The Golem To The Rescue of the Impossible

 Nadene Goldfoot                                              

Many of our young people today are worried, afraid that they have no future.  I admit, this is a scary period.  We have Iran on the verge of creating nuclear power of the stage needed to make ammunition to use against their enemies, who they see as Israel and the USA.  We're living in the beginning of a terrible pandemic with Omicron, the latest, said to be more deadly than the previous viruses.  We have suddenly realized that water is precious and we could run out of it.  The same can be applied to all our natural resources.  The light has turned on in the minds of mankind, and awareness is frightening.

                                                   

People in the past were in similar critical positions all the time.  As I see it, mankind only wanted to solve their problems by killing them, with a lot of hand to hand combat, (That scares the dickens out of me!) so attacks on others were a constant.  I don't think we of today could face the reality of the past as we are aware of all this.  I don't think people then were equipped with such awareness.  They didn't have history to fall back on for comparison.            

So, among Jewish people, besides hoping for The Messiah to come and save them from their woes, they created the story of the Golem.  The Golem was something like Superman.  Only Golem was an automaton in human form created by magical means which children could accept, but more particularly through the use of Holy Names.  The concept is common to many ancient peoples. It was usually made from clay or mud. 

 The word "golem" appears only once in the Bible (Psalms139:16). In Hebrew, "golem" stands for "shapeless mass." The Talmud uses the word as "unformed" or "imperfect" and according to Talmudic legend, Adam is called "golem," meaning "body without a soul" (Sanhedrin 38b) for the first 12 hours of his existence. The golem appears in other places in the Talmud as well. One legend says the prophet Jeremiah made a golem However, some mystics believe the creation of a golem has symbolic meaning only, like a spiritual experience following a religious rite.

Its development among the Jews is associated with the magical interpretation of SEPHER YETZRAH and with the belief in the creative power of the Holy Names.   The Sefer Yezirah ("Book of Creation"), often referred to as a guide to magical usage by some Western European Jews in the Middle Ages, contains instructions on how to make a golem. Several rabbis, in their commentaries on Sefer Yezirah have come up with different understandings of the directions on how to make a golem. Most versions include shaping the golem into a figure resembling a human being and using God's name to bring him to life, since God is the ultimate creator of life.. 

The Talmud relates stories of the creation of  a Golem and they recur in Jewish literature from the 12th to 13th centuries, and regarded the creation of the Golem as an ecstatic experience following a solemn ceremonial.  According to one story, to make a golem come alive, one would shape it out of soil, and then walk or dance around it saying combination of letters from the alphabet and the secret name of God. To "kill" the golem, its creators would walk in the opposite direction saying and making the order of the words backwards.

Other sources say once the golem had been physically made one needed to write the letters aleph, mem, tav, which is emet and means "truth," on the golem's forehead and the golem would come alive. Erase the aleph and you are left with mem and tav, which is met, meaning "death."                                   

From the 15th century, the Golem in Jewish legend under the influence of alchemical beliefs, became a real, rather than symbolic creature fulfilling tasks imposed upon it and also able to bring about destruction and ruin.  Power to create an actual Golem was ascribed to Rabbi Elijah of Chelm of the 16th century, and this story was later associated with the personality of Rabbi Judah Low ben Bezalel of Prague, known as the Maharal.  The Golem has been a favorite topic in Jewish literature:  Leivak's play on this theme is well-known.  The word is used in Yiddish for a stupid person since then.                               

“Superheroes, in general, have had a social justice bent,” Yang tells Inverse. “Those early Superman comics, he’s basically a golem. It comes out of Jewish tradition, the golem righting wrongs and beating up corrupt politicians,

 always fighting for the common man. You can’t  escape that.”

                                               

The origins of Superman Smashes the Klan lie in “Clan of the Fiery Cross,” a 16-part episode from the 1940s radio serial Adventures of Superman. From June to July 1946, Superman exposed Ku Klux Klan codewords, rituals, and its bigotry — all based on intel collected by activist Stetson Kennedy — before a national audience. The show damaged the 

group’s reputation and led to a steep decline in membership from which the KKK never recovered.

Superman is a superhero who appears in American comic books published by DC Comics. The character was created on

was created by writer Jerry Siegel and 

artist Joe Shuster, and debuted in the comic book Action Comics #1 (cover-dated June 1938 and publishe d April 18, 1938).  

 

Resource:

The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sefer_Yetzirah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superman_comics