The Golem

It was coming to the end of my time as a Jewish Sunday School teacher, and I had half-heartedly pitched a class on Jewish Monsters and Magic, over-subscribing my own time and not having a good lesson plan prepared. But I wanted to share the legend of the golem, a creature built from clay to protect the Jews of medieval Prague. None of the children opted to do it, apart from a Year 2 boy who was drawn irrevocably to the mention of monsters. So I agreed to tell the story just to him.

We sat on the sofa and I told him the legend of the golem - a mute but massive creature formed from mud and kabbalistic incantations, who knocked away the weapons of soldiers in the dark. He loved it, but wanted to see the golem in action. That was a problem, as kid-friendly golem animations did not abound in my quick YouTube searching. I settled on the 1920s silent movie Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, which seemed as ancient as the golem legend itself. We watched as the miming characters, faces white with paint, revolved on the screen.  By the time the Pharoah-like statue of the golem appeared, other children had gathered around my laptop screen. There were half a dozen of us, most in Years 2 and 3, watching the ‘masterpiece of German expressionism’ with rapt attention. As the stony golem blinked to life with eyes piercing through the monochrome tint of bygone decades, a boy covered his mouth in horror. 

‘It was a good monster’, I said, trying to outwit the already-forming nightmares in their minds. ‘It was made to protect us.’ Nevermind that in other versions of the story, the golem went haywire, wreaking havoc on innocent citizens of the town. Could they understand the complexity of a creature that had no true sentience, only a physical might bending towards chaos? It is no less difficult to imagine, perhaps, that from riverbank mud something honorable could be created. The movie was mute as the golem itself, black and white, etching itself in our minds as we sat there on a Sunday morning. The thralls of storytelling took us so far back that words were barely needed, and we were part of that collective incantation, willing something so crude to live.