The Idea of the Golem
After saying certain prayers and observing certain fast days, the Polish Jews make the figure of a man from clay or mud, and when they pronounce the miraculous Shemhamphoras [the name of God] over him, he must come to life. He cannot speak, but he understands fairly well what is said or commanded. They call him golem and use him as a servant to do all sorts of housework. But he must never leave the house. On his forehead is written ‘emeth [truth]; every day he gains weight and becomes somewhat larger and stronger than all the others in the house, regardless of how little he was to begin with. For fear of him, they therefore erase the first letter, so that nothing remains but meth [he is dead], whereupon he collapses and turns to clay again. But one man’s golem once grew so tall, and he heedlessly let him keep on growing so long that he could no longer reach his forehead. In terror he ordered the servant to take off his boots, thinking that when he bent down he could reach his forehead. So it happened, and the first letter was successfully erased, but the whole heap of clay fell on the Jew and crushed him.
– Jakob Grimm’s 1808 description of the Jewish golem in the romantic Journal for Hermits as quoted in “The Idea of the Golem,” pg. 159
Having now inadvertently read not one, but two books with sustained re-tellings of the golem myth this year, I got to reading “The Idea of the Golem” by Gershom Scholem, an apparently famous examination of the golem tradition that I’d never heard of. I was surprised to find in it a markedly different conception of man’s relationship to creation, and to his Creator, than I’ve encountered in traditional religion before.
For Scholem, a scholar who is fearless in the face of seemingly endless religious commentaries on the subject, the myth of the golem passed through several distinct stages of development, each with its own twist on the same basic tale. The earliest stage is that of the golem as a purely symbolic — and impractical — imitation of God’s cosmic creation. Far from employment in shining up the master’s shoes, the golem is created as the final culmination of years of study and worship, only to be immediately destroyed at the moment of its inception. In some variants, the creators forget all that they have studied the moment the golem is destroyed, so that, in Scholem’s words, “This creation of golem is an end in itself, a ritual of initiation into the secret of creation.” This tradition overlaps with an emerging conception of the creation of a golem as a kind of mystical experience, whose rites of creation, which involve the rhythmic recitation of the holy letters in every permutation, Scholem infers must have induced a kind of trance or ecstasy in the incantors. It is only relatively late, in the 15th and 16th centuries, after the “common people took up the old stories,” that descriptions of golems as servants arise. The golem increasingly becomes a figure of danger, growing to gigantic size over time, and in one of the most famous retellings, threatening an entire village. The danger, however, does not emanate from the golem itself, but its creator, and “the tension which the creative process arouses in the creator himself.” And so we get the golem of Jakob Grimm, who, terminated by his fearful creator, for that very reason falls and crushes him to death.
There are certainly parallels between the conceptions of the golem and what for many of us may be more familiar creation myths, like Frankenstein’s monster, or even Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice. But what struck me about the golem myths was not the different uses to which the golem is put, but a subject about which Scholem seems slightly more reticent — the relationship of creator to creation itself.
Regardless of the time period or any one myth’s particular evolutionary stage, every golem account agrees on a kind of special power of man to create. Scholem refers to this ability as a kind of “permissible magic.” And while this power is sometimes ascribed to the Fall, it seems equally often to be understood as a natural endowment springing from humans’ descent from God, perhaps even implying that those who are more righteous, because of their greater proximity to God, are able to create greater things.
The subtext is always there however — is this an antagonistic, even threatening relationship with God — one which could jeopardize His supremacy over creation? Are the golem myths, in effect, another version of the Tower of Babel story? In one of the stories quoted by Scholem, God creates Adam at first without a soul, because, “He said: If I set him down now, it will be said that he was my companion in the work of Creation: so I will leave [Adam] as a golem until I have created everything else.” In this same tradition, Adam is sometimes said to have been a golem of “cosmic size and strength,” and Scholem writes that “According to the Aggadah, it was only after the fall that Adam’s enormous size, which filled the universe, was reduced to human, though still gigantic, proportions. In this image — an earthly being of cosmic dimensions — two conceptions are discernible. In the one, Adam is the vast primordial being of cosmogonic myth; in the other, his size would seem to signify, in spatial terms, that the power of the whole universe is concentrated in him.”* This seems a neat parallel to the golems of later myth, which grow in size as if to “regain the original stature of Adam.”
But if God were truly threatened by the power of his creation we would expect, as in the Tower of Babel story, for punishment to be meted out. After all, isn’t the God of the Hebrew Bible a jealous God? And yet, punishment never comes. At times the power of human beings seems to rival that of God, as when a midrash on Job comments on God’s intentional scrambling of the Torah: “No one knows its [right] order, for the sections of the Torah are not given in the right arrangement. If they were, everyone who reads in it might create a world, raise the dead, and perform miracles. Therefore the order of the Torah was hidden and is known to God alone.” Yet when humans work to unscramble the secrets of God in creating what may perhaps be a reasoning, living soul, it is more often seen as an act of worship than of blasphemy. All punishments visited upon creators of golems, instead, come from the flaws of the creators themselves, as God looks on from somewhere above, nary a thunderbolt in sight.
All this seems a stark contrast to the Christian conception of God I grew up with. Taking golem and man to be in some respect a surrogate for man and God, there is something subversive in the suggestion that the creator may be held to account for his creations, even punished or undone by them. The creation itself — golem, or perhaps human — is not responsible for its flaws, but the creator is. This suggests a radically different reading of the fall from Eden than I’ve ever considered. In light of this culpability, might we not also read the story of Jesus as not only the redemption of the human race, but also, in Jesus’s death, a simultaneous punishment of the Godhead?
There is so much more in Scholem’s examination that I didn’t touch upon, including the different and often conflicting interpretive traditions of the Hasidim and the Kabbalists, and the frequent equation of speech with reason among Jewish theologians. For me, it was all entirely new. I highly recommend a read if the idea of human beings created from clay, mechanical servants, or even just retellings of interesting folklore appeal to you (of course they do).
*The description of Adam beginning as a giant and shrinking down to size is particularly interesting to me as I make my way through Paradise Lost. In Book 1, Satan appears with similar gigantic proportions and shrinks down in order to fit into his newly created capital city of Pandemonium. That this maps onto the story of Adam presented here supports the idea that in Paradise Lost Satan’s fall anticipates Adam’s.