untitled [Golem]

This series of drawings emerged from my interest in Jewish narrative tradition, and one of its most striking bodily expressions: the myth of the Golem.

 In his study of Medieval Jewish Folk Narratives, Eli Yasif emphasizes the centrality of the body in Jewish storytelling:

The body as the most concrete dimension of human life is essential to the very nature of folklore (…) The medium is mainly oral and so the artistic shaping of the work, as well as its messages, have to be clear, easy to understand and remember. In other words, it has to be concrete.[1]

The history of the Jewish Body in biblical texts starts with Adam. It thus seems natural that one of the most perennial mythical images in Jewish folklore directly echoes God’s creation of the first man from dust. According to Talmudic legend, Adam is called "golem," meaning "body without a soul"[2] for the first 12 hours of his existence. He is also described as a giant-a characteristic reminiscent of the folkloric creature.[3]

 The Sefer Yezirah ("Book of Creation”) contains instructions on how to make a golem.  The successful creation of such a creature would attest to the creator’s righteousness and his closeness to God. Several rabbis have interpreted these directions, among them Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan:

The Golem must be made of virgin soil, taken from a place where no man has ever dug. The soil must be kneaded with pure spring water, taken directly from the ground (…) The people making the Golem must purify themselves totally before engaging in this activity, both physically and spiritually.

 My drawings were inspired by Cynthia Ozick’s use of the Golem in “The Puttermesser Papers” (1993). Her interpretation of the myth is unique in that both creator and creature are women.  The protagonist, Ruth Puttermesser, is a brilliant but professionally and sexually frustrated woman in her 40’s. She is similar to the ancestral Golem-making rabbis in her superior and pragmatic intellect (in turn contradicting the traditional stereotype of the female mind as being irrational or fickle). Unlike her predecessors, Ruth creates her Golem (named Xanthippe) by accident. The five superimposed drawings allude to the trans/dreamlike state during which the creature’s body is shaped. Xanthippe is born out of New York’s violence and injustice and Ruth’s desire to bring peace to the city, these circumstances mirror the heroic tale of the Rabbi of Prague’s Golem, created to protect the Jewish community from anti-Semitic attacks. But Xanthippe is also the product of Ruth’s unfulfilled motherhood, a surrogate daughter, as suggested by the violent, almost sexual description of her creation. 

[She remembered] how, with a speed born of fever and agitation, she had whirled from windowsill to windowsill, cracking open clay plant pots as though they were eggs, and scooping up the germinative yolks of spilling earth. How she had fetched it all up in her two palms and dumped it into the bathtub. How only half-turn of the tap stirred earth to the consistency of mud-and how there then began the blissful shudder of Puttermesser’s wild hands, the molding and the shaping, the caressing and the smoothing, the kneading and the fingering, the straightening and the rounding, but quickly, quickly with detail itself  (God is in the details) unachieved, blurred, completion deferred, the authentic pleasure of the precise final form of nostril and eyelid and especially mouth left for afterward.[4]

 Ironically, it is the Golem’s insatiable libido that will lead her sex-less creator to her demise and force her to destroy Xanthippe. Golems always seem to give in to destructive impulses, their soul-less/incomplete nature surfacing, thus clearly establishing an insurmountable difference with God’s perfect creation.

 In the series of drawings, Ruth’s body is dismantled (only her upper body is visible and her hands are duplicated and struggling with mud) as she shapes Xanthippe.  The body of the Golem and that of the creator become entangled.

Puttermesser made Xanthippe; Xanthippe did not exist before Puttermesser made her: that is clear enough. But Xanthippe made Puttermesser Mayor and Mayor Puttermesser too did not exist before. And that is just as clear. Puttermesser sees that she is the golem’s golem.[5]

This phenomenon alludes to the essentially Jewish conception of the Body/Mind relationship; one that played an essential role in the Jewish imagination:

Jewish rituals and beliefs are directed toward the creation of unity between [spirit and body], and they are considered a single entity created in the image of God (…) although medieval folk traditions present the contrast between body and spirit, the superiority of spirit over body is never total.[6]

 As Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan instructions describe a physical as well as spiritual process, Puttermesser and Xanthippe’s story implies the surrender and melding of mind and body.

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[1] Yasif, Eli. The body never lies: The body in Medieval Jewish Folk Narratives, in People of the Body. State University of New York Press. p.203 [2] (Sanhedrin 38b) [3] “He lay supine, reaching from one end of the world to the other, from the earth to the firmament” (Ḥag. 12a; comp. Gen. R. viii., xiv., and xxiv.; Jew. Encyc. i. 175). [4] (p. 66) [5] (p. 79) [6] Yasif, Eli. The body never lies: The body in Medieval Jewish Folk Narratives, in People of the Body. State University of New York Press. p.209, p.211.