Rahel and the Golem of Prague
(A Short Kabalistic Love Story)
David Del Bourgo
Copyright 2011 by David Del Bourgo
A humble rabbi lived in the Prague Ghetto. He was not one of the charismatic rabbis like the esteemed Rabbi Loew of the Old-New Synagogue. He was unkempt and his general appearance was anything but attractive. Short of stature, he had small, beady eyes and the large hooked nose caricatured by anti-Semites. His sermons were simple and spoken slowly due to a speech defect that made him difficult to understand.
This little-known rabbi, however, did not care if congregants came to his shul for his eloquence or outward attractiveness. He believed that piety was between him and God, and refused to make a show of himself with witty aphorisms and memorable commentaries. When influential Jews would deign to visit his shop-front synagogue out of curiosity, they would not only come away unimpressed, but often returned home laughing at him.
The Jewish community agreed that this rabbi, who will remain unnamed, was perfectly placed in the smallest synagogue in the poorest corner of the ghetto. Whereas the educated and affluent would never have tolerated such a shabby rabbi, the indigent and crippled felt comfortable in this holy man’s presence. In his tiny synagogue, which had previously been a rug shop, the dispossessed had a place to call their own in the presence of God.
Unlike other holy men who wanted to enhance their social position with a wife and children, for many years this rabbi remained a bachelor. When he finally did marry, he chose a widow whom nobody else would have wed. Not only was she well into spinsterish years, she did not have one koruna for a dowry. Her lowly position in the community never concerned this rabbi. He had so little concept of social status, he did not realize that he was no prize, either. Yet in time, it is said, his wife came to love him because she saw beyond his exterior, beyond even his good heart, into his soul, where she claimed to have glimpsed the Divine Light, as pure and beautiful as anything to behold.
After several years passed and his wife did not get pregnant, she went to see the wisest doctors and most notable midwives in the ghetto. They all agreed that she was past the age of fertility and the rabbi and his wife would never have children. Perhaps by coincidence or fate, the day she conceived, the great Rabbi Loew’s golem first visited our lowly rabbi’s synagogue, clothed in a robe with a hood to conceal his real identity. The golem had heard that the dispossessed, crippled and disfigured could find solace in this unassuming rabbi’s presence. Some have said the golem visited our rabbi out of pity for his small congregation that often did not even make up a minyan. This could not have been the reason for the golems attendance, though, since it is against Jewish law for a golem to be counted as part of the minyan. Yet the golem must have found something that comforted him, because he continued for many years to attend the rabbi’s services.
The ghetto proclaimed it a miracle when the rabbi’s wife became pregnant, and for the first time the rabbi's name was spoken in all quarters. Yet the rabbi told all his new well-wishers that he did not want any celebration around the miracle of his son's birth. He desired only that the boy be pious like him. Thus the child was born quietly in the rabbi’s small house. And when the midwife held the rabbi’s long-awaited son in the air, she said, “Truly this is a miracle! A healthy baby girl!”
The girl was named Rahel, after her mother’s grandmother, and she grew up a loving daughter, especially toward her father. Like her mother she saw beyond his ugly exterior into his soul and glimpsed a purity she said was inexplicable. After adjusting to the fact that God had chosen for him a daughter and not a son, the rabbi knew in his heart that she would be a modest girl who would marry a humble, but honest rabbi like himself. And Rahel did everything within her power to be as her father wished. In this regard, truly, the girl had but one problem: she was astoundingly beautiful! Everyone in the ghetto thought, given the homeliness of her parents, her beauty was even more miraculous than the fact of her birth.
Rahel and her mother did everything they could to hide the girl’s physical attributes, knowing that her father thought that outward beauty could entice people into sin. Her mother dressed Rahel in heavy drab cloth, and after the girl reached her first niddah, they kept her chestnut hair covered. But to conceal her beauty entirely was impossible. It was said that just one glimpse of a lock of her fiery hair, or a peek at a corner of one of her sea-green eyes, and men fell mute at her feet.
The rabbi told his wife that Rahel must not leave the house until she became wed, except of course to attend his services. As she matured and grew more beautiful, much to the humble rabbi’s chagrin his shul filled beyond capacity. The new congregants were not only single young men. Husbands brought their wives who would leave the services comparing themselves to Rahel. These women would say things like, “My feet are smaller than hers” or “My bosom is more ample.” Always trying to find at least one attribute they possessed that surpassed the girl. But, as everybody knows, unlike the devil, beauty is not found in the details but in an harmonious assemblage of features.
The synagogue swelled with more and more congregants except for one. Since the golem had first come to the rabbi's services on the day Rahel was conceived, he had become one of its regular congregants, but on the day Rahel became a woman he ceased to attend. Some said that Joseph the Mute (that is what he was called because it was not widely known that he was a golem) had become uncomfortable among all the prosperous Jews coming to the synagogue to catch a glimpse of Rahel.
Word of Rahel’s beauty grew beyond the Prague Ghetto into the surrounding world of the Christians. They heard that amongst the broken cart wheels, rusted stove pipes and other detritus in the poorest section of the ghetto, a jewel was hidden. A girl that was not only dazzling, but modest, obedient, and pious in all ways. Her renown even spread to the chambers of the priest Thaddeus, a fanatical Jew-hater who was untiring in his attempts to rile the peace and harmony between the Jews and Christians, and turn it into hatred and discord.
This devious priest would stop at nothing, including attempts to raise the ire of the Christian community against the Jews by concocting stories of blood libel—the supposed Jewish lust for the blood of Christian children during Passover. He was even known to have paid disreputable men to dig up dead Christian children and plant them in synagogues and Jewish cellars during the holidays. Yet the golem always sniffed out Thaddeus’s plots. Protecting Jews against accusations of blood libel was the golem’s chief purpose on earth and the reason Rabbi Loew had created him from a lump of clay. Although Rabbi Loew and his golem had successfully thwarted all of Thaddeus's schemes, the priest had been cunning enough to remain beyond the reach of state law.
After hearing about Rahel’s beauty and piety, Thaddeus conceived of perhaps his most despicable plan against the Jews. If he could lure Rahel, the jewel of the ghetto, away from the Jews, he would claim that God could not condone such a pure creature living among the killers of Christ. Thaddeus knew exactly who he could use to attract the beautiful young girl away from her wretched tribe. The priest had a young student named Thomas who, like Rahel, was gifted in every way. Said to be the most handsome young man in all of Prague, Thomas was also pious and devoted to becoming a man of God. Yet Thaddeus believed that rather than Thomas joining the priesthood, he would better serve the Christian community by wooing Rahel away from the Jews.
The problem for Thaddeus was how to get Thomas and Rahel together, since Rahel was not allowed to leave her house except to go to shul, and a young Christian man walking into a Jewish synagogue would immediately raise suspicions. Then a brilliant idea occurred to Thaddeus. Years before, when he had almost succeeded in turning the Kais
er against the Jews, Rabbi Loew had requested the chance to write a rebuttal to each of Thaddeus’s accusations against the Jewish community. The rabbi’s defense of the Jews was so erudite and convincing, not only the Kaiser, but all of the Christian ecclesiastics except Thaddeus had been convinced that Christians could live in harmony with the peaceful Jews.
With malicious intent, Thaddeus told the Jewish leaders that he was finally prepared to be convinced that the Jews meant the Christians no harm and could be considered good and worthy neighbors. He said, however, that he would not be swayed by an orator with the skills of Rabbi Loew, whose well-known powers of persuasion might obfuscate the truth. He instead requested that the Jews choose their most humble and least assuming rabbi, a leader of the poor and dispossessed, to present the Jewish case. The treacherous priest said that in order to prove that the Jews were not trying to trick him by sneaking in an erudite scholar, he wanted to hold this debate in the chosen rabbi’s synagogue. Thaddeus could only be assured by the rabbi's lowly surroundings that he was
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