“Is it wrong to form with words something that cannot speak?Terribly wrong, but this is the order of things
As it comes down from heaven—
All 600 letters, alphabetically.”
—Genevieve Goffman, All the Words that Came Down (2025)

The golem stands over seven feet tall, iridescent and immobile. Its surface finish is a gleaming hand-made paint of K-500 medium, Cekol, and Iriodin 9605 Blue-Shade Silver SW. The golem does not move. Its mouth does not open — actually it’s crammed with pages repeating, “He can not call out to anyone with his mouth stuffed full of paper,” as if silencing it with its own rhetoric. Its chest bears the Hebrew word for truth — א†מת†(Emet ) — but the aleph has been struck through, rendering it ju תs מt (Met ), meaning dead, like a silent monument to the historical lore that shapes it and the present in which it is situated.

Across centuries the golem has been rewritten to suit the fears of its storytellers — first a mystic experiment, then a household assistant, eventually a holy bodyguard tasked with assuming the worst parts of the world. By the early 20th century, it had morphed into a kind of spiritual security system: a passive threat in an increasingly hostile Europe. Its evolution mirrors a shift in how we wield stories, from creation myth to trauma script. Goffman’s golem is not merely an ominous totem to the tragedy of the past, but a prism for understanding the violent ideologies that define our present. She asks what it means to shape identity through a creature whose entire purpose is to absorb threat, to embody it, to preempt it, and eventually to justify it. The golem does not judge. It reverberates with distorted echoes of history, while absorbing the stories of now into the ever-expanding archive that defines its shape.

In both book and body, Goffman composes a creature that is not so much alive as endlessly spoken into being. It is an object made of fear, born of language, but unable to speak for itself. In its monumental stillness, the golem becomes a reflection not only of collective memory, but of our compulsion to author fear into flesh. If stories are how we inherit meaning, then the golem is our most paradoxical heir. Whether you see a protector, a corpse, a glitch in the system, the result is a figure that resists closure, defined not by what it is, but by what we need it to be.

—Madeline Cash, 2025