The Devil in Jerusalem (37 page)

Bina had a vision of this child standing up on the bimah on his Bar Mitzvah day, such a joyous occasion, his face black and blue, his teeth broken, his terrified voice trembling as he read the words of the sacred Torah, the book of kindness and love that had governed the lives of Jews from their inception as a nation. It was an obscenity.

“Then my father was suddenly gone, and Shem Tov moved us all to his house. They were all there, except Bannerman. And Shem Tov was the king. They did whatever he said and did it like it was fun for them. Like they enjoyed it. They were a bunch of Nazis! Sometimes Shem Tov watched, and sometimes he joined in. They made me sit in weird positions and stay up all night learning. And if I fell asleep, Goldschmidt would lock me in the storage room for two days, every time, with no food or water. They gave me a bowl to use as a toilet and told me I wasn't allowed to fall asleep. They never opened the door except to throw me a little food or beat me. They kept a cell phone in there, so that Shem Tov could listen to everything going on inside. And when the battery died, they'd open the door and beat me, telling me I shut it off on purpose. Once, they tried to force pills down my throat. I think it was Ritalin. They took me to the mikvah and on the way beat me with a cell phone until they broke another one of my teeth. And when I tried to talk to my mother, I got dragged away and beaten so badly I couldn't move.

“So I made a plan. To run away and take Yossi with me. But we got caught. They forced liquor down our throats. Shem Tov told Batlan and Goldschmidt to beat us up. I thought I was going to die. Then they locked us both in the storage room. After a while, I stopped counting the days.”

Bina inhaled, then exhaled slowly. How much more, how much more? she silently asked. But if this is what the child lived through, I have to have the strength to at least listen.

“But that wasn't the hardest part,” he said suddenly.

Johnny and Bina looked up at him and at each other, startled, afraid of what they were going to hear next.

“The hardest part was watching what they did to my kid brothers. One night, I heard Shem Tov tell Batlan to beat Menchie. I sat there watching all night long as he hit Menchie with his fists, slapped him, kicked him. And I couldn't…” He began to weep, in heartbreaking sobs. Bina went to him, but he shrugged off her attempt at comfort. “No, don't. I don't deserve it. I sat there and watched and I was too afraid.… I was a coward! I didn't do anything. I didn't say anything. I just watched, you understand? They hit him with a hammer, until he bled, while Shem Tov watched, this fucking smile on his fucking face.…” The boy wept. “They burned his fingertips with a lighter, they stuffed his mouth with food until he almost choked, they put him under a faucet and almost drowned him. And I saw it all, I saw it all.”

“It wasn't your fault—do you understand that!”

“
No! You
don't understand anything. Once I tried to stop them and they beat me up and then … then …
they made me help them
!”

A current like a bolt of electricity went through Bina's body, a sudden sense of darkness clouding her vision. The root of Duvie's violence was self-hatred.

“I saw them taking Eli into the kabbalah room, Shem Tov, Batlan, and Hod. They closed the door. I heard Eli screaming and screaming and screaming. Hod came running out. When he opened the door for a second, I caught a look at Eli. He was pressed up against a spiral heater. Batlan was holding his skin in his hands. They'd just burnt it off! They brought my mother from upstairs. I could hear them telling her some stupid freaking lies—that Eli had stood too close, that they'd tried to move him away—and she swallowed it! Didn't complain to them! Nothing. Shem Tov didn't want him taken to a doctor. He told my mother to treat him herself. I think she tried. But then she saw it was getting worse. And Shem Tov kept beating Eli. I think she was afraid they'd kill him. So she told Shem Tov she was going to get him out of the house, give him to some lady she knew. And Shem Tov, who hated Eli most of all, said yes.”

He was breathing heavily, sweat pouring off his red face. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve.

“Duvie, I know this must be very hard for you. But you are doing great!” Bina said, trying tentatively to put a hand on his shoulder. To her surprise, he let it rest there.

“Can you tell us what happened to Menchie?” Johnny asked him after a short pause.

“The last day we were in Shem Tov's house, he made me tie Menchie's arms to the back of a chair with chains. They said it was to help him, so he wouldn't scratch the blisters on his burnt foot. His head was all swollen and purple. Shem Tov stood all of us up against the wall and told us that we should tell anybody who asked that Eli was burned by a fire in our house in the Old City. I heard him whisper to Batlan that he had to turn Menchie into a cripple so he wouldn't be able to tell anyone what happened to him. And that night, when we were moved back from Shem Tov's house to our own house in the Old City, I heard Batlan talking to Shem Tov on the phone. After he hung up, I saw Batlan go into the room where Menchie was sleeping. After that, I saw Menchie lying on the floor, and Batlan had his mouth over his mouth, trying to breathe into him. And then the ambulance came.”

“Would you excuse me a—” Bina ran to the bathroom and heaved over the toilet, tasting her breakfast once again. She washed her face, filled her mouth with water, and spit it out. She looked up at her face in the mirror, trying to reset her features, to remove the shock and horror so the boy wouldn't see. She needed to be calm, professional, she told herself, closing her eyes and breathing deeply.

She came back and sat down. “Sorry, please, go on, Duvie. This is very helpful.”

“In the next few days, Shem Tov's wife, Ruth, kept calling me. She told me to keep my mouth shut and to make sure my brothers and sisters kept theirs shut, otherwise, there were going to be a lot more tikkunim in the future when we went back to live with them.”

“That is never, ever going to happen, Duvie,” Bina told him. “Because of your courage, because you told us everything, you are going to be the reason that all of them—Shem Tov, Batlan, Goldschmidt, Hod, and this piece of turd Bannerman when we find him—are going to sit in jail for a very, very long time. They are going to eat prison food and be locked up twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

“I wish … I wish…”

“What?” Johnny said.

“That you'd do to them what they did to us! Tie them up and let me be in a room with them for a day, with hammers and spiral heaters and shit and vomit.”

Ah, if only real justice were possible, Bina thought, wishing for the same thing. But the state was so limited, its hands tied by its humanity, its adherence to civilized rules. For a moment she longed for biblical punishments, for death by stoning in which the entire city gathered, each individual invited to cast a rock at the perpetrators of horrendous deeds. How she would love to fling a few boulders on these men, watch them as they tried to protect their worthless hides with their cowardly hands, hands that had tortured innocent children. She could already see their defense attorneys crying crocodile tears: their poor clients were misled, brainwashed. They were only following orders!

And Shem Tov, the Messiah? What would his lawyer say? Already, he was trying to claim that Shem Tov should be granted asylum in Peru because authorities in Israel—fornicators, pig eaters, and idolators—had no sovereignty over the Holy Land, which was established before the Messiah against God's will. Shem Tov wasn't an Israeli because Israel didn't exist. He had been living in occupied territories, and thus so-called Israelis had no jurisdiction over him!

He would whine and cry and tell everyone what a great saint he was all the way to prison. He'd say that he was only trying to help this poor family who had asked for his help. That Daniella was the mother and she had watched it all, permitted it all. That it was her fault.

Would the court listen? Who knew? But Bina was going to make sure that those who judged Shem Tov heard everything she'd heard; that the words of the children echoed off the courtroom walls wherever these men were tried. Their judges would be fathers, mothers, grandparents. She would make sure not a single detail was left out.

As for herself, she knew she would continue chasing after evil, in spite of the full knowledge that she might never catch up. As a civilized human being in a democracy, she had no choice but to trust in the mechanisms put in place by human beings to administer retribution. It was a weak and flawed system, she knew, but the best one they had to deal with people like Shem Tov and his cronies. She promised herself to be there, every step of the way, watching and waiting, pursuing justice.

 

34

From the testimony of Daniella Goodman:

It is very, very hard for me to talk about my experiences with Menachem Shem Tov and his group because of the terrible pain and regret remembering brings to me. I wish there was a way I could throw it all into the depths of the ocean so that I would never have to think of these things again. Also, I find when I try to put into words what he, Shem Tov, convinced me to believe, it makes no sense. It makes me sound insane. Reading it over I get frightened and confused all over again.

Shem Tov told us not to learn the Torah because it was a very old book not meant for the modern generation, and we couldn't really understand its language anyway. He said that if we read in the Torah, “The donkey spoke,” it didn't actually mean that but some abstract, Divine thing beyond our understanding, and that abstract things are the real things. You are not supposed to understand it, you are supposed to “feel” those things, he said, like you feel your hand. You needed to put faith above reason and have a lot of desire, and then wisdom would be “revealed” to you.

The prayer book was also nullified. Its words were meant for lesser beings. We, on a higher level, had our own prayers that needed no words; they were simply a strong desire in our hearts.

Shem Tov taught me that the most important thing was to have faith. “Faith above reason,” Shem Tov said. Faith in what? In Shem Tov. And I did. I thought he was like Moses. That if he had to, he could split the sea. He was not a human being like others, like myself. He said he knew the secret of how to be like God. After I divorced Shlomie, Shem Tov promised me that if I followed him without question, he would teach this secret to me. But before that could happen, he said, I needed to reject God and reality, to put up a
masak
, a screen, between us. Only then, he explained, could I begin to receive the light of
chochma
, wisdom, which was supposed to open my eyes and turn me into a god.

That's when I stopped feeling like I wanted to be close to God. I wanted to
be
God. I wanted to have power, too. I felt shame, horror, and frustration that I wasn't yet on that level, God's level, Shem Tov's level.

There was a time, right at the beginning, that all these teachings broke my heart. I remember crying uncontrollably without even knowing why. Shem Tov called it “the Pathway of Sorrow.” He took hours and hours to explain to me why this was a good thing, how it was bringing me closer to God. Hod, Batlan, and Goldschmidt and my husband also told me they had gone through this, that every person who is climbing the ladder to holiness must go through this.

Something happened to me. Deep in my soul, I began to feel the pulsing of something dark, something I had never encountered before. Images passed through my head of blood, death, killings. All the images were monstrously ugly. I would imagine ways in which people could be tortured. I enjoyed this. I enjoyed the hate. Everywhere I went, I imagined the people I saw being crushed and annihilated by evil things, as if lightning from my body could electrocute them. I couldn't understand what was happening to me. Everyone around me was an annoyance, a hindrance, slowing me down in my progress to pass to the upper levels of spirituality and godliness, in becoming the Creator. I became antisocial, unhappy, cold, distant. I despised everyone and everything. I was frustrated with my children for not being completely integrated in our group, for making trouble, for not accepting Shem Tov's ways. I was embarrassed to have such children. I felt like a failure as a mother.

I was turning into a psychopath. I think I even knew this was happening, but I was powerless to stop it.

All I wanted was the light! I wanted it more than sex, more than my children. I wanted what they call
zivug
copulation with the “light,” so that the “seed” of the light would grow inside me. I had some euphoric moments, but they were surrounded by a despair that led to complete emptiness. Shem Tov said this was a good thing, that this is the price we pay our Creator for our progress.

I was all that mattered. I was told this was a positive thing. The “vessel,” that is, my ego, was expanding in order to contain the endless “light” now flooding it. I never questioned how holy light could make you self-centered and evil or how such a light could come from a good Creator who wished us all to love each other and be good. These questions were inside me but never allowed to surface. I spent a great deal of effort to batter them down, to obliterate them.

Shem Tov taught that we lived in a false world. That everything we had ever known was like a movie, a setup, unconnected to the true reality. Like that movie
The Truman Show,
everyone was the puppet of the “Creator”—they were just pretending to live.

From the moment I began to believe that, nothing ever made sense again. I became detached from myself, my core beliefs, my intelligence, my humanity. I was totally without any ground under my feet. I felt I couldn't believe my own eyes, my own brain. I was told that this was a wonderful thing. It even had a name: “crossing the barrier.” Shem Tov's circle considered it a fantastic breakthrough, proof of progress. Now I understand that it was probably a psychotic breakdown. I lost track of what was real.