Read Online One Hundred Philistine Foreskins by Tova Reich - Free Book Online Page A

astride their horses, on highly classified orders from the very top, were detailed to ride alongside Temima’s procession to keep guard over her to wherever her heart’s desire was guiding her.
    Still, it was especially treacherous maneuvering through the protesters camped out in front of the prime minister’s residence, to cut a path between the fors and the againsts on every issue, from territory to religion to reparations to imprisoned spies languishing in terminal stages of horniness, and so on and so forth, through the jungle of signs on poles brandished like paddles, through protesters in chains, in coffins, in cages, in concentration camp costumes, through women in green, women in black, women in white, women in blue and white, through tent cities and shiva-sitters and shofar-blowers and megaphone-screamers and forty-day-hunger-strikers stretched out in sleeping bags. For this purpose the head of state’s official quarters was placed on earth. Who made you lord over us? Korakh demanded, backed up by the collaborators Datan and Aviram, and two hundred and fifty bigshots called up to the tribe—who made you the boss, Moses?
    From within her aperion Temima took all of this in and shook her head. Enough with you already, sons of Levi! It was past noon, she was weary, it was time for her nap, but this was for her a day like no other, a day that was neither day nor night, she had to endure. Still she asked herself again now as had become her habit of late with the advancing years—lifting the curtain to peer out she posed the same question to herself yet again, Is this something I will miss when I am gathered back to my mothers?
    The procession continued along Azza Street and looped into Radak Street on instructions from Temima communicated by cell phone to the four bearers of her aperion, her Bnei Zeruya. This was the route that Temima had laid out in advance for her penultimate journey. She had always liked Radak Street from the days when she had walked the city to establish her exact place in the world after her flight from Abba Kadosh in the wilderness with only Kol-Isha-Erva at her side, just one faithful disciple accompanying her in those days to soak in her words—the canopy of its old trees, the privacy of its old stone houses, the dignity of its old dwellers, the narrowness of its old roadway that now, in her triumphant return passage, swelled with her people from seam to seam, heralded by the four horsemen of her apocalypse.
    She could have chosen a different route. There were other circuitous paths in the new city along which she could have led her people to arrive at her destination, and naturally she had also weighed the instructive value of taking them through the Old City, with all of its biblical visual aids,and beyond its walls to the City of David on the flank sloping down to the Kidron Valley and the pools of Silwan. She could have brought them through the ravine of Gehinnom, where our rebellious ancestors built shrines to their idols Baal and the Molekh, putting their own children to the fires as blood offerings—the Valley of the Slaughter, the prophet Jeremiah called it, hell on earth itself—then up to the plateau atop Mount Moriah where the Holy Temple once stood destroyed for their sins as Jeremiah had foretold, where our righteous forefather Abraham brought his own son Isaac to sacrifice him, bound him to the altar and raised the knife to slit the boy’s throat at the Lord’s command—the closest spot on earth to heaven itself.
    To ascend the Mount, though, they would have been obliged to acknowledge the Western Wall, and this was a site that Temima on principle shunned, not because of the unfair and demeaning partition of space between the worshipping men and the women; under the aspect of the divine, how could that signify? No, she avoided this mosh pit because of the flabbergasting idolatry of praying to stones. Not for nothing does the text make a