Truth or Scare
Radbam February 23rd, 2009
Prague 2/23/09
- Rabbi Loew and the Golem by: Mikolas Ales
It’s one thing to learn about the Golem legend through its modern incarnations in the hip, urban revisionings of the new generation of Jewish authors. The Clay Giant’s saga impressed American popular culture early in the 20th century, as it did the young lives of so many as Superman, the hyper-anglicized, ethnically deracinated Man of Steel.
It’s another thing entirely to walk the stone lanes where the legend lived, and where the Golem’s creator, Rabbi Judah Loew, reigned as Rav Supreme. The tale is a local variant of mass messianic movements, but with an admonishing twist. The Jews of Prague needed a hero (without the disco back track) to defend them against the forever simmering and often devastating anti-Semitism that lay beyond the quarter’s walls. But we are a cerebral, pious people, little schooled in the Charles Bronson vein of vigilantism. So the Jews did the next best thing: the faithful, scholarly leader Loew created a monster/robot (Czech word)/redeemer called the Golem to save the day, protecting the Jews while introducing the concept of deterrence and mutually-assured destruction to the Prague community centuries before the Cold War.
End of story? Hardly, for no Jewish narrative can conscientiously close without a strident moral message and tip of the kippah to rabbinic authority. Loew brought the being of Vltava river mud to life by inscribing 3 Hebrew letters on its forehead: aleph-mem-tav–Emet/Truth. When the Golem went off script and off the reservation, ransacking homes and lives as the embodiment of pure, unqualified violence, Loew, its only master, scratched off the Hebrew letter aleph, leaving the word met/death, thus ending the Golem’s sacred spree.
On one level, it’s a reaffirmation of the scriptural dictum-turned-cultural imperative: Not by might, nor by power, but by (My) spirit alone…But perhaps a less obvious lesson involves the essence of Truth. While it can set you free, any absolute taken out of context or employed without measure can be counterproductive at best, destructive at worst.
My minyan (+1) of fellow travelers have reached the boundary of the Promised Land of adult freedoms and responsibilities. Perhaps their most trying challenge will be to grow beyond the sureties of absolutes (a capacity lost to fundamentalists of all makes and models) to confront, even to embrace, the power and purpose of living life in the gray zone. Gray, the color of the Golem’s muddy form, the tenor of evolved ethical struggle, and the foggy but freeing pathway to moral resolution as our true, ultimate redemption.
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