Free One Hundred Philistine Foreskins by Tova Reich Page A

leper colony in the heart of Jerusalem, but this was the main entrance and it was the grandest, and through it HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv in her aperion and her entire flock entered and left this world.
    They marched down the central pathway toward the hospital building rising straight ahead in front of them with the words J ESUS H ILFE carved into the pediment from the days when the nuns and deaconesses of the order of the Moravians had ministered to the lepers, proffering the help of Jesus with punishing ecstasy. On either side of the path were fruit bearing and shade trees, olive and pomegranate and almond, carob and spruce and palm, and ancient gnarled cactuses, and there was a great stone cistern in which the water had been collected when the colony had been almost entirely self-sustaining and few healthy outsiders were condemned to enter to provide services and be infected. They passed the ruins of the herb and healing gardens with early spring sprouts of poppy, sweet pea, and hyssop, sage and lavender and nasturtium, haphazardly tended in therapeutic programs by youth groups afflicted with physical handicaps and mental retardation after the last lepers had been extruded and put away no one knew where.
    They paused in their forward advance to wait politely as two ancient turtles took their time making their way across the path as if in deepconversation, reminiscing on over a century of lepers who had lived and died in contaminated isolation and quarantine within these walls, taking note, perhaps, that now it seemed the patients were returning after all, but unwilling to tax their constitutions by letting themselves grow too excited about this new development.
    Kol-Isha-Erva climbed the steps to the landing in front of the main entrance to the hospital. Standing under the Jesus Hilfe inscription, gazing out over the assembled massed below her made up preponderantly of women, and speaking in the name of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, she said, “ Ha’maivina tavin —in other words, She who understands will understand.”
    There was a savage scramble as the members of Temima’s congregation swarmed in every direction to stake out for themselves the best squatting spaces within the hospital itself, with some of the less enterprising souls in the end forced to find shelter on the balconies or outside in the gardens. Cozbi and Paltiel claimed for themselves, as was their right, a suite of rooms on the ward floor, on the staff’s side of the partition still in place that had segregated the patients from those who had cared for them with exemplary pious strictness, since, as we learn in Leviticus, even stones and houses can be stricken with zora’at and must undergo purification. Rizpa was allotted a designated room next to the laundry and the kitchen, which, to the wonderment of all that only served to elevate and confirm in their eyes the powers of HaRav Temima Ba’alatOv, was already fully stocked with provisions of all sorts to last an indeterminate length of time, as if it were a bomb shelter. No one questioned these miracles. They believed in Temima and the higher forces that hovered in her radiance to protect and provide for her.
    In the midst of this frenzy, a hidden chamber on the patients’ side of the ward was discovered to be already occupied by a man wearing a keffiyeh on his head flowing down over his shoulders to the middle of his back who would not turn around to face those who stood frozen in the doorway and would not respond when they addressed him—an Arab squatter perhaps, perhaps, even more troubling, a leftover leper; the members of Temima’s flock who had stumbled upon him backed out of the entrance and slammed the door. Later, when Temima was apprised of this situation, she commanded with cold severity, “Do not raise your hand against the boy, and do not do anything at all to him”—summoningthe words of the heavenly messenger addressing Father