An anomalous Genesis: metaphor and implication in the creation of the golem

"I know I am a fool, hoping dirt and glory are both a kind of luminous paint; the humiliations and exaltations that light us up."
Jeanette Winterson, Gut Symmetries

Can Man really presume to assume the role of God? The textual sources that reference the process of golem-making seem to indicate that such an assumption of role is not only a possible but desirable act for the righteous and holy man to perform. Man, attempting to act in the capacity of God, desires to become a Creator - but can a made being truly entertain an aspiration to flawlessly fill the role of Maker? While folkloric and popular conceptions of golem-making seem to indicate directly that this aspiration is not lacking, there is a deeper subtext, a more complete meaning, etched and engraved in metaphor. The traditional and irreconcilable separation between God and Man is maintained through inchoate and incomplete mappings from the source domain of the Jewish Creation myth (the Creation of Man by God) and the target domain of golem-making (the creation of the golem by Man). Variant implications and independent metaphors within the two domains heighten the tension between what is stated and what is, in actuality, meant or intended. These metaphorical structures ultimately indicate an imperfect reflex, a broken mirroring of the act of Creation. Within the conceptual framework of Judaism, the gulf that exists between God and Man cannot be breached, there are no countermeasures that can withstand the void between divine and creatural reality. The metaphors that make themselves known - indeed, will not be restrained - within the context of golem-making (ontological verifiability of that act not withstanding) illustrate the inherent impossibility of true apotheosis.

The creature of the created, the golem itself, will here be defined as a kind of artificial anthropomorph. Much as Man is Created in the image of God, the golem is created in the image of Man, a replication that loses fidelity - the golem can never be or become Man, much as a Man can never be or become God. The golem in its original incarnation can be viewed as a kind of "magical homunculus"1 or an alchemically, supernaturally created and non-manifest being. The groundwork for its "creation" as such an enigmatic figure originates within the cryptic text of the Sefer Yetzirah (loosely translated as "Book of Creation"), the "oldest and most mysterious"2 of all the Kabbalistic works - the origin of this text is no longer accessable to historians, but passages are quoted from it as early as the sixth century.3 . The Sefer Yetzirah never describes or delves into literal instructions - the basis for the process derived from its text is purely oblique and interpretational in nature. The traditionally accepted and sanctioned interpretation is that of a thought exercise, or an ecstatic experiment - a non-corporeal, mystical experience4 by which the practicioner, through a vision of the golem, obtains communion with God.5 The Sefer Yetzirah provides the frame, the representational basis for golem-making - the secrets by which God brought the universe into being are carefully encoded6 and couched in arcane and obscure language - but a physically based interpretation is eschewed. Indeed, those foolhardy enough to seek, literally, to create an authentic, albeit artificial, "human" were ridiculed as performing an exercise in folly.7 It is in later incarnations that the mystical and acorporeal practice of golem-making acquired the tones and flavours of a being based in the physical realm, and the golem became an actualized, physically manifest figure in Kabbalistic legend.8 The concept of the golem, as will be dealt with here, is that of the latter disposition - a somatically incarnate, artificial being, created by Man. It is the fertile and abundant metaphorical constructions that the tangible golem of legend and folklore is inextricably embedded in that indicate the impropriety of the assumption of the role of God by Man within the overall context of Judaism. It is to this golem, that scrupulous attention will be addressed.

The metaphorical constructs that will be dealt with here function cohesively to reject the explicit meaning within golem-making texts and replace that explicit meaning with an implicit one - the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning9 is the point of departure. While the lexical items investigated here may reflect two or more disparate meanings at once,10 it is the deeper, imperative and culurally encoded and metaphorical meaning that is of relevance to this effort. A decidedly non-semanticist approach has been adopted; to assume that words have permanent meanings that designate some referents and exclude others,11 that words, the most basic units of language (if not speech) have hard cores and are not fluid, is to ignore context and reject the notion of a very real phenomenon - the phenomenon of meaningful metaphor. The analysis of the metaphorical structures inherent within the texts that deal with golem-making represents a discourse, an extra-linguistic reality12 wherein the literal sense of a lexical item - the sign - plays a secondary role to its metaphorical reference13 as it functions within the scope of a larger, contextual reality. By examining the incomplete mappings from the Creation of Man by God to the creation of the golem by Man and the variant implications and independent metaphors within the opposed cases, a deeper, mythic description or re-description of reality14 emerges from the chains of literal language.

In order to effectively and critically examine the assumption of the role of God by Man in the aspect of Creator, the Creation of Man by God, and its metaphorical constituents, must first be mapped out and delineated. Entering the dialogue of the Judaic Creation myth on the fifth day:

...then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
- Genesis 1:26-1:2715

There are several metaphors at work within this small passage which deal, respectively, with God, Man, language, the image of Man and control. While these metaphors may seem simplistic, they are not in any way superfluous and should not be taken for granted. The first metaphorical concept is that God is a Creator - again, the critical examination of this metaphor should not be considered to be obvious and below the notice of academic interest. It should be kept in mind that God is not necessarily a Creator - the act of Creation can be a salient characteristic or activity of any tradition's God, but that same God can be, for example, a Destroyer. Other entailments do exist, but it is not those entailments that are of concern within the textual boundaries of this passage. In this passage, God is mapped onto the role of a Creator; by virtue of His acting in the capacity of Deus Faber, or divine craftsman16 - the Creator as an artisan. God, as artisan or craftsman, therefore, lays claim to a kind of authourship, and consequently authourity over mankind as a creation, as any craftsman has authourity over objects of his creation. The associated mapping of Man is a Creation should not be easily dismissed as either inherent or obvious, for it is the essential nature of Man as a creature, as a created thing, that figures prominently, even centrally, within the context of Judaism. Man is a thing apart from God, made by God, created. God is the uncreated Creator, the unmade Maker, and Man is a creation. The term "Creation", without the preceding indefinite article ("a"), is in reference to a specific act - Man as a creation, with the preceding indefinite article ("a") intact, is the created object. As such, Man has a maker, as well as the entailments that correspond to such a situation - a creatural nature, dependency on a Creator, and subservience to the authourity of that Creator over His creation.

The nature of this Creation, the Creation of Man, has metaphorical markings as well. The Hebrew God, by voicing the making of humanity, creates humanity. By "speaking the word", a creative connection between cosmic order and the ordering principle of language is made.17 This cosmic order is mapped onto language - to name a thing is to instantiate an act of creation, a specialized version of creation out of nothing , or creation ex nihilo.18 While this concept - that to name is to create - has come under philosophical attack as an overestimated "language game...pushed to the point of superstition,"19 this fascination with words and assignation of a potent creativity to language is embedded within the matrix of the Jewish faith and cannot be dismissed, for to ignore the context out of which a thing examined arises - be it a linguistic superstition or a doctrine of the immutable nature of a god - is to fail to examine it at all.

The image of Man as the image of God is a particularly intriguing and somewhat problematic metaphor within the cited passage. Man is created in God's image, as a reproduction or facsimile of God, "according to our likeness." The notion of a plural God - in effect, multiple gods - within the monotheistic faith of Judaism is contextually and culturally inconsistent; the plurality in this passage may be due to translational error or shifts in theological doctrine and terminology. The interdomain mapping of the Creation of Man by God onto the creation of the golem by Man might, perhaps, be more consistent and less disparate as a result if a plural nature of God (as gods) were taken into consideration. As it is, the entailments of the monotheistic doctrine of Judaism add to the inconsistency and incompleteness of the assumption of the role of God by Man. While, in Judaism, there is but one God, there are many men - this concept alone complicates a truly complete rendering of metaphorical mapping.

The notion of power or control also comes into play, although it is a slightly less salient metaphor than those listed above. Power and control are referenced to an upward direction, a specialized version of a metaphor in which "goodness" is correlated to an upward direction, wherein the upward direction is associated with general well-being.20 Thus, we have Man in the "up" position, having control or power over the "lower" creatures. (God, in this cosmological scheme, necessarily has control or power over Man, metaphorically represented by His position in the heavens, with Man below.)

The second passage that deals with the Creation of Man by God is also a selection from Genesis, and provides another account, one different from that previously discussed, both in the nature and the timing of the Creation. (The conflict between these two accounts of Creation, albeit a fascinating topic with many implications within the contexts of religious literature and modern feminist theory, to name only two of a myriad of disciplines that would benefit from investigating this quandary, is too large an issue in its entirety to be dealt with in the specific context of this analysis.) Here, Man is made directly after the Earth and the Heavens, apparently before plant life (and, presumably, animal life as well) - not as a final creation, or a crowning glory, as is implied in Genesis, but before the rest of the inhabitants of the created world have been formed or created. This passage provides a slightly different version of creation ex nihilo:

...In the day that the Lord God made the Earth and the Heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up...then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being...
- Genesis 2:5-2:721

In this passage, some of the metaphors in the passage from Genesis 1 are reiterated, including the shift in some to more highly specialized cases, while others are absent. The metaphorical roles of God as Creator and Man as Creation are again duplicated, with the additional specialization of God as a potter. In this, the "clay myth"22 formulae, much as a potter works with clay, mixing it with water in order to create a finished product such as a pot or an urn, God mixes "the dust of the ground" with air to create Man. It is possible here, that "breath", in addition to providing another, distinct, metaphor for the life or the soul (to be expounded upon separately), is functioning as a metaphoric substitute for water. Water, associated with the feminine principle and with the amniotic fluid of childbirth from the womb23 , may be at once too corporeal and too charged with feminized signifiers to be associated with the male Hebrew God; "breath" as "air" may be considered to be a more lofty and spiritual substitute. It has been suggested that "clay myths" in which the clay alone is used as the sole primal material reflect the "old Mother Power of the ancient goddess cultures,"24 while "later clay myths in which the male plays a significant role as the one who breathes life into the clay or fertilizes it in some way" suggest a movement toward a more patriarchal religious vision.25 This may explain the use of air, a traditionally more masculine element, in place of water, a traditionally more feminine element, but it can be argued that air is simply conceived of as being a more inherently spiritual element by virtue of its intangibility and seeming acorporeal nature - a more fitting catalyst for the creative energy of a God who is not of flesh and blood. (As will be avowed, however, there are no such compunctions or limitations on the creative catalyst employed by Man, a more haptic and tangible creature, living in a creatural reality - indeed, water is a necessary element within the formulae for golem-making.) The associated mapping for God is a potter is Man is clay - again, a variant on the previously elucidated theme of Man is a creation. The qualities and features of clay as a medium are mapped onto the embodied Man - clay must be operated upon by an outside agent. Iinterestingly, Adam, as the first Man, as a being who was "taken from the earth"26 is designated, at one point in his incompleted creation as a golem, in the sense of being unformed and amorphous (from the Yiddish goylem; literally "shapeless mass"27 ), before being touched by the "breath of God."28 It is also of interest to note that "Adam" is not considered to be a proper name at this point; although "Adam" means "man",29 it is more than likely a play on the Hebrew word for earth, 'adamah.30 Without the participation of God as Deus Faber, the clay - the Man - remains formless and without identity. The finished clay product belongs, in a sense, to the potter, much as Man, within the cosmology of Judaism, in a sense, belongs to God. The issue of authourship and authourity is once more addressed.

The notion of power and control as connected to upward orientation is also echoed, in a fairly unambiguous manner. In this second passage from Genesis, Man is made from the ground, the earth, matter associated with a downward orientation and existing in opposition to the Heavens. It is only with the external influence from above, in the form of air, an element associated with the sky, from God in Heaven that his creation is complete.

Within this second account of Creation, the element of air provides both metaphor and metonymy. By breathing into Man's nostrils the "breath of life", God bestows life upon Man; "breath" is standing in, metonymically, for "life" - breath being a very necessary and salient feature of what is commonly considered to be life. Other salient features would work equally well for the purposes of simple metonymy, ie, a pulse, if one were to consider the flow of blood to be a necessary and salient feature of life. It should be noted here that "breath", in a non-metonymic sense, can be metaphorically understood as the soul, without which, within the context of Judaic thought, a thing is not truly alive. Even animals have a soul, albeit of a lesser kind than the human soul.31 There are therefore two processes at work here - one is the metonymic relationship between breath and life, the other is the metaphor of breath for soul and life. Without either soul or breath, a thing cannot truly be alive - this is an important concept to consider when deliberating upon the integrity of the metaphorical mappings from the Creation of Man by God to the creation of the golem by Man.

The textual accounts of golem-making, denoted as a practice with a palpable, physical result and commentaries and legends pertaining thereof are widely and wildly varied, but certain features and characteristics remain. Hylomorphically generated golems have been purported as created to serve in radically divergent capacities - from defenders of the righteous in times of danger32 to housekeepers or concubines.33 Historically, Jewish prophets have constantly warned against and discouraged the belief that Man can compete with God's creative powers,34 that entertaining such an ambitious endeavor may not be emulation but, in fact, a direct act of antagonism.35 And yet, at least in legend, there have been those who attempt to solve the riddle of Creation36 and replicate it, through the creation of a golem.

The elements used in the creation of the golem have been deemed unimportant by certain archaic traditions connected to the notorious Simon Magus37 - it matters not if the golem is made of dust or air or water. However, the more prevalent materials, the common elements employed in the genesis of this creature are tangible and organic - the "brute material" of dust, considerably tellurian in nature, and water. 38 The dust, or earth, purified39 is combined or kneaded with water; and the pronunciation of combinations of letters over the shaped body animate it:40

Golems can be created using many different methods, according to the sources. Some state that it is accomplished through combinations of letters. These combinations are called "gates", the number of gates differing according to the various Kabbalistic schools, and ranging in number from 231 to as many as 271, depending on how the letters are to be combined. (The gates were formed by combining every letter of the Hebrew alphabet to every other letter. The analogy in the Roman Alphabet would be to begin with AB, AC, AD, AE, and so on, until reaching ZV, ZW, ZX, ZY. In most systems of gates, letters are not combined with themselves.) Other schools taught that a golem was created through the utterance of Divine Names. The Talmud records that there are 12, 42, and even 72 letter names of God that might have been used for this purpose. Many schools, such as the Hasidim, held that the Hebrew word 'emet (truth) should be inscribed upon the forehead of the golem. Among a number of methods of deconstructing a golem, a common one was the erasure of the aleph, the first letter of 'emet. This leaves the word met (dead) which destroys the golem.41

These core elements - material and ritual, including ritual purity42 - are motifs that repeat over and over again.43 Although not all schools of Kabbalistic thought adhered to the same procedure of inscribing the word 'emet upon the forehead of the creature, word-magic is still employed. One of the Divine Names of God may be inscribed upon the forehead,44 for example, or either of these things - 'emet or a Divine Name - may be writ upon a piece of paper and placed either under the Golem's tongue or in its ear. The golem, the man-shaped figure of clay, neither breathes nor speaks,45 nor has a true soul.46 In order to destroy the Golem, language, the catalyst of genesis, is used as a vehicle of annihilation; the letter combinations of the gates may be chanted in reverse,47 or the letters of the Divine Name or 'emet, inscribed or inserted, must somehow be changed or destroyed. This can be accomplished through total erasure,48 partial erasure (ie, the removal of the initial aleph of 'emet to form met),49 or a recombination of the letters.50

There are many metaphors at work here, some of which are clearly drawn as parallels to the original Jewish Creation myth, some of which have different implications with regards to the role of Man as Creator, and some of which are independent of the original myth and are drawn from a purely human source. The common metaphors, those present both within the texts of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, must be examined first, for only then will the deviant metaphors, those which will not be mapped form the source domain of Creation of Man by God, appear appropriately significant. It is the rogue nature of those metaphors that bring into sharp relief the separate nature of Man from God, and embody the inability of Man to assume the role of Creator.

The prime metaphor that comes into play within the textual sources of golem-making is Man as Creator - or Man as God. In the most positive interpretation possible, Man is emulating the role of God,51 adopting the entailments of his Creator. The reverse of this, the negative interpretation, is that Man is, in essence, competing with the creative power of his God.52 Much as God made Man, within the framework of the Genesis tales, Man makes the Golem. Man therefore assumes the same rights of authourship; indeed, even the power of life or death, inasmuch as the golem can be said to be vulnerable to either. (This statement is reliant on the notion of whether "life", within this proscribed context, is possible without a soul or a "true soul".) Consequently, the golem stands in, metaphorically, for Man in its role as a creation. The golem is dependent upon Man for its existence - both at the instance of initiation and in the sense of continuity, for Man must ultimately destroy his creation; the golem is destined to return to dust.53

The specialized cases of Creation present in Genesis 2 are present here as well, the metaphor for a Creator is a potter is also applied to Man:

...Rabbi Leib found the sacks with the clay and began to sculpt the figure of a man. Rabbi Leib did not use a chisel but his fingers to carve the figure of the golem. He was working with great speed; at the same time, he prayed for success in what he was doing. All day Rabbi Leib was busy...when it was time for the evening prayer, a large shape of a man with a huge head, broad shoulders, and enormous hands and feet was lying on the floor - a clay giant.54

As a potter works with clay to form a finished product, as God Created Man from Clay, so Man creates the golem. By extension - God as Creator/potter, Man as Creator/potter - Man is God. The language employed here must be very cautious - within the context of Judaism, God is the Creator, with a definite article consistently employed, not a Creator circumscribed by an indefinite article. Man, here, by assuming the role of potter, is metaphorically assuming the role of "the one God." Accordingly, the golem, mapped onto clay (indeed, literally formed from it) is mapped onto the role of Man. However, while it can be argued that "Adam" is not a proper name,55 it is commonly treated as one. The golem, however, never gains a proper name - a golem is always "golem", with no pretensions towards a proper name, only remaining a "shapeless mass,"56 a thing-in-potential. God alone maintains the power to name or to create through language; were Man truly capable of assuming, completely, the role of Creator, the golem would achieve shape and form, no longer existing as a thing-in-potential but as a thing-in-itself.

Language is Creation is a metaphor that occurs and recurs time and time again - as in the mappings laid out for the passage from Genesis 1; as God says, so God Creates. The creative connection between Creation and language again comes into play; words, language, instantiate an act of creation. However, Man cannot simply call the golem into being through a pure statement of intention. Man must follow specific and exacting instructions when chanting the letter combinations of the gates or pronouncing the Divine Name, lest "the limb created by the means of this letter...change its natural place."57 God has no such limitations - and Man must call upon the power of God, Man must use the formulae circumspectly described in the Sefer Yetzirah, the formulae for Creation 58 in order to infuse his creation with life. Man cannot simply "speak the word." Language, however, is employed as the catalyst for the creation of the golem, be it in the form of the chanting of the gates, the writing of the Divine Name of God or the engraving of 'emet upon the golem's forehead.

The maker of the golem, in most instances, creates the golem in an anthropomorphic shape, although the golem has been described as "a creature, particularly a human being,"59 which indicates that non-anthropoid creatures may be made as well; however, the intent for these non-humanoid - indeed, non-anthropomorphic - golems seems to be of a more bodily and less divinely inspired sort than attempted apotheosis. There is a tale of a golem calf,60 for example, which had been created for the express purpose of slaughter - and was created again and again, to be feasted upon again and again. The golem is normally - almost normatively - created in the form of a man; there is but one singular and isolated instance of a gynomorphic golem, a golem created in the image of a woman:

They said about R. S{helemo} ben Gabirol, that he created a woman and she waited on him. When he was denounced to the authourities, he showed them that she was not a perfect creature, and (then) he turned her to her original (state), to the pieces and hinges of wood, out of which she was built up.61

This female golem was rumoured to have been ben Gabriol's concubine or helpmeet;62 it is interesting to note that the usual basic substance employed in golem-making is not used here - golems created in the form of man are of clay. Female golems are set apart, marked as Other even in reference to other golems, their very matter being other than that of Man or man-shaped golems. The mapping of the physical features of Man, of the primal substance of Man, onto the golem is not insignificant; it supports the overall claim that Man is attempting to assume the role of God. For Man to create the golem in his own likeness is to map directly from his own creation in God's likeness. The golem however, is not perfectly mapped onto Man - there are cracks and flaws in the metaphorical moorings. Although visual artists entered onto the scene of the golem legend late in its development,63 the visual metaphors for the creatures imperfect and anomalous nature are manifold. The golem is commonly depicted as thick and clumsy, squared off64 and, in one unique instance, with a "dull stare and a fixed smile...on the verge of tears."65 This tendency toward depicting the golem as an odd Other, crude and threatening66 is emphasized in the modern world of film- Paul Wegener's golem (from Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam, 1920), as a cinematic character is intended to "impart a terrifying strangeness, a sense of primitive urges, a certain mechanization in movement and behaviour, as well as the potential for human emotion."67 The golem in the world of visual art is a tragic creature of unrealized potential, heavy and bewildered;68 primordial and befuddled. These physical depictions of awkwardness and ungainliness may be outward manifestations of the golem's imperfect and somehow wrong nature - visual metaphors for the golem's spiritual imperfection, or outward indicators of the fact that the golem has no soul. Only rarely is it conferred a nefesh, or the kind of spirit, specifically stated to be a not-soul, given to higher animals;69 the golem is created with a "different brain than that of man."70 When, on the uncommon occassion, the golem is conferred a kind of soul, it is of a non-intellectual, lower sort than Man's, and as such, inferior. The attempt to recreate Man's Creation falls short:

As long as the power of the intellect does not illuminate the infant, he is mute, unable to speak. And if a man will create a creature, a golem, by the (Divine) Names and the holy letters mentioned in Sefer Yetzirah, and the golem has a figure with the appearance of a man shaped out of matter, having even a soul with all the powers and senses, but without (the power of) speech since he has no reason and his soul lacks the power of intellection, since man is unable to infuse an intellective soul and the power of procreation (koah ha-molid) but God alone, as we have explained in the book Beit ha-Yozer, which I have composed on the Sefer Yetzirah.71

The golem, lacking the ability to speak, can be said to lack what is considered to be a "true soul", within the context of Judaism. The iniquities of Man which separate him from God prevent him from creating a speaking man, a complete man; the righteous Man cannot duplicate his own Creation; Man's power is not so great as to "bring a speaking soul in man...since he is a man"72 :

Rava said: If the righteous desire to do so, they could create a world. What prevented (them)? Their iniquities, as it is written. But your iniquities have been a barrier between you and your God. Behold, if not for your iniquities, there would be no separation between you and him. Since Rava created a man and sent him to R. Zeira he was speaking to him, but he did not answer. Were it not for your iniquities, he would have answered. Whence would he answer? Out of his soul...Were it not for our iniquities, (which caused) that the soul is not pure, which is the separation between you and Him, as it is written...73

While Divine speech confers a higher soul (nishmat hayyim) to Man, Man can only hope to confer, at best, the lower soul (nefesh hayyah) to the golem.74 Man cannot grant his creation knowledge of divine issues or the ability to speak, indeed, to breathe. Such issues of knowledge and speech are "unattainable for any creature to accomplish, except God, May He be blessed."75 - the implication here is that Creation is the sole province of God, who alone is suited to maintain its bailiwick.

The golem's inability to procreate is another indicator of the failed replication of Man by Man, for "whoever has no sons is like a dead man...he is like a Golem, without form;"76 the golem is, in a sense, dead before it ever has a chance to live. It can bear no progeny; it is progeny of none - it is an artificially engendered being. Without the ability to procreate, the golem is considered a null, a void; a man without sons is somewhat less than human, compared, in essence, to a dead man. The golem, in this sense, is a functionally dead man, and can never live at all. It is because of the anomalous genesis of the golem, which is "not born from man's semen and is not grown in a woman's womb,"77 a doomed aetiology of sorts, that there is no sin in its destruction. It is precisely because the golem is a flawed reproduction of Man that destroying it is acceptable, even necessary. The golem is not permitted humanity - should a golem show sings of adopting human ways or falling "into the follies of flesh and blood"78 (such as wishing to wed, or desiring to study the Torah), it is the responsibility of the maker to destroy it.

Another important lacking quality of the golem, an indication of the failure of Man to totally and completely replicate his own Creation, is its lack of sensible free will - considered to be the greatest gift bestowed upon Man by God.79 The golem, created by an imperfect being, is necessarily imperfect; when urges even remotely bearing any kind of resemblance to that of free will arise within the abridged consciousness of the golem, the result can only be disastrous. When the golem attempts to function as a creature possessed of free will, its lack of reason and higher intellect complicate the matter, and difficulty and danger are the result:

...the golem often became independent, rebellious, and a danger to his maker. The golem of Prague, for instance, turned out to be an extreme literalist. When he was ordered to bring water from the well into Rabbi Loew's house, he kept on carrying pails of water in until the house was flooded. It grew more and more difficult to "program" him. He became so unruly that Rabbi Loew had to erase the sacred name on his clay forehead and thus put an end to his existence.80

This imperfect execution of free will is viewed as destructive, spiteful, treacherous and mad - perhaps an unfair assessment in light of the golem's limited capabilities. Man, having free will, is ultimately responsible for his choice to do or to do not evil - the freedom of that choice is where the significance lies - Man's acts of virtue and choice to not do evil, enhance God's Creation, give meaning to God's "divine experiments." The golem, by contrast, cannot even begin to hope to do so - deprived of the capability for higher thought - for the creative capability of even the righteous Man, for he remains a Man, is limited.81 The golem exists as a device, as a tool; it is possessed of an amoral, though not immoral, nature; its sins are the responsibility of its creator. Although the golem is explicitly intended to metaphorically stand in for Man in the scenario wherein Man plays at being God, it is never given the capability to do so, and can maintain only the most perfunctory vision of freedom, which inevitably results in its death. Although Man and the golem may be made of the same matter, they are not of the same mettle.

Thus the golem is subservient to Man, as is, in fact, entirely consistent and properly coherent with the mapping laid out in Genesis 2. As with the role of Man respective to God in Genesis 2, the golem is created from the earth, the ground, the dust at Man's feet. This dust, associated with a downward orientation, grants to Man an upward orientation erstwhile reserved only for God; a metaphor, as stated previously, for power and control. Man has power and control over the golem, to the point of taking the golem's life, granted by Man himself, away.

There are, however, other mappings not present in the original Creation myth which seem to be connected with the fact that golem-making is a peculiarly human activity. They do not appear within the tales of Man's Creation by God because they are unnecessary within that sphere - it is the golem's creation by Man, an imperfect mimesis, that provides anthropocentric metaphorical structures which are not present for the Divine Creator. These metaphors are absent or meaningless, with no reference, in the domain of the Creator God.

The human maker of the golem must concern himself with the concept of holy, ritual purity, a state in which he would be able to set foot within the Holy of Holies, the Temple82 - implying, certainly, that as a Man, he has the capacity for impurity. This is a notion that does not concern the Hebrew Creator God, who emanates holiness83 by virtue of His very nature. This God is not capable of sin, of having His holiness compromised; the holiness of God is a supposed static state; the holiness of Man is decidedly non-static. Man possesses free will and, having the capacity to do evil, may well choose to do so, rendering himself as stained or impure. The fact that physical rituals that the golem-maker must undertake in order to achieve a state of purity (ie, the mikvah, or ritual cleansing bath) exist points, inversely, to the veracity that Man can become tainted and unholy. In order to rid himself of the spiritual taint of sin, Man physically purifies himself; to be physically clean is a visual and tangible metaphor for spiritual holiness.84 The robes that the righteous wear, in every recorded instance, are white - metonymically mirroring and reinforcing the conceptualized and supposed state of purity The colour white can be read easily as an instantiation of the metaphor of lightness of tone for goodness.85 . Thus, physical cleanliness is a metaphor for moral purity and holiness,86 a factor that the hidden, non-physical God has no parlance with. The Hebrew God is not conceived of as having a physical body, or as being capable of a state of uncleanliness or unholiness. This metaphor, that physical cleanliness is tantamount to spiritual holiness, while in no manner pertinent to God, is extremely and pointedly relevant to the human condition - the condition of the golem-maker.

A variation on the white garments of the golem-maker - on colour as indicative of the golem's metatextual, or perceived, moral status - is the darkness of the golem itself. While the golem has no free will or morality, and can therefore not be truly immoral, its very existence is characterized as such through a reading of the golem's colouration. This metaphor is quasi-present in the name given to the first Man in the Judaic Creation myth; "Adam" may literally translate to "red earth."87 While this is not "black earth", it is also not "white earth;" darkness is metaphorically associated with badness88 - darkness engenders fear. This may be indicative of Man's status as, while not entirely evil, for Adam is not equated with blackness or total darkness, rather a "redness" (perhaps a state positioned precariously between black and white, with the potential to become either) clearly inferior to God's. The golem, on the other hand, is always depicted as immutably dark, made of dark earth, or, in the instance of the female golem, dark wood. There have been no cases of golden golems, coruscating golems, or golems made of crystal or glass - light-coloured substances, metaphorically representing goodness. If the concepts of good and evil hold no sway over the golem itself, as a being incapable of making moral decisions and acting on them, the existence of the golem, as a kind of hubris on the part of Man, may be the responsible, active agent for the attribution of the signifiers of badness or wrongness to the golem's physical form. At the very least, these signifiers impart coherent inferiority to the golem - as Man is, in this schemata, inferior to his Creator, so is the golem inferior to its creator..

The golem's limited existence as an inferior being is further illustrated by the common descriptors in its death scenes, which reflect the partial existence the creature is imbued with. While Man is clearly mortal, he has an immortal component, the soul. The golem is lacking in such a divine commodity, and the method of its demise is reflective of this deficiency or defect. The golem's mortal state is much more poignant than that of Man, much more clearly delineated. While Man comes from the earth, lives on earth, and will return to the earth, as dust or in a grave,89 upon death, his soul, the divine component, will be elevated to the heavens. The golem has no such compensation; its mortal nature is unquestionable and inevitable. When the golem "dies", or ceases to exist, it simply returns to clay, earth. Nothing more. The death scenes of the golem are informative as well - the golem tumbles, falls, or crumbles down to the earth, in a heap of dust. It does not dissolve ethereally; it does not explode volcanically. It simply crumbles downward to the matter of its making. The downward motion and the earth itself, both associated with downwardness and, hence, earthliness or mortality, highlight the golem's state as the most mortal of mortal creatures. While Man has a Divine maker, the golem's maker is all-too-human; though Man has a Divine component, he cannot confer such a thing to his creation. The golem's origin, while reliant upon the Divine names of God, is soleley human in function and privilege (or lack thereof).

The golem's return to a shapeless, non-animate heap of clay, is its only fitting end. If having a form is a metaphor for existence itself,90 the literal definition of "golem", as a "shapeless mass" can either solve or complicate the issue of whether the golem can be truly said to exist without a soul, the animating principle. Form, within this limited and specialized context, is not enough to confer existence onto any creature or being; the legendary, literary golem is frequently created without a soul at all. Without a soul, can the golem truly be said to exist within the confines of Judaic thought? If having a form is metaphoric for having existence, the somatic golem does exist, in that sense, but it cannot exist within the context demarcated by Genesis. The golem, textually, at least, exists in a literal-metaphorical sense, but not in a animus-metaphorical sense. The golem, as pure form, a form based on that of Man, exists as such; it does not, however, exist in a spiritual sense, even with the infusion of the nefesh, which deals with sensory reality alone; only Man possesses the nishmat, the higher soul. The question of whether or not the golem can be said to truly exist, as it is defined in the sources, is an interesting ontological problem in and of itself; it cannot be solved here. It can only be concluded that the golem's existence qua existence is somehow illicit and erroneous. The genesis of the golem is an anomalous thing, indeed.

The salient texts devoted to golem-making, and commentary pertaining thereof, are betrayed by a metaphorical interpretation - this reading betrays the literal, dis-orders it.91 And yet, time and time again, Man is warned against entering into an antagonistic relationship with his God, against attempting to recreate Creation. This warning is reiterated, metaphorically, within the very texts that condone the practice of golem-making. If golem-making were truly a sanctioned practice, those metaphors would not be present to displace the internal logical order presented in the texts, where golem-making is proscribed and described as a desirable act. The texts betray themselves; they judge themselves92 in the court of metaphor and language. Although this is never stated in the instructional texts and only ambiguously hinted at in the commentaries (which still treat the act itself as manageable), they find themselves lacking. The metaphorical structures that are inherent to the concept of golem-making, and the entailments derived thereof, operate on a semiotic level, for the most part - the sentences of the texts do not contain the meaning in entirety; the sentences are not reducible to the sum of their parts.93 Indeed, as imperatives and instructions, the semantic meaning refuses the semiotic meaning entirely. The words employed remain the focus of the effective metaphorical94 and mythic, extra-textual meaning - the words are not simply signs with solid referents and restricted, literal meanings.95 This distinction is an important one to make, especially as the function of these lexical entities, as the carriers of meaning,96 is entirely counter to the semantics of the sentence. Yet it is the semiotic approach which yields an interpretation that is coherent within the overall framework of Judaism - that Man cannot really presume to assume the role of God.

1 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Schoken Books, New York, 1974; p99 back to text
2 Aryeh Kaplan, Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and Practice, Samuel Weiser, Inc., York Beach, 1991; pix back to text
3 Ibid. back to text
4 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism; Schoken Books, New York, 1965; p188 back to text
5 Ibid. back to text
6 http://www.sff.net/people/d.honigsberg/ravasman.htp back to text
7 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism; Schoken Books, New York, 1965; p188 back to text
8 Ibid.; p184 back to text
9 Paul Ricouer, The rule of metaphor; University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1977; p81 back to text
10 Ibid. back to text
11 Ibid.; p112 back to text
12 Ibid.; p216 back to text
13 Ibid.; p217 back to text
14 Ibid.; p247 back to text
15 The Holy Bible (NRSV); Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, 1989; p1 back to text
16 David & Margaret Leeming, A Dictionary of Creation Myths; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994; p56-58 back to text
17 Ibid.; p59 back to text
18 Ibid.; p61 back to text
19 Paul Ricouer, The rule of metaphor; University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1977; p128 back to text
20 George Lakoff & Mark Turner, Metaphors We Live By; The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980; p18 back to text
21 The Holy Bible (NRSV); Zondervan Publishing House, Grand Rapids, 1989; p2 back to text
22 David & Margaret Leeming, A Dictionary of Creation Myths; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994; p60 back to text
23 Ibid.; p117 back to text
24 Ibid.; p60 back to text
25 Ibid. back to text
26 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism; Schoken Books, New York, 1965; p160 back to text
27 Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, Yiddish Folktales; Pantheon Press, New York, 1988; p372 back to text
28 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism; Schoken Books, New York, 1965; p161 back to text
29 Emily D. Bilski & Moshe Idel, The Golem: An Historical Overview in: GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p11 back to text
30 David & Margaret Leeming, A Dictionary of Creation Myths; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994; p117 back to text
31 Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Golem; Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1982; p23 back to text
32 Ibid.; p25 back to text
33 Moshe Idel, Foreward in: GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p6-7 back to text
34 Ibid.; p6 back to text
35 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism; Schoken Books, New York, 1965; p159 back to text
36 Moshe Idel, Foreward in: GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p6 back to text
37 Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid; SUNY Press, Albany, 1990; p6 back to text
38 Ibid.; pxviii back to text
39 Ibid.; p65 back to text
40 Ibid.; pxviii back to text
41 http://www.sff.net/people/d.honigsberg/ravasman.htp back to text
42 Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid; SUNY Press, Albany, 1990; p60 back to text
43 Ibid.; pxviii back to text
44 Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Golem; Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1982; p23 back to text
45 Emily D. Bilski & Moshe Idel, The Golem: An Historical Overview in: GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p17 back to text
46 Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid; SUNY Press, Albany, 1990; p70 back to text
47 Emily D. Bilski & Moshe Idel, The Golem: An Historical Overview in: GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p12 back to text
48 Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Golem; Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1982; p47 back to text
49 Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid; SUNY Press, Albany, 1990; p65 back to text
50 Ibid. back to text
51 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism; Schoken Books, New York, 1965; p159 back to text
52 Ibid. back to text
53 Ibid.; p188 back to text
54 Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Golem; Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1982; p26-27 back to text
55 David & Margaret Leeming, A Dictionary of Creation Myths; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994; p4, p117 back to text
56 Beatrice Silverman Weinreich, Yiddish Folktales; Pantheon Press, New York, 1988; p372 back to text
57 Moshe Idel, The Golem in Jewish Magic and Mysticism in:GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p24 back to text
58 Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid; SUNY Press, Albany, 1990; p10 back to text
59 Ibid.; pxvii back to text
60 Ibid., p19 back to text
61 Ibid.; p233 back to text
62 Moshe Idel, Foreward in: GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p6-7 back to text
63 Emily D. Bilski, The Art of the Golem in GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p49 back to text
64 http://www.seils.rutgers.edu/special/kay/backgroundgolem.html back to text
65 Ibid. back to text
66 Emily D. Bilski, The Art of the Golem in GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988.; p51. back to text
67 Ibid.; p51 back to text
68 Ibid.; p65 back to text
69 Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Golem; Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1982; p75 back to text
70 Ibid.; p37 back to text
71 R. Pinhas Eliahu, Sefer ha-Berit, folio 95b, Vilna, 1897; folio 95b back to text
72 Moshe Idel, The Golem in Jewish Magic and Mysticism in: GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p28 back to text
73 Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid; SUNY Press, Albany, 1990; p128 back to text
74 Ibid.; p71 back to text
75 Ibid.; p237 back to text
76 Ibid. back to text
77 Moshe Idel, Foreward in: GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p7 back to text
78 Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Golem; Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1982; p23 back to text
79 Moshe Idel, Foreward in: GOLEM! Danger, Deliverance and Art (Emily D. Bilski, ed.); The Jewish Museum, New York, 1988; p8 back to text
80 Ibid. back to text
81 Gershom Scholem, On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism; Schoken Books, New York, 1965; p166 back to text
82 Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid; SUNY Press, Albany, 1990; p60 back to text
83 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Schoken Books, New York, 1946; p115 back to text
84 The Berkeley Metaphor Group, Master Metaphor and Metonymy List; Linguistics 106 Reader, Berkeley, 1997; p186 back to text
85 Ibid.; p190 back to text
86 Ibid.; p186 back to text
87 David & Margaret Leeming, A Dictionary of Creation Myths; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1994; p4 back to text
88 The Berkeley Metaphor Group, Master Metaphor and Metonymy List; Linguistics 106 Reader, Berkeley, 1997; p190 back to text
89 George Lakoff & Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Metaphor; The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1989; p150 back to text
90 The Berkeley Metaphor Group, Master Metaphor and Metonymy List; Linguistics 106 Reader, Berkeley, 1997; p71 back to text
91 Paul Ricouer, The rule of metaphor; University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1977; p22 back to text
92 Ibid.; p58 back to text
93 ;Ibid. p67 back to text
94 Ibid.; p66 back to text
95 Ibid.; p69 back to text
96 Ibid.; p111 back to text

Copyright Rachel Strasser 1999

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