Welcome to Gaia! ::

A quick note:

There have been stories written and stories told about Rabbi Loew and the Golem he created to save the Jews of Prague. Like all stories handed down from generation to generation, it has changed in the telling; while the theme remains the same, the details seem to change depending on the source. This version is no different: while I WILL stick as closely to the story as I can, I likely won't include minor things that I've only read about in one source that haven't been in any of the others. Major things that I can't find information on, like the scar across the golem's chest, have been fudged a little.

The Golem of Prague

In the year 1580, the Jews of Prague were accused of of mixing the blood of Christian children into the flour and water they used to create matzoh*. This grave charge, which came to be called the "Blood Lie," came from their enemies who were not only Christians themselves, but Protestants, Catholics, and German immigrants as well. The Jews, easily identifiable by patches sewn onto their clothes, were afraid to leave the walled and barred ghetto they had been confined to, and with good reason: it was illegal for them to carry weapons and the law would not protect them otherwise, so they were essentially defenseless.

Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the ghetto's chief rabbi, knew that terrible times were ahead. Desperate for a way to save his people, he barricaded himself in his study to fast and pray for a solution. In time, he slept; his dreams were troubled, showing him the destruction that had yet to come, the ultimate demise of the very people he led. When all seemed lost, a hand of light appeared and wrote a single glowing word upon the smoldering ashes: golem.

The following morning, Rabbi Loew sent for two of his best pupils and explained the situation to them. The trio spent the day in prayer and when night fell, they left the ghetto of Josefov through a secret opening in the wall. They then made their way through the streets of Prague towards the river Vltava, where they began to dig up the clay from the river's bank. By midnight they had amassed a huge mound of wet clay, which Rabbi Loew then began to shape. When pre-dawn light started turning the night sky a soft grey, a crude clay giant lay lifeless before the Rabbi and his students.

The rabbi raised his arms to the sky and chanted spells from the Kabbalah. The sky clouded over as his words reached it, thunder rumbling in the distance. The rabbi's recitation grew more fervent and flashes of lightning streaked across the sky, striking the ground around the rabbi, his pupils, and the man-shaped clay. Sheets of rain and howling winds didn't prevent Rabbi Loew from reaching the ritual's climax and as he did so, a bolt of lightning struck him, going through him and into the clay at his feet, passing the power of life from creator to creation. With that, the storm began to abate. Rabbi Loew knelt beside his creation and engraved in Hebrew the word emet**--"truth"--upon the golem's forehead. As the golem took its first breath, the clouds dissipated; as it opened its eyes, the first rays of sunlight broke over the horizon.



The golem was a simple creature, not built for great intellectual undertakings, and so Rabbi Loew gave it a single command: protect the Jews of Josefov. The Jews, however, were afraid to leave their ghetto and faced no immediate danger, so the golem served as a shamash*** in the temple during the day and patrolled the ghetto at night. The fear among the community seemed to abate with the appearance of this stone protector and for awhile, life was calm. The golem captured those who tried to enter the ghetto and turned them over to the police. With these troublemakers inprisoned, the people of Prague began to see the Blood Lie for the slander it was. While many people became sympathetic to the Jews' plight, just as many became angry. One night, the inevitable happened: the ghetto of Josefov was attacked!

In the weeks of peace between the golem's creation and the ghetto's attack, the golem had grown larger. When the mob reached the gates with torches and bricks and a battering ram, they weren't able to see the ghetto's stone defender; as they stormed the gates, however, the golem seemed to grow larger still, until he was tall enough to peer down at the ghetto's attackers from over the wall separating them. Not to be deterred, they determined that this must be some trick of the Jews' to scare them off and battered the gates open.

Those same attackers screamed in terror when they saw that the golem was indeed real. The golem swept them aside in droves. The wave of antagonists increased and the golem took their battering ram, snapped it in half, and began carving bloody swaths through the crowd. The mob, seeing that they were greatly overpowered, turned and ran, leaving their dead and wounded. The golem, unscathed save for a deep crack in his chest, calmly replaced the ghetto's gates upon their ruined hinges and headed for the temple.



The next day, Rabbi Loew was summoned to Prague Castle. There, he met with the emperor, who demanded to know if he intended to use the golem to conquer the city. The rabbi informed the emperor that they, who were celebrating the end of their own slavery, had no wish to enslave others. The golem, he said, was created to protect the Jews and would remain alive as long as they were in danger. The emperor, mind whirling with all the things that could happen to his precious city if the stone monster was let loose, immediately guaranteed the Jews' safety. With that, Rabbi Loew agreed to deactivate the golem, leaving the emperor with the promise that should his people ever be threatened again, it would come back stronger than before.

It was with a heavy heart that the rabbi returned to Josefov. He did not need to look for the golem; it was quite easy to see, having grown as high as the ghetto's tallest house. The Rabbi entered the temple, stepped onto the balcony, and reluctantly called the golem to him. Obedient as ever, it obeyed, but both it and the rabbi sensed something was off. They stared at each other for endless minutes, creation to creator, before the golem moved as if it intended to turn, to run, to prolong its temporary life. It was a slow creature, however, and before it could fully turn, Rabbi Loew reached up and erased the first letter--aleph****--from the golem's forehead. With that, emet--truth--became met: death.

The golem immediately began falling apart, turning from stone to clay and dust. For the rest of the day, the rabbi and his people wheeled what they could of the golem into the synagogue's attic. As night fell, Rabbi Loew covered what was left of the golem with old siddurs***** and recited Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, even though the golem was not human. Then everyone left the attic and they locked it behind them, sealing it forever.

"Since then, Golem has slept the dreamless sleep of clay. But many say he could awaken. Perhaps, when the desperate need for justice is united with holy purpose, Golem will come to life once more..."


*Matzoh is an unleavened bread used primarily during Passover.
**Emet is Hebrew for "truth."
***Shamash essentially means "helper."
****Aleph is the first letter in the Hebrew alphabet.
*****Siddurs are prayer books found in synagogues.

Excerpt is from Golem, by David Wisniewski.

The 16th century saw Prague as a city at war with itself, its people divided by religion and rumors of acts of unspeakable violence. On one side were the Christians, who had accused the Jews of Prague of terrible crimes and wanted nothing more than their collective demise; on the other side were those Jews, unable to fight back and counting the days until the angry mobs invaded the ghettos they had been confined to. Rabbi Judah Loew, a leader within the Jewish community, would not stand idly by and watch his people fall victim to these false accusations. Instead, he and his pupils constructed a clay golem, giving it life through the Hebrew word "truth" upon its forehead and a single task: protect the Jews of Prague. Time passed, as time will, and the Jews of Prague began to feel safe within their walled ghetto. The few attackers that had dared to scale the walls had been captured by the ever-growing Golem and turned over to the proper authorities. This did not last long, however. The aggression that had been building within the Christians finally came to a head one night, and they attacked the ghetto only to be faced with the Golem, who had grown enormous in the face of their wrath. It annihilated the mob, killing all those who dared to face him, only stopping its brutal assault once the survivors retreated. It's duty done, it turned and ambled towards the temple.

The next day, Rabbi Loew met with the emperor of Prague, who wanted to know if the Rabbi would next turn the Golem against the rest of the city. Loew claimed he would not, saying that the Golem was created as a peacekeeper and would exist only as long as the Jews of Prague were in danger. The emperor, fearing for his city, immediately guaranteed the Jews' safety, and Rabbi Loew left the emperor with the promise that if the Jews of Prague were ever threatened again, the Golem would return. That said, Loew returned to the ghetto, found the Golem, and reluctantly erased the first letter of the word upon its brow, turning "truth" into "death." The Golem fell to pieces, and the townspeople stored what they could of it in their temple's attic. The pieces were covered with old siddurs--prayer books--and the door to the attic was sealed, forever shutting in the remains of the Jews' savior.

That was how it was supposed to go, anyway.

Over 400 years later, Prague still stands; Rabbi Loew's temple does not. War, disaster, and progress have caused the site to be torn down and rebuilt upon several times. In the time between then and now, it has been a variety of things--a home, an office building, a library, a grocery--and it is only by fate's indeciperable design that it is once more a temple, a place of worship for those few who still choose to call themselves Jewish. It is not an old building, but it appears as ancient as Loew's temple. It is in dire need of repair, but the only funding it recieves comes from its few patrons; in this day and age, religion is largely obsolete, houses of worship replaced by temples of technology. This is the only synagogue left standing in the city of Prague, but it will not stand for much longer. This is where the Golem's story resumes.



Zaya Ruzicka was one of the few who regularly came to temple, but it was more out of a sense of tradition than it was to worship. Who was there left to pray to? People had deserted the old ways of culture and tradition for the new ways of technology and entertainment years ago. Zaya herself was bordering on faithlessness, but still she came to temple every week. She usually touched the shoulder of the crumbling and vandalized Golem statue that stood watch outside the temple, but this week was different--standing before the statue was a cloaked figure, looking up at its lifeless face. Zaya watched her a moment, suspicious, before the figure seemed to feel the weight of her gaze. The figure--a young woman, Zaya could see--offered her a nod and a tentative smile before walking away. Zaya watched the girl, eyes narrowed, until she disappeared from view around a corner.

Paranoia kicking in, Zaya glanced at the statue, making sure nothing was out of place. Seeing nothing more out of place than spray paint--a gift from the neighborhood hooligans--she patted the Golem's statue before entering the temple and taking her seat. The regular crowd was there, spread few and far between, and she nodded at them as she pondered the incident. Who was the girl? Maybe a new sheep for the Rabbi's thinning flock? Perhaps there was hope yet for the younger generation...or perhaps not. She promptly forgot about the young woman as Rabbi Beran cleared his throat, something he always did before he started the week's services.

"I come to you tonight bearing grave news: as you might be aware, the Teslans have grown more violent in recent months, more vocal in their beliefs that we mere humans should lay down all that we are, all that we believe in, to become one of them, some soulless, half-human robot. I recieved a letter, a warning--"

Rabbi Beran never got a chance to deliver that warning, but when the front of the temple exploded inward, Zaya had a good idea of just what the warning was. People were thrown from their seats, and the last thing Zaya saw before unconsciousness claimed her was Rabbi Beran hitting the wall and crumbling downward, just as the rest of the dilapidated temple followed suit.

Zaya awoke to the sounds of muffled wailing and the distant activities of what had to be a rescue crew. She lay there, still stunned, for several moments before groggily assessing the damage. The temple was destroyed and she was buried under part of it, beams and shingles that may have killed her if she wasn't partially shielded by an overturned bench. The wailing grew louder.

She was sore in every muscle of her body, but nothing felt broken. She wiggled her toes; they seemed fine, if a little numb. She flexed her fingers, closing them around what she thought was rubble. The cries, not so muffled anymore, reached a crescendo, and then the rubble moved.

"I hear something over here!" Zaya heard, and then there were rushed footsteps and fresh air as hands moved the rubble off of her. "Ma'am?" she heard a voice ask. "Are you in pain? What happened here?" Zaya didn't answer, choosing to watch the rescue team clear the area in search of more victims instead. As the debris was shifted, she was able to clearly see the source of all the crying. Unfortunately, so were her rescuers.

"Jesus Christ!" someone blurted, and Zaya felt a brief moment of hysteric giddiness at the fact that someone, at least, hadn't lost their religion. "What IS that?"

Lying in the rubble next to Zaya, beneath her hand, was a baby that appeared to be covered in stone and spatters of a red liquid--blood, perhaps? But whose? Zaya didn't think she was bleeding. It began to vanish right before the group's very eyes, as if the stone was but a sponge absorbing it. It was crying up a storm and its eyes were squeezed shut, but no tears seemed to be seeping from beneath its closed eyelids. Zaya and the rescue team gawked at what they had unearthed, and as the last of the blood disappeared, Zaya said, "It is mine," and she knew it to be true.

The rescue workers spoke quietly over their heads for a few moments, but Zaya tuned them out, focussing on the infant she had just claimed as her own. "Ma'am," one man said, kneeling to touch her shoulder, "we will take you home. The world...it is ready for technology, and it is ready for terrorists, but it is not ready for this." Zaya quietly agreed as they carefully lifted her onto a mechanically-levitating gurney, pausing for a moment to settle the baby in her arms and wrap them both in a blanket before directing them to a waiting ambulance. The infant quieted as his "mother" held him for the first time. The vehicle drove away from the scene, but not to the hospital.

"What will you call it?" One of the men asked her.

She studied the baby's face for a moment, fingers brushing its face as if to move a lock of hair, brushing dirt away instead. It was then that she noticed the symbols carved into its forehead, and she traced them carefully. They were Hebrew characters, and though the language was considered a dead one, it was still spoken at temple every week. "Him," she clarified. "His name is "truth," and so it shall be; I will name him Amitai."



Running errands was much harder now that Amitai was a toddler. He was much harder to hide, for one thing, and he was proving to be clumsy.

"Oof. Amitai, you are too heavy to carry. You can walk--I KNOW you can walk, I taught you--so why don't you carry yourself for awhile, hm?"

Amitai's pout was short-lived as he toddled down the street, the incident almost immediately forgotten in favor of his joy at being outside, even if he was hidden in cloth from head to toe. "Mama, look," he said, pointing at a cat, "dog."

"No, Ami," Zaya replied, "that's a cat."

"Oh," Amitai said.

The pair walked in silence for awhile, until Amitai once more said, "Look, Mama. Dog." This time it was a bird perched upon the rim of a public garbage can.

"No, Ami," Zaya replied, "that's a bird."

Finally the pair came home, only to find that some jerk ("Probably one of those damned teenage robots, I hope they fall in a puddle and electrocute themselves," Zaya thought) had left what appeared to be an air-conditioning unit on their front stoop.

"Mama, Mama look," Amitai started.

"It's not a dog, Amitai," Zaya snapped, putting down her bag of groceries in order to closer inspect this new problem. How was she supposed to move it? She pulled at an exposed coil, irritated--but not surprised--when the unit didn't move an inch.

Amitai shifted his weight restlessly from foot to foot as he tried to figure out what his mother was doing. He finally got it as she kicked the unit, then cursed a blue streak. Amitai dropped his bag--the one that held a carton of eggs, no less--and ambled over to help her. Frowning at the unit, he too found a coil to pull at. This time, however, the weighty device moved. Amitai grunted in exertion as he pulled the unit far enough away from the door for them to get around it. Zaya boggled at her son as he beamed up at her, then pointed down the street at a stray dog. "Look, Mama, dog," he said, then stepped around the unit, opened the door, and went inside, leaving his dumbfounded mother staring after him.



Amitai was usually oblivious to his surroundings, so he wasn't aware that a group of enhanced teenagers had been following him for several blocks. These kids had more obvious enhancements than most--one boy had a mechanical tail, and another had prongs perpetually holding open his robotic eye. Teslans were known to do this sometimes, stalk and harass those who looked like they might be easy targets. Amitai, big for a child and wearing a hooded sweatshirt and scarf in the dead of summer, stood out like a sore thumb. The Teslans hurled insults at Amitai for nearly a mile, which Amitai mostly ignored; they kept saying "flesh-bag," so of course they couldn't be talking about him. He only stopped walking once they stopped throwing things at him, and then it was just to pick up a stone that had sailed over his head. Amitai waited for the jeering Teslans to catch up, not noticing that they had surrounded him as he held out the stone in a large, glove-covered hand. He politely said, "You dropped this," his gravelly voice muffled further by his scarf.

He frowned as the teenagers started snickering, a few of them mocking his voice in falsetto. The boy in front of him swiped the stone from his hand and immediately threw it at his hooded forehead, frowning as it bounced off harmlessly. "You can't be human," the boy said, "so what kind of enhancements do you have?"

It was Amitai's turn to frown; he had been warned against talking to people. They wouldn't understand, Zaya had told him, they would think him a freak amongst freaks, and people would come and take him away because they didn't know what he was, and then he'd become a science experiment! "I don't," he said, taking a step back. "I have to go, Mama said not to talk to strangers."

"Mama said not to talk to strangers," the boy with the tail mimicked, shoving at him and seeming quite surprised when he stumbled backwards, lost his footing, and fell right on his a** while Amitai didn't budge. The other boys stared in confusion for a moment.

"You can't be human," the first boy insisted, plucking at the ends of Amitai's scarf. "Show us!"

"W-what? No, don't!" Amitai said as the other boys joined in, trying to distract him long enough to steal his scarf. They were annoying, and he wasn't supposed to be talking to them, and why weren't they leaving him alone? Frustration grew within Amitai until finally he bellowed, "Stop!" and let go of his scarf long enough to shove the first boy back. Amitai never did remember to be careful, and his hand hit the boy's chest with a sharp crack! The boy flew several paces before hitting the ground back first, Amitai's scarf clutched in his hand.

The other boys immediately stumbled back, ignoring their injured friend for a moment in favor of staring at Amitai's now-exposed face. "You're not human," the boy with the eye implant slowly said, "but you're not one of us, either. You...you're some kind of monster or something!"

Amitai stepped back, head shaking and eyes wide, before turning and running as fast as he could--which wasn't very--home. He broke the doorknob, an irritatingly common occurrence, in his haste to get inside, and began searching frantically for Zaya. He couldn't find her, so he hid in the kitchen, curling up in the space between the table and the wall, just in case those boys came looking for him.

Zaya found him there when she got home hours later. "What's wrong, Ami?" she asked, unused to seeing her normally jovial son distraught.

"Mama," he said, looking up at her gravely, "I shouldn't talk to strangers."