Eileen Gunn: Questionable Practices

In truth, I don’t know whether, without his intervention, I would refrain from labor, or work as dutifully as usual. My nature is mixed, as he says.

And yet I must be a Jew, mustn’t I, if the Holy Name has power over me? Without it, I lose life, although I retain the form of life, a form very similar, but not identical, to that of a man. Women, it is clear, do not consider me a man, and yet they are fearful of me in a way that they are also fearful of large, bad men, not in ways that they are fearful of beasts. This is puzzling to me. If I am not a man, I cannot be a bad man. My fault here, I think, is that I am large.

Perhaps it is because of my mixed nature that I have not accepted the yoke of mitzvot, of the necessity of taking one’s duties as a human seriously. In any case, I do not fully understand what those duties are, so that even should I want to fulfill them, I have not the means. I am not religious, and I shall not pray for the means. Would a rock pray to be human? Would it be right to grant such a wish? Personally, as a rock, I have no ambitions to be human, and I find it makes my head hurt to think about this.

Through the window of this storehouse, high in the Altneushul, I can see a being on the branch of a tree near by, watching me. Sitting on a branch it looks very much like a tiny bird, but when it rises into the air, it does not move like a bird. It is trying to get my attention, with its abrupt movements and its twittering. It is filled with life, but I don’t understand what it is trying to tell me. Why are the birds and the flowers so concerned with communicating with me?

I need no messages from birds and flowers. They have nothing to tell me. I served the Rabbi, and the Rabbi served G-d. What I know, I know from my closeness to the Rabbi, just as what he knew came from G-d.

That day, before I discovered my weakness with respect to the gravestones, I met the daughter of the ratcatcher. However, it may not be quite correct to say that I met her, since no introductions were made, nor were names exchanged. The ratcatcher’s daughter had come to the cemetery to visit the grave of her mother, and she had left a few pennies on the grave. I saw this, and I thought she had forgotten them, and brought them to her as she was leaving. She was afraid when she saw me approach her, and would have run away, but I held the coins out to her. She saw what I offered, and recognized them as her own, but it did not make her less fearful of me. Unlike the flowers and birds here, she was not at all interested in communicating with me. I put the money down on the ground in front of her, and stepped back.

She looked at me warily. She was a dark-haired woman, thick-waisted and sturdy, and courageous, I think.

I did not try to talk, for if I did so the Shem would fall from my mouth, and my sounds were worth nothing at any rate. But I think she understood my gestures.

“You can have the money, Yossele,” she said. I remember even now the sadness of her expression. “Or you can leave it for some other unfortunate. I left it there so that whoever needed it could take it in my mother’s name. People should not have to ask for alms.”

An unfortunate, I thought. Am I an unfortunate? At the same time, I was thinking: Yossele. She knows my name. How wonderful that I have a name and she knows it.

I thought, was I fortunate before I had a name, before I was given a sort of life? If so, how would I become fortunate again? Was I unfortunate because, even though I had a name, I had no soul and therefore could never know the ecstasy that I had seen on the faces of the men when they danced? Or was I unfortunate in that I could not talk or procreate, and thus could not participate fully in the life of the community that I defended?

At the same time, I thought: Yossele. She knows my name.

And I thought: she thinks I am a monster. She is afraid of me even though she knows I am the protector of the Jewish Town. How sad that is. Is that why I am an unfortunate?

At any rate, I took up the pennies again, since she had said I could have them. Perhaps I am an unfortunate, and they would therefore be of some assistance to me. I had no place to put them for safekeeping — a golem has no use of pockets — so I put them in my mouth, with the Shem. The Rabbi could keep them safe for me when he took the Shem out of my mouth for the Sabbath.

It was after this this, upon returning to work, I discovered that I was unable to lift the stack of gravestones, or to carry even a single stone to a gravesite.

Because I did not talk, they thought that I did not have much of an intellect. I suppose this is to be expected. How would they know? Men, in those times, depended so much on words, on talking and writing. Perhaps I could write, but no one has ever given me access to writing tools and told me to write. I would never write on my own. I can imagine it, but I cannot do it.

Talking was a special case, indeed. Perhaps I could have spoken up, but no one seemed to want that. Most people felt no need to know what I thought, and even the Rabbi did well simply on intuition. No one really understood that I could talk, and that was fine with me.

In part, their mistake came from the fact that men think intelligence depends on the soul, which is demonstrably not true, at least in my case. Some say that it is the physical brain in which intelligence is seated, but I am made of clay, all the way through. However, it is possible that my intelligence is derived from that of the Rabbi. If so, he lives on somehow in me even now, although he has been gone nearly four hundred years.

In those years, I was not sure what the soul did or if I had one, but I knew, even back then, that I had intelligence, contrary to what the Rabbi and his students thought.

The problem was, of course, that an intellect must be fed in order to grow. But, you know, they set me to work day and night, six days a week, and they did not stay up all night to watch me. No, they were too busy, eating and drinking well, dancing in worship of G-d, and calling forth cries of pleasure in their wives. So I had time, late at night, to sneak into the Klausshul, where the Rabbi studied and taught, and I gave myself an education by carrying books around. I understood that the Rabbi and his students read the books and debated what was in them, but I was able to understand their contents just by lifting them and moving them from shelf to shelf.

Not that I apprehended the books’ arguments immediately. I became gradually aware, over a few weeks’ time, of ideas and images, of knowing the answers to questions I had not been asked.

Not that anybody ever asked me any questions, of course — why would they ask the golem? But I always was aware of questions in the air, of hesitancies, of questions suppressed. And I knew the answers to many of them. Not that I would answer. Who would believe the golem, if it offered information or advice?

When I first started acquiring knowledge from books, I was astounded and horrified. Astounded at the transcendent heights of human knowledge, and horrified at the depths to which mankind can sink.

I have read the entire breadth and depth of human learning, as it is stored in the shul’s books, and now I understand why the good Rabbi called me forth to protect the ghetto. The world is a fearful place. It has not gotten better as the centuries have run, nor do I see any indication that it will get better in the future.

The more I read, it seemed, the more I understood about the past. And the more I understood of the past, the more I could intuit of the future.

It is just as well that the Rabbi did not know what was in store. Knowledge of what has come in the past four centuries would not have been of any help to him, nor would it reinforce his belief in a G-d of the Jews. I assure you, it has done nothing for mine.