by Naomi Ragen
Bina thought of the years stretching ahead and the never-ending war she was involved in, the infinite stream of criminals causing havoc in the world. Did she have the strength for it? And would the little she could do actually matter in the larger picture? It was like using a teaspoon to bail water out of a sinking ship.
Noah came in at eight.
“What’s up? You look wasted!” he said cheerfully, kissing her cheek and sitting down next to her on the couch.
She leaned her head against his strong shoulder.
They had met in the army. He was a young corporal and she was assigned to Intelligence. She remembered the first time she’d seen him from afar, standing on a hill in the Golan peering through binoculars at a Hezbollah terrorist outpost. He looked so tall and manly, his back straight, his arms and face chiseled with strength and youth and determination, his knitted skullcap sloping at a jaunty angle. Before she even met him, she’d fallen in love with the firmness of his stance, his calm, business-like demeanor as he faced the unknown. There had been an attempted Hezbollah terrorist kidnapping just weeks before, two soldiers killed and a third wounded. The enemy was always there, always waiting for the slightest lapse in vigilance.
“I think I’m in the wrong business,” she whispered.
“What’s up?” he repeated, stroking her forehead.
“I’m just … I don’t know anymore.” She shook her head.
“Don’t know what, honey?”
“This Shem Tov, the things he and his Hassidim did to those helpless kids while the mother stood by hypnotized and the father was off in Wonderland…”
“So, you’ll put him and his cronies behind bars for a long, long time so they can’t do it again.” He shrugged. “And you’ll teach the parents a lesson they won’t forget.”
“And then what? This Shem Tov will just be replaced by another Shem Tov. The parents by other brainwashed, naïvely religious morons. And the children … the children…” She felt herself suddenly sobbing. She buried her head in her husband’s clean, warm shirt, listening to the steady beat of his reliable heart.
He stroked her head. “You remember that passage in the Torah? The one that has your name in it?”
“My name?” She took the tissue he handed her, blowing her nose. She was embarrassed. She never cried.
“Our name,” he corrected himself. “‘Tzedek, tzedek tirdof,’” he quoted.
“‘Pursue justice’?”
“Right. Did you ever wonder why the Torah doesn’t say, ‘Justice, justice, do it’? Why ‘pursue it’?”
She shrugged, mystified.
“I’ll tell you why. Because you can never really catch justice. You can run after it, but it will always be just beyond you. But that doesn’t absolve us from trying. Bina, keep running after it. That is all God asks of us.”
“But how can I bring another child into such a world? I feel my whole body has been tainted. My soul feels polluted.”
He pulled her closer, squeezing her shoulder. “Then we’ll wait. This, too, shall pass, my love. Consider it a war wound, shell shock. Take the time you need to heal.”
She gathered him in her arms and held him to her, the incarnation of all that was good in the world, she thought, of all she loved and would fight to keep safe.
She thought about the coming meeting with Daniella Goodman. How, how was she going to break through to that soul so long encased in permafrost? On a whim, Bina went to the computer and searched for “mothers in cults.” What she read astonished her, changing completely how she viewed not only the entire case but Daniella Goodman herself.
That night, when she lit the Sabbath candles, shutting her eyes as was customary before reciting the prayer ushering in the holy day of rest, she pressed her fingers against her eyelids a little harder than usual as she peered into the thick, heavy darkness. God, she prayed silently, may it be Your will that evil be wiped from the face of the earth. And in the meantime, please make me understand how to put Menachem Shem Tov and his accomplices behind bars for a very, very long time. Please, God, show me the way!
When she was done, a sudden image lit up in her brain. The image of Daniella Goodman.
That, she understood, was God’s answer.
30
He was the president and the prime minister. He was Aaron the High Priest and Elijah the Prophet. He was Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney. He was an angel on a platform so high above the earth, she could barely see his outline. It was as if Moses had climbed down off Mount Sinai, the tablets of Law in his hands, and instead of talking to the wise elders, he had inexplicably pointed to some obscure woman in the throngs, choosing her alone out of the minions.
He was the Messiah. And he had chosen her.
Daniella’s head swirled with amazement and incomprehension and joy and pride. He had chosen her!
How was it possible? She was nothing, no one. And yet, the miracle had happened. He could see things in her soul that she herself could not even imagine. Great things! He, the all-seeing, all-wise, closer to God than the angels themselves, had chosen her!
He loved her. He wanted her.
Oh, the miracle of it!
When Shlomie returned from the Ukraine, she hardly noticed him. Nothing changed. The Messiah and his boys had, more or less, moved into her home, helping her with the children. At Shem Tov’s insistence, she no longer allowed Shlomie to sleep in her bed.
It took several weeks, but even Shlomie began to understand that things had permanently altered between them. Of course, he went to his rebbe for advice.
“What can I do to bring peace to my home? To return my dear wife to me?” he asked with real agony, torn apart with sorrow.
“You must give her a divorce immediately,” Shem Tov told him, looking straight into his astonished eyes.
“But Rebbe … I love my wife. And you said … you told me, if I went away—”
“You asked me for my advice, right?” he replied with annoyance, cutting him short. “Your marriage needs a tikkun. If you divorce your wife and live apart for a while, this will repair your marriage. Afterwards, you will remarry and it will be as it was when you were a young couple.”
Shlomie thought about this. To be again as newlyweds! It was the deepest desire of his heart to win Daniella back to him, the bride of his youth.
“Thank you, Messiah,” he replied. “Thank you.”
The divorce became final almost immediately. And as Daniella stood before three rabbinical judges and caught the bill of divorcement Shlomie threw at her (as was customary) she felt her heart leap up in joy.
Finally, she thought, an end and a new beginning. She could not have dreamed what was to come next.
31
Early Sunday morning, Detective Tzedek met with Daniella Goodman. While the warrant for Shem Tov had already been issued, she knew in her heart that Daniella’s testimony was vital not only to ensure a conviction but, most important, to give this woman’s children some peace. They were brokenhearted not only because of the horrors they’d experienced, but because their mother, whom they dearly loved, had betrayed them. For them to heal, she, as their mother, needed to confess her wrongs and ask their forgiveness.
They sat there silently, facing each other.
Bina began slowly. “Tell me, Daniella, what did it feel like to watch Menachem Shem Tov and his ‘saints’ starve Eli and beat him and lock him in a suitcase, make him eat his own vomit and feces?”
Daniella turned white. “How did you … who told you?”
“Who told us the name of your great ‘messiah’? Would you be surprised to hear it was one of his ‘tzaddikim,’ who also blamed you for everything that happened to your children? Who said it was you who wanted them abused?”
She covered her ears with her hands, shaking back and forth.
“What did it feel like to watch your baby, your beautiful little Menchie, treated like a punching bag, beaten black and blue with fists and hammers, until his face swelled up like a balloon? To h
ear his cries when they broke his arm then tied it behind his back? Menchie, your baby, your little baby, who now lies in a coma because of what your ‘friends,’ your ‘tzaddikim,’ did to him just so he wouldn’t talk and tell what had happened to him?”
Daniella rocked uncontrollably.
“I have to tell you, Daniella, I’m a mother. And yesterday I found myself kissing my little girl’s chubby knees, her little fat arms so much she had to tell me to stop. How, how does anyone deliberately allow a child to be hurt? Any child, let alone their own? I must tell you the truth: Every time I’ve met with you, I’ve felt a sense of such disgust, such outrage. I thought: What kind of worthless, despicable person lets someone do this to her babies? But you know what? Once I got to know your children, I also thought this: What kind of person raised such lovely children, children so brave and resourceful and intelligent, and so loving and loyal they refused to say a word against her?”
At these words, Daniella suddenly looked up, a new light burning in her pale face, her eyes—for the first time Bina could remember—really alive.
“And so I decided to research this. I went to my computer and typed in ‘mothers in cults.’ One of the first articles I came across was on a Web site called International Cultic Studies Association. There I found an article written by Attorney Susan Landa called ‘Children and Cults.’”
Daniella’s eyes didn’t leave Bina’s face.
“Did you ever hear of Jim Jones? The cult leader, the mass murderer, who fed hundreds of his followers Kool-Aid laced with cyanide?”
She saw shock in Daniella’s eyes as she slowly nodded.
“His cult was called the Peoples Temple. One little girl, no older than five, was restless in class, so he ordered her to be taken from her home at night and left a quarter of a mile away. They told her that snakes and monsters were waiting for her. They made her walk home, blindfolded. On the way, they snaked a slimy rope around her shoulders and made animal noises. Sound familiar?”
She saw Daniella’s eyes drop down to her fidgeting fingers.
“One fourteen-year-old girl was kept for weeks in a plywood box with only two holes for air and a can for a toilet, while adults taunted her. A boy—whose ‘crime’ was that he took time out to rest at work and argued about the amount of fertilizer to add to the earth—had his teeth knocked out. Another boy was stretched by four adults, who pulled on his arms and legs until he was unconscious.”
Daniella gripped the edge of her chair as if keeping herself from flying away.
“The children were also punished for their parents’ behavior. If a couple was discovered talking privately, the children were forced to masturbate or have sex with someone they did not like in front of the entire congregation.”
“Please…,” Daniella moaned.
“Your ‘messiah’ isn’t special. He is one in a long, long list of cult leaders who decided to physically hurt children in order to ‘teach them a lesson’ or ‘break their spirit.’ There was a cult called the Garbage Eaters group who wrapped a piece of wire around a two-month-old baby’s thigh and screwed it tighter every time he cried. Thank God, his grandparents were able to get custody. The wire was only discovered when his grandparents took him for a medical exam after they got custody. Doctors told them there were fresh scabs around the wire, which means the torture had continued until the very moment he was handed over to them, and that the wire had cut so deeply that skin had begun growing over it—”
Daniella jumped up: “Stop, I beg you!”
“Why, Daniella? What bothers you? Stories about other people’s children? Doesn’t what happened to your own children bother you? Enough to punish those responsible?”
She sat down.
“You think your ‘messiah’ is the only Jewish cult out there? Cult, Daniella—you hear what I’m saying? You were not involved with a holy man but a psychopath who hurt your children, not to make them holier, but to satisfy his own sick, narcissistic lust for power and domination. He couldn’t have cared less what happened to you or your children. He didn’t love you.”
“You’re wrong!”
“Psychopaths can’t love. They can only exert their charm and will and power over people they select. You, Daniella, were selected. It wasn’t random. They have a nose for sniffing out vulnerability, for finding people who are troubled and depressed, who’ve lost confidence in themselves. You were the perfect victim, Daniella. Can’t you see that?”
She shook her head violently. “We were not a cult! We were close to God, we spoke to angels—”
“In the House of Judah cult, the children were beaten with cords, switches, branches, broom handles, and ax handles. They weren’t allowed to cry when they were hit or saw their brother beaten to death. In the River of Life Tabernacle in Montana they beat a five-year-old boy to death with electrical cords and a stick. When the toddlers behaved the way toddlers behave—like your Menchie hiding your car keys so you wouldn’t leave—they believed their child was possessed by the devil. If parents couldn’t make their eighteen-to-thirty-six-month-old toddler ‘behave,’ they were told they were guilty of not submitting to God’s will. Sound familiar, Daniella? And right here in Israel, in Jerusalem, there was the cult of Elior Chen, who tortured eight children, beating and starving them, while their mother watched.”
Stunned, Daniella said nothing.
“And it’s not just about your babies. Think about your older children, Amalya, Duvie, Yossi, Gabriel, and even Shoshana—think how they must have felt when they were forced to watch as Eli and Menchie were hit with hammers, starved, frightened, tortured.…”
Daniella covered her face. “Please,” she begged. “No more. I can’t…”
Bina pulled Daniella’s hands away from her face. “Don’t you understand? Your children feel responsible, especially Duvie and Amalya, because they were the oldest and they saw it all but weren’t able to do anything to help!”
“God!” she cried out. “Help me!”
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do! Listen to me, Daniella. What I’m saying to you is that what happened to you has happened to many others. Your precious ‘messiah’ and his ‘tzaddikim’ were no different than those in many other cults, and what they did to your children has been done to other children in the name of many other crazy, psychopathic gurus. It had nothing to do with God, Judaism, kabbalah. These other cults were Christian, Mormon, atheists, and yet they believed the same things, did the same things. Your ‘messiah’ was not a saint; he was a criminal who tricked you, like your Reb Amos tricked you. Are you getting that! You and your husband were victims, Daniella. Victims. You were taken in, fooled, manipulated—”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about! You’re a liar!”
Bina continued calmly, “Think, Daniella, think. Use your brain, your reason! I know you haven’t done that in a long time. In these cults, they don’t let you think. They make you believe anything outside the cult is dangerous and satanic, that your family outside the cult hates you and your only chance for salvation is inside the cult. They tell you that if you are even thinking of your child or another human being, with any kind of softness or tenderness, that it is going to lead to your destruction and to the child’s destruction.”
Daniella suddenly raised her eyes in wonderment. “That is exactly what I was told. Exactly that!”
“Of course you were, because you were a cult member, and you had a cult leader, not a holy man, a rebbe. Shem Tov’s whole purpose was to get his victims’ unquestioning loyalty and undivided devotion. He wanted absolute control over the minds and bodies of his followers.”
A sudden, radical change came over Daniella. She slipped to the floor, her body twisting into a fetal position. She moaned.
Bina thought over the last thing she’d said, wondering exactly what in her words had triggered this response. A sudden insight came to her. “Is that what happened to you? Did Shem Tov take control of your body as well as your mind?”
There was a tiny, almost imperceptible nod, Daniella’s face clenched in horror. For a long time, they sat in silence.
“After the divorce, Shlomie moved out. Shem Tov wouldn’t let him come anywhere near me or the children, even to visit. He was crying when he said good-bye, and the children were hysterical. ‘It is only temporary,’ I heard him say to them, just like my father had said to me so many years ago. This triggered something inside me. I began to regret what I’d done, not so much for myself but for my children. But soon after, the Messiah came to me. ‘Shmaya will watch the children,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
“I was confused. I followed him out to the car. It was very cold and already pitch-black. I remember searching for the moon, but it had vanished. For some reason, this frightened me even more. Kuni Batlan and Yissaschar Goldschmidt were sitting in the backseat. I remember my body shaking as I got into the front seat next to the Messiah. He drove too fast, too fast! I thought for sure he would kill us all. The strange thing is I wasn’t frightened of that. I was even hoping something might happen. Isn’t that strange? When we got to the edge of the Ramot forest, he parked. Everyone got out. Without speaking, the Messiah walked into the woods—”
“Daniella, please. Stop using the word ‘messiah.’ He was a man, a psychopath named Menachem Shem Tov.”
Daniella hugged herself without responding. “I remember standing there, cold, frightened. I didn’t want to move. But then he, Shem Tov, turned around. I couldn’t see his face. It was hidden in the shadows. ‘Come,’ he said to me. And I did. I followed him like a little child, followed his voice. I remember feeling sick, but also that I had no choice. I put one foot in front of the other and I walked into the pitch-black woods. The branches brushed my face, and the brambles scratched my legs. I was wearing my good Sabbath shoes, and the hard rocks and small stones cut into their thin soles.
