Golem

D’var Torah

July 10, 2009

Andrew A. Feinstein

The Golem

First, a little shameless self-promotion. Every Yom Kippur I teach a class here after the morning service. This year’s topic is Kabbalah. Tonight’s sermon is merely a forespice, which is Yiddish for appetizer. On Yom Kippur, I will survey Kabbalah more broadly and cover topics such as emanations, the Zohar, Shabbetai Zvi, Gematria, Lilith, and the Dybbuk. I promise you, my Yom Kippur class will not be Madonna’s Kabbalah. Tonight I will focus on that Kabbalistic favorite: the Golem.

Before I discuss the Golem, let me take a moment to comment generally on the Kabbalah, or, more precisely, our relationship to the Kabbalah. Kabbalah is the mystical, magical, spiritual, folklore-ish, fantasy-based, popular, insular, primitive, and highly sexual form of Judaism that developed in Spain and Eastern Europe in the late middle ages. In many ways, Kabbalah is the antithesis of modern, American Reform Judaism, with its focus on rationality, individual responsibility, and involvement in the world. Yet, Kabbalah has bequeathed us a rich legacy of symbols, ideas, and mythology that enrich us as Jews. I see Kabbalah like youthful misbehavior: we Jews are embarrassed by what we did, but we learned a lot from it and are kind of glad we did it.

Chapter 2 of Genesis contains the second story of man’s creation, as follows:

4 These are the generations of the heaven and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made earth and heaven.

5 No shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no herb of the field had yet sprung up; for the LORD God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground;

6 but there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.

7 Then the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

So, living human beings are created with three elements: water, dust, and breath. Sounds simple enough. Simple enough to try at home.

It is the 1580’s in Prague. Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel wants to serve and protect his community. Using his detailed knowledge of the Kabbalah, understanding how to pronounce the sacred name of God, Rabbi Loew forms a creature from the earth. He writes Emet or Truth on the creature’s forehead. It comes to life and serves as a tireless manual laborer, easing the lives of the Prague Jews. Day by day the creature, known as a Golem, grows and becomes stronger, until he becomes a threat to the community. Rabbi Judah erases the Aleph from the beginning on Emet. The word becomes Met, or Dead. The Golem collapses into a lifeless pile of dirt.

Golem legends developed very early in Judaism. Indeed, verse 16 of Psalm 139, appears to refer to the Golem when it says, “Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.” The Talmud refers to Adam as a Golem, that is, a body without a soul, for the first 12 hours of his existence. And, of course, Islamic and Christian alchemists and Christian Gnostics, like Paracelsus, also studied human creation of humans. Paracelsus, Goethe, and Carl Jung were all obsessed with the homunculus. Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, E.T.A. Hoffman in Der Sandmann, written into Tales of Hoffman by Jacques Offenbach, and modern ethicists in their debate over cloning all are fascinated by the same magical trick.

Golem myths are part of the same genus but are of their own distinctly Jewish species. Let’s survey some of those uniquely Jewish elements. A Golem is a man created by magical art. By the Tenth Century of the Common Era, a book, known as the Sefer Yezirah, or Book of Creation, was well-known and influential in Jewish scholarly circles, although the evidence is strong that the Book of Creation was written as early as the Third Century. This book is the root of all of Kabbalah, laying out the sefirot of 32 secret paths of wisdom. These 32 paths, plus the 22 elemental letters of the Hebrew alphabet, are the foundation of creation. Learn these elements, put them in the right order, study, study, study, and you can create a Golem. In other words, secret knowledge is essential to create life. Like Christian and Muslim Gnostics, Jewish mystics believed that, by gaining secret knowledge, they could become divine. Note that this notion runs directly counter to the lesson of Leviticus 10, where Aaron’s sons are destroyed for becoming too God-like.

The most closely guarded and most sought-after of secret knowledge has to do with the Tetragrammaton Yud Hay Vav Hay. These four letters form the secret name of God. Is it Yahweh or Jehovah or Adonai? Do you read the letters backwards as Hu Hi or He/She? If we knew how to pronounce these letters, the mystics claimed, we would have the power of God. And, the power of God is, as we know from Genesis 1, the power to create life. The Kabbalists did not stop with the Tetragrammaton. They believed the entire Torah was the name of God. The spaces and the vowels were just one way of reading the scroll. Divide the letters differently, use different vowels, and you have another true story of human creation. And why would the Torah begin with a Bet, not an Aleph? An Aleph has no sound of its own; it takes its sound from the vowels and the surrounding letters. What is the Aleph but a breath of air? Is it not the breath of God that created Adam in Genesis 2?

If you study for all your life, have reached the age of 40, are male, are happily married, know the Torah backwards and forwards, quite literally, do not masturbate, have no wet dreams, and can recite the secret incantation, you can create a Golem. If the Golem gets out of hand, you can recite the secret incantation backwards and the Golem disappears.

So, one distinctly Jewish element of the Golem myth is study. The power to create comes from study. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. How do you create a Golem? Study, study, study.

Another related distinctly Jewish element is positing Truth and Death as opposites. Listen to the tale told by students of Rabbi Judah the Pious of Speyer who died in 1217 in Regensburg:

Ben Sira wished to study the Sefer Yetsirah. Then a heavenly voice went forth: You cannot make him [the Golem] alone. He went to his father Jeremiah. They busied themselves with it, and at the end of three years a man was created to them, on whose forehead stood Emet, as on Adam’s forehead. Then the man they had made said to them: God alone created Adam, and when he wished to let Adam die, he erased the aleph from Emet and he remained Met, dead. That is what you should do with me and not create another man, lest the word succumb to idolatry as in the days of Enosh. The created man said to them: Reverse the combination of letters and erase the aleph of the word Emet from my forehead – and immediately he fell into dust.

Again, note the missing Aleph. No breath of God; no life. Now obviously this Emet/Met routine is nothing but a silly word game, like reversing God to dog. (Oh, if we only revered God in the way we worship our pets what a righteous community we would be.) Yet, even dismissing the cute word game, there is the underlying notion that humans need truth to live; that without truth there is no life. Within all the magic and voodoo of Kabbalah, there lies an ethical core. The message here is that there is no life of lies. Bernie Madoff never lived.

Third, a Golem is not a human being. Moses Cordovero said that a man has the power to give hiyyut, or vitality, but not nefesh, life, ru’ah, spirit, or neshamah, soul. Indeed, in many stories, the Golem lacks the power to speak. The original Golem creator, the Talmudic Rava was unable to confer speech. Eleazar of Worms faced the same limitation. Interestingly, a 12^th Century retelling of the Talmudic story of Rava says that a man without sin could confer language, but not a man who has sinned. The idea is that the creator transmits his soul to the creature. The soul of life comes from purity. Impurity is the dividing line between the righteous and God. As in Leviticus 10, humans cannot be God. Their attempts to do so will lead to destruction.

Eleazar of Worms goes further and says that the Golem is dead because his creator cannot give him knowledge of God or speech. Speech was the highest of human faculties to the Kabbalists and the mother of reason and revelation. Clearly, the Kabbalists had never heard Sarah Palin speak. A Spanish Kabbalist had a slightly different view, saying:

When the rabbis say: a childless man is like a dead man, this means: like a golem without form. Consequently pictures that are painted on a wall are of this nature, for although they have the form of a man, they are called only tselem, image and form. When Rava created a man, he made a figure in the form of a man by virtue of the combination of letters, but he could not give him demuth, the real likeness of a man. For it is possible for a man, with the help of mighty forces, to make a man who speaks, but not one who can procreate or has reason. For this is beyond the power of any created being and rests with God alone.

So, the Golem cannot have reason and cannot reproduce. Note that many of the genetically modified crops and cloned animals are unable to reproduce. So, the Golem does not really live, but he does not really die either. The Golem just returns to its original element.

In the modern world, we all risk becoming Golems. Remember Kafka’s The Penal Colony where the death sentence is written on the prisoner’s forehead. Kafka argued that mechanized violence, whether in his Penal Colony or on the plains of Europe, was merely the logical extension of a bureaucratic model of writing that elevates the abstract over the concrete, that confuses the symbol for the thing symbolized, that makes the written word the idol, the modern Golden Calf. As Milan Kundera wrote, “In the Kafkan world, the file takes on the role of the Platonic idea. It represents true reality, whereas our physical existence is only a shadow cast on the screen of illusions.” Like Golems, we risk becoming our social security numbers or our ATM cards. We are dehumanized by being labeled and categorized. And, we dehumanize others by referring to them as a label. Oh, he is a Muslim. She has cancer. We seem all too capable of doing the converse of what Rabbi Loew did. Instead of creating a Golem from dirt, we create Golems from human beings.

Finally, a distinctively Jewish element in the Golem myths is the notion that all power, all scientific progress, all human creation is both good and bad. Only God can create and say, “It is Good,” as He does in Genesis 1. As Martin Buber wrote,

Man is no longer able to master the world which he himself brought about: it is becoming stronger than he is, it is winning free of him, it confronts him in an almost elemental independence, and he no longer knows the word which could subdue and render harmless the golem he created. … Man faced the terrible fact that he was the father of demons whose master he could not become.

And, that is the message of the Golem. The Golem can protect our community or serve our needs, but only if we control our creation. Is not the computer a modern Golem? It has vitality, but no soul. It can help us, but it can also master us. Our job is not to avoid creation. It is not to put an end to science. Instead, our job is to ensure that we remain the masters of our creation.

The Golem is a powerful symbol. To become initiated in some Kabbalistic sects, one had to wear pure deerskin parchment inscribed with the secret names of God, fast for seven days, and then call out the secret name of God over the waters, starting all over again if the waters looked green. We don’t have to become zealots and fanatics to distill some valuable lessons from the Golem, lessons like knowledge brings power, that honesty is an essential element of being alive, that we need to resist all efforts to dehumanize us or any other human on earth, and that we need to control our creations.

Amen.