Professor David Peimer
The Cult of Horror: Dybbuk and Golem

Professor David Peimer | The Cult of Horror Dybbuk and Golem | 04.30.21

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- Okay, so, right. We’re going to dive into just having a look today at “The Dybbuk and the Golem.” And I mean, why choose this today in the 21st century when so many things are going on in the world, obviously. Why a topic like this? And I think when we initially thought of it, it was not only about the spirit world or the world of creatures and ghosts or even the horror movie world, but the world of beliefs and beliefs in imagined created monsters, if you like, compared to the rational world. We’ve been talking a hell of a lot, I know, over the year about enlightenment and the rise of the rational and the thinking world and the scientific medical endeavours compared to beliefs and mythologies. And I think the idea, specifically in Jewish history and Jewish tradition, the idea of The Dybbuk and the Golem obviously feed into that very, very much.

That’s the overall picture, if you like, of the story. And the question that is profound and important, does it echo today or are we past at all? Have we outgrown mythological creatures and imagined spirits and ghosts and all these kinds of things? Or are they still part of not only how we live, but how societies perhaps actually create and root themselves? And I go back to Harari who argues that the collective fiction, it’s the collective myths that are actually at the core of society more than anything else. Without that, you can’t have a group of people functioning together to produce things, to make things, to collaborate and work together in any functioning way. So all of this fits into these overarching narratives, if you like. They’re very specific of The Dybbuk and the Golem. So the first, what I’m going to do is have a look at three things today. First, specifically is a bit of the history and understanding of what an Earth The Dybbuk and the Golem were and are in Jewish mythology. Second, going to more depth to understand, you know, what these myths actually mean and how they might echo today. And then have a look at how the history or how the Jewish world of horror and ghosts is maybe not so far away from us, as we might imagine in our sophisticated mirror image of ourselves today.

Yes, it’s a world of monsters, a world of creatures, magic, superstition, nonsense, and yet wildly believed thoughts. Believed, not proved. And I want you have a look in a different way, which I’m going to propose a little bit into the talk today of how we can look at this idea of the word monsters and how it does actually echo, but in a different way today. So to begin with, I’m sure many people have heard of, you know, the main story coming out of Prague, of Rabbi Loew and the golem and the story there, which I’m going to get onto as we go through today. But this is one of the classic, like, depictions of the golem from Prague, where so much of the story took hold of the central European imagination, certainly in Jewish culture and Jewish history. So what was the Dybbuk? The Dybbuk was a malicious possessing spirit from the soul of a dead person. Not so far, if we think about some of the movies, you know, which relate to Christianity and religion and the crucifix, the exorcisms, “The Exorcist,” and so many others, horror movies going way back to the early 20th century, all the way through to today. I would include things like “Jurassic Park” and many of the others, which I’m going to mention a bit later, of the contemporary depiction of these monstrous creatures, if you like, the shadow, the archetype of Jung, the shadow of the human being, the shadow of when we call certain humans, monsters, certain individuals alive today or in the past.

We use these words, monsters, creatures, horror, evils, spirit and so on, and how we transform from what was a manufactured figure out of clay or mud or straw, whatever, into through vocabulary today, into the performance. And it’s a performative thing, into the performance of human beings. So the symbol becomes transformed into human nature, into human being itself in a 21st century way. And that’s what really fascinates me in the sense here. Okay, so they are superstition, they’re nonsense, you know. There are beliefs which come from the history in the past. Always the question for me is how they resonate for us today. And for me, it’s very linked to a performative understanding of these spirits. So the Dybbuk is this possessing spirit. It leaves the host body once it’s accomplished its goal. Again, not so far from the stories of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein and many others. The words first start to really appear, if you like, in more popular imagination or more popular pilots in the 16th century.

But there were some accounts of possession, let’s use that word from the ancient Latin translation of Josephus, where they spoke more about demonic possession. And we would obviously understand this in a biblical context, demonic possession and how it’s a similar idea, which gets echoed through the ages all the way down to our times. And there’s some scholarship on even doubting Moses’ crossing of The Red Sea could open one to possession by Dybbuk. So traditionally Dybbuk were male spirits who possessed women on their wedding eve, and typically in a sexual way, jumping way centuries ahead to Ansky’s play, which was the first significant work of Yiddish literature, or Yiddish theatre in particular, and how much Ansky’s play. His name originally was Solomon Rappoport. Anyway, how his play “The Dybbuk” captured the imagination in a quite a contemporary way in the last century into our times. It’s been adapted into different versions by Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein. Tony Kushner’s probably the most influential playwright of our times, a fantastic playwright to adapt “The Dybbuk.” And in the play, a young bride in Ansky’s play, a bride is possessed by the ghost of the man she wanted to marry, who the romantic love, a Romeo and Juliet story of the two youngsters who had wanted to love, but the father did not want her to marry a poor, young rabbinical student because he was poor.

So what happens is the guy dies, the Romeo figure dies and comes back and haunts. That’s the basic essence. I’ll go into more detail a little bit later of the story of the Dybbuk in Ansky’s play. And that’s the one. And interestingly, it came through theatre, a play, that the very idea of the Dybbuk in a way got resurrected for modernity in modern times, much more, and then going onto the adaptations and versions by some of the people that I mentioned. And I think that’s what’s fascinating, that one piece of theatre can almost resurrect, if you like, something going way back thousands of years. Then in film, there was the 1937 movie of “The Dybbuk,” which was based on Ansky’s Yiddish play. Then the Dybbuk is featured in other horror films such as “The Unborn,” 2009, “Possession,” 2012, “Ezra” 2017, and then this interesting short film, 2019, directed by person Dayan Oualid, which deals with an exorcism in the Jewish community of Paris.

I just want to give a few examples, not going to too many ‘cause I’m going to focus here primarily on Ansky’s play and a couple of others, a little bit on Kafka, “Metamorphosis” and Isaac Bashevis- and Isaac Singer’s stories. So in television, Sydney Lumet, interestingly, directed “The Dybbuk,” which is also based on Ansky’s play. A lot of stage versions and others, but the most interesting probably, you know, is Tony Kushner’s work. All right, so this is here a depiction of the Golem, not the Dybbuk. To go onto the Golem was, as I’m sure many people know, so I’m not going to go into too much detail, but it was an- create a creature made out of inanimate matter, usually clay or mud. And that’s what we see in the picture here. This is a very classic, symbolic example from Prague of the Golem. You can see the echoes of today’s films of “Star Wars.” You know, the Darth Vader image, the head, the costume almost of Darth Vader and some of the others in “Star Wars,” you see the absolute influence in horror movies all the way through. And Karel Capek’s great play, R.U.R, where the word robot was first used by Capek, the fantastic Czech writer and playwright. And he himself was influenced partly in the play by the story of the Golem.

So it’s made out of clay or always something inanimate. It’s first mentioned in the Psalms and some other mediaeval writings much later. And the word golem is a word for, in a contemporary language sense for something amorphous, unformed material, an unfinished human before God’s eyes. That might be a way of phrasing it for us today to comprehend this notion of the golem. And as we know, the most famous representation of the golem was by Rabbi ben Bezalel, the 16th century rabbi of Prague. The golem is a metaphor, obviously, for many possible meanings. This is a statue here of the Rabbi Loew. This is the statue in Prague of Rabbi Loew. I mean, quite extraordinary if you think about it. A statue of a rabbi in a central/eastern European city. A statue of a rabbi? You know, it’s fascinating to me, given the history that we’ve all looked at, to many of the fantastic lectures of Trudy William and others, you know, of Jewish history. Statue to a rabbi? Let’s not underestimate that for a second. Whenever it was reworked and recreated and so on.

Nevertheless, it’s for me, the symbol in a performative context and a cultural context is important. It’s powerful. Okay, so this is obviously the most famous story of the golem and a metaphor of many meanings. You know, you read so many interpretations, the golem can be a victim, it can be a villain, it can be Jewish, not Jewish. It can be man or woman, or both. It’s unformed material in God’s eyes. An amorphous creature created out of, you know, clay or mud. And over the centuries, it’s often been used to connotate wall, community, isolation, hope, despair. The older stories of the golem come from The Talmud, And Adam was initially, let’s not forget, the myth in the Bible is that Adam was initially created as maybe a Golem when his dust was kneaded into shapeless husk. So, you know, from dust unto dust, from clay, from mud, all of these phrases, these words seem to intermingle in some way. To me, there’s an interplay of the language without being obsessive and pedantic about exact interpretations of ancient words.

But you know, from dust, from clay, from mud, how it’s formed or shaped and created, and the Golem is one of them, and maybe Adam and Eve. I leave it open, you know. We choose. 1625, there’s a guy whose name was Joseph Delmedigo who wrote that many legends of this kind were current, are current, particularly in Germany. And I think it’s important that it takes hold first, if you like, in the post mediaeval period in Germany, in the German imagination of Judaism or the Jewish German link. In the 1600s, I think that’s when we can identify the regenerational, the rebirth of these ancient myths. There’s a Polish Kabbalist who writes in 1630 that there was one man whose name is Rabbi Eliyahu, who has made a creature out of matter, out of dust, a golem. And I think that one phrase of this polish writer in 1630 captures it, a creature out of matter, out of dust, a golem. Not so far from God creating the human, the Adam and the Eve and so on. So I just throw that out, because the spirit world and the mythical world and the legend world and the world of the legends of God creating humans, et cetera, intermingle when we go back to biblical narratives and how that relates to the enlightenment’s attempt to separate the spirit world from the material world, the rational from the emotional, the thinking world, from the belief world.

The whole endeavour of the enlightenment project is that compared to the belief world and how the belief world in a humane way is always going to come back, it’s always going to shadow the rational. But this separation of inter-dualities of the human condition, which we are all part of, you know, living in the coattail or living in the final act five, scene five of the enlightenment, or it may already be over, the plays already closed, the curtains down, you know. The audience is gone from the enlightenment. We can imagine, if we like, for a moment, a world where we don’t have these dualities, where the spirit and the material are much closer, the rational and the belief worlds are much closer. And that goes back to biblical, pre-biblical and perhaps an emerging contemporary world or not. We debate it. Then there was a rabbi, Jacob Emden, who published a book in 1748, and this is what he wrote. I write here what I heard from my father’s holy mouth, regarding the golem created by his ancestor. When the ancestor saw that the golem was growing larger and larger, he feared that the golem would destroy the universe. He then removed the holy name that was embedded on his forehead, causing him to disintegrate and return unto dust.

This is a rabbi in central Europe in 1748 writing this. I’m reminded of immediately, of course, if I may make an anarchic satirical leap to Tarantino’s image “Inglourious Basterds,” you know, of gouging out with a knife, the image of the swastika on the captured Nazis’ foreheads. And I wonder if Tarantino even read about this or maybe got it or heard about it from a friend maybe. Who knows? It doesn’t matter. The image of symbolise or making symbol on the human forehead, on the human body is what is so powerful. It can be the cross, or even, you know, the swastika image. There’s something on the forehead. It is such a powerful enduring performance image in theatre, in art, and in so many aspects of culture. In rituals, it’s what is painted on the forehead, you know. And it’s how the body is used, and it’s performance body for me, always. You know, when I watch rituals or performances or even weddings or religious rituals, whatever. It’s performance. And it’s the body that is the core of the performance. The body and the idea that make the performance.

So I go back to this of it’s not so far from many other cultures and how the cultures used the body, and in particular, the forehead. So the classic narrative comes from Rabbi Loew, here. And I’ll give you another picture of him. This is Rabbi Loew and the Golem. Now this is just painted by a- Drawn rather, by an interesting Czech artist, Mikolas Ales in 1899. Imagination of the rabbi on the right-hand side. On the screen, you can see of the image. And then the Golem on the left with the Hebrew letters on the forehead, which is the classic image for It was to put the Hebrew letters on the forehead. And I believe that goes back, you see it in many cultures and rituals globally. When you look all around, it’s the forehead that’s used and the head is always much bigger. It’s fascinating. The head is much bigger and looking down on the human. And the human is trying to have some relationship with a spirit force. Let’s remember the genie that comes out of the bottle and the big head of the genie, let’s remember. Let’s remembers the Darth Vader. If the head, you know, the image of the head is what makes prominence. And when we symbolise it in performance or in culture and in sculpture, the spirit world is the head. Even Frankenstein. Look at those images.

Let’s go back in horror movies. It’s the head that takes prominence, always. And it’s coming from a spirit world, a non-material belief world, if you like. Is it created by the human or is the human creating it? Who’s dictating to who? And I think what Ales captures in the drawing is who’s actually the boss of who, to put it bluntly. To put it simply who’s ruling who? The image, the genie out the bottle or the human? Which? And we go back to Shakespeare’s last play, has always fascinated me that he chose Prospero. And Prospero creates magic creatures on an unnamed island. And Prospero has powers of magic. Prospero has powers of superstition and can create creatures and spirits, good and evil. You know, we have Caliban and Ariel who are of the spirit world. They’re not of the human material world. And “The Tempest.” Why did Shakespeare choose that as his last play? And there’s so many arguments and debates about it.

But I want to say that, you know, I think he was obsessed, you know, living when he did in those times with the spirit and the material and the rational, and the imaginative. Yeah, understood all of these constantly change our human psyche. And I think we get a sense of this in this drawing. We have the , obviously at the bottom. The little bottle at the bottom with the X, you know, and the one hand up with the finger, you know, in that classic position like that, which has got many religious connotations that we all know and ritualistic connotations as well. And we see it echoed in many other Christian mythology, in the story of not only “Aladdin,” but in many other fairy tales. You know, it’s an image. This is the wise man, the rabbinical creature, the rabbinical figure, human figure. Wise, the wise man, the witch doctor type. All of it seems to coalesce for me in this quite simple, but for me, interesting drawing, because of the tension between the spirit face and character and the human. And it’s the face of the spirit character we see. We don’t see much of the face of the rabbi. Okay. So to go on a little bit. This is for me.

This is amongst the most interesting drawings or paintings that I’ve found. If I try to imagine a relationship between the two or how to stage it in a way that we would try to stage Prospero and Ariel and Caliban, you know, the spirits and Prospero, if we try to stage Shakespeare as The Tempest. Okay. This is going on to the Old New Synagogue. That’s the name of it, as we know in Prague, with the rungs of the ladder, because you the go into the story of the golem and Rabbi Loew. But the idea was that at the end of it, is that he puts the remains of the golem up in the attic of the synagogue and tells everybody, don’t go there, whatever you do. Otherwise, the golem will be reactivated and come back and may cause harm, may not protect the Jews as it was originally intended to. But because of the mistake that the rabbi has made, basically the story was that he would create the golem in order to protect the Jews of Prague from antisemitic attacks and pogroms, et cetera. But he forgets on the Friday night to do a couple of things with the golem. And because of that, he remembers on the Saturday, oh hell, what’s going to happen? The golem is still activated on the Sabbath, and God’s going to be crossed and the golem’s going to be turned into evil spirit, et cetera.

Anyway, cut a long story short, and he manages to get the golem up into the attic and shuts it there so that he won’t come and do horrible, evil things to the Jews of Prague. And what’s happened here in the Old New Synagogue is the rungs of the ladder going up to the attic, because to this day, the attic is not open to the public, part of the whole story. It’s all myth. It’s all legend, obviously. But the fact that a myth and a legend are made literal and symbolic in the rungs of the ladder going up to the attic. We can choose. Is it satire? Is it satire on a myth? Is it just trying to be more, if you like, literal to the symbol? We can choose our interpretation as we wish. Image of a Jewish museum with a statue of the golem in Ustek in the Czech Republic. We can see that it’s a small museum. It’s a very small town, really, in the Czech Republic. And on the left is a statue of the golem in Czech Republic here. This here is a statue of the Prague Golem created for the movie “The Emperor and the Golem” in 1952. And I wanted to show it because it shows again the influence of topics, play R.U.R, which was about robots and machines overtaking humans, et cetera, in the early 20th century.

Again, look at image, and this is a horror movie. And we look at it today and we see it as a kitsch, as stereotypical and boring actually. But if we go back to 1952, in its time, it’s quite powerful for a horror movie. And obviously, it’s the eyes and the chest. It’s not only the head and the face, but the eyes and the chest that stand out. And we have the beginning of the modern machine age really taking over, you know, in horror movies. And we have the chest and we have the big arms and the eyes. The eyes are much bigger and almost like laser beams at us. And then there’s the belt image, et cetera. The bottom left is one of the costumes from the movie. So going back for a moment to Rabbi Loew and his story. So he’s a 16th century rabbi in Prague, who reportedly creates a statue of the golem out of clay from the banks of the beautiful Vltava River and brings it to life with incantation to defend the Prague ghetto from antisemitic attacks and pogroms. You know, not so far from the cross used to stop, you know, in horror movies and other myths, stop Satan, et cetera. And of course, the legend was that the Jews in Prague were either going to be expelled or killed under the rule of Rudolf II, the holy Roman emperor.

So the golem was called Joseph, and it was said that the golem could make himself invisible and summon spirits from the dead. And Rabbi Loew activates and deactivates the Golem to help save the Jews or to help protect the Jews, rather. And then of course, he has to deactivate it on a Friday evening so it can rest on the Sabbath. And that goes to the story that on one Friday night, he forgets and he feels that the golem is going to desecrate the Sabbath and there’ll be a rampage or chaos will ensue or whatever. Terrors will happen. So the rabbi manages to immobilise him in front of the synagogue and takes him up, and the golem falls to pieces and takes the pieces up to the attic of that synagogue that I showed, and it’s stored up there. And Rabbi Loew forbades anybody from going up into the attic to have a look to see the golem. In 1883, the attic was renovated in the synagogue. And needless to say, no golem was found. No pieces of dust or clay or mud or anything. So what are the sources of this narrative? What is really, what’s going on here? Let’s get literal for a moment or historical.

The general view that the story of the Golem of Prague was a German literary invention of the early 19th century. And I’m going to hold it there and come back to it a bit later. There’s a similar story, interestingly, in the Golem of Vilnius. A story about a rabbi in Vilnius in the 1700s and so on. Okay. This for me, going back now, this here in the movie, what this movie really is in a sense, it’s about hubris, about human pride, going way back to the ancient Greeks, about human pride taking over and what happens in manufacturing robots and machines and things and spirits. You know, Frankenstein as a spirit manifested in a creature that takes over the humans. The same with the Capek play, is the machines take over. They become animated creatures called robots. “Frankenstein,” “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” “The Terminator,” all of these movies, so many of them horror movies. Classic horror movie theme and story is exactly that. “Jurassic Park,” you know. Let’s get the genetic material of dinosaurs. Let’s animate, create wonderful Garden of Eden. And then of course, the evil spirits come in and the evil dinosaurs take over and threaten the humans, to destroy them and take over. “Jurassic Park,” “Star Wars,” so many classic horror movies. I want to suggest, even that “Jaws,” you know, the great Spielberg film is similar, yes. It’s a shark, you know. And we know it’s a mechanical shark filmed in a huge water tank, you know, in Hollywood and so on.

But, you know, it’s a similar idea of a spirit coming in and then the creature taking over and becoming much bigger. It’s the Jungian archetype, Jungian shadow of human nature. We cut it down to its essence taking over. It’s the same mythological theme going way back, you know, into today’s times, and so many horror movies cover it or capture it, going way back to the 20th century and our times as well. Even in “The Gingerbread Man,” you know, a lonely couple make a child out of clay with disastrous and comedic consequences. So there are so many that use this ancient archetypal myth. All right, this here is a movie poster. German film of 1952 called, “Der Golem.” And we can see the influence of Fritz Lang and “Metropolis” and the idea of the mach- This, if you like, mixing or intermingling, at least of the machine age, robots taking over the human together with the idea of ancient spirit, good or evil, taking over the human, the spirit world, the spirit creatures. So it’s all manifesting in this way. If we have a look here, we can see this is, you know, it’s so classic for the 70s, 80s movies, even going into the 90s and going way back before of all of this tradition in horror movies that I’m talking about.

Again, the letters on the forehead, the Hebrew letters. And the Hebrew letters on this creature’s head read, Emmett, which means truth. And in some versions of the Prague narrative, ‘cause there are many versions of the Prague narrative, of the golem, but in some versions the golem is killed by removing the first letter from the forehead and making the word spell met, not emet, which means dead. Pretty simple, pretty obvious. But nevertheless, showing this, again, this interaction between the human world and the spirit world. And that’s really what I want to get at, is all of these ideas come together when we look at the enlightenment and the rational and the human world, material versus, if you like, the spirit world of imagination, of myth and legend, and who actually rules who? Who dominates who? Who’s the boss between the two? Or is it just an eternal, fantastic theatrical invention and tension that happens between the two? And that’s just part of human nature, because everything is imagination.

I believe, first. The screen we’re all looking at was somebody’s imagination first. This phone that we all use was in somebody’s imagination. The road, the building had to be imagined before it became real. So I think, you know, the role of the imagination for me is what the enlightenment thinkers ignored at their peril. And what Freud and many others tried to argue to kind of push back, if you like. It’s pushback from the imagination world of human nature. Other movies, there was “The Golem.” “The Golem” movie was made. There was a German silent horror film called “The Monster of Fate” in 1915, that was the American title of the movie, a silent horror film. There was another German one. It’s all German coming out of- And it’s fascinating for me, it’s coming out of German literature. That’s why I do believe that the story of even “Rabbi Loew and the Golem” came from some German literary source. But you can’t say for absolute certainty, it came from A, B or C. There was another one called “The Golem and the Dancing Girl.” 1917, a German silent comedy horror movie. Then in 1936 was a classic contemporary title, “Le Golem.” 1936, a Czech monster movie. 1962, Abraham Ellstein’s opera “The Golem” commissioned by New York City Opera. In 1994, Richard Teitelbaum composed “Golem,” based on the Prague legend.

Okay, now I want to move on to this here on the second part for today is I want to look at Jeremy Dauber’s fantastic, brilliant essay on “Demons, Golems and Dybbuks: Monsters of the Jewish Imagination,” moving away from historical resonance and looking at what does this all mean for us today? What on earth does this say or possibly resonate today? Jeremy Dauber’s got a fantastic essay, if I’m right. As far as I know, he is the Prophet Columbia of Yiddish literature. And it’s really such a good essay. In this book, “Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History,” and it’s a book. It’s called “Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History: From the Middle Ages to Modernity.” And edited by Iris Idelson-Shein and Christian Wiese. And what Jeremy Dauber suggests is that in the 18th and 19th century Eastern Europe, many believed that the ghostly presences haunted abandoned synagogues, but only at night.

Now, with the rise of Jewish mystical thought, if you like, the renaissance of Jewish mystical thought in the 16th and 17th centuries, there was a strain which focused on the human soul and its capacity to survive beyond the body. And so, along with that came the dybbuk. And that the dybbuk is actually a tortured spirit of a sinner who’s forced to wonder the world in the in-between states, neither dead nor alive, like a vampire, like a Frankenstein, like so many others that emerge in the European and British and in the Western imagination, that western literary imagination. And the spirit possesses a body who then begins to speak often like the dead person’s voice. And the dybbuk is unwilling, having found a good host is unwilling to leave the host body. So it has to be exercised by a rabbi, usually. And today, I suppose the dybbuk might be seen as mental health or mental illness, whatever, possession, spirits, all the rest of it. But I don’t think we can dismiss this idea and how powerful it is in imaginative and cultural history. We can see the links to Christian religions, to many others of exorcisms of spirits.

I’ve mentioned already, horror movies, other examples. And in the 16th and 17th century, a lot of readers quite quickly believe in this, perhaps, in the existence of dybbuks. And there’s a thought that in the stories in which evil spirits afflicted an innocent person, why did somebody get something? Why did it happen? If you can’t explain it by science, you can’t explain it by rational thought, how do you explain it? Your resort to belief. Your resort to superstition, to legends, to myths, to dybbuk and other kinds of spirits, if you like. Prospero and Ariel and Caliban, we come back to that tension between the human and the spirit world. When we can’t explain certain things, that’s when, I think, we go back to these archetypes. So in a community, in many communities in Eastern Europe, in other parts of Europe, obviously parts of Russian empire, endless pogroms, anti-Semitism, violence. What happens? What happens to the Jewish imagination? How does it try to explain it and understand it? Obviously, there’s economics. There’s history, there’s Christianity. There’s blood libel and so on. That’s obvious. But what else? And I want to suggest that the Jews become monstrous in the eyes of Christianity and other western, and other religions, even, and the western imagination.

And this word monstrous becomes important. And the blood libel, I mentioned, the Jews kill innocent Christians. So the Jew can be seen as anti-Christian, as demonic. And demonic depictions of Jews who poisons the wells, who brings disease, who brings plague, who brings catastrophes, you know, on Earth and in the spirit and everywhere. Of course, you know, the Jew. And this is what is depicted in so many movies they’ve taken up and myths and images in the 20th century. Who is in league with the devil? Who’s buddies with Satan and going to be in league and work with Satan to destroy Western civilization? Who has the horns? And it’s not only in idea, but the imagination has to- The human beings have to make the idea concrete, have to manifest it physically. The myth must have a body. And the body is of the body of the Jew, horns. The Middle Ages. Look at all those images. We can go back to not only horns, but so many others. The hooked noses, so many things. We have to have so-called inverted , deformities of the body. We have to perform it in a physical way for the human nature to absorb it in a literal way.

So it goes out of imagination into the literal. And the Jewish body itself becomes monstrous. Always the bodies. The body is the performance of the other. It’s the body. The black person is obvious. It’s the skin, et cetera. And, you know, we can see it resonating, how it is performed between the self and other through the body. How do we perform monstrousness? How do we say when we say somebody was a brute, was an animal? How does it perform? You know, the figure of the Irish character in English literature and in English theatre is fascinating because it’s the brute of the Irish, almost the peasant image and so many of the others. How’s the English gentleman performed? How’s the body shaped? James Bond, whoever. And it’s how the body is performed in Western imagination. So it’s these kind of antisemitic sentiments that become, that help the golem become popular, help these ideas become popular. So stories of the golem which are originate in Talmudic times, the third and fourth century and before, and then a tale from Prague, you know, came back a couple of centuries, become manifested in a more, if you like, literal way. So that becomes quite central, as Harari would say, to the collective fiction of Western society.

The collective fiction of how do I who may rule or be dominant, define myself in relation to an inferior other who is physically shown as the Jew and whose powers, and this is what’s fascinating, the powers of this Jewish body that has all these horns and other horrible things, yet has miraculous strength, has supernatural awareness, has supernatural qualities, who can conquer everything, perhaps, the genie in “Aladdin.” Who’s going to win? Who’s going to be the boss? Can’t let it happen. Get it back in. Defeat it. Kill it, ultimately. Who’s going to protect these Jews against these Christians, against the threats? So the miraculous and the spiritual and the supernatural world become manifest very physically. And that’s what’s interesting to me, and that’s what Jeremy Dauber’s essay tries to capture. So the modern eras has been pretty tough on monsters in the sense of the “Aladdin” story and the golem and dybbuks and all the other stories that we have. And an age of reason, an age of disbelief, has it driven it underground? Has it driven it out of western circulation or has it merely driven it underground? So that it always is going to, in a Jungian way, archetype shadow come back and reemerge as metaphor in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Proponents of Jewish enlightenment from Germany to Russian and elsewhere, they talked about dybbuks, dead souls, wandering spirits, truth tellers, creatures. But they used it to try and satirise tradition, to try and satirise folk beliefs of Jewish history and culture. But I want to suggest that it pushed it underground, the Enlightenment and even the Jewish thinkers of the Enlightenment. But it’s going to resurface in other ways. I would suggest that Ansky in his play, he saw monsters as characters in the Jewish theatre of nationalism, ultimately of Jewish identity, of how to use the supernatural folk tales to show the Jewish identity, how deeply entwined is it with Europe or not. And we’re back to the classic assimilationist debate. To assimilate or not to assimilate. To be or not to be. Assimilate or not are causing that eternal tension between the two in the assimilationist debate. And Dauber’s essay really looks at this in fantastic depth, and I think he brings it right into the contemporary context. And I’m indebted to his ideas in sharing some of this with you. He looks at Isaac Bashevis Singer and his story, “The Last Demon,” where Singer writes about a world where the supernatural pales before the monstrous actions of human beings during the Holocaust.

The narrated characters in Singer’s story, the narrator character says, how can I be a demon when mankind himself has become a demon? And that’s a brilliant question of Singer. How can I be a demon when mankind himself has become a demon? And that is the profound question. I want to centre this whole talk about the dybbuk and the golem and all of these spirits. We talk about the monster within today, not without. The monsters inside us, the monsters all over, and how we unleash it. And all of these things in the past, in ancient times to me, were, if you like, physical manifestations of imagined myths. So you make something in clay or mud or straw or out of a tree or whatever you want, you know, or dust. But in today’s world, these monsters exist within us. In other words, the horrors of the 20th century have not only caught up with but maybe outrun the monsters of clay and mud, of fiction, of ancient biblical past. “Satan In Goray,” in the story, it’s set in 1666, two decades after a lot of Cossack pogroms, you know, happening obviously in Eastern Europe and so on.

So the Jewish people, Jews of the time question, how is this happening? Where is the Messiah? Where is God in all of this? How do we explain it? And so later in the story, comes a character called Sabbatai Zevi, who declares himself the Messiah. Good part of the Jewish world has lost itself in ecstatic frenzy. Singer was fascinated by what another theorist has called The Extraordinary Madness Of Crowds. And we all know it only too well, The Extraordinary Madness Of Crowds and the Douglas Murray book and others, of not only the Hitler period or the Mussolini or the Stalin, but going way back to the Romans and before all over, understanding the power of the crowd and the mob and its ability to con itself, to deceive itself. So Singer, he may ground the story in some idea of history, but he sets it in a mythical town called Goray. And the citizens fall under the spell of this guy, this character, Zevi, and are transformed and bankrupted morally into creatures. And it’s a fantasy or delirium, so powerful that it maintains its hold on the group in the town, even after Zevi has converted to Islam. So Singer is being ironic and satirising and mocking this whole- Anybody can be caught up in a demonic crowd frenzy.

And of course, we see the story of this possession almost happening, but happening now within the crowd through the spectacle. So the mud and the clay of these ancient images is now with the monster within and it has a performance ability in the crowd, in the entertainment, in the spectacle where it can be unleashed. So the horror and the supernatural of ancient times is within and it becomes an allegory of ourselves today. And of course, you know, singer is writing in the 30s and he’s seeing what’s happening in Stalin, in Russia, in the Soviet Union and in obviously. And he understands what happens when the masses embrace the good old Roman dictum of how you rule. Bread and circus, yet again. Okay, to move on to Ansky and the dybbuk. And interestingly, Ansky, as I said, his original name was Solomon Rappoport and he returned to his roots. And in fact, you know, when he was in his 30s, the Jewish roots.

In 1911, he helped work on or initiate partly what became known as the St. Petersburg Ethnographic Exhibition, which is a trek through the Russian empire to collect a lot of literature and artistic treasures of Jewish culture, basically. And “The Dybbuk” is a play written by Ansky, Solomon Ansky, and coming out of his research. And it’s this play which brought the dybbuk back into the 20th century theatrical and cultural Jewish imagination. And in the play, as I mentioned before, there’s the main character, Khanan, who is a post rabbinical student who’s immersed in Jewish literature and studies, et cetera. He studies the Kabbalah. So anyway, we have the Romeo and Juliet story that I mentioned, and he comes back as a spirit and he comes back into the Juliet character, if you like. And what happens? So it’s got a very contemporary resonance because it’s a classic Romeo and Juliet story of- It’s a story of tradition versus modernity, of fathers having the right to say who the child can marry, the daughter or not. Tradition, belief, you know.

It goes way back to Fiddler and not only Jewish religion, but many others. It goes back to the idea of the law. Who’s got the law to decide who the child can marry. It goes back to Romeo and Juliet, romantic love of modernity versus traditional beliefs. So the plot combines obviously Romeo and Juliet with a tale of the Dybbuk, romantic obsession and traditional law of the Father, if you like. But Ansky also had other oppositions in mind when he wrote it, because he subtitled the play. And this to me is almost more interesting or equally interesting, at least. He subtitled his play “The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds.” And that to me is fascinating. You’ve got it. The world of Jewish mysticism versus the world of Jewish law, the world of the haves and have-nots, the world of mystics and the world of rational enlightenment thought. The world of what he’s studying, the student is studying the Kabbalah, mysticism and so on. And the father does not want to let the daughter marry. So it’s all these contrasts which are captured in the play, which echo through today, “West Side Story,” all of these others, and the adaptations by Tony Kushner, which are fantastic.

We get a small variation, I think, interestingly to me, always come back to Kafka, “The Metamorphosis.” Gregor Samsa wakes up one morning to discover he’s a giant beetle, a monstrous beetle, a monstrous character. And it’s again that word, the monster, which to me is so powerful in contemporary western imagination. And it’s the monster. He’s a beetle. Almost like vermin or huge beetle. His biggest freak out is how am I going to get to work on time? I going to lose my job, and I’m not going to be able to earn income for my family and others? What’s going to happen? Kafka wrote it in 1912. He was 29. At that time, he was fascinated with Jewish culture and in particular, Yiddish theatre and went to watch a lot of Yiddish theatre and would’ve understood or had it explained, et cetera. He was immersed in that world. His very close circle of friends were Jewish and immersed in Jewish culture and history. So this idea of his, I don’t think just comes only from his brilliant artistic imagination.

But I think it comes from him having understood a lot of these currents happening in German and Central European literature and mythology, the dybbuk in Ansky’s play. And Sam Gregor’s body is changed, the Jewish body. I mean, Kafka doesn’t say Gregor is Jewish, but the body is changed into self-loathing, self hating because his body becomes a huge giant beetle and it freaks him out. Obviously, he can’t bear it. He has become a monster in his own self-belief. In his own body, he has become what the other dictates to him. You are the monstrous body. You are the black body, the hook nose, the horns, the devil incarnate, whatever, your body is it. And it’s the performance again of the body that shows the spirit world manifested. We don’t need the clay and the mud and the physically made sculptures anymore. The metaphor has transformed into the human body. And that’s what these mass demonic spirits, I want to call it that, of the early and the middle 20th century. Hook, ride. They capture. They ride that horse of the shadow.

And the monstrous transformation is at the heart of Kafka’s story, perhaps, as Jeremy Dauber writes, and it reflects maybe, maybe the mixed feeling Kafka had of his own Jewish identity. And global, trying to be citizen a of Prague, the citizen of being Jewish, citizen with his friends, a citizen of literature and writing. Global, local, Prague, not Prague, et cetera. All these classic tensions in the Jewish identity come out in Kafka and his work. And I see the spirit, I see this example the idea of the insect, this huge insect that Gregor’s body becomes. And let’s be honest, even the Jews of highly westernised Europe and the Jews of Eastern Europe, how do they view each other? Who is slightly superior, maybe? Slightly inferior, maybe. The Jews of Europe themselves have a different perception of each other, you know. And there is a slight pecking order. Let’s be honest about it. How do Western European Jews want to see themselves and distinguish themselves compared to the poorer masses, perhaps of Eastern European Jews? The dichotomies keep going deeper and deeper. It’s fascinating to me. I don’t think it’s right or wrong, good or bad.

It’s fascinating and how it’s performed in daily life, not only in theatre or in the imagination of a writer. And ultimately, maybe the Jewish monster is also a creature of the Christian imagination and the Jewish imagination and trying to capture and understand the dybbuk and the golem in a very contemporary way, starting out as something to try and protect Jews and the legend and the myths and so on. But we’ve got to be honest, how Jews themselves portray ourselves today. Not only Ashkenazi- I mean, we have all the differences everywhere. Everybody knows it only too well. I just want to be honest about it. You know, we can look at some of Tony Kushner’s work, and what Jeremy Dauber suggests and I think it’s accurate. Whether it’s Tony Kushner’s imagination, conscious or not, but we can maybe at a stretch make a link between the Roy Cohn character in “Angels In America.” I’m sure many have seen the play. But that character is almost a monster. In the city, he’s a political animal to its core. Fascinating. Richard III, political animal to his core. Richard III, The Hunchback. It is not by chance. Even there, the monstrous deformed body, The hunchback of Richard III, Roy Cohn character in Tony Kushner’s fantastic play. And he says that he is the anti-communist prosecutor in the McCarthy trials. He learns he has aids. Sorry, not the McCarthy trial.

But he’s the Roy Cohn character from the McCarthy trial. He learns he has AIDS and in the play asserts he’s not homosexual. He’s a heterosexual who’s had sex with men. It’s fantastic the way Kushner plays with these dualities, these tensions that I’m trying to get at. So he redefines sexuality in terms of power. That’s what I think Tony Kushner gets to with that character. And when we talk about characters in history, and I’m not going to mention the obvious one, you know, the big one of Hitler and all that, but there are so many. But when we talk about them and monstrosities and characters and all the rest of it, we know now where these words come from. And the vocabulary is very important, because it shapes how we imagine them, when we talk about these people in our minds and how we talk about the Jewish body and how the Jewish body is portrayed, male or female, how it is portrayed by the other, how it is portrayed by the Jewish person, you know. The Woody Allen character is obvious. And then we have many others, you know. We have them in “Inglourious Basterds,” the Jew Bear character. Come on. We have the Judah Maccabee, you know. And Abba Kovner. We have so many. There’s the warriors spirit. There’s the scholar. There’s the intellectual. There’s the spiritual. There’s the thinker. There’s the fighter. So many of these known for, as part of the Jewish identity, and add to that the western civilization of Christianity. So we have angels and demons and saints and sinners and supernatural lives and and horror movies fascinate the Jews as much as anybody else within Judaism and other religions. And it’s obvious, the devil and the Jews, not only from the anti-Semitic point of view, but from within, and it’s obvious the blood libel link and how it gets physically manifested and performed, if you like. So to come back to these last thoughts to share with everyone. The sense of the dybbuk and the golem, for me in Jewish mythology, on the one hand is quite minor. But song, “Hallelujah.” The minors and the majors. The minors. The minor keys, the major keys. The minors can also become majors, if we accept something of collective fiction idea, that at the heart of it, of any society that tries to collaborate and function together by working together, by agreeing, basically we won’t kill each other.

We’ll try and work and we’ll have jobs or whatever, all the different things, who gets what? That we need myths and legends. And they are there in our imagination. They’re created by imagination. And if we delve deeper, of course, are simply parts of us and how the horror, the spirit of the horror, and the movies and the images and the ghost world maybe is not so far from us today. And I want to come back finally to the word monster. And when we use it and how we see it in our own archetypal way in us, it is nonsense. It is superstition. It is mythical, magical creature. But it’s still, I think pretty wildly believed because it is in us. Prospero knows ultimately, that Ariel and Caliban are part of him and Shakespeare knows it.

Okay, so let’s hold it there and thank you very much everybody.

Q&A and Comments

From Clive. Thank you, Clive.

Q: How many versions of the Golem did Paul Wagner make? Two or three? A: Good question. I think it was two, but I’ll check it, Clive.

Thank you, Susan. Christianity and the ashes on the forehead. Absolutely. Baptism. Not by change the head has to go. David, the concept of the golem being formed from dust should not be such a stretch. In the burial service, we say the body goes from dust to dust. Also, what is the impact of the false messiah? Exactly. Sabbatai Zevi on the derivation of the golem. Absolutely. And we say, why do we choose from dust to dust? It’s a fascinating thought, you know. It could have been something else. Why dust? Why not something else, but why dust? There are many possible- I can’t go into it now, but thank you. But David, you’ve raised really interesting point. Why is it dust and what is it when it’s manifested? Hindi. So when did the Yiddish expression ? My mother often said when she observed crowd disruptive mentality. Great question. My mother used to speak a little bit, a few words of Yiddish many years ago. But I remember very few. I’ll have to check that and get back to you. I’m not a Yiddish expert.

Heather, I think the X on the bottle is an olive. Ah, thank you Heather. That’s a great connection. Julian. I believe the forehead or the third eye corresponds to the pineal gland physically or the third eye in Western and Eastern mysticism, plus one of the chakras in eastern. Also, ah, in the Kabbalah tree. Fascinating. I didn’t know that. The third eye. Of course, it’s the third eye. You made that connection Julian. Great. Cheryl.

Q: What is the origin of the idea of the golem? Who actually articulated it? A: Well, it’s originally, as I mentioned, it is mentioned in the Bible and in the Psalms, you know, as an unformed, unfinished material, if you like. Dust or clay or mud. But something unformed. It’s not quite formed into human body.

Pat, thank you. Jean. The facade of The Old New Synagogue, got a golem-ish face to me. It’s great that you see that, Jean. Sam. The 1952 image is the same as a depiction of the alien Sontaran race of military fanatics in “Doctor Who.” There are so many connotative, fantastic. Sam, thank you. We see it now resonant in so many ways. In movies and posters. Clive.

Q: What is written on the piece of paper that the rabbi puts in the Golem’s mouth to activate him? A: I have to check that, Clive, because the problem is that there are many versions of the story of the Rabbi Loew story. Many. And I’m trying to take, in a sense, the most common one. And there are many versions of what the words mean as well. So I think it went from the German to the Hebrew, to Yiddish to so many different. They’re literally and of Ansky play, there are so many versions of that story.

Ron. The statue of Rabbi Loew in Prague.

Q: What is coming out of the base of the statue? A: I need to go back and have a look at it. What is coming out of the base of the statue? Is that the Golem? Oh, I don’t think so. I always just saw it as a stand. I didn’t see it as the “Aladdin” image. I just saw it as a stand that he’s on. The rabbi. Ron.

Q: Do we know if there was a literal belief in the golem in Jewish communities? A: As far as I understand it, perhaps in the 16th and 1700s, yes. Well, not a literal, but a spiritual belief. In a way of trying to- Part of a bigger picture of how to understand things which could not be rationally explained. You know, misfortune, whether disease, plague or pogroms, violence, antisemitism, hate, things that could not be rationally explained, how to explain them. And I think the golem and the dybbuk all come out of that period in a way.

Alice. Frankenstein was the creator with Mary Shelley. Yep. Myrna. King Kong. Absolutely. Appears that the ashes on the forehead, an attempt to equate filth with Christian attempts to attract early Hebrews. Fantastic. Thank you for that research about the ashes on the forehead. King Kong is absolutely classic archetypal stuff along these lines. Barbara. It’s also the mark of Cain. Great. All these connections you’re making are fantastic. Thank you. Harriet. Removing the from the forehead, which makes sense of the letter , not the X on the bottle, the missing ingredient to reactivate the golem. You got it. Harriet, great point. Rose, thank you. Of course the story of the Prague was a biblical grate. Wonder if it’s the balance between good evil. Yep. Beverly. Jews allocating power to objects and letter on the forehead. The high priest in the temple ward. Yeah. Okay. Holy to God inscribed on the section covering his forehead. I believe at the time, maybe. Power of the to ensure the purity and acceptance by God, the sacrificial animals. This is all fantastic stuff, Beverly. That’s another series of lectures.

Ron. I think of the garlic and dybbuk as metaphors for those forces in the world that are greater than us that we don’t understand. “Jurassic Park,” horror movies. Yeah, the 50s. Radiation, metaphors of hubris. Yeah, absolutely. And of course, the story of the golem, it does touch on hubris, because why does he forget to deactivate the golem on a Friday night? The rabbi. A serious man and the golem moniker. Great. Bob, the German from the “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” brings the Golem to mind. Yes. These are fantastic connections which we make. Stephanie. Ted Hughes’ children. Science fiction novel, “The Iron Man” comes to mind. Great little book full of mischief, but not evil. That’s a wonderful way of describing it, Stephanie. Julian.

Q: Did the prevalence of the God in German art affect antisemitism in some way? A: I think it was used. Maybe some of these artists even believed it. To encourage or discourage, yeah. The fear of the power of the Jews, maybe.

Absolutely, Julian. I wouldn’t put it past it. Richard.

Q: Is any possible connection between the golem imagination and the normalisation of the capitalistic beliefs? A: That is a whole series of research to go into the Kabbalah. I purposely try to not go into the Kabbalah because that would bring in a whole range. To think to do it justice, would require a whole lot of other talks. Are people who are much better than, knowledgeable than me about Kabbalah. Karen.

Q: Michelangelo’s Moses has horns, yes, which I’ve heard described as rays of light, but do they look like horns? A: Karen. I’ve also seen that, and it is a question. I’ll leave it at that.

Q: David. Do you think that the invention of the golem was an attempt to divert anti-Semitism from the victimisation of the Jews? A: That’s a very, very good question. Thank you, David. I don’t know. I think the invention, it might have been. To divert anti-Semitism from the victimisation of the Jews. Or it was to protect the Jews. Yeah, it’s for me, bound up in this context, in the myth. Herbert.

Q: What about the phantom , phantom golem of the opera? A: Great connection.

Carol. I was taught you should not believe in idols. When I saw your golem in clay, it looked like an idol. Please gimme your explanation. Well, Carol, you are right. But isn’t it about not make idols in relation to God? These are spirit forces manifested in clay and mud and whatever other sculptures. It would need somebody with better religious knowledge than I do. Great question.

Q: What happened to the rabbi statue in Prague under the Nazi occupation? A: I think this was put up after. I’ll check it. I think this was put up after the Nazis.

Dorothy. The opera, “The Dybbuk” is the best version you’ve seen. Okay. Ever been or not? Sorry, I haven’t seen it. Great. But there a lot of these. Ron. How are you? And hope you’re well.

Q: Is the mythical term yet mentioned, perhaps a reference to the island of Goree? A: You know, that’s the island with all the slaves. A lot of the slaves were taken through in Senegal. The 15th to the 19th century, largest slave trading centre, on the African coast and now the UNESCO World Heritage tribe. Absolutely. It might be. It might be of Singer. Because, I mean, Goree is huge. If you look at black African literature and culture history and obviously African American, obviously Goree Island is absolutely massive and most of the slaves were taken through for three centuries. It may be Goree, Goya.

Julian. 10 arts. I’m not sure if you’re right, what you’re saying here. God put into the world, without the ability to create, Golem is said to come from the section of the Kabbalah, related to, okay, “The Book of Formation.” The mysteries of creation. Yes. I know it, and I was going to go into this a little bit. The book about the mysteries of the creation. But I felt that would take us into another whole world of the Kabbalah. And to do justice, I think one has to really talk about the Kabbalah a lot before, whereas I chose obviously the cultural and performative approach in the film.

Ron. The view of the other in Judaism is not only the rational Jew looking down on the use of magic and so on, but also mystical Jews thinking that rational Jews are missing half of what is important in the world. Yep. Great point. Because of course, looking at it from the other side is that Jews who are living and imbued with spirituality and mysticism and belief, it’s a whole different perception and it’s the fantastic point you’re making.

Q: Herbert, how does the devil fit into this? A: Well, the devil is Satan, you know. Created in obviously ancient, in biblical mythology and ancient writings and then going all the way through, obviously into Christianity of our times, more contemporary times through mediaeval. And Satan is of course, you know, the evil spirit performatively manifested through the imagination.

Gail, thanks so much and hope you well in Joburg. Emily. Thank you. Stuart. The concert of crowds being swept up, motivated by rage is a moment seen by the villagers, torches and pitchforks, yeah. And it’s also in the ending of Frankenstein. Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head, Stuart. It transforms the monster of Frankenstein from a victim into an object of sympathy. Yes. And so many of these, you know, even Darth Vader becomes an object of sympathy when he is revealed as the father of Luke Skywalker. the dinosaurs in “Jurassic Park,” some of them were now killed and die, finally. In their dying throws or moments, and you see their face and the dying moments, we have sympathy even though they’ve horrific dinosaur monsters, but they’re dying. And Spielberg’s brilliance, where the camera transforms them into moments of sympathy. Yes. Not the shark. Although, maybe. I don’t know in “Jaws.” But certainly. And that is a mark of a supremely good filmmaker and theatre maker when even the evil monster becomes, has a moment or two of sympathy. Yep.

Bringing this concept of fear and evil and self-deception of the crowd and the mob into real life. January the 6th. Yep. Everyone, thank you. Barbara. Indian stone on the forehead. Yes. Lorna, thank you. Novel by Alice Hoffman, “The World That We Knew.” Some great women who make a female golem. Yes. Janice. They’re benign or friendly kindly golems. I don’t know. I haven’t found them, really. Margaret. I think it might relate the universal energy field, interaction with energy and matter. Yep. Bob. the rabbi wrote the explicit name of God that Jews aren’t supposed to say to activate the golem. Yep. Monique and Danny. Into the golem’s mouth or on his forehead, is placed the word emet, truth. When the golem is killed, the word is made into, met, death. Both in the Hebrew, yep, that be saw in that one image. Linda.

Q: Is the Coen movie, “A Serious Man,” in the Coen movie, “A Serious Man,” the opening is all about the arrival and dispatch of the golem. A: Yes. And they searched it superbly.

Patricia. The and Christianity is a reminder, we come from dust and we’ll return to dust. At the beginning of Lent, fast is the lead up to Easter. Yes. Esther. Sephardic Jews used the hand of the five to protect from the evil eye. Exactly. And in many other religions. Julian, I’m going to have to come back to this. Fantastic. It’s a lovely long comment you’ve made here. Okay, Barbara. All right. Thank you, Carol. Thanks, Susan. Thank you. Ron. I looked up at the statue of Rabbi Loew. Great. You can move faster than me with the God of Google. Maybe Google is the golem of today. Who knows? The goodie or the baddy. You can decide. But Google is a spirit.

If I may stretch the Jungian metaphor for a moment. I looked up the statue of the Rabbi Loew. Ron. It appears that there is a lion at the base of the statue, which makes sense, because Loew means lion in German. Yes. I think you got it, Ron. Thanks for that. The golem of Google came to help you. Thank you very much everybody. Lauren, thank you so much.

Take care and hope you have a great week.