humility. Upon Temima was placed the burden of having to strive to fulfill an even higher mitzvah for which she would get no gratitude.
Her quest also lay in the realm of death, that much was clear—but what? Remembrance? Resurrection? Reclaiming the tree of life that the first woman had forfeited? Slashing her way beyond the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword guarding the entrance to the east of Eden and plucking its fruit? Finally, the woman had figured out which fruit was the forbidden one. Knowledge was tasty, delightful to behold, desirable to attain—a pastime, a plaything, a distraction. But choosing life, swallowing up death forever and wiping away the tears from every face—that was the true prize, that was her messianic mission, her thankless task.
Nevertheless, the women who worked alongside Temima under her direction performing the purification ritual considered it a great honor to be joined in their holy society by a personage of such stature. Moreover, they regarded her participation as an extraordinary privilege accorded to the remains lying naked under a sheet, a distinction the corpse was surely aware of at some level of consciousness and could appreciate.
Temima demanded to take on for herself the most difficult and unsavory tasks—washing the waxen feet encrusted and scaled like hooves and cleaning under the clawlike toenails with a toothpick, thrusting her hands into the orifices to drain out all solid and liquid matter like a plumber, extracting whatever they were stuffed with, false teeth, rotting food, pessaries, excrement, gems, money, drugs, once, a piece of wire coathanger, another time, a vibrator like a dead rat. She chanted psalms and verses from the Song of Songs in praise of the beauty of the remains lying stiffly in front of her as she labored, pausing between refrains before exposing the next section of the body to be worked on in order to beg forgiveness of the dead if in any way she had violated her dignity, addressing her by name—so-and-so daughter not only of a father but also of a mother, she had ruled that the mother’s name must also be noted and invoked as well.
So it happened one night that Temima repeatedly intoned throughout the meticulous washing of an exceptionally heavy woman weighing more than three hundred pounds the words, Forgive me Frima daughter of Zsuzsi and Rudolf if by any of my actions I have in any way trespassed on your honor. But it was only when she would not be dissuaded from serving as one of in this case three women who held up this massive body while the fourth poured the nine kavin of water over it in a continuous stream for the actual tahara ritual, chanting She is pure, She is pure, She is pure, only when she felt the full crushing weight of this body through which this human being had experienced her life and looked out at the world, only then did Temima realize with a pang of despair that the dead woman she was raising was her father’s wife, Frumie. She had removed the plaintive polish from the nails, raked between the toes, separated the folds of fat to wipe the crevices in between, extracted the false teeth from the mouth, probed inside the nostrils and ears with a Q-tip, combed out every knot in the wispy hair, cleaned the scar over the gash through which the womb had been scraped out, cleaned the webbing of scar tissue where the breasts had once been, cleaned out the orifice where her father had deposited his seed, repeating the name of the dead woman all the while, pleading for forgiveness for any sins this woman might have committed among them surely gluttony, begging forgiveness for herself if in any fashion she had offended her. But not until she had hoisted the great load of the physical remains for the purification bath itself did Temima recognize that this had been her own stepmother Frumie to whom she had been attending all this while. She had invoked her name again and again and the name of her mother and father, she had looked at her closely, examined the moles and bristles on her skin, the sores and spots and discolorations, the lumps and lesions, her acne-pitted face, but she had not taken her in, she had not truly seen her in death to know who she was as she had not seen her in life.
How much older was Frumie than Temima? Five, six years at most. But the body Temima now gazed down upon ready to be dressed in its shrouds was utterly used up. Frumie’s girls, the daughters of her father but not her mother, Temima’s half sisters, whom she had always conflated with the five daughters of Zelophekhad of the unmentionable sin demanding their right to exist, might even at this very moment be waiting outside the door of the purification room in the direction toward which their mother’s feet were pointed, assuming they had escorted her remains from Brooklyn for burial in Israel, which would have amounted to a grudging expense for their mutual father, Reb Berel Bavli. No matter, whatever they shared in common, Temima would not have recognized them in any case except perhaps if they were clumped together in a gang of five, and out of delicacy members of the holy society because of the intimate knowledge they acquired of the deceased took pains to avoid contact with survivors especially those who had in some form once been inside this very body.
She wondered if her father might be lurking somewhere nearby too or even if he had come to Israel. Maybe he hired some loafer to accompany the body stowed in the cargo hold of the El Al carrier through all the stages to the interment in some less prestigious and cheaper cemetery in the Jerusalem environs, the compromise Temima imagined worked out by her father in his negotiations with his wife so that she would give up and die already, just as he had hired a bum off the street to recite Kaddish over her own mother. In any event, Temima had not had any contact with her father since he had turned down her appeal for help in obtaining a divorce from Howie.
Soon after that, he had officially cut her off entirely by declaring her dead and sitting shiva over her for committing adultery with a schvartze whom nobody could ever convince him was a Jew even if you stood on your head and spit wooden nickels and talked until you were blue in the face. At least he sat shiva in person, Temima reflected, rather than hiring some good-for-nothing to do the job in exchange for a brisket.
Throughout her father’s seven days of mourning over herself, as a point of honor, Temima took great pains to make her living presence felt. At first she called the Boro Park house nonstop on the telephone. One of the girls would always pick up in the way of youth still hopefully expecting their lives to be altered dramatically through a message communicated from the outside world. Temima could hear the girl yelling across the living room to her father sitting on the floor—she could picture it—on the avocado green wall-to-wall carpeting in his stocking feet with the ornate smoky mirror in its gilded frame draped with a sheet behind him, accepting condolences from visitors for her passing. “Tateh, it’s Tema,” the kid would yell, “long distance, from hell—she wants to talk to you.” Naturally, her father did not come to the phone since she was dead. He wasn’t like some kind of meshuggeneh in the street, he didn’t talk to himself, though as he never failed to point out to others he conversed with that at least if he talked to himself he would be talking to an intelligent person, a person with some brains in his head.
Even so, despite the brazenness of Temima’s constant calls, the family tolerated them longer than she might have predicted, probably because the girls kicked and screamed and raised a fuss and threw a fit against unplugging their lifeline, until finally, at the end of the third day, they clamped down and took the phone off the hook. Temima considered coming to Brooklyn herself from Israel and sitting down on the floor beside her father in sackcloth and ashes to mourn her own life like Jephta’s daughter or like a character always wearing black in a Russian play, and thereby in the presence of family and friends, mourners and comforters, rub in the absurdity of the whole travesty and farce, but that would have been too much of an effort, that would have implied she cared too much. Instead she arranged through the Toiter to have some of his people march full time back and forth in front of the house carrying signs on poles, Tema Bavli Lives, Tema Bavli Is Alive and Well and Living by the Dead Sea, Reb Berel Bavli—Your Daughter Tema Is Not Dead Meat, and so on, now and then breaking out in joyous singing and dancing, giving the lie to the rumors of death. On the sixth day, by personal order of the police commissioner of the city of New York, the Toiter’s demonstrators were arrested for disturbing the peace. On the seventh day Temima rested—not in peace but in indifference.
Now, as she worked with the other three women to dress Frumie in her simple white linen shrouds like the high priest in the Temple on Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment and Awe, it required all of Temima’s inner strength to hold back from bursting out in hacking laughter that would have glided inevitably into savage crying. She looked down, focusing on her task, chanting the order of the dressing in a soft trembling voice—And she shall be attired in a linen headdress, and linen breeches shall be on her flesh, and she shall don a holy linen tunic, and with a linen sash she shall be girded, and God Almighty will give her mercy. She did not inform her companions who this woman was to her even though now that she had recognized her she ought to have been spared this further painful invasion of the physical privacy of someone who, after all, was related to her even if only by marriage, she should have been shielded from revealing the nakedness that belonged to her father, an explicit incest prohibition in Leviticus, a variation on the sin of Ham. May I be lost in the depths of the sea, Temima prayed to herself, may I be vaporized in the atmosphere, may I be swallowed up by the earth rather than have this poor body of mine that I have guarded so zealously to dispose of in accordance with my own desires subjected to handling even by well-meaning souls such as these earnest good women who are toiling at my side at this very moment.
The lifting of Frumie’s dead weight to slip on the pants, simply finding a pair of pants that would fit her from among the shrouds, a sash that would go around her waist just once much less three times with a bit left over to tie with a slip knot, never mind such fancy stuff as fashioning it in the shape of the letter shin for God Almighty’s name Shaddai—viewed from above, with detachment, with no imperative for reverence, the scene was slapstick, black comedy. Temima turned her inner vision to her memory of Frumie pregnant, sitting at the edge of the bed in the Boro Park house where her own mother had once slept and perished, Frumie dressed in her hat and coat with the white fur trimming, her black patent-leather pocketbook in her lap, her suitcase packed ready beside her, all set to escape, crushed by the realization that there was no way to sustain herself on her own, no one who would be left to protect her daughters, no place for her to go—she was trapped. Few and bad had been the years of her life. Now she was released early for good behavior, she had found the only way out. For your salvation I had hoped, O Lord.
Temima was overcome with a desire to give Frumie a parting gift, some token to thank her with for her kindness over the years they had lived together under the same roof, for the generosity of simply leaving Temima alone to find her own way, but that was impermissible. Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I will return. Shrouds do not come with pockets for little treasures or mementos, in death there is no discrimination between rich and poor, the same uniform for everyone, the same plain pine box put together without nails, in Israel maybe no box at all, affording unimpeded access for the maggots and all the other creatures of decay burrowing in wait. Even between men and women the distinctions fade in death; a devout woman is clad in trousers in death perhaps for the first time in her life just like a man, the restrictions fall away—with the exception, Temima now reminded herself, of the prayer shawl in which only a man is privileged to be cloaked in life, in death his prayer shawl can become his winding sheet.
With a nod to her companions Temima stepped away for a moment from the corpse to retrieve her capacious white talit with its licorice black stripes. It was a traditional prayer shawl, with no extraneous ornamentation and no feminizing accents. She wore it whether praying alone or with others regardless of the time of month in a woman still cyclic, she did not consider it a show of excessive piety or ostentation as a woman to wrap herself in it but rather an essential cocoon inside of which she could achieve the focus and transcendence that carried her to new mystical planes considered unattainable by her sex. She always carried it with her in a special bag in those days should the opportunity for hitbodedut present itself, which she performed during this period in the enhanced isolation of the sheltering white tent of her prayer shawl.
The three women working alongside Temima did not question her actions, they simply followed her lead, putting their complete trust in her higher powers. It required the maximum effort from all four of them heaving together to levitate the rigid, putrefying mass of Frumie’s body, whisk away the cloth it was resting upon and replace it with Temima’s talit with its fringe torn, no longer usable for prayer. As they were folding the talit over Frumie as if shaping a stuffed cabbage, bundling her to be sent off from the struggle of this world to the void who knew where, Temima pronounced the words, “Frima daughter of Zsuzsi and Rudolf, know that you are dead.” Only then did the body seem truly to expire, to relax and deflate. The face cloth with the broken pieces of earthenware over the eyes and mouth seemed to flutter and they all heard the words, “Thank you, Tema.”
The members of the holy society turned stunned to Temima. One of them dared to inquire. “You know her?”
Temima nodded. “Yes, I knew her. Alas poor Frumie.”
The more flesh, the more worms, Rabbi Hillel was wont to say. In almost the same breath he also used to say, The more women, the more witchcraft. This was the more tolerant sage Hillel, the Hillel of the Golden Rule, the Hillel who did not, as did the more severe Rabbi Shammai, swing his stick in the air to whack the prospective proselyte who had the audacity to demand to be taught the entire Torah while standing on one foot, but answered instead, What is hateful to you do not do to your friend.
The rest is commentary.
As word spread throughout the Jewish Quarter and beyond that the dead women prepared by Temima for the next life invariably raised their voices in the final moment to thank her, there were those among the living who also raised their voices—to accuse Temima of witchcraft. Conjuring up the dead, consulting familiar spirits and ghosts, the ov and yedonim—this is a Canaanite abomination strictly forbidden in the Torah, an encounter with the supernatural we are fiercely enjoined to shun, an odious practice we must ruthlessly extrude from the sanctified precincts of the Promised Land along with its idolatrous priestesses.
Temima’s response was sharp and absolute. She let it be known that henceforth she would be called Temima Ba’alatOv, Mistress of the Spirits, to honor the woman / witch (here the two words had elided and become synonymous) of Endor who at the behest of King Saul raised from the dead the ghost of Samuel to ask for a prophecy.
You have sinned, God has forsaken you, tomorrow you will die, the prophet said.
You shall not let a sorceress live, the Torah says. “It depends how we define ‘live,’” said Fish’l Sabon, leader of the movement in the Jewish Quarter against Temima. “In that golden age when the Messiah comes, speedily and in our day, God willing, when the Holy Temple is restored on its Mount and the Torah is once again the law of the land, a witch will be put to death by stoning, the same as a person who has had sexual intercourse with an animal. Meanwhile, in these dark and profane times, we shall not let her live in peace.”
Out of pity for Fish’l Sabon, Temima tolerated his harassments for nearly a full year. In a sad way, she felt a strange kinship with him. The story was that he too had taken his name—Sabon, soap—in a spirit of defiance reminiscent of how she herself had assumed the mantle of Ba’alatOv, in his case to spit in the eye of the arrogant Zionist powers who, with such disdain for what they regarded to be the sheep-to-the-slaughter passivity of Diaspora Jews, had called the victims of the Shoah sabon since, as rumor had it, soap was what the fat of their bodies had been processed into by the Nazi psychopaths. You call us Sabon, you obnoxious Zionist snobs? Fish’l in effect was saying. Henceforth, that will be my name, my badge of honor, I wear it with pride.
Of course, Fish’l had not been recycled into soap himself, but he was a survivor—as Temima taught, Who in this life is not a survivor? Orphaned before the age of ten, he wandered alone in perpetual terror somewhere in Eastern Europe, hiding due to the ineradicable scar of Jewishness on his male flesh, joining a band of partisans in the woods where, because of his small stature and undernourished size, he was used to plant explosives on railroad tracks. After the war he was smuggled by Zionist activists out of a displaced persons camp, arriving in pre-state Israel singing the “Hatikva” at the top of his lungs and dancing a hora, then forcibly turned away by the British occupiers to Cyprus. There Fish’l, by then already a young man nearly twenty years old, along with his fellow survivors, was herded yet again, to the everlasting shame of the entire so-called civilized world, into another prison camp behind barbed wire.
No one knew how he eventually made it back to Israel to settle permanently. There were some, it is true, who maliciously and it is generally agreed falsely maintained that Fish’l had never actually been in the war at all or even a bit player in its theater—that he had never even been out of the Holy Land in his entire life, that he was a ninth-generation descendant of a family that sustained itself on alms from the Diaspora and begging from pilgrims in the alleys and arcades of the Old City of Jerusalem, and that his true name was Yonah Seif. For this version of the story, there is very little authoritative support.
One thing is certain, however. Until his public emergence as Fish’l Sabon, as if fully formed like Adam himself the first man without the tenderizing benefit of childhood or youth or for that matter a mother soon after the Six Day War of 1967, very little is known about Fish’l Sabon except that he had been a constant presence at the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann six years earlier as evidenced by the repeated capturing of his unmistakable image in the background of news photographs and television footage from that historic event. No one even knew how he had made a living until he came out fully and definitively in that triumphant messianic year, 5727 from the creation of the world, though there were some who asserted that he was the mysterious author known as 202500, widely admired and revered as the writer and illustrator of a series of booklets that brought to public attention in painful detail the terrible sadistic sexual tortures of the Nazis, may their name and memory be erased.
For Fish’l, Israel’s stunning victory in the Six Day War against such impossible odds was an irrefutable sign that the redemption was underway and the messianic age at hand. You had to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to recognize the mighty hand of God in such an obvious miracle, Fish’l insisted, or damaged even more hopelessly, in the very pith of your soul. It was around this time that Fish’l assumed the title Baba, an acronym heralding the imminent arrival of the Messiah, B’mhera B’yamenu Amen, Speedily and in our Time, Amen. Baba Fish’l Sabon burst into the public consciousness by establishing himself as a fixture at the redeemed and repossessed Western Wall, declaring himself its official janitor. Every night he could be seen with a squeegee and a bucket, mopping the stones of the plaza in front of the wall, and once a week, after the Sabbath, when three stars appeared in the darkened sky and the blessing dividing the sacred from the profane was recited with sprigs of fragrant rosemary wafted in the air, Baba Fish’l would come out with a long rubber hose and aim a powerful stream of water full force at the stones of the wall, sending the piteous kvittlakh and petitions stuffed in their crannies pouring down in rivulets like copious tears, which he swept up with a brush broom into plastic garbage bins and dumped.
Everyone agreed that the fissures and clefts had to be regularly cleared out to make room for the next batch in the endless flood of pain and supplications, but there were those who were troubled by Baba Fish’l’s seeming callousness and sacrilege in discarding with such casual disrespect and hardheartedness these poignant letters many of them doubtless inscribed with the name of God as the addressee, therefore rendering them holy fragments requiring eternal preservation through burial in a designated cache. To these benighted souls, Baba Fish’l coolly pointed out, “A retaining wall, nothing more,” with a contemptuous shrug of a shoulder toward the massive stones bolstering the western side of the mountain. “An exterior wall, a prop, a casing, like a pita bread,” Baba Fish’l added. Raising his eyes to indicate the plateau protruding above the wall overlooking the plaza with its two domed Muslim edifices, like two invasive tumors, he said, “Up there—that’s the big falafel.”
Not for a single minute did Baba Fish’l lose sight of this prize. It infuriated him that the Zionist government had so cravenly handed over control of the Temple Mount to the imams of the Muslim Waqf after the war in June of sixty-seven, an unforgivable suicidal multi-culti concession to stroke and make nice to the gentile world that loathed us even more for our imbecile simpering fawning and obsequiousness. Every one of Baba Fish’l’s thoughts and actions from that day forth was focused on reclaiming this old threshing floor of Arauna the Jebusite, which David our king who is alive and everlasting had purchased for fifty silver shekels fair and square for the purpose of erecting an altar up there to stanch the plague that was consuming the Jewish people in those days—and, in our own day, too, Baba Fish’l hastened to add, is still eating us up alive.
To build an altar up there once again, to restore the Holy Temple erected on this site by David’s son Solomon in all of its splendor so unparalleled that he who had never seen it had never seen beauty in his life—this was the goal to which Baba Fish’l now dedicated himself. To reach this height, he publicly declared himself a Nazir, asserting that he would faithfully adhere to his Nazirite vow of asceticism until the Temple Mount was reclaimed. It was this Nazirite path that rendered the particular offense of Temima’s communion with the dead, her necromancy, even more profoundly distressing to him than her all-around witchcraft, which in and of itself was already bad enough. He declared himself a Nazir very soon after he came to the wall as its self-styled custodian in his quest to discover the divinely ordained path from this peripheral station to the Holy of Holies at the summit. Standing in front of the wall with a cadre of fellow seekers he declared, “The first kvittel I pluck out from between these stones will reveal to me the way to the top.” He inserted his hand, pulled out a precisely folded note torn from a pad with a letterhead that indicated it had come from a law firm in Washington, D.C., and read aloud these words: Dear G-d, Please don’t let me go bald. Thank you in advance. Sincerely, Mervin Zupnik, Esq.
In a flash, Baba Fish’l recognized that this was the sign he was seeking. The most distinctive feature of the Nazir, the way in which a person who has taken the Nazirite vow can instantly be recognized, is his hair that he is forbidden to cut, like Samson, because it is in his hair that a man’s life force and vital strength reside, it is his crown and glory that he dedicates to the Lord. A razor may not touch the head of a Nazir; the fullness of his growth of hair is the outward mark of his vow as its inward expressions are his abstinence from eating grapes in any form wet or dry, intoxicating or not—the blood of the grape—and his avoidance of all contact with a dead person, even his closest relative, mother or father, sister or brother, son or daughter. With these three strictures the Nazir sets himself apart as holy to God throughout the specified duration of his vow, in certain respects even holier than the high priest himself who can sip his wine while getting a haircut. Extracting from the lawyer Zupnik’s note the divine sign he was seeking intended for him alone, Baba Fish’l immediately announced that he was taking upon himself the yoke of the Nazir, sanctifying himself to God for a designated period of time, which, Baba Fish’l affirmed, would be the day on which he would be able to mark the fulfillment of his vow by offering up the requisite sacrifices on an altar on top of the Temple Mount.
Several times a year, without any advance notice, Baba Fish’l and his band of followers would attempt the ascent up the Temple Mount carrying a one-year-old unblemished male lamb for a burnt offering, an unblemished ewe lamb in its first year for a sin offering, a ram without blemish for a peace offering under which he hoped to burn his shorn-off hair upon ending his Nazirite term as is required, plus a basket of unleavened cakes with their libations as well as a portable altar and all the other prescribed accessories and gear. One way or another, with varying degrees of savagery and derision, the pilgrims were always halted in their ascent and prevented from attaining their hearts’ desire. Most likely there was a traitor or a mole or a double agent planted in his inner circle, Baba Fish’l suspected. They were blocked not only by the Muslim interlopers and trespassers, as might have been expected from such barbarians, but, far more troubling, by the Israeli authorities themselves, their own brothers and sisters, the vaunted holy nation, the kingdom of priests, who cut them off with astonishing ruthlessness and shocking mockery.
In his most spectacular attempt to end his Nazirite period with the mandated sacrifices, which exploded in banner headlines in all the newspapers not only in Israel but in the nations of the world as well, Baba Fish’l and his comrades loaded the animals and all the other supplies including the porta-altar onto a helicopter paid for by a billionaire American evangelical from Florida and sought to land on top of the Temple Mount, only to be viciously apprehended and placed under arrest by a security force welcoming committee made up of Arabs and Jews, united for the first time in history for this disgraceful purpose.
As the years passed and he persisted without success in his efforts to bring his Nazirite vows to an end by performing the required sacrifices on top of the Temple Mount, Baba Fish’l’s hair, which he was not permitted even to pass a comb through lest he break a strand in violation of his ascetic commitment, grew into a wildly tangled ash-colored mass with the coarseness of sackcloth stuffed with straw, ending in long tassels of fused-together locks, the tips so dry they seemed to give off a crackling sound like kindling as he moved about the vicinity of the wall carrying out his self-imposed duties, a small, withered holy man upon whose head the dark mass of a threatening sludge-brown cloud seemed to have settled and would never lift. For a Nazir, it’s all in the head, Baba Fish’l taught—not only the hair on top, but also the hole in the face known as the mouth through which he abstains from taking in the fruit of the vine, and the two little holes of the nose through which he avoids even breathing in the secondhand smoke of death by rigorously shunning all proximity and contact.
Temima’s communion with the dead carried the pollution of death’s aura into the intimate space of the enclosed city in which Baba Fish’l dwelt, contaminating the very air he breathed. Her necromancy, her summoning up of the spirits of the dead with black magic, endangered the forthcoming redemption that he had devoted so many years as a Nazir to bringing about. The Nazir is the Maccabee who reconsecrates. The Nazir Baba Fish’l Sabon would be the soap that cleanses and washes away the impurity of the witch.
Witch! Makhshefa! Sorceress! Necromancer! Such slanders and others far more excoriating, calling attention to every part of Temima’s body from head to toe—the squirming venomous serpents of her hair, her cloven feet like a demoness, and all the swampy filth and stench in between including the raw nakedness of the tail behind—were found scrawled with paint or marker or chalk on the stones of her quarters in the Street of the Kara’im almost every morning, requiring vigorous scrubbing to remove them by Kol-Isha-Erva supervising a damage-control team. Dumpsters were overturned or set on fire outside her building. Stones were hurled through the windows wrapped in messages tied with string warning that BABA, Swiftly In Our Time, Amen, when the Temple is restored on its Mount, such stones will be cast directly at the softest and tenderest parts of Temima’s sinful body in compliance with the sentence of death meted out by the Torah to a sorceress. There were mornings when they opened the door to the street and knocked over slop buckets set down in the night. Excrement smeared over the entryway, used condoms and bloody sanitary napkins deposited in heaps, dead birds, dead cats, dead rats, such were their daily deliveries, and every now and then, for a festive touch, whole rolls of toilet paper unfurled and hung in streamers from whatever projection they could be affixed to or draped over, which inspired Temima to pronounce the blessing thanking God for having kept her alive and sustaining her to this time, marveling at how far the State of Israel had come since the early pioneer years when quality toilet tissue had been such a precious commodity no one would ever think of using it for decoration or a prank, it was a luxury to be hoarded, to be dispensed sparingly, imported from abroad as she herself had done in a special suitcase when she had first arrived in the Holy Land. Blood was slathered on the doorpost one night, along with instructions in gothic script, ANGEL OF DEATH, DO NOT PASS OVER THIS HOUSE. Another time an X was slapped across the front door with tape punctuated by a skull and bones and the warning—POISON, PLAGUE, BLACK DEATH.
The tape gave off a grating screech as she tore through it and once again took her life in her hands by stepping out. She went out on her own to check out the scene, ventured beyond the four walls of her house. Urchins leaped into view like imps from every side screaming Lilith! Delilah! Jezebel!—running in front of her, ringing bells as if to alert the citizens of the approach of a leper, crying Impure! Impure! Stones and shoes, rotten vegetables and eggs and other assorted objects were hurled at her but on no account would she allow her persecutors to keep her a prisoner in her own house or prevent her from going wherever her heart led. Through this pelting storm of taunts and missiles Temima floated regally, divinely untouched like the first time she entered the army camp overlooking Hebron and walked between the raindrops. It was as if she hovered above and beyond all that was transpiring in the chaos of her orbit, she its fixed star.
More difficult to bear though was the relentless stalking by Baba Fish’l himself whenever she ventured outside the city walls in search of the solitude she needed for the practice of hitbodedut to strengthen herself spiritually. Temima’s people urged her to avoid leaving through the Dung Gate, which was the closest to the Western Wall where Baba Fish’l was always on patrol. Like a hawk he would spy her departing and swoop down at once on her trail. But Temima refused to change course in any way that might even implicitly acknowledge this little Baba’s power over her. For a mere woman like herself the Dung Gate would serve, she declared, departing through it was the equivalent of taking out the garbage, egress by the bowel. Beyond it the hills and valleys opened up before her, the purported tomb of the prophet Zekharia, the cone-shaped pinnacle of what legend had it was the burial site of David’s wayward and rebellious son, dazzlingly handsome, endowed with such a lavish head of hair it killed him in the end—Absalom.
Like Absalom’s grim supporter Shimi ben Gera, Baba Fish’l Sabon came after Temima, he came out through the Dung Gate cursing her the whole way, throwing stones at her and at all of her people to her right and left, he would curse her and say, Get out, get out, you bloody whore, you witch. One of Temima’s Bnei Zeruya protectors would demand, Who is this dead dog to curse you? Let me at him and I’ll chop off his balls. But Temima would shake her head. Since he is cursing me, said Temima, it must be the case that God intends for me to be cursed. But the day will come when God will recompense me for all the abuse he is heaping on me.
For many months Baba Fish’l Sabon continued to walk alongside Temima and her people unimpeded through the hills and wadis, the valleys of Kidron and Jehosephat, along the brow of the Ofel and by the Gihon Spring, beyond the walls of the Old City, walking and cursing, casting stones in Temima’s direction and fistfuls of dirt, until one day Ibn Kadosh came up the flank of the slope from Silwan with a herd of goats and followed along on the ridge beside Temima, taking in the ravings of her oppressor through the shade of the dark velvety richness of his lowered lashes. “Why you let this little rasta lice-head talk to you like this?” he insisted. Temima smiled, pleased to see the lithe form of this beautiful boy again after so long an absence, the glow of his polished mahogany skin. “Never mind,” she said, “in the end all is known.”
The next time Temima went out of the walled city for hitbodedut through the Dung Gate Baba Fish’l did not appear. He did not appear the next day either, or in the days after that. At around the same time the daily bombardments she had been subjected to for so long inside the Jewish Quarter subsided until she grew out of the habit of fortifying herself inwardly in anticipation each time she stepped out, and even the memory began to fade so that it was almost impossible to believe it had ever happened, it was as if she had been trapped in a bad dream.
One morning as she was sitting alone in her study reflecting on the strange case of Elazar son of Dordaya of whom it was said that there was not a single whore in the entire world with whom he had not had sexual intercourse at least once, a story recounted in the Talmud open on her table to the tractate Avodah Zara focusing on all forms of idolatry that are the lethal side effects of mixing with the gentiles, she raised her eyes and saw Ibn Kadosh standing in front of her. She had not heard him enter; she could not say if he had slipped in through the door or the window or descended like a stealth angel from the ceiling, so silently and mysteriously did he appear. He stared down at her sitting there at her table over her Gemara and pronounced, “I want for you to raise from the dead someone for me.” Temima’s eyes widened in alarm.
Ibn Kadosh let out a dry laugh, decoding her leap. “No, not him, not your little Bob Marley rasta lice-head freak. You think maybe I kill him? Why I want to kill him? And if I kill him, why I want to see him again? But not to worry, I already take care of him for you, he don’t bother you no more.” And from the sheepskin pouch slung across his chest, Ibn Kadosh extracted some photographs that he fanned out on her table. “I give him one for souvenir. You take too. Present.”
Temima’s eyes ranged over them, all copies of the same image—Baba Fish’l Sabon naked except for his yarmulke affixed with a triangular metal clip to his monumental thatch of hair, trussed up like a turkey, an object resembling a large sausage sticking out of his rear end and a rubber ball plugged into his mouth. Towering over him was a formidable female specimen, on her chiseled blond head a Stormtrooper’s visored cap with a skull and crossbones insignia, a tight black leather jacket open to reveal pneumatic breasts, a garter belt hoisting sheer black stockings, tall shiny black leather riding boots with spiked heels digging into Baba Fish’l’s pasty flesh as he groveled at her feet, one of her gloved hands yanking his head back brutally by its dreadlocks to force him to bare his face to the camera lens, her other hand with the red swastika armband swinging a whip over his back, spongy and white like dough.
“Special whorehouse in Tel Aviv for Hitler S&M freaks,” Ibn Kadosh commented. “Your lice-head is regular customer. When I show him picture he say to me, ‘Big deal, for Nazir like me and Samson no law against fucking any way turn us on—only no wine, no dead bodies, no haircut, that’s it, don’t say nothing about fucking.’ What is this Nazir thing anyway—some kind of Nazi gig? But one thing for sure, now he leave you alone forever.”
Temima pushed the photos away from her with the squeamish tips of two fingers across the tabletop back toward Ibn Kadosh. Elazar ben Dordaya in the tractate Avodah Zara heard about a prostitute living by the sea whose price was a full purse of dinars. With a purse full of dinars he crossed over seven rivers and came to her. While they were fornicating she passed gas. She said to him, Just as this gas can never return to the place it came out of, so too Elazar ben Dordaya can never return in penance. He cannot be forgiven.
“I get rid of this lice-head for you,” said Ibn Kadosh. “I do you big favor. Now you raise up from the dead for me someone.”
Temima objected, she had never possessed such supernatural powers as had been attributed to her, she protested. He, Ibn Kadosh, should know this better than anyone. He had attended her in childbirth. She was an ordinary woman—she bled, she shat, she cried, she howled in pain. She had been falsely charged and persecuted by this madman with his pathetic fantasies, the dead she prepared for burial never opened their mouths to thank her, it was a hallucination conjured up by her coworkers in an ecstatic state to fill their own void, they were hearing voices.
But Ibn Kadosh refused to accept this. “I want you should raise up for me my mother.”
A vision of Ketura as Jezebel appeared before her inner eye as if on a screen on the back of her lids, Ketura’s body turned into dog shit so that no one could say this was Ketura, the shadow of the black wings seared into her face dissolving into the sand. “Your mother is too long dead to be reached. Her spirit is too far away,” Temima said.
“I need her. I need for to ask her a question.”
The answer came in a bass rumble from below. “Enough already, I told you on the mountaintop but you refused to believe me. I did not kill her, it was her own people, an honor killing.”
Temima let out a cry. What were they seeing? An old man, hollow eye sockets, broken bones, his long cloak in tatters, his black flesh shredded, covered all over with dried blood and gravel, a ghost. “What more do you want from me?” the old man growled. “Why do you disturb me now by bringing me up from the depths you have cast me in?”
Ibn Kadosh flung himself on the floor, his body stretched out prone to hide his eyes from this terrible sight. Temima knelt down beside him and stroked his head and long back. She led him to her bed where she tended him for a week, feeding him milk and honey with a spoon until he regained his strength, neither of them rising to take part in the rites of mourning for Abba Kadosh condemned to wander in the next life seeking his own path to mercy, from them he would not find forgiveness.
Reports of his death were broadcast that evening. According to a press release issued by his chief widow and lawyer, Em-Kol-Hai Kedosha, the martyr Abba Kadosh, za’zal, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing, had thrown himself off the mountaintop of the suicide rock of Masada in an heroic sacrifice rather than submit to the Judeo-Romans threatening to seize him and sell him back to slavery in America. His remains when they were discovered had already been picked over by the black birds swooping down from the desert sky, leaving only shredded fragments of one of his striped homespun robes made of hemp, the costume he wore every day except for special occasions, Sabbaths and holidays. Even the signature staff he always carried was nowhere to be found, all of which necessitated a painful delay until he could be definitively identified and properly mourned.
There was a spasm of attention to the violent end of this self-styled Jew, leader of the cultic polygamous sect of outcast blacks in the Judean Desert, and then all interest fizzled out. On the extreme religious right, the notion that this son of Ham who called himself Abba Kadosh like some kind of Christian holy father pope could ever be accepted as a Jew was a joke, not worth pinching your nose to blow some snot down into the gutter. As a small aside it was also noted in this camp that if he had been an authentic Jew he would have known better than to jump from Masada. On Masada you committed suicide by sticking a knife into your heart or you fell on your sword; if you want to be a big hero and kill yourself by jumping, the place to go is up north, to Gamla.
The topic also came up in passing on one of the television news shows when an expert tapped his temple and indulged a speculation as to why anyone in his right mind would even want to become a Jew, and especially a black man—didn’t he have enough problems already? It could only be some weird form of masochism. From the ultraliberal far left a buzz of indignation was revived in newspaper commentary around that old question, Who is a Jew? and its logical corollary, If a person considers her or himself a Jew, who among us has the right to tell her or him that she or he is not a Jew and deny her or him full-fledged Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return? We are all guilty of Abba Kadosh’s death. All of us pushed him off the top of Masada. The sheer hypocrisy of excluding this Jewish wannabe from the congregation of Israel is intolerable, it is an ethical outrage. In what way are we, the purported light unto the nations in the immortal words of the prophet Isaiah, any better than the racist thugs of America hooding themselves in sheets muttering mumbo jumbo and burning crosses on the lawns of a black family that moves into your all-white neighborhood?
Just such an image lit up in Temima’s mind one night some months later as she gazed out of the window of her private quarters on the second floor over her newly established synagogue and study house in the Bukharim Quarter of Jerusalem. Positioned directly in her line of sight a quorum of ten men was performing the lashes of fire ritual of a pulsa denura across the street instead of in a cemetery where this curse is traditionally delivered. Temima was well aware that an exception was being made for her sake so that she could witness the rite with her own eyes and take heed, pack her bags at once, and exorcise herself from the neighborhood. For atmosphere, however, a token coffin was set down at the feet of the ten men lined up in a row facing her, each with a yellow star affixed to his breast over his heart and a crumpled Xerox of the kabbalistically potent curse custom-tailored for Temima clutched in both hands. She was not able to identify any of these men, but she did recognize the coffin, it had her name on it, and certainly she also recognized the impressive wide-screen back in its shimmering black kaftan of the leader of the group, Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger, son of the Oscwiecim Rebbe from Brooklyn. The old man was also in Jerusalem, she had heard, but no one had actually seen him, he was kept hidden away in a state of raving dementia, so they said, unrecognizable and unrecognizing. It was generally believed that Kaddish had kidnapped his father, a necessary act according to his Hasidim for the sake of the perpetuation of the chosen dynasty, in order to restore the court in the Holy Land on the correct path with himself as the designated heir. Meanwhile his mighty mother, the Oscwiecim rebbetzin, ran a rival court from the old house in Brooklyn over which another son, Kaddish’s younger brother Koppel, was poised to preside.
Even before Temima’s physical arrival in the Bukharim Quarter, Kaddish had taken upon himself the task of mounting the campaign against her, ordering his men to harass and attack the Arab workers renovating her headquarters and to plaster posters on walls throughout the neighborhood especially in the crucial media-center intersection of Sabbath Square warning of the danger that her existence in their midst would pose. Now from her window Temima could hear every word of his incantation in a Hebrew richly schmaltzed with a Yiddish inflection, each phrase then repeated in unison by the pack reciting from the scripts in their hands illuminated by the streetlights, first zooming in on her by name as at a bull’s-eye—Tema daughter of Rachel-Leah of the family Bavli, also known as Temima Ba’alatOv—followed by the plea that the blasphemous perversions and corruptions she promulgates never come to fruition, May they not come to pass, May they not come to pass, May they not come to pass—culminating with the call to bring down upon her head the full wrath of God, May all the curses listed in the Torah cling to her, all the plagues, all the afflictions, all the malignant diseases of the body, all the derangements of mind and spirit, May her name be erased from under the heavens, May she die immediately.
The angel Metatron was disciplined with sixty pulsa denura maledictions for passing himself off in paradise as a co-God, thereby encouraging the heretical dualism in the mind of the brilliant apostate, Elisha son of Avuya, known as Akher, the Other. Temima stood at her window with the curtain drawn slightly back as if she were in a theater box observing herself being played by the actor receiving the lashes of fire, and as she stood there witnessing her laceration her mind expanded with the realization that this trial befell her as a consequence of the spiritual penetration of another Elisha, her Elisha Pardes known as the Toiter, the Dead One.
Since the seven days when they had sat on opposite sides of the synagogue tent in the army camp overlooking Hebron mourning the baby boy Kook Immanuel she had not seen him in any form resembling the flesh she had known that had led her deep into the most dangerous and secret levels of understanding, from text to subtext, literal to allusive to interpretive to mystical, contained in the orchard of paradise. Daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, tell him this—that I am sick with love. Sick unto death he came to her afterward, his apparition, his ghost, his familiar spirit, directing her into the tent of Abba Kadosh in the wilderness and keeping her there until the correct hour, a figure faded and wasting away, she did not know if it was he or his shadow, if he was alive or dead, he took his hand back from the hole and everything inside her stirred for him. He appeared among the gravestones on the Mount of Olives when she sought her solitude to cry out, a wan and gaunt messenger at dawn with his cloak drawn up across his mouth, tolling a warning bell and calling out Unclean! Unclean!—bearing the news that a grand dwelling place was being prepared for her outside the city walls, on the broad avenue carved out in Jerusalem by the tribal mountain Jews of the Caucasus, now in the quick of the most rigid piety, a divine test of her readiness to go forth without question. Every detail would be in accordance with the required specifications—study hall and house of worship and holy ark on the ground floor, overlooking it the men’s balcony, beyond that her private quarters, inner courtyard planted with fig and pomegranate trees.
Within days after she moved into the stately building in the Bukharim Quarter he made his presence known again, masked, backlit with fever, ravaged by mortality, bestowing the estate upon her for all eternity, fusing and welding her to the line of the Dead Hasidim, contaminating her, so that she took to her bed infected and inflamed and did not get up for a week. Rising from her acute contagion she went out again bedecked with the veil, her personal partition that separated her ever after in all her public appearances, rendering her instantly recognizable by the manner in which she was set apart.
Early in that week of confinement Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger stomped heavily up the stairs followed by a small entourage of retainers, pushing past Kol-Isha-Erva as if she were invisible, stationing himself in Temima’s room at the foot of her bed that was surrounded and concealed by a heavy burgundy brocade curtain puddling on the floor like pools of melting wax. He began at once to state his position, without bothering to ascertain if Temima was actually present on the great raft within that enclosure; for his purposes he would consider himself completely absolved, in fulfillment of his obligation whether she was there or not.
The notorious path she had carved out for herself, Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger declared, sinning and causing others to sin like Jeroboam son of Nevat that led directly to the destruction of our Holy Temple and our exile from the Holy Land, made it incumbent upon him to set aside any personal connections he might feel toward her through their fathers and shared roots in Brooklyn, New York. At great personal risk, he has brought himself and a few of his inner circle to her infested residence, a recklessness that would now oblige them to immerse their bodies in the ritual bath immediately after departing from her in order to cleanse themselves from her pollutions. He has come to serve notice that she must without a moment’s delay remove herself and her malignant teachings and influence from their midst. As the designated successor of the holy Rebbe of Oscwiecim, the town better known by its infamous German name of Auschwitz, he, Kaddish Lustiger, bore upon his shoulders the responsibility to do everything in his power to prevent another Hurban such as befell our people at the hands of Hitler, may his name and memory be blotted out forever. This catastrophe that overtook our people was, as everyone knows, the deserved punishment for the abomination of men lying with men as they would lie with a woman, the very same sin for which the city of Sodom was gassed and cremated and reduced to ashes.
Her unnatural behavior—her insistence on carrying out commandments and obligations that are the exclusive province of men, on wielding authority and participating in ritual and studying and commenting and pronouncing on texts reserved for men alone, on setting herself up as a special case among women, and so on and so forth—all of this can only be explained in one way. She is in actuality a man—a man locked inside the body of a woman. Her external female shell is possessed and inhabited by the dybbuk of a man who in his lifetime was guilty of the grave sin of lying carnally with men as if they were women. Now his punishment for all eternity is to be imprisoned inside the body of a woman. Midah ke’neged midah—as he had sinned so is he punished. And what punishment could be more terrible to such a sinner than to be trapped forever inside the body of a woman, a place that in his lifetime he found so loathsome and disgusting? “You are nothing but a vessel,” Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger reminded Temima, “a putrid vessel for the fulfillment of the ordained punishment of this male sinner. But unlike the vessels of the Holy Temple defiled by idolators, there is no living water, no ritual bath, no mikva, that can ever purify or reconsecrate you. You can only be cast out.”
When he finished he turned at once to leave, neither requiring nor expecting a response from behind the curtain, so when Temima’s voice came at him like a heavenly bat kol he stopped short as if the breath had been knocked out of his body by a punch in the gut from a hidden assailant.
“I know you, Kaddish,” Temima’s disembodied voice called out to him as he reached the door. “The inclinations of your heart have been nothing but evil from your youth. When you go to the mikva bath now to purge yourself of me, beware lest you put a naked little boy on your lap again as you have done so many times in the past. It is an abomination.”
For a few days afterward there was a halt in the defamatory poster campaign that Kaddish had launched well before Temima’s actual arrival when news of her impending residence in their midst had first reached him. During this pause he conferred with his kitchen cabinet as to whether to pull back so as not to antagonize this witch lest she unleash a vindictive barrage of false rumors and calumnies against him, or whether to push forward even more vigorously with their righteous mission of forcing her out of their sphere of influence. They determined on the latter course, setting up as a precaution a squad of swift boys to tear down immediately any counter posters that Temima’s people might dare to put up.
The new set of posters slathered on the walls by Kaddish’s camp setting out like guerrillas in the night armed with brush brooms and flour paste were far more furious and slashing than the earlier ones had been, like the deadly curses on Mount Ebal, calling on Temima and her cohorts to Get Out Now Or The Land You Pollute Will Vomit You Up, bringing down upon her head Blood And Fire And Pillars Of Smoke, Cancer And Heart Attack, Terror And Torture, Madness And Humiliation, Agony And Death, issuing an urgent warning to the People Of Israel to Guard Against This Nazi Who Will Turn Your Skin Into Lampshades And Your Hair And Beard And Payess Into Mattress Stuffing, this Sotah Adulteress, this Makhshefa Sorceress, this Lilith She-Devil, this Delilah Seductress, this Female Who Commits The Perversion Of Standing Naked In Front Of An Animal For The Purpose Of Mating—An Abhorrent Transgression For Which She Is Condemned To Death Along With The Animal—and so on and so forth. All of this was communicated to Temima who absorbed it with a vague smile, noting only that it was instructive and on balance maybe also even slightly insulting how, considering the immediate provocation, Kaddish’s new offensive abstained from retaliating in kind by according her at the very least the dignity of the equivalent label of lesbian—no doubt, Temima observed, because there is no specific ban in the Torah against such woman-on-woman activity, it is not taken seriously, no seed is spilled, it leads to nothing, woman’s desire is beside the point and probably does not officially exist in any case, a woman is merely a receptacle, all that is required of a woman is to lay there like a dead carp that is turned into gefilte fish.
For a period of time Temima watched with mild interest while Kaddish’s attacks unfolded, as if to gauge the limits of his creativity, until the night she grew bored with the range and predictability of his insults and invective and simply to add interest entered the fray. She gave the order to her Bnei Zeruya bodyguard contingent to fan out and hang up multiple copies of the same poster at strategic points throughout the neighborhood and to watch over them lest they be vandalized in any way. In almost every respect these posters resembled notices that sprang up daily announcing a recent death—Blessed Is The True Judge, Let Every Eye Weep And Every Heart Groan, Oy Vey, We Shall Never See His Like Again—but in this instance the name of the deceased in stark bold black letters was Rabbi Kaddish Lustiger, za’zal, son of the Oscwiecim Rebbe, may his candle shed light.
Kaddish himself was the one who happened to pick up the telephone when the first condolence call came to the house. “Kaddish, is that really you? I expected to get the rebbetzin, you know, the widow, the almunah, or maybe God forbid one of your eleven yesoimim. Where are you talking from? I’m telling you, I’m so shocked my hand is shaking, I can’t even get the words out from my mouth, I didn’t expect to find you among the living, much less you should answer the telephone. The notices are hanging up all over the place, about you being niftar, God forbid. Maybe it’s a different Kaddish Lustiger with a different father the Oscwiecim Rebbe, it shouldn’t happen to us. Oy vey, Kaddish, thank God, thank God you’re still alive, such a terrible terrible mistake, it should only not be a bad omen, God forbid, it should only not God forbid open up a mouth to the Satan.”
Directly after hanging up, Kaddish buried himself in his bed, drawing the covers over his head. In a muffled shriek as if from underground he ordered his wife not to bother him. “Leave me alone, woman. Can’t you see? I’m being hunted down by the angel of death.” Yet over the years, in times of intense tribulation and stress, relief was always at hand for Kaddish by imagining himself already dead, untouchable by his enemies, indifferent to all outcomes. With a kind of morbid onanistic pleasure he would evoke his own namesake by chanting in Aramaic over and over the Kaddish elegy for himself, Exalted and Sanctified Is His Great Name. But this time the tranquilizer didn’t work. The specter of his own death this time had come from outside, he had not summoned it up, it was not under his control. However many times he sought to lull himself with the drone of his Kaddish, no comfort was forthcoming, he was not soothed until, like the holy Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai setting down the mysteries of the Zohar Book of Radiance in the darkness of his cave while in hiding from his Roman oppressors for thirteen years, Kaddish also dipped into the bottomless well of the kabbalistic mysteries. There in the darkness of his bed he plunged into the mystical depths to retrieve the correct pulsa denura curse with Temima’s name on it that would bring about the end of his tormentor. He drew forth the white-hot fiery lashes, repeating this pulsa denura to himself again and again like a charm until he knew it by heart word for word. When he finally emerged from under his covers and resumed his place in the world as the living heir designate of the Oscwiecim Rebbe, he wrote out the pulsa denura personalized for Temima in a fluent stream as if taking dictation from a voice within, channeling it. Together with his elite strike force of loyalists, he then awaited the most auspicious night to deliver this precision bomb that would explode in the face of his persecutor and wipe her and her abominations off the face of the earth once and for all.
Over the weeks and months that followed, Kaddish and his cadre watched and waited for the powerful spell to take effect. They had full faith that it would succeed, and though they could not predict in what form exactly it would show itself, they knew that the disaster that would soon overtake Temima would be the result of the pulsa denura they had planted like a mine.
Reports were delivered to them regularly of the activity at the Temima Shul, the streams of supplicants and petitioners coming and going, men and women, including rabbinical authorities arriving incognito seeking and then taking full credit for responsa to newly urgent questions such as those relating to technology with its God-defying hubris and power for good and evil, like the copper and iron invented by Tubal-Cain and the overreaching of the Tower of Babel. Jews and non-Jews made their way through the upstart Ba’alatOv’s quarters, according to the reports of those who had been sent to spy out the land, among them Arabs emerging as if drugged, cradling precious blessings, hailing miraculous cures, extolling life-altering insights, the meaning of dreams, of past events, of future possibilities, and also students and seekers notable for the hordes of women who packed the sanctuary to hear the words of Torah from the mouth of this so-called holy woman delivered from behind a curtain on the elevated platform of the bima or at the great tisch over which she presided veiled at Sabbath eve dinners on Friday nights tearing one hallah after another and distributing the pieces to her Hasidim clamoring for a blessed morsel touched by her sacred gloved hands.
There were also many eyewitness accounts of sightings, Temima moving freely through the streets, always veiled, always accompanied by her sidekick, Kol-Isha-Erva, guarded by her Bnei Zeruya phalanx, trailed by assorted acolytes, a sorry band of lost souls and misfits, from Kaddish’s aspect. Word reached him of how on one such outing she had removed her gloves and placed her two hands nakedly upon the head of the penitent beggar Yisrael Gamzu, and blessed him ostentatiously as he held out his cup at his usual post on Malkhei Israel Street in front of the pizza store, the upper half of his drastically mutilated body, all that remained of him after his tank exploded in the Sinai during the Yom Kippur War, potted like a surreal rootless growth in his wagon. Immediately Kaddish arranged for posters to be slapped up all over the neighborhood denouncing this brazen woman for her lewd immodesty in touching a man, even one missing all of his lower-level equipment, her shameless flaunting of physical contact between the sexes in a public place.
It was also communicated to Kaddish, despite some trepidation among his Hasidim, that Temima on one of her forays through the streets of Geula and Mea Shearim had encountered his father, the Oscwiecim Rebbe, as he was being taken out in his wheelchair for an airing by Ishmael their Arab houseboy, and of how the old man had greeted her by her childhood name—Tema—grasped both of her hands in his aged liver-mottled claws and in a quavering voice had declared to her that he had been waiting to meet her, he had been prevented from dying until he had the chance to see her once again face-to-face and beg forgiveness from her for ever thinking she was possessed by a dybbuk and forcing her to suffer the humiliation of an exorcism, now by the refracted light of the next life he recognized all she had endured in her childhood, he prayed she would accept his apologies since only the injured party could forgive a sin between one human being and another, even God could not wipe him clean, he hoped she would grant him full and sincere pardon for the sins he had committed against her so that he could die in peace at last and be allotted a place in Gan Eden when he stood before the heavenly throne to be judged, she was a holy soul put upon this earth for an extraordinary destiny, he recognized that now and bowed his head.
Kaddish dismissed this story entirely. It was not possible to believe some Muslim menial’s report that his father with a brain sucked dry like a prune could experience even a moment’s lucidity, insofar as such an encounter even if it actually took place could be cited as an example of lucidity. Within the week, however, the old man expired, as if in confirmation of the report that he had been holding out only for the opportunity to be absolved by Temima before throwing off the burdens of this life.
Following all the mourning rituals and a decent interval of thirty days, Kaddish immersed himself in the mikva to purify himself from the taint of death, after which he was declared the new Oscwiecim Rebbe—at the very hour by the clock, as it happened, that his brother Koppel was named the successor in Brooklyn in a private ceremony attended by the mayor and governor and senators of New York as well as other bigshots at which his mother served marble cake and prune compote on real china plates rimmed with gold and cherry heering in genuine cut-crystal goblets. But since Kaddish was in Israel his anointment came first by the world clock, a divine confirmation deeply gratifying, seven hours before his brother’s elevation as the earth rotates on its axis seeking the light of the sun.
Yet all this was worth nothing to him so long as he could still see Temima sitting in her palatial house or parading through the streets receiving full honors like royalty. Why was the pulsa denura curse he had so painstakingly devised to target this demoness exclusively taking so long to work? Where was his personal God? The veils and cloaks that enshrouded her completely—he could only hope and pray that they were concealing boils oozing pus and inflamed open sores bubbling with worms, rotting white skin shriveling and flaking like scorched parchment off her crumbling bones. It was a comfort to picture the curse festering underneath all those rags, but only a small comfort. Kaddish needed more proof to find peace at last, he had to see with his own eyes.
Draped in black robes from head to toe with a black mesh pane across his eyes like an Arab matriarch just returned from a pilgrimage to Mecca, he entered the Temima Shul on a day a public lecture was announced. He endured the indignity of fighting for a spot in the main study hall in the herd of cows, squeezed in among menstruating females with mouths open like pitchers full of blood drinking in the words of their guru. Apparently, she was giving some kind of talk about Bruriah, the brilliant wife of the Mishna giant Rabbi Meir. Could it be that this witch had the hutzpah to compare herself to Bruriah, practically the only woman in rabbinic history whose moral authority and legal rulings are mentioned, even praised, even on occasion accepted in the pages of the Talmud? Kaddish was horrified. No comparison was possible, lehavdil elef havdolos, the two were separated from each other by one thousand separations. But in the end, Kaddish was reminded, Bruriah proved herself to be no less empty-headed than any other woman, despite her arrogant insistence to the contrary, surrendering to the seductions of one of Meir’s students who was charged by his teacher, her own husband, with the task of bringing her down for the thrill of winning the argument about the fundamentally unserious and flighty nature of a woman’s mind.
When a woman submits to temptation, Temima was offering her sick commentary to this story, it tells you something about her mind. When a man submits, it tells you something about his body.
Kaddish felt sullied by her sarcasm, he needed a bath. In his black shrouds, vile intimate fumes gusting from all the orifices of these females pressing against him, he could hardly breathe. At least Bruriah had the decency to strangle herself afterward, Kaddish reflected, more than could be said for this shameless female up there, she continues to cackle away with her woman’s naked voice—about what? About Meir’s guilt for destroying a prideful woman? I should be so lucky. Not with hexes and voodoo, Temima was saying, as some among us have been known to attempt to destroy a woman. We shall not name names here because our sages of blessed memory teach that whosoever embarrasses a fellow human being in public has no place in the world to come, it is like spilling blood—But you know who you are. She strained her neck and jutted her chin and swiveled her head as if to cast a hidden seeing eye like the beam of a searchlight over the crowd. How he would have loved to clamp that windpipe of hers with his two hands and squeeze, if only to get her to shut up once and for all. I know you, he heard her calling out into the congregation. Your spells and black magic and hocus pocus and mumbo jumbo and evil eyes and pagan curses and lashes of fire, they are nothing less than idol worship, plain avodah zara. Commandment Number One—I Am the Lord your God. There is nothing else besides I Am. I Am, I Am, I Am.
Bruriah’s husband, Rabbi Meir Master of the Miracle, is said to be buried standing up, not out of remorse for his sexual manipulation setting up his wife or his ruthless intellectual competitiveness and condescension, but rather like a sleeping horse positioned to be first out of the gate when the Messiah arrives to awaken him.
The morning after Temima’s talk, the fourteenth of Iyar, the anniversary of Meir’s death, a warm spring day, Temima with her entire inner circle and protectors left Jerusalem for the north in a caravan of taxis. She performed her hitbodedut at dusk on an isolated beach on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Lake Tiberias, not far from the tomb of Bruriah’s husband, an albatross circling in the otherworldly refracted light of the sky over the silvery waters of the Kinneret as she cried out to God as to a mother and pondered the question whether it is preferable for a woman to be destroyed out of love or hate.
They climbed by foot westward to Safed where they stopped at the tomb of Hannah mother of seven sons willingly handed over and martyred in sanctification of The Name. From there they hiked through the springs and past the fruit trees and caves of Wadi Amud, ending up on the eighteenth of Iyar, the thirty-third day of the Omer counting from the liberation from the Egyptian bondage of Passover to the acceptance of God bondage forty-nine days later on Shavuot, at the tomb of the purported creator of the Zohar Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai in Meron. Here, along with throngs of other revelers marking the anniversary of Bar Yokhai’s death, the happiest day of his life, they celebrated the hillula with torches and bonfires, singing and dancing and feasting among the women and bearing witness to the shearing of the heads of three-year-old boys by the men, and Temima discoursed on the subject of the journey from the cold rational cliff of Meir to the steamy mystical cave of Shimon paved along the way with the heads of children offered up as sacrifices.
When the taxis brought them home to Jerusalem a little less than a week later and they entered the Temima Shul in the Bukharim Quarter, they were struck immediately by the aura of discordance between the familiar arrangement of the sanctuary and study hall, all of its books and benches and tables in place and the eternal light still burning, clashing with the satin curtain draping the ark that they took in instantly out of the corners of their eyes hanging in ragged shreds, as if raked by the teeth and claws of wildcats roaming freely at the end of civilization. When they opened the ark they were sucked into the dark void where all the Torah scrolls had once stood; only Temima’s little mother Torah remained, mantled in dust wedged in the blackness of the far corner, forgotten and rejected and branded as a plaything to be dandled by children. The floor of the ark was covered with human feces of various textbook sizes and configurations still steaming.
Even as they were examining the ruins and desecration, four giants entered the building dressed identically in one-piece convict suits in a fluorescent orange synthetic, white crocheted skullcaps drawn over their shaved heads to their eyebrows with two long ringlets flowing down on either side like loose ties that could be knotted in cold weather under their chins that sprouted new beards from a stippling of dark pores. They strode directly up to the ark glancing neither to the right or the left. After removing Temima’s little mother Torah and handing it like an ember rescued from the flames to Kol-Isha-Erva, they girded and trussed the ark all around with belts and straps to hold it together and seal its doors shut. The largest among them then bent over as the others lashed it to his back like a wardrobe. They did not utter a single word as they performed these tasks methodically, step-by-step, chanting instead the aphorisms of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, Gevalt, Never give up hope, Because there is no despair here in the world!—raising their voices to a soaring anthem as they made their way out of the sanctuary into the street, hauling the ark and its contents away with them.
“I had to wait for you to return so that you could see with your own eyes—so that you would not simply conclude that the ark had been stolen along with everything inside it.” These were the first words he spoke to her when he came into her private chamber that night. She was lying in the cavern of her bed, her little mother Torah resting in the crook of her arm. His glow pierced the thickness of the curtain pulled closed all around. He parted it and lay down beside her, transparent to the bone, no longer of material weight, a shaft of light no longer connected to his physical being. “I have heard from behind the veil it said of me as it was said of the apostate Akher, Elisha ben Avuya, Return all of My backsliding children except for Akher,” he whispered in a hoarse voice. “My repentance alone will not be accepted.” From these words Temima understood that this was the last time he would come to her, she would never again see him in this life.
“The greater the thirst, the stronger the pleasure when it is satisfied,” he went on, his lips grazing her ear. “The stronger the desire the greater the obstacles. Within the obstacles, God Himself can be found. Your destiny is a tight bud that has yet to open fully and reveal itself. Not the good wife-mother Sarah-Rebekah-Rachel-Leah to bless girls by. Not the Wise Woman of Tekoa or of Abel-Bet-Ma’akhah saving men from their animal nature. Not even Deborah wife of Lapidot setting up shop on her own under the palm tree, judge and prophet, warrior and poet. Yours will not be any familiar female emanation. What will still happen to me I do not yet know, but of this I am certain—the Messiah will come from me through you.” And he brought his lips down upon her open mouth and kissed her, transmitting to her whatever infection remained in him that he had not yet passed on.
Early the next morning the four ex-convicts in their orange prison jumpsuits appeared again pushing a dolly on which was mounted a huge steel vault bank safe weighing several tons. Still without uttering a word, chanting only the mantra of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, You should know that the whole world is a very narrow bridge, they wheeled the safe to the honored spot at the head of the hall where the violated ark had stood. They hoisted and maneuvered it into place, tested the alarm system, checked the security of the tight-fitting door, and handed a sealed envelope to Kol-Isha-Erva containing the code to the combination lock. Three of them then perched on the dolly as on a scooter while the fourth, the giant who had carried the desecrated and befouled ark on his back the day before, pushed his comrades out of the study hall into the street, all of them singing jubilantly at the top of their voices over and over again the chorus affirming the most important point—Not to be afraid at all.
When the four returned again about two weeks later they were dressed in shimmering white, their holiday best, no one would ever have known they had once been in captivity. It was the fifth day of Sivan on the cusp of summer, the anniversary of the death of Sashia, wife of Rav Nakhman of Bratslav, who bore him two sons taken in infancy and six daughters, four of whom survived; therefore he had no heirs and his followers are known as the Dead Hasidim. It was also the eve of the holiday of Shavuot when the liberated Hebrew slaves received the Torah in the wilderness at Sinai—or, as Temima observed referring to the text, at least the men among them received the Torah at Sinai, since it stands to reason that God’s command to prepare and sanctify and make themselves pure three days in advance by abstaining from going near a woman could only have been directed to the men. There was thunder and lightning, the mountain was covered in clouds of smoke from God’s fiery presence upon it, it trembled violently, the blast of the shofar grew louder and louder. The trumpets blared as the four freed slaves, each one holding aloft a pole attached to a corner of a canopy stretched overhead as in a wedding procession, made their way toward the Temima Shul through streets lined with onlookers. Beneath the canopy other newly redeemed slaves carried the reclaimed Torah scrolls freshly decked out in gleaming white satin mantles and ornate sterling pomegranate finials and lavish high silver crowns like brides, and behind them came more men rejoicing, whirling with all their might and leaping into the air, shouting and blasting their horns, roaring the words of Rav Nakhman, The bride is beautiful, Love is perfect.
Temima, also dressed in white with a heavy white veil over her face, opened the safe-ark with the combination of numbers that equaled three hundred and forty-four totaling pardes, the orchard at the heart of which the universe’s most dangerous knowledge is guarded. The Torah scrolls were settled inside the ark-safe in their rightful places, the doors were shut, and the white satin huppa was taken down from its four poles and hung on a specially designed rod to serve as a curtain over the face of the ark.
Embroidered in gold thread across this curtain were the words, AMONG WOMEN IN HER TENT OF TORAH MOST BLESSED, THE RABBI, THE ZADDIK, THE QUEEN, THE ANOINTED ONE, TEMIMA BA’ALATOV, DAUGHTER OF RACHEL-LEAH OF BROOKLYN. This was Elisha Pardes’s final gift to her, she knew now for sure that he had set out and was gone. Temima took her place in front of the ark and surveyed the congregation, the women packing the main stalls, overlooking them in the balcony the men including a few of Kaddish’s Hasidim who had been swept in with the crowd and whom she recognized from the pulsa denura, conspicuous now for the white gauze bandages wrapped around their heads, arms in casts and splints, black eyes, bruised and swollen faces, leaning on crutches, still groaning in pain days after the battle to reclaim the abducted scrolls, and as she gazed outward she searched within herself for the truth concerning the fate of the beautiful bride once the wedding is over.
Kaddish waited three days from the end of the Shavuot holiday and the Sabbath that followed. On the third night he dispatched his commandos with brushes and pails of flour paste and thousands of new posters still smelling of wet ink to be hung up wall-to-wall screaming in thick black letters that a herem is hereby imposed upon the witch known as Temima Ba’alatOv. She is hereby excommunicated from the congregation of Israel. She is to be ostracized and treated as dead. She has no place in the world to come. All God-fearing people are hereby strictly ordered to shun her like a leper lest her defilement rub off on them and contaminate them. Should they unintentionally cross her polluted path or come within four cubits of her contagion they must immediately turn their backs to her and run away, they must stuff their fingers in their ears if she attempts to speak, they must spit three times onto the ground as if to vomit her dreck out of their system and utter the words, Ptui, Ptui, Ptui.
“What does it mean for a woman to be excommunicated, to be put into herem?” Temima calmly posed the question to Kol-Isha-Erva who had conveyed the news of this latest assault and then took down the words of her teacher. “Not to be counted in the minyan? Not to be called up to the Torah? Not to be honored with leading the blessing after the meal? To be banned from the study hall? To be isolated and excluded and treated with contempt? To be ignored in public? To be considered unclean and impure? To be regarded as weak and inferior and light-minded? To be kept out of sight and confined to the harem? Is it at all surprising that over the centuries no one has really taken the trouble to put women into herem? I shall send word to the Oscwiecim pretender that I am honored among women to be singled out for official recognition and, yes, somewhat befuddled as to why he even bothered.”
She dictated to Kol-Isha-Erva her thank you note to be delivered to Kaddish, adding as a helpful postscript the personal suggestion that for his own sake he might wish to consult the Gemara Sanhedrin page such-and-such, column such-and-such for a discussion of the cut-off age for abusing a child above which pederasty is considered a sin warranting stoning, but if the urge is too overwhelming for him with no convenient outlet she suggested that he take the advice of those sages who ruled that it is not a capital offense to relieve oneself by using one’s own member to penetrate one’s own anus.
Temima raised no objections when Kol-Isha-Erva indicated she would make this response public. By no means was Temima of the camp that maintained it is preferable to refrain from washing dirty linen in public out of fear of what the goyim might say or from pointing an accusatory finger at a clerical figure who has exploited his position lest the entire congregation of Israel be stigmatized. She fully intended to air out the filth inside Kaddish’s house, but her immediate task was to fumigate the courtyard in front of her own. Kaddish’s people had appropriated it as if she no longer existed, the logical outcome of the excommunication imposed against her like a death certificate. They laid claim to the vacated estate. Temima ordered her Bnei Zeruya and other supporters to prevent the trespassers from invading the building itself, but for the interim she was tolerating their squatting outside her door.
They transformed the courtyard overlooked by her headquarters into a bazaar bustling late into the summer night. Young boys escaped from stifling schoolrooms to this new attraction to engage in the furious trading of rebbe cards bearing portraits of rabbinical luminaries with their records and rankings—I’ll give you nine Teitelbaums for one Feinstein, five Gerrers for one Munkacz—which they would then flip against the wall panting asthmatically in long intense matches. Married men left their study halls where they were serving the nation spiritually through Torah learning to deal in all manner of goods from lottery tickets to cigarettes to ritual objects to diamonds. Old men were parked in the morning in their wheelchairs under the fig and pomegranate trees by female members of their households where they sat until the moon came up and the chill set in peddling single shoelaces and half-used toilet paper rolls that they had secreted out of the house in their pockets, false teeth belonging to the recently departed or plastic bottles of unfinished pills with the labels peeled off. Throughout the day they all ate nonstop, food that did not require the washing of hands and a full grace after the meal. The yard filled up with the remains, sunflower seeds and peanut shells, wax paper from greasy snacks, candy wrappers, fruit pits and peels, empty soda and juice cans, tea and coffee cups. Cats poked in the rubbish, ravens perched high up on tree limbs, foxes were seen prowling at night.
Scooping up handfuls of this trash they cried out Schmutz! Dreck! Treyf! and hurled it at Temima’s disciples making their way through this swarming occupied territory to their master’s feet undeterred. Nor did Temima in principle alter her comings and goings, pausing at her door in a cocoon of her stalwarts as Kol-Isha-Erva raised her woman’s naked voice to order the interlopers off the property at once—The ground you are treading upon is holy, You are banished outside the camp for your sins—which provoked them to turn their backs instantly and scurry to the edges of the garbage-strewn courtyard as far as they could go with their fingers plugged in their ears, muttering Ptui, ptui, ptui! and spitting on the ground. Now and then Temima would deliberately coordinate her departures with their prayers three times a day, as they were immersed in the Eighteen Benedictions of the Amidah with their feet pressed together, forbidden from reacting to any interruption or distraction. While they squinched their eyes shut and murmured to themselves the verses of the silent devotion—May all the heretics perish instantly, Speedily uproot all deliberate sinners, smash them, cast them down, destroy them, humble and humiliate them speedily and in our day—Kol-Isha-Erva would excoriate their master Kaddish as a molester and pervert and pedophile and pederast, and then she would proceed to revile all of them as well for scavenging in this plot, they were like maggots and dung beetles, they were nothing but parasites, and she would order them off the premises immediately if they knew what was good for them. By the time they took three steps backward and bowed their heads three times in three directions and muttered He who makes peace in His heights, Temima and her retinue had passed through their swaying rows, out of the courtyard, and disappeared.
The Bnei Zeruya pleaded to be allowed to break the heads of these pathetic invaders—Come, let us give their flesh to the birds of the sky and the beasts of the field—but Temima rejected this brute tactic, rounding her thumb and forefinger into a circlet and gesturing with her fist, an indication to just be patient and wait to see how events will unfold. On the third day she authorized the police to dispatch two officers on horseback to the courtyard, but she forbade them from doing anything further such as tossing canisters of tear gas into the rabble, a service they had offered to perform, no problem. They were simply to station themselves in the midst of the crowd as a warning, like the queen of England’s mounted guard. As the hours passed and no action was taken by these armed men on their lofty beasts, the squatters grew emboldened, calling them Nazis, Gestapo, pogromchiks, Chmielnickis, anti-Semitin’, corrupt instruments of the corrupt Zionist state, at other times attempting to reason with them and win them over to their side by stressing the point that, after all, the land they were seizing was vacant as the previous occupant had been officially pronounced dead, it was a land without a people and they were people without land, as the Zionists like to say in their own defense. The children pulled the tails of the horses and dared each other to run under them but the long-suffering animals paid no attention, they stood there stoically and endured, placidly dumping clods of manure onto the ground, contributing to the muck.
Toward evening of the fifth day the police on their horses moved to either side blocking the opening into the street at the same time as Temima’s people under the command of the Bnei Zeruya contingent dispersed in the courtyard and jammed the squatters into a huddled mass in the middle facing the doorway of Temima’s headquarters. Temima herself emerged with Kol-Isha-Erva at her side. The two women set their feet on the threshold as on a small platform that seemed to be fashioned out of bricks of sapphire, like the essence of heaven in purity.
Kol-Isha-Erva raised her woman’s naked voice. “Listen up, guys. Your time is up. The party’s over. If you continue to remain here, violating this holy space, you will be condemned to look at the forbidden at mortal peril to your souls.”
Temima then stepped forward. “On this day you will know that I live and that it is I who am speaking,” she declared through her veil. “Hineini. I am here.”
She parted her robes. Naked, she revealed herself to them.