One Hundred Philistine Foreskins by Tova Reich

up like a lost kitten beside our beloved mother burying her face in the maternal warmth and wept and wept as Ima Temima stroked her head and murmured over and over until her spirit was restored, “You are so good, my holy, holy Rizpa, you have worked so hard, you have suffered so much, how you have suffered, we owe you so much, forgive us for not recognizing you, forgive us for taking the labor of another woman for granted, we should know better, forgive our ingratitude, mommy.”
    Y ES, TRULY , thank you, Rizpa—and, thanks also to our heavenly mother and father, we lacked for nothing. Bottles of wine were placed conveniently within everyone’s reach, and we were directed by Ima Temima to drink down to the dregs each of our four cups. “It is a mitzvah,” Ima Temima said. “Do not for onesecond think you don’t deserve it, do not deny yourself.” And Ima Temima taught by example; Aish-Zara and I had the honor and privilege to be the royal cupbearers for the evening, charged with offering the wine to our queenly mother, lifting the lower part of the veil modestly, like a bride’s under the canopy, and tipping each of the four cups to the holy lips until they were drained.
    Also gracing our table were heaps of round shemura matzot, burnt to perfection at the edges, guarded every second, like the dead before burial, at every stage of their production process lest they be exposed to moisture and the danger of fermenting into hametz —strictly supervised from the harvesting of the wheat to the kneading and shaping by hand to the baking in the oven for no more than eighteen minutes, God forbid, to the sale of eight pieces for thirty dollars minimum in a cardboard box barely distinguishable in taste from the matzot themselves. Aish-Zara and I glanced at each other when we noticed one of those emptied boxes with its print in bold black letters. They were Bobover matzahs, produced by the Hasidim of Bobov. Aish-Zara, who had grown up in Boro Park, Brooklyn, very near to Ima Temima’s girlhood home, was the daughter of a Bobover Hasid, and even now with her illness in the incurable terminal stage she was still dealing with many painful unresolved issues concerning her childhood. For a moment I feared that a rush of recovered memories and the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder would seize our Aish-Zara, but, to my great relief, in the joyous spirit of the evening, she leaned toward me, she blessed me with her playful smile that exposed her dark gums with almost every tooth knocked out, and whispered, “At least they’re not Pupa matzahs. Pupa is much more constipating.” Aish-Zara’s ex-husband, the wife-beater and abuser, was a Pupa Hasid.
    In the center of our table there were two tall goblets of equal height, one filled with wine for Elijah the prophet and the other filled with water for Miriam the prophetess. Water was Miriam’s sign, she was an Aquarian—the water over which she stood watch when her baby brother Moses was hidden among the rushes to save him from Pharaoh’s death sentence against all newborn Hebrew boys, the water over which she led the womenin song and dance with timbrels and drums when the Israelites crossed the Reed Sea on dry land with the Egyptian chariots in pursuit, the water of the well that, it is said, escorted them in her merit during the forty years of their wandering in the wilderness. There was also a magnificent Seder plate in the center of our table, fully loaded. In addition to the usual shank bone and the bitter herbs and the greens and the egg and the red paste of the haroset to commemorate the bricks our ancestors were forced to make during their enslavement in Egypt—in addition to all this familiar antipasti there was also a piece of gefilte fish (turd-shaped rather than sliced, unfortunately) to symbolize water. “For our Miriam mermaid,” Ima Temima taught, “to whom we dedicate our Seder on this