The Golem
The golem (Jorge Luis Borges)
If (as the greek Cratilo says) the name is the archeotype of the thing in the letters of 'rose' is the rose and the whole Nile is in the word 'Nile'.
And made of consonants and vocals, there will be a terrible Name, that encodes the essence of God and that keeps Omnipotence in exact letters and syllables.
Adan and the stars knew it in the Garden. The rust of the sin (say the cabalists) has erased it and the generations lost it.
The crafts and candor of man have no ending. We know there was a day in which God's people looked for the Name in the vigiles of jewry.
Not in the way of others, which insinuate a vague shadow in the vague history, the memory is still green and fresh, that of Juda Leon, who was a rabbi in Pague.
Thirsty of knowing what God knows, Juda Leon gave himself to premutations of letters and to complex variations and finally pronounced the Name that is the Key,
the Door, the Echo, the Guest and the Palace, on a puppet that he crafted with clumsy hands, to teach him the arcana of Letters, Time and Space.
The simulation raised the sleepy eyelids and he saw shapes and colors that he didn't inderstand, lost in rumors and he tried fearful movements.
Gradually he saw himself (like us) imprisoned in this sound network of Before, After, Yesterday, While, Now, Right, Left, Me, You, Those, Others.
(The cabalist who worked as numen named the vast creature Golem; these truths are referred to by Sholem in a learned place of his volume.)
The rabi explained the universe to him "this is my foot; this one yours, this the rope." and he achieved, after years, that the pervert broomed, rightly or wrongly, the sinagogue.
Maybe there was an error in the spelling or in the articulation of the Sacred Name; despite such a high wizardry, the man's apprentice didn't learn to talk.
His eyes, less of man than of dog and way less of dog than of thing, followed the rabbi throught the doubtful gloom of the confinement's pieces.
There was something abnormal and rough in the Golem, for at his passing the rabbi's cat hid. (That cat isn't in Sholem but, though time, I guess it.)
Raising subsidiary hands to his God, he copied the devotions of his God or, stupid and smiling, he hollowed out in concave oriental zalemas.
The rabbi looked at him with temderness and with some horror. 'How' (he told himself) 'could I father this sad son and I left the inaction, that is sanity?'
'Why did I add to the infinite series one more number? Why, to the vane mop that unwinds in eternity, did I give another cause, another effect and another worry?'
In the hour of distress and vague light, he stopped his eyes on his Golem. Who will tell us the things that God felt, when looking at his rabbi in Prague?