Adam, says the Talmud, was originally made a golem; only later did God give him human life. The latter is a power no human creator can imitate, but the latter – giving life to shapeless mud -lay in the power of the great Rabbis. The golem is obedient, but cannot speak: it is only mud, the formless, come to life, and what does formlessness have to say? If it speaks it is only as the reverberation of form, the stirring of an indeterminable life without contour.
Life – but it is the shadow of life, for who would say the golem is alive? Life’s shadow, the edge of life as that edge becomes a threshold and then a plateau. Are you alive? Are you dead? Or is it that you’re death in life, death given life, death that looks for itself on the ice-field like Frankenstein’s monster. How can death know itself except by way of the wilderness? Death looks for itself there, in the wilderness. Death looks for itself in the golem, whose soul is only death turning in itself, seeking itself, restless and insomniac.
‘I would like to die’. – ‘Only when you have done my bidding’. – ‘I would like to die.’ – ‘Death will be your reward, when you do my bidding.’ There are many stories of Rabbis who took golems as servants. And there are stories of golems summoned as figures of vengeance. Rabbi Judah Loew raised a golem from the clay of Prague’s Vitava river, to defend the Jewish ghetto. As it grew, the golem became more violent, killing without discrimination and spreading fear. Rabbi Loew rubbed out the first letter of the word he had inscribed on the golem’s forehead to give it life. Emet, truth, became met, death.
The golem’s prayer, even in the wildness of its violence: to return again to clay; no longer to give death contour, for isn’t that the greatest pain: to live death, to live death in life, death trying to find itself, to rub out the first letter on its forehead.
Other stories speak of the power of the golem to raise witnesses from the dead, who were allowed to testify in court. The golem once again at the threshold, but now charged with watching over the dead in the name of justice. ‘Let justice be done, and I will lie down to die.’ As though death itself were demanding justice. Or that justice holds sway over death.
But I prefer Loew’s wild golem, who has grown too large, too quickly, and whose growth is his pain. No – the pain of death in search of itself, death made to live a life in the world, and taking revenge on the others that live, returning them by violence to the state for which the golem longs. Death gone mad in the world, because it cannot die.
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