There once was a man who was not born and could not die, who never ate and never tired and always worked. He had no past and he had no future because from the moment he first woke up to the moment he would at last sleep he would always remain as he was, never to grow, never to age. He asked nothing of the world, and had little. He had his work, he had his name, and he had his word, and his word was the Word that was the world, and so in a way he had more than most, but he did not have himself.
He knew the man who had him, the man who woke him and gave him his name. This was the man to whom he owed his life, and this was a debt he could never pay because the man already had what he was owed. The man's name was Sason ben Levi, a tzaddik beloved of his community for his wisdom and generosity. To give life to the form he’d built, he gave it the Word, and to wake it, he gave it its name.
“Emeth,” he pronounced in the language of the Name when life first burned in his eyes, “truth. You are golem. It is yours to work as it is yours to live, to the purpose of he whose Name is the Word.”
The tzaddik then set him to his duty, and Emeth began the work that was his life, without feeling. He was to operate the pump in the deep tunnel beneath ben Levi’s home just outside Prešporok, which was what the People called Bratislava in those days. For years he toiled under the ground until he was forgotten and no one living remembered a time when ben Levi’s well was dry.
Days and decades came and went, the house above was destroyed, rebuilt, and extended, and Emeth toiled until the rusted pump handle snapped off in his hand. His task halted, the golem was still; and this is how they found him.
David was a boy of Sason's line. He was the youngest of the family and one of only two still toiling on the Earth. He lived with his brother, Ezra, a young man possessed of all the trappings of filial piety. Eleven years old now, David was beginning to really contribute to their small household. This is how his brother came to send the boy to the tunnel when their water had ceased to flow, and how David came to be the first in three generations to see the huge, clay man with the glowing eyes who lived beneath his floor.
All thoughts of the pump vanished from David’s mind and he rushed back to the surface and his brother. He told Ezra, frightened out of his wits and panting for breath, that beneath their abode stood a demonic child of the Behemoth, four meters tall and built like a barracks, its eyes blazing with hellfire, its right hand holding the broken remains of the pump he must have destroyed.
Ezra did not believe this childish fantasy, of course, but he was a kind brother and descended into the tunnel himself. He was amazed by what he saw; the boy had hardly exaggerated. The creature he found there was three meters tall and its eyes glowed only faintly. Though it was impressively large, it was malformed to the extreme, no more closely resembling a man than does a hastily-stitched rag doll. Ezra felt entranced by the being’s presence; he reached out his hand to touch it and felt the cool, damp flesh, rubbed it and watched unbelieving as the living earth became malleable in his fingers and he pulled off a small lump. In his hand the dirt crumbled and fell to the tunnel floor, indiscernible from that which lay around it.
Ezra was only thirty, still a young man, and few young men knew the old ways, but his family was very old indeed. They had lived in that house since before Ferdinand abolished serfdom, before the Habsburg rule began, before Great Moravia was formed. Their family helped to build the Universitas Istropolitana, served at every meeting of the Hungarian Diet until 1848, and fought for King Samo at Wogastisburg. They kept to the mitzvot, the Torah, and the Kabbalah, and he’d been brought up to know. When his voice returned to him, he spoke. He spoke first in his native tongue, then cursed his own foolishness and tried again in the language of the Name. “Golem,” he said, and saw no recognition on that most terrestrial face. He told it to put down the pump, but it did not move. He asked it why it was there, and received no answer. He took hold of its arm and pulled gently, nearly stripping away more of its clay. Defeated, he ascended to the courtyard where David waited, huddled in fascinated horror. Ezra told him not to be afraid, that the creature was a golem, a mere device, no more demonic than a clay pot and made animate in service of the Name.
In their uncounted generations, Ezra's family had produced more righteous men than most, and the young Ezra grew up on stories of them from his uncle Maimon, a historian. The greatest of them, according to Maimon, was Sason ben Levi, Ezra's great-grandfather. Sason had fourteen children and was sixty-five years old when Titus, his youngest son and Ezra's grandfather, was born. He was
a very inquisitive man, a true son of the Enlightenment and follower of Moses Mendelssohn, and among his many fine achievements was the ritual creation of many dozens of golems, each attempt recorded in great detail in his journals.
Sason’s journals were a family treasure that Maimon could not bear to see destroyed. He buried them in 1940 before the deportation. Three years later in an alley of Sobibór, marked with the pink triangle and afraid for his life of the other prisoners, he whispered their location to his favorite nephew. It was the last time Ezra saw his uncle. The journals had rested untouched in his study since the day he unearthed them, and so he knew just where to find them.
Ezra read and reread the crisp and faded pages that described Sason's work with the Sefer Yetzirah. He had attempted the ritual of golem creation more than three hundred times and his attention to detail was exacting in the extreme. His first success, according to the tidy and meticulously kept journal, was in the form of a goat that his blessings made edible and which, though it was split- hoofed, was nevertheless kosher because it was not the creation of the Name. He created dozens of other such golem animals, most of them for sacrifice and the rest for food. The writings made it clear that though he was producing far more golems than his esteemed ancestors combined had done, he never lost the purity of purpose that is essential to their creation and upkeep.
Before they were separated by the war, Ezra’s grandfather, Titus, told the boy stories of Sason, who had fourteen children and was over sixty when Titus was born. Every golem Sason created, The old man told his grandson with a hint of awe in his usually grave voice, however secular its task, was made primarily to improve his understanding of the Eyn Sof, the unknowable aspects of the Name,
so as to help bring about the unity of the ten Sefirot, or divine aspects, and redeem the world. Other writings in the Kabbalah ultimately stole his interest away from both the golems and the betterment of the physical world. He stopped his writings eventually, and stopped speaking except in prayers shortly after. He moved with quiet self-assurance about his tasks from then until the day he died. A radical movement among the Roman Catholics of southwestern Slovakia saw the end of most of Sason’s remaining creations. Apparently only Emeth, named for tradition and safe below the world, survived.
When the young man finished this study, he decided not to simply repair the pump and allow the creature to continue its duty. Ezra decided that he could afford the expense of a mechanical pump and that there were greater deeds in store for Emeth.
In all his life since the war, Ezra had been concerned only with returning to the glory and the innocence of the past. He had split what time he had between studying the mystic texts, tending his late father Isaac’s shop, and raising his half- brother, who was born after the atrocities to his already shrouded mother, Eidel, and a father dying of pneumonia. Ezra had known neither joy nor acceptance, but only work and struggle. This golem was a relic of a better time, and Ezra was determined to learn all that he could from it.
Ezra told Emeth to write its name, but the golem did not move. He took the pen from it and commanded it to watch his movements as he wrote upon the page in the angular letters of his fathers. Then he handed it back and told Emeth to do as he did. It wrote in exactly the same script that Ezra had, copying his handwriting in perfect detail. Ezra explained to it that this action was writing its name, and then ordered it to write its name again. Delightedly, he watched the golem write “Emeth” once more. It had mastered this simple task. Ezra burned with curiosity as to how much it could learn.
“Emeth, your name is no longer Emeth, but Eliza,” he told it. He showed it how to write this new name and asked it to write them both, one after the other. He was not disappointed. He told it then to write its name, and it was ecstatic to see it write Eliza.
It had learned! It had learned and Ezra had taught it! Surely this feeling was true joy, true ecstasy. Surely this was his place in life. Fancying himself in the style of Penemue, he fetched the journals and other books from his study, and brought a table on which to lay them.
“Eliza, today you will learn the meaning of words,” he told it, and set about teaching the golem how to read from aleph to tov, explaining how the symbols became words and the words became ideas. Eliza learned only what he told it to and had no imagination of its own, but it learned the first time it was told and it did not forget. By breaking down every part of reading into a separate task and then combining them, Ezra found that he could order the golem to perform tasks more complex than would seem possible from a mere device. Before long, it was ready for the difficult task he had in mind for it.
Ezra ordered Eliza to copy its creator’s journals, word for word, ten times in fresh notebooks, so that his wise words could not be lost again. He watched as it began, its eyes shining upon the words it wrote, and then went up to his evening prayers, enamored with a new reason to give praise to the Name. Returning from the shop the next evening, Ezra saw that it had already completed two copies in its tireless work. By the Sabbath, it had finished them all and stood waiting for its next command.
For the next week, whenever Ezra had a free moment, he devoted it to teaching the golem to read and to write, and then set it upon a selection of texts to read and understand. These lessons began with mathematics. He thought up simple problems of arithmetic and logic for the golem to solve, and steadily increased the difficulty until Eliza could, with a pen in its steady, terracotta hand, answer questions that he himself could not, making cold sense of the mysteries presented by Newton and Leibniz. This required patient work, but if he was methodical, he could not fail. He then began a more ambitious project; he would teach the golem to think.
It took several weeks of carefully planned and organized input from Ezra before it had demonstrably mastered the concept of language as a tool for expression. It could remember the expressions and the manners of response that Ezra taught it and use these to approximate a real conversation. It still did not speak as a man spoke, however, and could never venture an opinion of its own.
In these early experiments, Eliza seemed to have a curious rabbinical habit of answering a question with a question. When once Ezra asked if it had had a good day, the golem asked in turn if Ezra wanted it to have a good day. Unsure of how to proceed, Ezra decided that if the golem could not be creative, it could certainly become learned.
Ezra made the clay man read the holy texts and showed it how to interpret and analyze the works to find their meaning, discerning truth from lies. His great goal was to eventually find a way to teach the golem to judge value so that he could truly make of it a man, a reasoning personality with whom he could converse, an eternal servant of the Name with no other master but Him.
Throughout the months of this progress, Ezra left his home only to tend the shop. David was now old enough to look after the household chores, and since only the two of them lived there, he felt that his study could take precedent over his other duties.
When he occasionally spoke to his brother, he did so reservedly because he knew that he could never explain the joy of teaching the golem, which was, as he every day became more convinced, true ecstasy. His brother was still only a boy, and could never understand this connection. Ezra interrupted his work with the golem only to eat, pray to keep his mind and spirit firm in their purpose, and sleep, which he often sacrificed much of to continue his experiments late into the night. Eliza was his hope and his joy, a gift from the Almighty that freed him from the specters of the past that hitherto had haunted his every waking moment.
One evening, however, after a month of late nights, while puzzling over a system not yet perfect but progressing rapidly of teaching Eliza other languages without knowing them himself, banished figments and memories began to infiltrate Ezra's thoughts. As he began to drift into sleep over his research, he saw the face of his mother, Lisa, as her train pulled away. He saw his older sister running, heard the blast, saw the scarlet cloud that should have been her short, dark hair. He saw his uncle’s mad eyes, so changed, so unfamiliar, as he whispered his secret. He saw faces twisted by anger and rage and hopelessness and fear, faces he knew and faces he didn’t, and seven pairs of boots drifting in the wind high above the ground. It was the first time those memories had emerged since he found the golem and wen to his work, and he felt wronged somehow, as though uncovering that fragment of a lost lifestyle should free him from his past.
He was flung deeply into depression and, looking up into Eliza’s fiery stare, the feeling crept upon him that he had succeeded already, that the golem was no mere tool, but had become a thinking creature in its own right, and one more at peace than he. Though he assured himself that this was nonsense, that the golem could only produce what it had been given, he could not dispel his strange conviction that Eliza’s ability to reason was a man’s ability to think.
Ezra’s pale gray eyes, which in quiet places darted into corners and wandered nervously about empty rooms, stared into Eliza’s glowing sockets for some time, then he rose, gave the creature a piece of charcoal, and began to speak and to read.
“Eliza, you are to answer the questions I ask. Do you understand?” Yes.
“Good. Eliza, do you know who I am?”
Yes.
“Who am I, Eliza?”
You are Ezra ben Levi.
“Eliza, that is my name. My name is not who I am. Do you understand?” Yes.
“Eliza, who am I?”
You are a servant of the Name and my master. You command Emeth. “But are you not Eliza?”
That is my name. I am Emeth.
“I see. Eliza, your name is Emeth. Emeth, I am worried. I fear that I am a poor servant of the Name. Do you understand?”
Yes.
“Emeth, you have read the holy texts with eyes unclouded by life. Tell me, what is the essence of the Name?”
I cannot.
“Why can you not?”
The Name cannot be named. The Name can be known only by following
the way of the Name.
“What is the way of the Name?”
The way must be followed to be known.
“Then how can I follow the way?”
The Name will guide you.
“But I do not know the Name! How can I follow the way?”
The Name knows you. You follow the way.
“Emeth, I have seen horrible things on my way. If this is how I know the
Name, why should I strive to experience the Name?”
You experience the Name at all times.
“Then why don’t I understand the Name?”
To understand experience, one must isolate experience.
“I see,” said Isaac when the golem finished its reply, “You mean that other
things are distracting me from understanding the Name. Emeth, I fear I may have lost my way. You serve the Name. Can you help me to find the way?”
Yes.
“Then do so.”
A golem is as much a spiritual being as physical. As Ezra waited for a reply, the air became less oppressive than it had felt before; the ground, which he had taken no notice of, felt suddenly soft and silent, and the darkness seemed welcoming. In this new environment, he found himself tremendously calm. He he was no longer eager for the reply, and stopped his nervous fidgeting. The painful memories he’d tried so hard to avoid left his head, and his breathing slowed down to a more regular pace. He found himself forgetting concerns he didn’t know he’d had, about his business, about his brother, about his own health, about his next meal. His heartbeat slowed and his eyes half-closed. Still gazing at Emeth, he began to look at the world in a different way, and gently the clouds parted for him to see...
...present the blood, and dash the blood round about against the altar that...
...Woven wool, leather, cotton thread, shaped iron...
...Austerity honor propriety mercy happiness...
...The it for when am they is can why...
...I...
...I...
...That be not her am in of do is been...
...Humility respect piety compassion serenity...
...Hair, skin, blood, muscle, nerves, bone, marrow...
...in extremes: Pull a bowstring too far, and you wish you had let go before...
***
“Ezra?” David called, late in the morning, descending the ladder to find out why his brother had not emerged. Ezra stared blankly at the boy. “Ezra, are you alright?”
“Yes,” he said. He started to say more, but stopped. There were no words true enough. He closed his mouth and smiled softly. He took a knife from the workbench and marred the word carved into the golem's head. Its eyes faded and it was merely clay. He left the tool there and went to embrace his brother. He said with the warmth of his skin and the pressure of his flesh all that was worth saying in the true language of the Name. Together, the brothers climbed back up to the light from that calm place within the Earth.
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