The Golem of Vilna

If you know the secret Name of God, you can build worlds and you can destroy them. You can move mountains. You can also make a human being—a living person—out of clay. A golem.

One such golem was made by a great rabbi, a gaon, a genius. Oh, what marvelous consolation that golem was for the Jews! The rabbi created him so that he could provide the Jews with fish for the Sabbath. He would send the golem into the depths of the river, where the golem, using the language of fish, called them together, trapped them in a net, and distributed them to the Jews.

The Vilna Gaon formed this golem out of sand and clay and water. And since the Gaon, may heaven be radiant for him, was a scholar and knew the five Books of Moses and the Commentaries all by heart, as well as all the secrets of the Cabala—since he knew all that, he also knew the blessed Lord’s secret Name of Names and had written it down on a piece of paper. This he put into the golem’s ear, and it was the writing on the paper that turned the clay into a living human being.

The golem could leap from roof to roof, like a bird, and he could disguise himself so that nobody knew who he was. He could drift through the air like a breeze on a cold day. Ah, what was there he couldn’t do?

He was at once human and inhuman. For instance, the Gaon could send him to the synagogue to extinguish the Sabbath candles, because, though he had the appearance of a human being, he was not really human and therefore not required to fulfill all the prescriptions of the Torah. He was allowed to violate the Sabbath.

But his most important work was to defend the faithful on holidays and market days, when drunken peasants turned ugly and started to beat Jews. It was then that the Gaon turned the golem loose. Ah, how the golem used to crack their heads and break their arms and legs! There was no way they could escape from him. Sometimes he was on the rooftop, sometimes underwater in the river, sticking out his long stone tongue. When the governor heard about him … ah Lord, Lord … the golem, I mean the Gaon, sent the golem to slap the governor around a bit.

When the Gaon decided that he did not want the golem to be a golem any longer, he simply removed the bit of paper with the Name of Names on it from the golem’s ear. He did so because, may the good Lord be thanked, there are now plenty of fish in the marketplace. Even such poor folk as we are can afford a bit of carp for the Sabbath. Besides (and I hope never to see the day(, should the time come when we do need the golem again, there will be someone to revive him. A new gaon will arise who will put the terrifying bit of paper into his ear. But I trust God will protect us from that. It will be much better if we never have need of the golem again.

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Glossary

Gaon: (Yid. “goen”) Originally the title of the head of a Jewish rabbinic academy in Babylonia between the seventh and eleventh centuries C.E.; it was later applied to an outstanding rabbinic scholar.
Golem: (Yid. “goylem;” lit., “shapeless mass”) A creature brought to life by magical means, especially through the use of a divine name. Different Jewish communities have legends about local “golems” created to protect them against persecutions, specifically against blood-libel accusations. The best-known is connected with the “golem” created in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal of Prague.
gaon: (Yid. “goen”) Originally the title of the head of a Jewish rabbinic academy in Babylonia between the seventh and eleventh centuries C.E.; it was later applied to an outstanding rabbinic scholar.
golem: (Yid. “goylem;” lit., “shapeless mass”) A creature brought to life by magical means, especially through the use of a divine name. Different Jewish communities have legends about local “golems” created to protect them against persecutions, specifically against blood-libel accusations. The best-known is connected with the “golem” created in the sixteenth century by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal of Prague.

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Annotations

TELLER: The story appears in actor Joseph Buloff’s memoirs; he heard it from the wife of his *kheyder* teacher, in Vilna, Poland, ca. 1920.
SOURCE: Buloff (1986), pp. 159–60, abridged.
COMMENTS: The golem legend in Jewish folklore goes back to Rabbinic times, when Rabbi Raba, for example, is said to have created a homunculus who was like a man in all but the ability to speak. In Eastern Europe there were many legends about the making of *goylomim* by both famous and lesser-known rabbis and mystics. One of the most popular Polish Jewish legends was about the golem of Khelm (Chelm), Poland, created by the Cabalist Rabbi Elijah of Khelm in the sixteenth century. When the Khelm golem ran amok, like the Prague golem before it, it was returned to dust by removing from its forehead the piece of parchment containing God’s name. See Scholem (1965), pp. 203–4.