How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck) by Wex, Michael (summer reading list txt) 📕

to acquire a soul. A golem has all the material that goes into a human being, but it still needs work, plenty of shaping and polishing, along with actual animation, before it will come to resemble something that we might think of as human. A golem is to a man or woman as a chunk of dough is to a loaf of bread; indeed, a related rabbinic tradition (Genesis Rabbo 8:1) describes how the raw material of Adam-the-golem was stretched from one end of the world to the other, as if primordial man were really a primal pizza.

It is this idea of incompletion that causes the legendary automaton to be called a golem. A golem can do anything that a person can do—stories of people using golems as unsalaried butlers are legion—except think and speak, the two activities that separate human beings from everything else. If you tell a golem to do something, it will keep doing it until you give it an explicit command to stop. If you ask a golem a question, it will stare at you and say nothing. Hence the colloquial use of golem in Yiddish to denote a slow-moving, ungainly, dull-witted sort of person; zitsn vi a leymener goylem, “to sit like a golem made of clay,” is to be the Yiddish equivalent of a cigar store Indian, someone who just sits there, silent and immobile. You talk and talk, ask questions, try to draw her out, but not a word comes out of her mouth and you begin to wonder if she’s really human or merely a clever simulation. The golem—the real one, that is—has the outward physical features of a human being, but is like Adam in the third hour of creation: it has arms and legs, but lacks brain and soul. It is a rough draft of a human being, basic material still sorely in need of refinement.

It can hardly be an accident, then, that the Mishna chooses the word golem, rather than something that means “fool” or “unlearned person,” to describe the opposite of a sage or wise man. But typically for a document that has had so much influence on Yiddish patterns of thought and speech, the Mishna only mentions things that the golem doesn’t do. These are:

Keep silent in the face of someone with more experience and education.

Let a person finish speaking without interrupting him.

Consider what he’s going to say before making any reply.

Confine his questions to the matter under discussion and give direct answers to any questions that he’s asked.

Address matters in the order in which they’ve been presented.

Say “I didn’t hear you,” when he doesn’t hear [i.e., admit to not understanding what has been said].

And admit the truth when he is found to have erred.

(ovos 5:7)

In other words, a golem is the kind of person who knows more about everything than you do and never shuts up about it. He doesn’t listen to what you’re saying because he’s too busy talking at the same time, jumps from one topic to another with no rhyme or reason, and refuses to acknowledge any fact that could indicate that he isn’t right. As the technology necessary for radio or television news-talk shows had not been developed at the time of the Mishna, these were still unambiguously negative characteristics. In a culture that valued debate above almost all other human activity, the inability to converse properly disqualified a person from full participation in society. Look up the word conversation in any English dictionary and you’ll see that it comes from the Latin conversari, which doesn’t mean “to talk,” but “to live with, keep company with.” Someone who doesn’t know how to talk to other human beings doesn’t know how to live with other human beings; the Mishna might call him a golem, but he’s really a shmuck in a toga. Remember Mr. Cohen, the “cancer, shmancer” guy from chapter 1? Just move him back a couple of thousand years and you’ll see that the golem is like the synagogue on the other side of the road from yours: he is the person you don’t talk to. But that doesn’t always mean that he isn’t talking to you already.

In his commentary on this Mishnaic passage, Moses Maimonides, the incredibly influential twelfth-century rabbi and philosopher whose fans included Saint Thomas Aquinas, elaborates on the difference between the golem and everyone else:

A golem is a person who possesses some intellectual and moral virtues, but without any of them being complete or properly ordered. They are confused and mixed up and contaminated with defects. [Such a person is called a golem] because of his resemblance to productions of an artisan which have received their basic shape but have not been refined and finished, like a knife or sword that the smith has not finished: they have only their most basic form, but have yet to be whetted and sharpened and polished.

(COMMENTARY ONOvos 5:7)

Maimonides bases his interpretation on the relatively common Mishnaic use of golem to mean “unfinished vessel or utensil, artisanal production still in progress.” The golem that he describes has failed to reach at least one essential stage of human development; just as a spoon that needs planing and buffing is still unfit for use, though it has the form and appearance of a spoon, so the golem falls a step or so short of real mentsh-hood. He has a body, but still needs “to be whetted and sharpened and polished” before he can be anything other than a walking klots—that’s klutz in English—a great big chunk of wood that lies athwart the path to social relations.

The wise person with whom the Mishna contrasts the golem is not described as clever or well informed, but only as knowing how to make his or her conversation an orderly thing that takes account of the presence and feelings of the other party. The Mishnaic golem differs from the robo-golem of more recent times in