Golem Meets the Book of Life

Ps. 139:16

How do we imagine our own protection when so little can be promised to ensure our safety?

We imagine. A lot.

Back by unfortunate popular demand, The Golem is back - showing up in books, films and conversations about AI. 

According to different Jewish traditions that begin with a mention in today’s psalm -  the golem is most widely known as an artificial creature created by magic, often to serve its creator and defend the Jewish people from harm. While similar phenomena is known in other ancient cultures, the Golem is unique in that it is activated or deactivated with the use of three Hebrew letters carved on its forehead.  What’s the story of the Golem and what’s so interesting about its origin in Psalm 139 which is officially ascribed to King David although many interpreters read it as the psalm of the original human - Adam.  It has to do with human angst in the face of the unknowable, and with human agency to face whatever comes with more resilience and stride. 

Psalm 139 is about the human recognition that the divine is everywhere and all the time, with no escape possible - sunrise or sunset, inside or out - we are in the divine image and part of the divine reality, whether we like it or not. The admission that our lives are in the hand of fate and faith is all we got comes to a crescendo in this depiction of the creation of humanity: 

גׇּלְמִ֤י ׀ רָ֘א֤וּ עֵינֶ֗יךָ וְעַֽל־סִפְרְךָ֮ כֻּלָּ֢ם יִכָּ֫תֵ֥בוּ יָמִ֥ים יֻצָּ֑רוּ וְל֖וֹ אֶחָ֣ד בָּהֶֽם׃

Your eyes saw my unformed limbs;

they were all recorded in Your book;

in due time they were formed,

to the very last one of them.

Ps. 139:16

The Hebrew for “my unformed limbs,” golmi, is a unique word (hapax legomenon) from which the concept of the golem comes from. The famous folk-legend about a mysterious man-made force created with clay and three Hebrew letters might stem from The Aramaic translation of this unique word - ‘a shapeless mass’, 

Most readers assume that the original meaning of this text is about Adam - the first human - waking up to consciousness, and how the human journey evolves each time from mass of organs, into soul-fused being with distinct identity. Numerous rabbinic references to Psalm 139 depict Adam in Eden - a not-yet-differentiated or gendered being, slowly waking up to what being human is about. 

One rabbinic teaching imagines the original Adam as a giant lifeless Golem beginning to comprehend reality, and claims that

“When Adam was still a mass of limbs, as a Golem, the Holy One who Spoke the World into Being showed Adam each future generation and its wise people, each generation and its leaders and each generation and its unique customs.” 

Another famous rabbinic tradition derives the origin of some of the Jewish prayers from this poem - imagining  the first nocturnal hours of Adam’s life, the mortal terror of darkness -and the impetus to create fire and bless both darkness and light. 

But the most mythically charged trope that imagines this psalm as the progenitor of human agitation and agency is the legend of the Golem. The mass of clay that is animated by divine speech echoes the act of creation - Adam is likewise earth with divine breath added. Throughout the centuries in Babylon and later on through Europe - legends of sages creating Golems to handle crises or to test their powers - abound - and seem more popular than ever. Maybe that’s  because the dangers to Jewish people have never really stopped, and maybe there’s also increased interest in all forms of robotic responses to human fears and limitations.  One recent addition to the Golem canon is the super current, hilarious and thought provoking novel written by a good friend: Adam Mansbach's The Golem of Brooklyn.

As we end the season of the holy days and begin another year with trepidation - what is fascinating in this verse is the link between the Golem status and the notion of being written or recorded in ‘the book’ - presumably the Book of Life. A culture so obsessed with the written word and the power of the alphabet to create and uncreate worlds had to also include this legend of a man-made force - written into existence by the use of just three letters - Alef, Mem, Tet. These three letters are the start, middle and end of the Alphabet and they also spell the word TRUTH. To deactivate the Golem all you have to do is remove the first letter and what’s left is the Hebrew word DEAD. 

There’s much more to explore in the realms of the Golem but I’ll leave us with this fascinating quote by the Kabbalah Scholar Gershom Scholem, who wrote about the scientific aspects of the mystical experience in "The Golem of Prague & The Golem of Rehoboth" back in 1965:

“The old Golem was based on a mystical combination of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are the elements and building-stones of the world. The new Golem is based on a simpler, and at the same time more intricate, system. Instead of 22 elements, it knows only of two, the two numbers 0 and 1, constituting the binary system of representation. Everything can be translated, or transposed, into these two basic signs.”

So is AI our new Golem? Do we get to recreate creation with the wisdom of the words and numbers that replace the older methods of culture-making? Who or what is the Golem in these new complicated paradigms? 

This poem ends with a plea for guidance, deeply rooted in mortality, the poet concedes that despite so much know-how  we are still as the original Adam was - often alone and quite scared in the dark. Whatever we do to seek confidence and guidance - whatever golems we create to defend our lives - there’s humility in knowing that there’s a greater goal and purpose, and we make our way, day by day, clay with courage, breath by breath, page by page in the ever-written, page turner of surprises - book of life.

Image: The Golem’s Inner Life by Judith Jospeh