The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [42]
"The golem? Yes, of course, I mean, in a passing way; as a boy my father told me the story many times."
"Golem? What's'zat?" said Pinkus, who still emitted a faint sickly greenish glow in spite of an hour's scrubbing with a stiff steel brush.
"The word golem derives from the Hebrew for fetus, or unformed life," said Doyle. "Said to be the name that Jehovah gave Adam when he breathed life into the figure he molded from the common clay of Eden."
"Jehovah?" asked Pinkus, popping his chewing gum. "You mean ... jumpin' Jehovah?"
"Jehovah is the Hebrew name for God," said Stern, amazed at the depths of the man's blockheadedness.
"But the story of the golem that is more relevant to this discussion," said Doyle, turning to Stern, "begins in the Jewish ghetto of Prague in the late sixteenth century. A campaign of bloody pogroms was brought against the Jews of Prague, as there had been throughout Eastern Europe. But the attacks in Prague were particularly vicious and bloodthirsty. One of the elders of the temple was a scholar by the name of Rabbi Judah Low Ben Bezalel, a gentle, almost saintly figure. Rabbi Low desperately sought a way to protect the Jews in the ghetto from this deadly persecution. He spent years searching through the old temple libraries looking for an answer. One day, so the story goes, buried deep in the cellar of the Great Synagogue he found an ancient book of great and mystical power...."
"Not the Book of Zohar, by any chance," said Innes.
"The name of this book is not specified, but a copy of the Zohar would surely have been in the synagogues of Prague; a man of Rabbi Low's learning would certainly have known of it. In any case, as he read through this book, the Rabbi allegedly stumbled across a passage that contained a secret coded formula that with his incredible scholarship he was able to decipher....
"The entire Zohar, by the way, is supposedly written like that, every sentence hiding some metaphysical mystery," added Stern.
"So like what are we talking about here, some kind a' turning lead into money-type deal?" asked a wide-eyed Pinkus.
"This passage revealed to Rabbi Low nothing less than the formula for bringing human life out of base earth that Jehovah used for the creation of Adam, the first man."
"You gotta be kiddin' me," said Pinkus.
"It's ... a legend, Pinkus," said Doyle.
"How did he allegedly do it?" asked Innes.
"Using pure water and clay from a pit dug in sanctified ground, he crafted the limbs, head, and torso of a giant figure crudely resembling a man. Then, according to the precepts of the ritual, he connected the pieces together and wrote a sacred Hebrew word on a slip of paper which he inserted under the figure's tongue...."
"What word was that?" said Innes.
"You'd have to ask Lionel's father about that, I'm afraid," said Doyle.
"So did the golem come to life?" asked Pinkus anxiously.
' 'The next thing he knew, the golem, as he called it, sat up and began to move. When he spoke to it, the golem did exactly as he ordered; Rabbi Low realized he had created a servant that would follow his instructions to the letter. Eight feet tall, powerful arms and legs; small rocks in place of eyes, a crudely fashioned mouth. He used the golem for household labor until his confidence about its obedience grew; then Rabbi Low began to send the golem out into the night, frightening away anyone who might come into the ghetto to harm the Jews.
"Every evening he would insert the paper, giving life to the monster. When its work was done at dawn, the golem returned home, the Rabbi removed the paper, and the golem lay like a statue in the Rabbi's basement. And people were so terrified of this horrible being roaming through the night that violence against the Jews in the ghetto came to a halt."
"Not a bad yarn," said Pinkus, holding on to the bunk beds for dear life. "Kind a' like that whachamacallit, that Frankenstein guy."
"It's been suggested that Mary Shelley derived a large part of her famous work from the legend of the golem," said Doyle.
"No kiddin',"