the golem: oy vay you say

Return of the golem. The problem is not creating these golem, its how to get rid of them. If you don’t kill them off quickly while there is still a bit of moisture left in the clay, they start adapting to the environment, enjoying the creature comforts, and then you’re really stuck with them.They’re basically indestructible  and if they start reproducing. Oy Vay you say.The automatons who are quasi-human and first appeared, or were created in the Prague cemetery in the sixteenth-century and they keep hanging on well past their expiry date. Creating life is forbidden in Jewish law, so once exceptions started to be made, something like the Church tolerating indulgences, well, the results were predictable. There are a large contingent of the golem in modern Israel and they have been shamefully programmed from a saving grace of a diaspora community under siege to an instrument of state repression with a specialty in home demolition.

…friends: the media will likely not report on this, so we need to: i’ve just been informed by meir ( margalit) of this emergency situation. this is the fifth time that the “icahd house” in jerusalem, named “beit arabiya” is being demolished by the authorities. but this is the first time they are doing this in the middle of the night. the destruction of the house is happening as we speak and we need the help of all our friends to stop it and to make it widely known. meir is in the field at this hour and we need to be in this fight with him and the other friends….( Hune Margulies)

The golem and the deeds he and his later creations performed on behalf of the Jewish people, are not at the forefront of our minds. And yet, just when we think the inventory of Golem are safely stocked away in an attic somewhere, lying harmoniously beneath a pile of discarded prayer books; he reappears, ready to remind us of the trials and tribulations that Jews have faced over the last two thousand years, and why in damnation do they have to resort to bullying Palestinians and wrecking their modest abodes? When will the golem turn on their masters? How could yahweh permit such uprooting behavior, such a perversion of the trust inherent in the covenant. A trust misplaced? There will be no answers forthcoming  today, but the problem may be more profound than a few bad apple golem wreaking havoc…

…”beit arabyia”, located in the village of anata, north-east of jerusalem, has been demolished by the authorities, together with some bedouin tents nearby. this is the fifth time this has happened and the first done on the cover of night. meir and icahd friends were there trying to prevent this injustice but to no avail. what’s the answer? to rebuild. and then next time to rebuild again….( Margulies)

ADDENDUM:

Can we blame all this messianism, and its accompanying militarism on the teachings of Rabbi Akiba, the father of normative Judaism as it is known today. The muscular, vengeance filled ideology that seems to fuel the passions intrinsic to Zionism…

in Kabbalah, in the Rabbi Akiba and in Scripture itself similar assertions can be found. Bloom writes:

Despite Philo of Alexandria, prince of Jewish Platonic allegorists, a true name for God, in the tradition of Rabbi Akiba, is Ish (man). Exodus 15:3 magnificently intones, ‘Yahweh is a Man of War, the Lord is his name.’. . . The great Akiba, who truly founded the Judaism we still recognize . . . held strong to the literalism of Yahweh as Ish, God as Man, despite Rabbi Ishmael and his school. Yahweh walks about in Exodus 13:21, however unhappy sucah perambulation was to make the Prophets. I find a crazy comedy in the early exegetes who follow a strolling Yahweh around, while chirping, “He’s not walking!” After all, the hardworking and energetic Yahweh really rests on the seventh day .

. A swordsman, Yahweh needs downtime, like all men of war. And Yahweh is joyous, or angry, and frequently hungry. Akiba sensibly found all this quite acceptable, but it roused his friend and opponent Ishmael to indignant denials. . . . Read More:http://www.necessaryprose.com/namesdivine.htm

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HB: Oh sure. Oh sure, I mean Yeshua, if he was crucified, was one of hundreds of thousands of Jews who were being crucified by the Romans in those days. And the biggest single holocaust of Jews took place after Rabbi Akiba proclaimed Simon bar Kosba, Simon bar Kochba or son of the star and said he was the Messiah, ben Joseph, that is to say, not the Messiah ben David but the Messiah ben Joseph, the warrior who comes first. And that led all of the Jews in the world into a terrific rebellion against Hadrian, and millions of Jews were eventually slaughtered and Akiba tortured to death at the age of 95; Bar Kochba went down heroically, taking legions of Romans with him. At one point in the book I have a sentence that Jeanne, my wife, reading it, said “Harold, it shouldn’t be there; it will get you into trouble.” But I’m glad it’s there, because you know the great phrase about Yahweh in the Psalms and elsewhere is that Yahweh is a man of war, and I think his most memorable single appearance, and I talk about it, in the Bible, in Tanakh, is in the Book of Joshua, where at one point Joshua—you know it is after the death of Moses and Joshua is in command of the Israelites and they conquered Canaan, and before a crucial battle near Jericho he notices an armed warrior. He doesn’t recognize him, and he boldly goes up to him, and he says, “Are you one of us or one of them.” And the fellow replies, “The ground upon which you stand is holy. Take off your sandals.” At which Joshua takes off his sandals and abases himself because he recognizes that it is Yahweh a man of war come to fight in the battle of Jericho, which he does, as he also fights, you know, with the tribes that came to the battle in the first Hebrew poem that we have, the song of Deborah and Barak in Judges . So I have this sentence in the book: “If Yahweh is a man of war, then Allah is a suicide bomber.” I think they are all bad news, Judaism and Christianity and Islam. But I wanted to make clear in the book that there is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian tradition. That is absolutely ridiculous. And fascinatingly enough there are two things that I’ve said throughout my life when I’ve addressed Jewish audiences, say at the Jewish Theological Seminary or such places, and they always get furious at me. But they’re both true. One is that nowhere in the whole of the Tanakh does it say that a whole people can make themselves holy through study of texts. That’s a purely Platonic idea, and comes out of Plato’s Laws. That simply shows how thoroughly Platonized the rabbis of the second century were. The other one, which I say in this book and it has already given some offense, is that in fact not only is Judaism, which is a product of the second century of the common era—and it’s worked out by people like you know Akiba and his friends and opponents like Ishmael and Tarphon and the others, is a younger religion than Christianity is. Christianity in some form exists in the first century of the common era. What we now call Judaism comes along in the second century of the common era. Christianity is actually the older religion, though it infuriates Jews when you say that to them. Read More:http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/bloom_hartman/bloom/bloom.html