‘What If The Messiah Is A Woman?’

by Susan Reimer-Torn, Special To The Jewish Week

Not long ago, a woman rabbi raised a provocative question: Might we dare imagine Judaism as it would be if the tradition had been shaped and transmitted by feminists? Or to put it differently, how is Judaism experienced through the mind/body of a spiritually attuned woman?

Tova Reich’s “One Hundred Philistine Foreskins” (Counterpoint) explores this essential question through the lifelong travails of its central character, Ima Temima, a prophetic guru and iconoclast teacher of our times. The novel moves between Temima’s life as a charismatic spiritual leader in Israel and her brutally isolating girlhood in ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn. At age 11, already a voracious reader and original thinker, Temima is shattered by the death of her mother and left to the brutish cruelty of her father. Her school principal, whom she encounters lurking among the reeking garbage in the building’s basement, subjects her to sexual abuse. She withdraws into study and deep contemplation, seeking sanctuary at her mother’s grave. A few years later, Temima uses a marriage of convenience to a Zionist zealot who works at the neighborhood deli as a ticket to Israel, where she eventually makes her name as a visionary leader.

The book opens with a tumultuous, end-of-days scene in which Temima and her mob of followers — “a mixed multitude of hanger-ons and groupies, assorted fans and freaks and misfits” — are winding their way through the streets of Jerusalem, with the aged, veiled Temima, hidden like the divine presence in a portable arc, transported by four hefty bodyguards. The raucous scene, like those vividly rendered throughout the book, is set in cinematic detail. The throngs are “dancing, stamping their feet, twirling, clapping their hands, swaying, many bearing musical instruments, drums, tambourines, rattles, bells, roaring, ululating, whooping, chanting the Te-Tem-Ima-Temima-from-Brooklyn mantra.” 

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