Part 3: Song of Praise
A widespread legend about the childhood of Jesus relates that he made birds of clay which flew off. This Christian apocryphal conception remarkably parallels Jewish tales of the golem, the man of clay animated by the adept who brings about a magical transformation of the earth through the influx of the ‘alphabet' of the Book Yetsirah. Popular Golem narratives tell of Prague's Rabbi Loew making the golem in order to combat lies about ritual murders attributed to Jews during the reign of King Rudolf II. A more pedestrian version states the good Rabbi simply needed help in managing the work of the Old-New Synagogue. Neither version accurately reflects historical exegesis, which definitively stresses, according to Gershom Scholem, that golem-making serves no practical ‘purpose' other than to demonstrate the power of the holy Name.
When rigorously interpreted, even the following statement in Pseudo-Saadya's commentary on Yetsirah (II, 5) remains within these limits: ‘I have heard that Ibn Ezra made such a creature in the presence of Rabbenu Tam, and said: See what [power] God put into the holy letters, and he said [to Rabbenu Tam]: Go backward; and it returned to its former state [as lifeless earth].
The golem, no sooner created, is dissolved again into dust. Such a sacred demonstration requires the primary materials of earth and language. In the popular tale, Rabbi Loew receives his golem-making charge in a dream with abecedarial form – a phrase of alphabetized words. The double message – containing the imperative to animate a creature as well as the indication of a coded or systematized organization of language – underscores the mystical literature.
Hayim Joseph David Azulai, a famous Jerusalem Kabbalist of the eighteenth century, who was well acquainted with the traditions of the seventeenth-century school of Kabbalists in Jerusalem, said to Rabbi Jacob Baruch in Livorno (by word of mouth, it would seem) that in magic the ‘corporeal combinations of letters as they first meet the eye are not sufficient.'
This remarkable phrase, corporeal combinations of letters, suggests that certain sequences are already incarnations, words becoming flesh, as if to say an alphabet is a body. The Rabbi, depending on the version of the tale, inscribes letters onto the clay forehead or slips a paper on which the correct words have been written under the clay tongue. I cannot help but to think of the Greek Catholic rituals of my childhood, the priest writing on my forehead with water, or placing bread and wine, foods like words, onto or under my tongue. Were we humble churchgoers made of clay then, animated by the sacred acts of the righteous man, as the life of the body again results from the combination of earth and word, presence and absence? Does the word zephyr, a gentle wind, shares the Arabic root sifr , from which we have zero? Consider the presence/absence confluence of the second line of Genesis: And the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Primo Levi contemplates this line in the first chapter of his novel The Periodic Table. He translates the verse from the Hebrew bible: The wind of the Lord breathed upon the face of the waters. Spirit, as respiration, inspire , expire , derives from spire meaning breath (of God), a (sacred) wind. Wind over water = zero over one. As breath (the vowels) breathes life into language (the consonants), so spirit animates the material of the body and the world. Now we may approach the first four lines of John's Gospel.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Who is the he of the second sentence? Syntax suggests he was the word. The word, a person, facilitates all making, especially of things. What is a thing? And what about those things not made, implied in the second sentence, the null set of the possible? Are these sentences about making, about life and light being in the making in the past, continuing to shine in the present? The light of men, then, allows them to make in turn, and in their making they become like God, as the youthful Jesus with his birds, as the Rabbi with his man of clay, as the priest with his flock. But I am getting ahead of myself – a single golem, a pair of birds (Adam, Eve?), a congregation of worshippers – what are the differences between one or two or many incarnations? And in what beginning do John's first three words find us? Perhaps not of the creation of the universe, but only the creation of the book: in the beginning (of this book) was (is) the word (you are now reading). Is this not after all a literary device? As David Copperfield starts with I am born, John begins with beginning, but with more than words; he composes corporeal combinations of letters. Thus is each of us a book of pages animated by divine inscription. We are multitudes, and we are volumes. As each book, a container, holds endless interpretation, contradiction, possibility; the infinite book in the library of the human, in each and in all, volumes not of clay, but of sand. The singular, then, remains that book beyond interpretation, noncontradictory, the inscription on the stone (clay?) tablets of the Decalogue, the flat book, without volume. The golem is the law. The birds, the two, instance the unstable pair, singular collapsing into multiple, the doorway of love. What do we incarnations have in common – be we one (the law, the guardian), two (the love birds of childhood), or many (the wolf pack calling from the trees) – only this: our brevity. No sooner are we created than we dissolve again into dust, like the words of this page, written, spoken, vanishing. We of flesh have no purpose but to demonstrate the power of the word, and great danger, warns Gershom Scholem, threatens the creator who forgets that fact. With that admonition in mind, let us restate ourselves. For what reason does breath animate this body? Only for this: a song of praise. Remember the angels of Talmudic legend – existences created each to sing a single note of praise to God and then to vanish.
arm
armpit
backbone
chest
cranium
dimple
eardrum
elbow
eyebrow
eye
foot
finger
gland
hair
hairline
heel
hamstring
head
heart
iris
islets of Langerhans
jawbone
kidney
lung
leg
molar
mouth
nostril
neck
nose
navel
occipital lobe
pelvis
rib
rectum
sternum
stomach
spine
skin
shin
tooth
tongue
thumb
thyroid
tearduct
uvula
upper lip
ventricle
windpipe
wrist
whisker
word
x-chromosome
y-chromosome
zygote
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