Secret Magdalene by Ki Longfellow

Salome moans about binding her treasures, and worries about her menses, a thing that now visits me. But Tata has an herb for our monthlies. It does not stop them, but it makes them so much less and so much easier to hide. She makes sure our cloths are taken from us when needs be, that they are smuggled into the woman’s camp and buried there. Tata also tutors us in our choice of phrase so that we do not say things as a female might, nor abase ourselves before our fellow males without thinking. Where did Tata come by all this knowledge?
    Above all, Tata tells us, is the matter of being “cut.” If the removal of their foreskin isn’t the single most important thing, after the member itself, in a Jewish male’s life, I don’t know what is. It marks him as chosen; it is the blood covenant he has made with God. Salome says you would think if God wanted to mark a man chosen, he might have left this bit off their person in the first place. Now,
that
would be a mark.
    Here in our wilderness, people are daily coming or going: old, young, men, women, children, whole families, Jews as well as Gentiles. Our small open spaces are so often packed with travelers and their animals, with asses and dogs and goats and sheep and camels, the encampments so swollen with tents or simple bedding under the stars, or the caves so filled to overflowing, it is like Jerusalem at Passover. These visitors seek out Seth or Addai or others we do not yet know. The travelers are ill, or they are wounded, or they are troubled in their minds. Some come to bathe in the large basin set aside for them. Some come for the prayer. More come for the herbs, or poisons, or potions that are traded here or grown here. All come for miracles. Some never leave but are buried in the cemeteries on the edge of the cliffs.
    Yet not all who arrive are ill. Nor are they blind or crippled or possessed. Some are the men who stood recently at the edges of Heli’s crowded courtyard, the hairy, wild-eyed men. All these are sons of Israel no matter if they are Samaritans or if they are Galileans or even Ituraeans. I am confused and confounded by them. Some are armed and some are not. Some men in the same sect carry knives and others do not. Ananias is certainly right: there are more divisions in an Israelite’s belief than I should ever have imagined. And all spend much time arguing with each other! Each evening at table, we hear them. They shout, they wave chunks of bread, they turn their backs on each other. Salome says they speak much more of war, revenge, and righteous hatred than of the nature of their god. Or perhaps, adds she, such things
are
the nature of their god.
    Meanwhile, though all who are Jews have the same god, not one of them can agree on how to approach him or to honor him. What they do agree on is that God, who is male, is the only God. By this they do not mean YHVH is supreme among gods. They mean that there are no other gods or goddesses at all. They mean that those that claim to be gods—Baal and Isis and Zeus and so forth—are demons. By the hour, they assure themselves that the One and Only God has singled them out especially. They swear they are
am segulah,
God’s treasured people.
    Salome and I have discussed this before Addai as we should never have discussed it before Father. In Father’s house there was never much talk of Yahweh. But here it is as if he were only in the next city and were due home at any moment, and all were women crazed to ensure he would be pleased by how tidy his house, how obedient his children, how full his coffers. We question: if the Jew is the jewel of all creation, why did God bother with any others in the first place? Salome also asks what has happened to God’s wife? Tata tells us Yahweh once had a wife, and one of her names was Shekinah, and another was Asherah, and another was Astarte. She tells us they lay together in the Temple’s Holy of Holies as the Bride and the Bridegroom. But where is Shekinah now? Has