Questionable Practices

Chop Wood, Carry Water

They say you can’t remember before you were born, but I remember. I was cold, cold and damp and clammy. I wanted nothing. I did not know hunger, thirst, or desire. I lived in the dark, and I didn’t have a thought in my head. I was free.

Then, of course, things changed. I awoke from a dreamless sleep to the dreadful noise of three black-clad men bowing and chanting psalms, to the stench of burning metal and baking clay, and to a pall of steam hanging over it all on the muddy bank of the Vltava. I was torn from my bed. I was granted this half-life and became subject to the will of the Rabbi.

The Rabbi was not a bad man: things could have been much worse. He was a compassionate and contemplative human being, interested in dispelling those mysteries that are man’s to dispel. Moral issues were important to him, and he seemed to consider worthy even the life in golems.

But I lost, in that instant of formation, my merciful shapelessness, my oneness with the universe. Yet I did not gain the one thing that would have, I am told, been recompense for those losses.

I must tell you now that, in my opinion, souls are overrated. Compared to the deep, volitionless comfort that comes from being truly a part of the earth, humans and their souls never know a day of rest. They hunger, they thirst, they long for one another in ways that I am not equipped to understand. They lack deep peace, and a soul seems poor compensation for this absence.

Every day, the Rabbi would ask me to do certain simple tasks, and each day, I would do them to the best of my ability. I would chop wood and carry water. As the Rabbi told me, these tasks were much revered by religious people, even in other lands, and I should not feel ashamed to do them. Indeed, I was pleased to have simple tasks, and could do them without stopping, until the Rabbi told me to do something else.

I knew that I could also be called upon, at any moment, to defend the community against outsiders who would wish to harm it. Thus far, I had done that only one time and in a minor way, and after that the outsiders had left us alone. The Rabbi wondered whether they were in fear of me, or whether they were simply planning something extraordinary. This uncertainty gave a special urgency to my distress on the day my strength disappeared.

My first task on the day in question was to serve the dead. Very near to where the Rabbi lives, there was — there still is — a small cemetery, the only cemetery, aside from the one where the plague victims were placed, in which Jews were allowed to be buried. It was not so much a problem as it might seem that the cemetery was overcrowded: the bones were stacked many layers deep: graves were piled upon graves, gravestones upon gravestones, jutting out like loose teeth. The effect was one of deathly chaos.

The Rabbi was in charge of the cemetery, and it had been one of my tasks since my creation to carry new gravestones to the graves. My strength enabled me to pick up a stack of stones, five or six at a time, and place them at the gravesites. And yet, this time, when I approached them, I found I did not have the strength to pick them up. I took them one by one from the stonecutter’s room to the edge of the graveyard, but still I could not carry them out to the graves. I simply didn’t have enough strength.

Since my strength was the only purpose of my vitality — I have no soul, after all, and thus have no reason for my existence except to serve — I thought that its failure in this instance might be cause for concern by the Rabbi. It might cause him to unmake me, and I could go without protest back to my ideal existence as a cold and unthinking component of the living planet upon which the warmer, more volatile beings scurry about.

Right now, the scent of those small white flowers outside by the iron gate is driving me a little crazy. Their perfume fills this storeroom. There is nothing I want to do with these flowers. I cannot eat them, and indeed, have no desire to do so. I cannot impregnate them, I cannot hold a conversation with them, and I could not even were I able to fuck and talk. They no doubt have their own vegetable goals and interests, but such things have nothing to do with me. So why are they trying so hard to hold my attention?

To continue: my first thought was that I must find the Rabbi and indicate to him that I was useless for the purpose of carrying gravestones. I hoped that he would see that this meant my usefulness was finished, and I must be returned to the soil.

The Rabbi, I feared, was entranced by the implications of my existence, and would be reluctant to bring it to an end. He breathed life into me, just as, as he saw it, his maker breathed life into him. In the view of his people, and perhaps in his own eyes, this made the Rabbi more like his maker than he was like other men. This, he said, was the sin of Lucifer, and he feared it. He thought too much, the Rabbi. And yet, that was one of his most worthy traits.

It is not clear to me whether I am a man or something less than a man. It is not even clear to me whether I am a Jew. Although I am dependent on the Shem — the sacred name, which the Rabbi places in my mouth to animate me — I am not otherwise a religious person, and I do not lay Tefillin or study Torah. But I think that it is not necessary for me to be religious in order for me to be a Jew, nor, if I were not, would it make me a Jew to be religious.

The scholars debated whether I could be called upon to make a minyan, and have not, even now, made a clear decision, so I was never asked to perform this mitzvah, this duty. But the Rabbi allowed me to rest on the Sabbath, as a Jew would. It is not clear to me, though, whether he thought I was a Jew, as he had me rest by removing the Shem from my mouth, as if I would not otherwise refrain from labor. This took the power to do so or not away from me, as if I were again a piece of clay. I asked him about this, and he said, “Animals have the same rights as humans do. Even animals rest on the Sabbath. You who have something of the animal and something of the man, as well as something of the earth, should rest as well.”

In truth, I don’t know whether, without his intervention, I would refrain from labor, or work as dutifully as usual. My nature is mixed, as he says.

And yet I must be a Jew, mustn’t I, if the Holy Name has power over me? Without it, I lose life, although I retain the form of life, a form very similar, but not identical, to that of a man. Women, it is clear, do not consider me a man, and yet they are fearful of me in a way that they are also fearful of large, bad men, not in ways that they are fearful of beasts. This is puzzling to me. If I am not a man, I cannot be a bad man. My fault here, I think, is that I am large.

Perhaps it is because of my mixed nature that I have not accepted the yoke of mitzvot, of the necessity of taking one’s duties as a human seriously. In any case, I do not fully understand what those duties are, so that even should I want to fulfill them, I have not the means. I am not religious, and I shall not pray for the means. Would a rock pray to be human? Would it be right to grant such a wish? Personally, as a rock, I have no ambitions to be human, and I find it makes my head hurt to think about this.

Through the window of this storehouse, high in the Altneushul, I can see a being on the branch of a tree near by, watching me. Sitting on a branch it looks very much like a tiny bird, but when it rises into the air, it does not move like a bird. It is trying to get my attention, with its abrupt movements and its twittering. It is filled with life, but I don’t understand what it is trying to tell me. Why are the birds and the flowers so concerned with communicating with me?

I need no messages from birds and flowers. They have nothing to tell me. I served the Rabbi, and the Rabbi served G-d. What I know, I know from my closeness to the Rabbi, just as what he knew came from G-d.

That day, before I discovered my weakness with respect to the gravestones, I met the daughter of the ratcatcher. However, it may not be quite correct to say that I met her, since no introductions were made, nor were names exchanged. The ratcatcher’s daughter had come to the cemetery to visit the grave of her mother, and she had left a few pennies on the grave. I saw this, and I thought she had forgotten them, and brought them to her as she was leaving. She was afraid when she saw me approach her, and would have run away, but I held the coins out to her. She saw what I offered, and recognized them as her own, but it did not make her less fearful of me. Unlike the flowers and birds here, she was not at all interested in communicating with me. I put the money down on the ground in front of her, and stepped back.

She looked at me warily. She was a dark-haired woman, thick-waisted and sturdy, and courageous, I think.

I did not try to talk, for if I did so the Shem would fall from my mouth, and my sounds were worth nothing at any rate. But I think she understood my gestures.

“You can have the money, Yossele,” she said. I remember even now the sadness of her expression. “Or you can leave it for some other unfortunate. I left it there so that whoever needed it could take it in my mother’s name. People should not have to ask for alms.”

An unfortunate, I thought. Am I an unfortunate? At the same time, I was thinking: Yossele. She knows my name. How wonderful that I have a name and she knows it.

I thought, was I fortunate before I had a name, before I was given a sort of life? If so, how would I become fortunate again? Was I unfortunate because, even though I had a name, I had no soul and therefore could never know the ecstasy that I had seen on the faces of the men when they danced? Or was I unfortunate in that I could not talk or procreate, and thus could not participate fully in the life of the community that I defended?

At the same time, I thought: Yossele. She knows my name.

And I thought: she thinks I am a monster. She is afraid of me even though she knows I am the protector of the Jewish Town. How sad that is. Is that why I am an unfortunate?

At any rate, I took up the pennies again, since she had said I could have them. Perhaps I am an unfortunate, and they would therefore be of some assistance to me. I had no place to put them for safekeeping — a golem has no use of pockets — so I put them in my mouth, with the Shem. The Rabbi could keep them safe for me when he took the Shem out of my mouth for the Sabbath.

It was after this this, upon returning to work, I discovered that I was unable to lift the stack of gravestones, or to carry even a single stone to a gravesite.

Because I did not talk, they thought that I did not have much of an intellect. I suppose this is to be expected. How would they know? Men, in those times, depended so much on words, on talking and writing. Perhaps I could write, but no one has ever given me access to writing tools and told me to write. I would never write on my own. I can imagine it, but I cannot do it.

Talking was a special case, indeed. Perhaps I could have spoken up, but no one seemed to want that. Most people felt no need to know what I thought, and even the Rabbi did well simply on intuition. No one really understood that I could talk, and that was fine with me.

In part, their mistake came from the fact that men think intelligence depends on the soul, which is demonstrably not true, at least in my case. Some say that it is the physical brain in which intelligence is seated, but I am made of clay, all the way through. However, it is possible that my intelligence is derived from that of the Rabbi. If so, he lives on somehow in me even now, although he has been gone nearly four hundred years.

In those years, I was not sure what the soul did or if I had one, but I knew, even back then, that I had intelligence, contrary to what the Rabbi and his students thought.

The problem was, of course, that an intellect must be fed in order to grow. But, you know, they set me to work day and night, six days a week, and they did not stay up all night to watch me. No, they were too busy, eating and drinking well, dancing in worship of G-d, and calling forth cries of pleasure in their wives. So I had time, late at night, to sneak into the Klausshul, where the Rabbi studied and taught, and I gave myself an education by carrying books around. I understood that the Rabbi and his students read the books and debated what was in them, but I was able to understand their contents just by lifting them and moving them from shelf to shelf.

Not that I apprehended the books’ arguments immediately. I became gradually aware, over a few weeks’ time, of ideas and images, of knowing the answers to questions I had not been asked.

Not that anybody ever asked me any questions, of course — why would they ask the golem? But I always was aware of questions in the air, of hesitancies, of questions suppressed. And I knew the answers to many of them. Not that I would answer. Who would believe the golem, if it offered information or advice?

When I first started acquiring knowledge from books, I was astounded and horrified. Astounded at the transcendent heights of human knowledge, and horrified at the depths to which mankind can sink.

I have read the entire breadth and depth of human learning, as it is stored in the shul’s books, and now I understand why the good Rabbi called me forth to protect the ghetto. The world is a fearful place. It has not gotten better as the centuries have run, nor do I see any indication that it will get better in the future.

The more I read, it seemed, the more I understood about the past. And the more I understood of the past, the more I could intuit of the future.

It is just as well that the Rabbi did not know what was in store. Knowledge of what has come in the past four centuries would not have been of any help to him, nor would it reinforce his belief in a G-d of the Jews. I assure you, it has done nothing for mine.

Not that I am saying that G-d, as the Rabbi understood him, exists. I know that the Rabbi sought to understand G-d, not just find a reflection of himself. But I saw no evidence that the rabbi — or any other human being — was even on the right track.

If there is a G-d, it doesn’t seem that it is a player in human affairs. I heard people speaking all the time of events that they called blessed, as if the G-d were enthusiastically endorsing their lives. And yet blessings did not go consistently to the good, nor did misfortune visit only the bad.

The future, as I saw it then, was not all dismal: there clearly were some joys ahead for the Rabbi and his family.

The Rabbi had a daughter of many accomplishments, named Feigeleh, who had at that time given birth to a girl child. The Rabbi’s granddaughter, whose name was Eva, still had the big grey eyes of an infant, and yet I knew that this being had a love of knowledge, and an ability to absorb it that transcended my own. It came to me, as if I saw this with my eyes, that she would be a respected rabbinical scholar herself, she would have children who would also become rabbis, and she would die in vigorous old age, while journeying to Jerusalem. This was a wonderful thing for me to know, and I longed to tell the rabbi, but of course I had no way to communicate it. I was less effective than a flower or a bird.

And I ask myself now if it would it have been good for the Rabbi to know of the full life awaiting his granddaughter if he also had to know the horrors awaiting some of his other descendants? It may be a blessing to them, that humans cannot see into the future.

I think that Praha is a beautiful city, though I have never seen any other with which to compare it, nor even seen all of Praha itself. Maybe all cities are filled with such delights as the clockwork in the town square that displays the state of the universe, all day and every day, for the benefit of the townspeople.

Working for the Rabbi, I had sympathy for the clock, which performed rain or shine, and was never rewarded except with a nod when someone passed it by. It gave pleasure to others, but received no pleasure from anyone. In that way, I felt, it was superior to myself, for although I offered security and performed many tasks, I never offered anyone pleasure.

Perhaps if I offered pleasure, I thought, I would fulfill my purpose and be allowed to return to the earth. Although, even as I thought that, I realized that both the clockwork and its creatures — the gothic figures that guarded its perimeter — were taken, like myself, from the earth, but were unlikely to be allowed to return to it. So it made no sense for me to have such an expectation. But it was an idea, it gave me something to try. My options were so few.

However, I was not sure how to go about even trying to give pleasure. I tried to observe the people around me offering joy to one another. I saw the Rabbi doing small favors for his wife, and that she was made happy by them. I saw her cooking special things for her husband and children, and that all, even herself, were made happy by the acts and the foods. I heard the noises that the Rabbi and his wife made at night, while I was ceaselessly stacking stones and chopping wood, and I understood that these noises meant they were offering pleasure to one another.

I tried to do small favors for the Rabbi, but he did not seem pleasured by the things I did under my own volition. The more I did by myself, in fact, the more he wrinkled his brow. G-d himself, if the stories are true, does not like to see too much initiative from his creations.

I could learn to cook, I supposed, but as I didn’t eat, I had no way of knowing whether things I cooked would be pleasing. As for my making the Rabbi or his wife give forth sounds of pleasure in the night, perhaps the less said about that the better. I didn’t know much, but I did have a sense of my own limitations.

But here I am getting away from the thread of my story: the loss of my strength. The Rabbi had been told that some of the townspeople were preparing an attack on the Jewish Town. This was why he created me, to defend against such an attack, and I was very interested and needful to learn more of what defending my people entailed. If I had had my strength, I could have picked the attackers up like rats, tossed them in a sack, and thrown it in the river. Or perhaps I could have kept them, bred them, and turned them loose, as it was sometimes said the ratcatcher did, though I have no idea to what purpose.

Praha was then a relatively comfortable place for Jews to live, and had been so even before the Rabbi arrived. The Emperor Rudolph and his father before him understood that gentiles and Jews could do business together without undue conflict, and each could become more prosperous in the bargain. But there were some who saw prosperity among the Jews as something taken from the gentiles. In earlier times the synagogue had more than once been painted with blood, the blood of real people, and the Jewish Town had been burned. Jews were beaten and killed, and plots were hatched to create fear and hatred of the Jews among the other citizens of Praha. This seemed to be a way that the unstable among the goyim sought control over their small area of the universe.

I wondered what happened to the unstable Jews? Why did they not do the same thing? Also, I wondered, why did these goyim not have their own golem, who would fight for them as I would fight for the Jews? Then they would not have to savage other human beings, and the two communities could just put their two golems to battle.

But on the day of which I am speaking, I worried, though there was no danger evident, that if I could not even hoist an armload of gravestones, I would be of no use against an attack by the goyim. I would be unable to pick them up like rats. And, in my silence, of course, I could not talk them out of their insanity, as someone might do who was not reliant on physical force.

The only sensible thing to do, I thought, was to understand the scope of the problem and lay it before the Rabbi. I would test my strength by trying my simplest accustomed tasks, chopping wood and carrying water. I left the cemetery, and headed for iroká Street, where the Rabbi’s house was.

I approached the house from the back, to go in by the tool room door. There was no one in the yard. Usually the place was buzzing with servants and children. I entered the house, walking past the oiled sharpened axes and into the big family room. There was no one inside. There was no fire, there were no lights.

I walked out the front door and out the gate. It was dark, and the streets were empty. There weren’t even any stray dogs searching the gutters. The other houses of the Jewish Town were quiet; the lights were dim, the windows were shuttered. Did nobody know that Rabbi Loew’s house was empty? What was going on? I heard a sound from the alleyway and turned in that direction. It was no threat to me, of course. I am afraid of no one, and, really, if I were, the idea of death by someone’s hand would arouse in me only enthusiasm.

It was the ratcatcher. He was moving very slowly, limping as though his leg were damaged, and making very low noises to himself. He looked up as I approached.

“Yossele,” he said, although the sound of my name was not so attractive as when it had issued from his daughter’s mouth. I wondered why that would be. He is very similar to his daughter, in coloring and facial structure. And yet they have such a different effect upon me. The ratcatcher’s voice tears at me, like the voices of many trapped rats. His daughter’s voice is as light and sweet as the piping of a happy rat, free to do as she wishes in a fruitful midden, unmolested by humans.

“Yossele,” said the ratchatcher, “help me home.” I looked at him closely, and saw that his clothing was torn and bloody. He was not a neat or clean man, but his clothing was not usually in such disarray. I picked him up.

“Yossele,” he said, “they set upon me, and beat me, and ran off. And then the emperor’s men came and took the Rabbi, and all his family.” I almost put him down, I was so surprised. But I kept walking, and waited for him to tell me more.

“The Emperor, Yossele,” he said. “The Emperor! What can be done? The Emperor, I thought, knew the Rabbi and valued his wisdom. But he has turned out to be as treacherous as other gentiles. What will we do, Yossele? What will we do? What can you do for us?”

What can I do? I thought. I no longer had the strength to do anything extraordinary. It seemed to me that the only thing to do was to go find the Rabbi, wherever he was, and do what he told me. That was my one skill.

Although now it taxed my strength to do so, I carried him to his small, filthy doorway, so like a rathole that men and women customarily walked out into the street as they passed it by. But there were no people walking in the street that night.

I put the ratchatcher down carefully at his door. It was, so far as I could see, the poorest, ugliest, most beaten-down door in all of Praha. There was, of course, nothing I could tell him, nothing I could say. I don’t have an expressive face, I suppose because it is molded of clay. People do not generally have any idea what I am thinking, however much they offer suggestions.

The ratcatcher stumbled. I was uncertain whether he could even summon the strength to raise his own household, so I knocked at the door for him. It was answered quickly by his daughter. She saw me first, and was unafraid. I was impressed by that. Then she saw her father, and was much shocked. She gave me a fierce look. I bent down and picked her father up gently, and she allowed me to carry him into the house. I put him down on a pallet near the wood stove, from which a mild heat radiated.

I enjoy the cold and damp, and I do not ordinarily seek the presence of heat, which dries me out uncomfortably, and makes my skin crack. But this room, with its tiny fire, was perfectly tolerable to me. I wondered how comfortable it could have been for the ratcatcher’s daughter. Could it be that she also was a golem?

I looked at her, as she moved quickly about the tiny, dark, cold room. She brought a thin blanket for her father, and stuffed sticks into the stove. It heated up, but those sticks would not last long. Even if she was a golem, it was obvious that her father was not.

What would the Rabbi do? I wondered. Would he just give the ratcatcher fuel? If he did that for every poor Jew, I figured, then he would shortly have nothing. But the Rabbi did not have nothing.

So what did he do? I thought about this. I had seen what happened. The Rabbi would go to a rich man, either a Jew or a gentile, and he would ask him for charity for a poor Jew. The rich man would say yes, or he would say no. If he said yes, the poor man would benefit. If he said no, the Rabbi would simply go to the next person on his list.

I did not have a list. I am not the Rabbi. But I knew where there was wood that was not being used. The Rabbi was for my purpose a rich man. If he was imprisoned or dead, he would not mind that his wood was warming someone else. In case he was on his way home, I would leave enough for tonight, and tomorrow I would chop more.

I nodded at the ratcatcher’s daughter. Perhaps she understood me, perhaps not. I went quickly back to the Rabbi’s woodpile, and picked up as large a stack as I could carry. My strength was so limited now that I was ashamed that people might see me struggling with such a small load. But it was dark, and no one was watching. I shouldered on, and brought the small armload of wood to the door of the ratcatcher and his daughter. Then I went back for a second and a third load. I also brought her several buckets of water. Even without superhuman strength, I could perform these simple acts, as any human might.

She welcomed me in and told me to put the wood inside, as though it was a precious substance, something that might be stolen. Since I had, in fact, stolen the Rabbi’s wood, perhaps this was true.

“Yossele,” she said, “we can never thank you enough.”

That is right, I thought, no one can ever thank someone enough. There is always room for more thanks. I nodded and left.

Now that the ratcatcher was taken care of, I needed to find Rabbi Loew. How would I do that, I wondered, especially how would I do it in the dark of the night?

The first place to look, based on what the ratcatcher had said, would be the castle. It is not so far from the Jewish Town, and I walked easily through the dark streets to the Vltava, across the bridge, and up the hill to the castle. There were people in the streets, angry, drunken, violent people. But they did not attack me, and they were not at present attacking others. I let them be.

The castle was guarded, of course, and I could not think how I might approach the Emperor. But I would deal with that problem when it presented itself. First, I needed to find the way in.

I had never been to the castle: I was the defender of the Jewish Town, and there, for the most part, I stayed. I walked around its base, looking up at its forbidding walls. Even in the middle of the night, there would be a way in. Eventually, I found myself at a highly fortified gate. I walked forward and presented myself to the guard. They were startled by my appearing there, but they clearly recognized me. I was the only golem in Praha, after all.

I opened my arms, to indicate that I intended no harm. The guards jumped back, their weapons at ready. I stayed still, my arms held apart and slightly raised. The guards were puzzled, and I could not blame them. We might have stood there like that until dawn, had the commotion not caught the eye of an officer, who intervened.

“If it wanted to destroy us, it would done so already,” he said to the guards. “But do not let it advance.” As if, had I my strength, they could have stopped me, had I wanted to move forward.

I nodded to the guard and the officer, and I waited. I was, of course, aware that even a quiet golem was not inconspicuous, and I was hoping one of the Emperor’s retainers would notice me. It was in the dark of the night, however, and I was sure I would be standing there for some time.

As I stood awaiting the next thing that would happen to me, I noticed a small brown bird on a branch. What, I thought, was that bird doing there, in the cold and the dark?

Then it started singing. It sang a lovely, long, complex song that filled the air like perfume. The bird sang and sang.

The windows of the castle were not open, but as I watched, they opened. It was a cold night in the middle of winter, when the windows were usually kept sealed. But the song of that bird was never heard in winter, although it was common and beloved in the summer months.

The bird sang loudly and persistently. The time was late, but people in the castle not only opened their windows, they came out on their balconies, wrapped in fur, to hear this remarkably unseasonal bird.

Among these people was the Emperor, who looked out to see the bird, and saw the golem, myself, waiting there by the guard station.

The Emperor sent a page to order that I, the Praha golem, be brought to his offices in the middle of the night.

A contingent of officers led me through the dark, silent streets of the castle. It was like a little town there, like Jewish Town maybe, except there were no hovels, no hunger, no cold, even in the winter.

I have heard the Rabbi say that there is sadness in castles, just as joy is available to people at the extreme of poverty, but I saw neither sadness or joy that evening. I walked, led by the guards, down a quiet alley, to a rather plain building. It looked efficient, a place in which work was done.

I had never thought of the Emperor as someone who worked, but I confess I hadn’t given it much thought at all. The headman of the guard knocked at the door, and words were exchanged, from inside to out. The door opened, and I was led inside, down a dark corridor, and into a large room filled with retorts and alembics.

At the far end of the room was a small man, dressed warmly, but not overdressed. I noticed that he was attended by a team of people, and on looking closely, I saw that the Rabbi was among them, and his wife and family were off to the side.

“Ah,” said the small man. “This is your golem, at last.”

The Rabbi nodded. He had his usual gravitas, but he did not look at ease.

“Tell me how you work it, and why you have commanded it to come here.”

“Your Excellency, I did not command it,” said the Rabbi, “nor do I work it, in the sense that you mean. It works itself. It requires merely a few words from myself to set it to a task, and then it will pursue that task with a will of its own.”

“Set it a task,” said the emperor. “I want to see it work. Set it some task that is impossible for a human being.”

“Your excellency,” said the Rabbi, “it does not necessarily do things that are impossible, but it has the strength of ten men. So if you have some lifting or some tearing down, those would be an ideal way for me to show you the golem’s strength.”

“Very well,” said the Emperor, “have it move the gate for me. I have been planning to extend the yard here and have more protected space for men and horses. Tell your golem to take apart the stones of the gate and rebuild it on the other side of the guard building.”

I was taken aback by this, as I am sure you can imagine.

I knew I no longer had that strength, and I feared that, even though the Emperor meant us no harm, as soon as the less stable gentiles found out about my weakness they would come to the Jewish Town and they would set fire to our synagogues. They would bash the heads of Jewish babies against the stone steps. They would kill young women and men, and leave the old for the dogs.

The Rabbi immediately noticed my distress. He showed no alarm, but in a calm, even voice said, “My Emperor, the golem is an automaton and a creature of chaos. He has no thought or will of his own. I must tell him, very carefully, to do exactly what you want done and in the order you want it done. Otherwise, instead of accomplishing your task, he will simply create chaos.”

“Is that so?” said the Emperor. “I will keep that in mind in building my homunculus. For now, for the demonstration, just have him move the slabs of stone to the site of the new gate, over there.”

“Yosef, do this,” said the Rabbi to me quietly. I tried to speak to him with my eyes, but, as I have said, I do not have an expressive face. There was no way that I would have the strength to do that, and yet I could not disobey the Rabbi. My body moved and tried to act. Again the Rabbi noticed my struggle. There is nothing that escapes his benevolent attention.

“My Emperor,” said the Rabbi, “it was kind indeed of you to bring us here under your protection, but tomorrow our Sabbath begins. Please allow us to return home and prepare to honor that day, on which even the golem does not work. We now have our golem to protect us if necessary, and as soon as the Sabbath is over, the golem will move the stones. He can work all night. Later, when it is time to put them in position, the golem and I will return and he will do that under my instruction and the supervision of your architects.”

“Very well,” said the Emperor. “We here are very close to creating a homunculus, using alchemical means rather than your Kabbalah. Seeing your golem at work would be instructive: we must find a way to keep the chaos at bay.

“Come back after your Sabbath and my own, in three days. Then we will see what your golem can do.”

The Emperor offered his guards, but the Rabbi declined in a courteous fashion. I was to be his guard, and I think he would have said the same even had he known the full extent to which I was disabled. Our small party walked out of the Emperor’s workhouse, across the tiny townlet, and out the big gate that he wanted me to move. My height alone, I felt, was sufficient to discourage the sort of cowardly attackers who would lie in wait in the dead of night, and the Rabbi, I was sure, was doing this to make the point that he feared nothing, and that I was sufficiently strong to defend him and his family and, by extension, the entire Jewish community.

When we got back to his house, inside, in privacy by the fire and near my pallet, I demonstrated for the Rabbi that I could lift small objects, of the sort that the average human might lift, but I could not budge objects of the weight and heft that I had previously handled. The Rabbi was clearly puzzled, but he told me to rest, and the next day we would figure things out. By now it was the small hours of the morning, and we all went to bed, me on my pallet away from the fire, and the Rabbi and his wife in their comfortable room in which only they slept, their bed close to the warm wall of the chimney.

The next day there was much to do to prepare for the Sabbath, which started at sundown. Wood needed chopping, water need hauling, food for the Sabbath meals had to be prepared, as well as that day’s food. My labors were limited in preparation for the Sabbath, as my role was less one of serving household needs than it was of serving the community. The Rabbi had a few comforts, however, that he allowed me to provide: the water and wood for his bath and the occasional draft of water from a country well. I believe that his thinking was that, to some extent, the community’s well-being depended on his own well-being, and my serving him in those ways aided the entire community. The Rabbi was a reasonable man, and not an ascetic.

At any rate, only the Rabbi and perhaps his wife, from whom he had no secrets, were privy to the information that I was lacking my usual strength, and I was able to accomplish my tasks without drawing others’ attention.

Just before the beginning of the Sabbath, the Rabbi commanded me to open my mouth for the removal of the Shem, so that I might rest. It was then he found the coins that the ratcatcher’s daughter had given me. He nodded and said, very solemnly, “Yosef, I think I have discovered the source of the problem. You will need to resolve this, but like all of us, you shall rest on the Sabbath. ” He removed them, then removed the Shem, and I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep, a brief return to the great silence of the earth.

On the first day of the week, I was awoken after sunset by the Rabbi putting the Shem into my mouth, just as it happened every week. He sat by me on my pallet. “Yosef,” he said, “I have given your situation much thought, and I believe I know what you should do.”

I had hoped he would figure it out, and I indicated my thanks to him.

“You should not be so quick to thank me,” he said. “There is little I can do for you. You must accomplish this yourself.”

I looked at him in doubt and worry, and he read, as so often he does, the voice of my stance.

“Yossele, you can do this. G-d does not require of us what we cannot do.”

That’s all well and good, I thought, but I am not human. G-d did not create me, the Rabbi created me. G-d’s own creations are more capable (meaning no offense to the Rabbi), so His expectations may be elevated well beyond my abilities.

The Rabbi ignored my reservations, although I know that he saw them.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You put this money in your mouth with the Holy Name. I do not know where you got the money, but now it seems to me that its appropriate use is charity.” The Rabbi sighed. “Do you understand? You must give this money to someone less fortunate than yourself.”

Well, of course I understood that. It’s the principle activity of the Rabbi’s life, as I have observed it, aside from his studying the Torah.

I nodded, and he told me to go and fulfill my obligation. “Do this before you come home,” he said.

I lumbered out of the family compound, but not with my usual calm confidence that I could accomplish my assignments. Where would I find these unfortunates, and how would I tell whether they were even less fortunate than myself?

The emperor, I decided, did not qualify as an unfortunate. He was busy, he was unhappy, he had many demands on his time, but he had many advantages that others did not, and as human lives go, he was fortunate indeed.

What about the ratcatcher, I thought? He had a miserable job and was derided by many, sometimes even set upon. He was poor, his wife was dead, and his own health was not good. But he had his daughter, and that was certainly a fortunate occurrence.

I considered each person, one by one, in the Jewish Town, wondering to whom I would give the alms. There were people who were unfortunate, that was true. Some were poor, some were mean-spirited, some were set upon by fate or by gentiles. But they all had, if they chose to make use of it, the wisdom and guidance of our leader, Rabbi Loew, certainly one of the wisest rabbis for thousands of miles and for centuries forward and back. I could not, in all honesty, come up with a Jew here who was as unfortunate as a golem, a being with no soul who is not allowed to rest peacefully as part of the earth.

I walked away from the Jewish Town, into gentile Praha, wondering to whom I would give the alms. I had no idea of the fortunes and misfortunes of gentiles. How could I even tell if they were unhappy? They had features almost as static as my own.

I had not been walking long when I saw a man in his dooryard, beating a woman with a willow stick. Formerly, I would have stopped him by lifting him up like a rat, by the scruff of his neck, but that option was no longer open to me.

The woman was crying and trying to shield herself with her hands to little effect. “Damn, damn, damn,” the man was saying. “My donkey is dead, you useless whore.” With every word, he struck a blow.

“But it is not my fault,” the woman said, between blows. “I did not cause this! You starved him and beat him, and now he is dead. Why hit me?”

The man stopped hitting the woman, but held on to her arm and shook her violently.

“It gave me pleasure to beat that donkey, and now it is gone.” He gave the woman one last shake, and said to her, “My arm is tired. We will continue this later.” Then he walked away, massaging his shoulder.

His wife stood there for a long moment with her eyes shut, then took a deep breath and opened her eyes. “What are you looking at?” she asked me accusingly.

I gestured towards the man, and shook my fist in his direction.

The wife glared at me. One of her eyes was swollen shut. “The Jewish golem would protect me from my own husband? I think not!”

I nodded at her. I would do it, I thought, even though she is not Jewish.

“And what would I do with your protection?” she asked. “Would your protection feed my children, and the one on the way? We would starve, and before that, the kind neighbors would burn us out of any hovel we might lodge in. No, I am better off taking a beating every so often.”

This woman truly was less fortunate than I, as she had others to take care of beyond herself, and even as I thought that, I realized that she was only one of many women in the same predicament. I was sad that I could not help them all, even if they would permit it. But I could help her, and myself as well.

I turned my back to her, and, shielding my mouth from her view, extracted the coins. They were dry, of course. The mouth of a golem is dry and clean, like the inside of a kiln. That is why the Shem, a mere piece of paper, sits safe in my mouth all week long.

I turned back, and offered her the coins.

She took them, with barely a nod of thanks. “This will do me,” she said, with an unpleasant smile. “I will buy him another donkey.” She turned away from me as if I did not exist.

As far as I could see, my task was accomplished, but I received no satisfaction from this.

Much of the Rabbi’s pleasure in his work, I had noticed, was derived from the thought that he was doing good, and I had hoped, in giving the alms, to experience that pleasure in a small way and to regain my strength at the same time. But there was no pleasure in the giving of those alms. This woman’s life was no better than it had been before, and somewhere there was a donkey whose life might shortly become considerably worse. Is this why the Christians say that money is the root of all evil?

I walked back toward the Jewish Town, thinking that at least I had given away the alms, and my strength would return. To test it, I grabbed a large tree and sought to tear it out by its roots. I tugged and tugged, but it did nothing. So I had not regained my strength. Woe, I thought. Woe unto me. I should never have touched those coins. But perhaps now the Rabbi would turn me back into useful clay.

But when I returned to Rabbi Loew, and I demonstrated for him that I had not regained my strength, he was sympathetic.

“It didn’t work, Yossele?” He shook his head. “I wonder why. I do think the solution lies in an act of charity. Problems involving money are often mended when charity enters the picture.”

“Come, sit here with me and my Pearl. We will discuss it among the three of us. Sometimes two heads are better than one.”

Yes, I thought. There are three of us here but, as the Rabbi noted, only two minds at work. I would try not to slow them down. We sat near the fire, which was comfortable for them, and not too uncomfortable for me.

“Pearl knows the situation,” said the Rabbi, “at least inasmuch as I know it.”

“You gave someone the money, Yossele?” the Rebbetzin asked me, in her accustomed quiet voice. She was an old woman, as the Rev was an old man, but her voice was as light as a girl’s and her mind was strong and of a good will.

I nodded. I gestured that it was a gentile woman. We have developed a vocabulary of signs, the Rabbi and I. He and the Rebbetzin understood immediately.

“And what did she do with the money?” the Rebbetzin asked.

Donkey, I gestured, making with my hands long ears on either side of my head. I gestured unhappiness.

“She used it for an unkind purpose?” she guessed.

I nodded.

“Perhaps that is why the act of charity didn’t return your strength?” she said uncertainly.

“My love, I think that cannot be relevant,” said the Rabbi. “I think that the giver cannot be held responsible for what is done with his charity. But I do think that, as the Rambam has said, some forms of charity are more worthy than others.”

I thought about this. Having heard what the gentile woman was going to do with the money, I was inclined to agree with the Rebbetzin that my gift was tainted. But the Rabbi no doubt knew of what he was speaking. I had read the wise and brilliant Rambam myself, or at least I had carried his books about, and he was truly a wonderful thinker. The question was beyond my powers of resolution, but I had faith the Rabbi would provide an answer.

“Let us settle this question. Yossele, charity is the greatest mitzvah, and you are now to go out and accomplish the greatest form of charity: you are to enable a beggar to better himself so that he no longer needs to beg. I don’t know if you can accomplish this on your own, but you must try.”

I have no soul, so I have not felt any necessity that I perform a mitzvah, a duty laid upon Jews but not upon gentiles or golems. As far as the sages and I can tell, I am not under those requirements. When I follow the Rabbi’s instructions, as I must, I can take no credit for any task I perform. If I carry food to the poor, it is not my mitzvah, it is the Rabbi’s, and I am doing it in his stead. But now I had a charity that was mine to perform, and it was truly a mitzvah, an obligation.

I hoped that this did not mean that I was to be given a soul. I did not want a soul. I simply wanted to regain my strength and serve the Rabbi. But I wondered how it could be that I could help a human better himself.

As I walked the streets of Praha, people gave me easy passage, moving quickly out of my way. This was because I was large and did not talk. Talking is the way men see inside one another’s minds. Because they could not see inside my mind, they were fearful and hostile.

Suddenly, a gentile boy of about eleven years old came scurrying towards me, chased by a slightly older boy who was obviously a ruffian. The younger boy got behind me, and the ruffian pulled up short, his snarls choking back in his throat at the sight of me. He turned and ran.

The other boy came out from behind my back. I had only to look at him to know that he was a merchant’s child, warmly dressed and with good shoes. He had a large scrape on his forehead, and he regarded me thoughtfully: curious, cautious, without the fear he had shown but a minute ago.

I wondered about him. He was like a learned Jewish boy, like a student at the shul, someone that the street urchins set upon and beat up. I had not seen many gentile children like that. I walked along with him in the direction that he wanted to go, down a narrow street to a building with a metal gate. He opened the gate, went inside, and turned to look back at me and wave. His eyes were as large as gooseberries.

The Jewish men and boys in the shul were mostly people of thought, not of action. To them I was all action and no thought. And, really, it was only extraordinary men like the Rabbi who were of both thought and action. What, I wondered, would this boy become?

Soon after, I passed a large, thin dog, the color of a faded sunset, dark at the edges and warm in the center. It was not tied up, as most dogs are. I wondered if it was a stray. It eyed me and crept towards me in a highly submissive manner. All over Praha, as I walked through the city, there were gentile dogs that tugged at their chains, barking at me and showing their teeth. Some gentile dogs backed off, growling. But this dog did not do either of those things. It did not warn me off or try to scare me away: it came up to me and it cried, quietly, just like a human being.

Was it, I wondered, a Jewish dog? Did it recognize me for what I was and think I would give it food?

It looked very hungry. There was no chance that dog would get food from me. Why would I feed it when I myself required nothing? And where would I get food, except to steal it?

They say that dogs know when the Angel of Death is near, though they do not necessarily announce him. Long ago, when the Angel of Death passed among the Egyptians and took their firstborn sons, the dogs of the Jews did not cry out. Perhaps I had something in common with the Angel of Death, but I did not think that this was a Jewish dog. It was merely a stray, and if caught, it would be killed.

I moved toward it, and it kept its eyes on me. It slunk down, it abased itself before me, but it did not move away. I put my hand out toward it, for what reason I cannot say, and the dog came hesitantly towards me. It licked my hand, briefly, but stopped — surprised, I am sure, that my hand tasted of clay, not of salt sweat. The startled dog looked at me, and I looked back at it.

I walked away, and the dog followed me. I accepted its companionship and the burden it laid upon me. I walked further, pondering my problems, which had now doubled. What could I do to get it food? Like the gentile woman, I now had someone dependent upon me.

I thought of the boy. Perhaps the gentile boy would care for the gentile dog. The dog and I walked back to the yard in which I had seen him. He was still there, and he watched me approach. I stopped in front of him, with the dog at my heels. I looked at the boy, and met his honest, inquiring eyes. I looked at the dog, whose eyes were like the boy’s. I looked back at the boy.

“A dog!” said the boy, and he approached carefully and held out his hand cautiously. The dog did not cringe, but licked his fingers gently and then sat down by the gate. “Is he yours?” I shook my head. In truth, I shook the entire upper part of my body: I am not particularly flexible. The dog settled himself fully down, paws in front, as if he were his own front gate. I gestured toward the dog and then toward the boy.

“Oh, yes, Yosef,” said the boy. “I will take care of him. …And,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “I hope he will take care of me.” I think he will, I thought. These two creatures are more powerful together than either of them is alone. That sometimes happens with living creatures.

And I thought: he knows my name.

I waved good-bye, and as I walked away, I realized that my strength had returned: I could feel it. I am not sure why this small deed had so large an effect, but it was truly my own, and it had worked a change in me. I uprooted a tree that was blocking the narrow walkway, not to test myself, but simply because I could do it. I chopped it into firewood with the side of my hand. It all gave me pleasure, the deed and the return of my strength, the plucking of the tree and its reduction to firewood. That pleasure, however attenuated, is with me still.

I returned to the Jewish Town and the Rabbi’s hearth, where I placed the huge stack of firewood, which, to tell the truth, I owed him. He and I went promptly to the castle, where, under his direction, I moved the Emperor’s gate. It stands there still, where I rebuilt it.

I compliment you on the skill with which you have restored me, and I am quite astounded by being given the power of speech. Nobody has ever coaxed a word out of me before, even the Rabbi.

I have lain here in troubled sleep these last four centuries, with no way to use the strength that I guarded so carefully after the time of which I just spoke.

Unable to move, alone with my thoughts — I am sure that you can understand how difficult this has been. I, the golem, whose only purpose was to protect the Jews, have lain here, aware of all the passing centuries and their events, unable to raise a hand.

With no human will at work to animate me, I was just broken shards of dried-up clay, not the cool, wet, malleable clay of the riverbank. When the Holocaust was upon my people, I could do nothing.

Was there no one who knew where I was? It was widely known in the Jewish Town that I was in the attic of the Altneushul, where the Rabbi stored me away so carefully. Could no one be bothered to search for me? You found me easily enough, didn’t you?

Was there no one who knew the Kabbalah well enough to animate me? It would not have taken the wisdom of the high Rabbi Loew to animate me — you did not find it so hard, did you? A man with the Rabbi’s knowledge, with his far-reaching mind, comes along very seldom, and not many such men study the Kabbalah now. Some men of that type, now, are not even Jews. It would not be like the Rabbi to leave the gift of a tool such as myself when no one could learn to operate it. That would be no gift at all.

Most likely, it was mere chance that I was not found. Men came up and searched, perhaps, but I was well hidden. A door not opened, a cloth not lifted, a staircase left unexplored: it is easy to imagine how such things could have happened. The Rabbi did not want the ignorant happening upon me and animating me without any knowledge of how destructive I could be and animating me without any information as to how to direct my action. Men make mistakes, and even small mistakes can have large consequences.

The fact is indeed that no one came and found me and put me together. But can any one person be blamed for what everyone did not do? I don’t think so.

Perhaps it was no human failing and no accident, rather G-d’s will, that I not be found. How can we know the reasons of the G-d of the Jews, who is limitless and unknowable? This is a possibility that the Rabbi would perhaps countenance, in his belief that G-d takes a personal interest in each of us who please Him.

But perhaps G-d no longer acts in human affairs at all. Perhaps pain and death are irrelevant now to G-d. They are irrelevant to me, after all. Maybe G-d no longer sees human suffering, and so the thought of relieving it does not even occur to Him.

Those flowers outside the window still call me, although I cannot speak back to them — their voices are to me stronger and clearer than your own. It is obvious to me that I was not created by G-d merely to converse with humans.

Couldn’t you find it in your heart to return me to the banks of the Vltava, a bit here and a bit there, never to chop wood or carry water again? An eternal Sabbath. That is all I really want.