One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

O
NE
H
UNDRED
P
HILISTINE
F
ORESKINS

Also by Tova Reich

My Holocaust

The Jewish War

Master of the Return

Mara

One Hundred Philistine Foreskins

Copyright © Tova Reich 2013

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

A section of this novel was written at the Yaddo artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York. The work was completed with the support of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reich, Tova.

One Hundred Philistine Foreskins / Tova Reich.

pages cm

ISBN
978-1-61902-204-1

1. Women rabbis—Fiction. 2. Jewish fiction. 3. Satire. I. Title.

ps3568.
E
4763O54 2013

813'.54—dc23         2012040587

Cover design by Rebecca Lown

Interior design by David Bullen

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

TO
S
ARA
T
OV

Part I:
Azuva

King Solomon Made an Aperion for Himself

More Bitter than Death Is Woman: Azuva

Part II:
Yiska

Here's Your Wife, Take Her and Go

You Shall Give Me the Firstborn of Your Sons—And You Shall Do the Same for Your Cattle and Sheep

More Bitter than Death Is Woman: Yiska

Part III:
Haya

They Have Gone Astray in the Land, the Desert Has Closed in on Them

And Dina Came Out

I Remember, O God, and I Moan

More Bitter than Death Is Woman: Haya

Part
I

It is a matter of record that certain living creatures, feeling the end of life squeezing them in, make one last desperate attempt to break free and do exactly what they want to do and express themselves exactly as they wish to be understood, on their own terms, without consideration of the desires or pressures or disapproval of family and other enemies, or of any being at all who claims ownership over them.

As she readied herself to carry out such an action, HaRav Temima Ba'alatOv, the renowned Jerusalem Bible teacher and beloved guru revered as Ima Temima by thousands of disciples, called to mind the case of the most godlike of all mortal creators, the writer Lev Tolstoy, who in a grand final gesture took flight from the unbearable materialism and vulgarity of wife and other hangers-on and bolted from his estate Yasnaya Polyana in search of the purity he preached and needed—yes, he had to have it right now, he could not put it off another minute, this was his last chance, his final statement—only to be reduced by an old man's illness in the once insignificant train station of Astapovo, where he died the ignoble but fitting death of a holy fool.

Tolstoy was a Russian, as everyone knows, but under the same heading of striking out at the last moment in a pure gesture of unrestrained, desperate fidelity to self, as Temima was preparing to make her own
radical statement on this order, she also called to mind a German—a German Shepherd to be precise, her gentile neighbor's dog known as Germy from the earliest chapter of her life when she was a girl growing up in the ultra-Orthodox Boro Park section of Brooklyn and was known in those days as Tema. Howling raggedly day and night, lunging at the end of his rope inside his wretched cage of a yard due to the surrounding Jews' fear-of-dogs gene, Germy's fur thinned and faded as Tema bore witness year after year until one day, when they both turned twelve and Tema was legally and
halakhically
considered a woman accountable for her own sins, and Rabbi Manis Schmeltzer, the principal of the girls' school she attended, maneuvered his member into her mouth to her wonderment that such a curious idea could even be contemplated—Germy finally shut up once and for all. Casting off his chains with the recklessness of nothing more to lose, he leaped wildly through the gate, staggered down the alley that separated their two houses straight into the street to keep his appointment with the oncoming truck driven by Itche the junkman, which smashed into him, killing him instantly, leaving nothing but a pulped and liquefied mess.

From dead dogs Temima's thoughts glided seamlessly to her area of universally acknowledged expertise, the Hebrew Bible—Tanakh—with her specialty, its difficult women, problems one and all, coming to rest on one of her dearly beloveds, her pet, the majestic Queen Jezebel—in Hebrew, Izevel, island of garbage, female spam—who, as the very strict prophet Elijah the Tishbite had foretold, was recycled first into dog food and then, in the natural course of bodily processes, into dog shit in the fields of Jezreel. Jezebel was the model to whom Temima now turned as she made her preparations for a public demonstration that would finally bring clarity to all who took note of it. Nothing remained of that proud old queen but a skull picked fleshless, a pair of inedible feet, the palms of her idolatrous hands—leavings that even the dogs had spurned. The bitch got what she deserved—Jezebel, a name translated on the tongue of posterity to harlot, but oh how noble and true to herself she was in her final hour, Temima could only bow her head awestruck. Staring straight into the eye of her doom without a speck of self-deception or self-pity, her murderer already at her door, even so this proud old dowager makes him wait, takes her regal time, applies her eye makeup like war paint slowly and artfully for this last battle, the outline of black kohl punctuating
her death mask, she helmets her hair as befits a warrior queen, she arranges herself at the upper story window of her palace as for a royal audience—and from that elevation she talks down to the killer of her sons and her own designated assassin—Traitor! Usurper! Murderer! Her eunuchs arrayed behind her take stock of the situation, consider their options, give the old lady a little push, flick her out the window, skirts flying up to expose the withered queenly jewel box, blue blood splattering all over the walls, the absurd indignity of that tough old carcass splayed on the ground to be mashed under the hooves of her executioner's mount.

Her eyes rimmed with black kohl expertly applied by Cozbi, one of her two full-time personal attendants, the unwholesome glow of her skin calmed with white powder, Temima Ba'alatOv sat at her window that morning in her private chambers on the upper floor of her house in the Bukharim Quarter of Jerusalem, gazing down on the street below. Her richly embroidered white silk yarmulke was pulled low over her nearly hairless skull, her phylacteries box from the morning prayers was still affixed to her forehead, the tefillin straps still wrapped around her slack arm, her great talit draped over the shoulders of her loose white robe. Women at windows were never good news, she reflected, they never came to a happy end, you didn't need the Bible for that insight. The women for sale in the storefronts in the municipal whore market in Amsterdam, for example, each a different piece of goods depending on the depths of your fantasy and your pocket. She had been window-shopping that night so many years ago with Abba Kadosh, blinded by too much light, and he was explaining to her softly, in his intimate voice that forced her to lean in closer, in his spiritually enlightened mode, how each of these women in the storefronts was an aspect of the feminine emanation of the divine presence, the holy
Shekhinah
, and by offering herself so generously to the broken vessels of the shattered male spirit, each of these beautiful, holy, holy ladies in sheer synthetics and leather studded with nailheads and gelatinous smears of lipstick was performing an act of unparalleled loving-kindness and
tikkun olam
, world repair, for which the reward would be incalculable and the redemption hastened.

What had been leaving Temima transfixed and breathless during that entire trip was her knowledge that Abba Kadosh almost never left his
compound in the Judean Desert where he had recreated a patriarchal community with himself as the number one patriarch, but for her sake, for the sake of swaying her to join him as either one of his wives or a concubine, he had taken her on this educational junket to the red-light district of Amsterdam at great personal risk to himself. She was dazed with flattery beyond anything she could have anticipated, like the most simple and inexperienced of girls, she had considered herself above such primitive seductions but in the end she was swept away. She was thirty-five years old when Abba Kadosh became her impresario, but her thighs were still like globed jewels the work of an artisan, her navel like a round goblet, her belly like a heap of wheat, her breasts like two fawns, her neck like a pillar of ivory, her eyes like the pools of Heshbon, her nose like the tower of Lebanon looking to Damascus, her head like a camel, her hair like purple streamers in which the king is entangled—people said of her that her beauty was surreal. She was still ravishing, still smoldering, still desirable despite seven pregnancies, five miscarriages and two live births, both of whom, including the baby buried in the ancient cemetery of Hebron and the little boy not even three years old, she had abandoned along with her husband of over fifteen years, Howie Stern of Ozone Park, Queens, reinvented as Haim Ba'al-Teshuva, scribe and phylacteries maker in the holy city of Hebron in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria, known to the alien world as the West Bank—Occupied Territory.

In Judea and Samaria, between Bethel and Ramah, the ferocious Deborah, wife of Lapidot, sat under a palm tree and prophesized, belting out her victory song after the battle against the Canaanites, gloating over her conjured-up image of the mother of the enemy general Sisera sitting at
her
window, gazing into the distance, awaiting the return of the chariot of her triumphant son—in vain, in vain. How long are you going to sit there waiting at that window, Sisera's mom? Your boy is already dead. The savage Yael, wife of Hever the Kenite, in whose tent he had sought refuge, refreshed him with milk, warmed him with her mantle, offered him so selflessly who knows what other acts of lovingkindness to repair his broken vessel, and when afterward he had immediately fallen asleep, as men tend to do, snoring with supreme entitlement, she drove the stake of her tent through his temple and into the floor, pinning him like a trophy beetle spread under glass.