A lot of good arguments are spoiled by some fool who knows what he is talking about. —Miguel de Unamun
Take the nothing therein and turn it to the matter at hand – Possibly Lao Tau
Even though it was in the last century, as tomorrow is the first day of the Jewish year 5784 it really isn’t so many years ago when I wrote a show based on Jewish stories about a city of fools. It was supposed to be the fourth show in a series called Tales of A Far and Wide Cat. My company back then was called Far&Wide Puppets. Each time I’d make a show from a story that fell into my field of vision and made special sense to me. The first was Arabian, the second, Romanian and the third North American. What next?
“Hold on a moment”, I thought to myself, “these tales come from cultures all over the world, what about tackling one from my own culture?” And like the words say” …when you commit to something then magic happens.” Almost immediately a story fell my way. It was the story of the Golem of Prague. I should have mentioned that I am Jewish. Not religious, not particularly adhering to anything but unequivocally Jewish. This ethnic inheritance runs deeper in my DNA than any other national or cultural trait.The story of the Golem happens in a time of pogroms. The Jews were confined to the ghetto in Prague and baseless rumours were rife. Especially at that time of year when Easter and Passover coincide. At that time, it was rumoured that the Jews made their flat unleavened bread, which they eat at Passover in memory of the miraculous escape of Jewish slaves from Egypt led by Moses, from the blood of Christian babies. If you’ve ever seen a flat piece of matzo made from flour, water with a little salt – you’d see the utter absurdity of this claim.
Nevertheless, absurdity abounds in the world of humans and it was enough to start another bout of Jew massacre.
There was a wise rabbi in the ghetto. His name was Rabbi Loew and he was known as the Maharal meaning the lion heart. He was a great educator and studied the mystical book called the Kabbalah. The Maharal decided that something had to be done to be done to save his people. He decided to make a giant and powerful man out of mud. So, with three close friends and disciples they went to the river and performed the magical necessaries and the Golem was born. The Golem saved the people but the Golem became more and more autonomous and hard to control. Rabbi Loew found a way to end the Golem and rumour now has it that the Golem is in the attic of the old Synagogue in Prague. Like Mary Shelley before me, I I was captivated by the tale.
My mother’s oldest friend from early school days came over on the Kindertransport. My Mum also escaped from Germany. They made friends at school and remained friends ever since. I rang my mother’s friend and she said she knew a Rabbi who had written her rabbinical thesis on the Maharal. An appointment to meet the Rabbi was arranged. And so, given my lack of observance, on what I thought was any old day, I turned up at the Leo Baeck College in North London. I knocked on the door and a very weird masked face peered through a hatch on me. This was absurdity but good absurdity. I didn’t know it but I had arrived on the festival of Purim. A festival for children, for giving to the poor, for feasting particularly on sweet things.
I was ushered into the college which was full of masked people in a very celebratory mood. Something in me felt instantly at home. In some ways, more at home than I had felt out on the streets of London moments earlier. People were noisy and irreverent, happy, loud and full of ebullient colour. My presence was welcomed but not overly fussed over. Over the course of that day, I learnt much more about the Rabbi Loew and the Golem.
Afterwards I bought several books and read several versions of the tale including a purported first-hand account of the Golem’s creation by his brother-in-law. My mother’s friend rang me and asked how I was getting on with the story. “Fine”, I told her,” But I’m not sure I feel comfortable doing a show that is so blatantly about bigotry and massacre.” She replied” Why don’t you tell the story of Chelm?” When I said I knew nothing about Chelm (a line later repeated back to me by a very old man from Baghdad in a Jewish old people’s home – another tale) Anne, my mother’s friend, said she’d send me some stories. And a show was born about a city of fools.
Now, as I said before, as the saying goes, commitment to an idea can lead to magic. A friend from Chile visited. He showed me pictures of Indian story boxes. Boxes that unfolded to reveal different scenes. To ensure food on the table, I was doing some paid work with a fostered teenager who had some very serious issues. The lad taught me the vital importance of home. He had lost his idea of home and it deprived him of the value of being alive. He would play a game of standing in a busy road with cars coming on either side. It was extremely scary to witness and try to stop him because he didn’t care. My job was to make a puppet with him. Like all of the work I’ve ever done with young people, all I can do is hope that the time we spent together made some sort of difference and created some sort of different sense of self.
One day I was taking him home and there was an old wooden trunk on top of a skip. My story box of Chelm was born. I had a carpenter friend and he helped me create a story box that could unfold to reveal several different panels within the trunk. I also had a painter friend who was willing to paint different scenes that portrayed an element from the Chelm stories I intended to tell. There are a lot of stories. I mean these are stories about how humans are fools so there would be a lot.
Chelm happened because of a foolish angel. The angel has a simple job. The angel’s task is to fly around the world with two sacks – one full of wise souls and the other full of foolish souls. The angel simply has to ensure that everywhere in the world there is an equal distribution for the sacks – half wise and half fools. A simple task. But… (all these small words like if, but, yes, no, why… are really the biggest words are they not?) but the angel was absent minded. The angel was enjoying flying so much that when one sack got snagged on a tree on top of a hill, the angel failed to notice. By the time the angel noticed, the sack had emptied its contents all around the steep hill. That sack was full of all the foolish souls. So, all the foolish souls built their city around a hill in Chelm.Chelm stories are almost endless, always absurd and imbued with foolishness. They usually involve solving a problem, answering a question or meeting a challenge and coming with a madcap solution. Quite like Harpo, Groucho, Chico and Zippo Marx! In Yiddish there are many words for fool and a hierarchy of foolishness – Schlemiels, Schmendricks, Nudnicks, Klutzes …and many more. I enjoyed portraying them all to populate the city and bringing a world of fools to life as Leonardo De Mish Mash, a Chelmite artist in search of wisdom. He finds it in the Yiddish concept of chochma.
The Zohar breaks up the word chochma into two words: “koach” and “mah“. “Koach” means “potential”, and “mah” means “what is”. Thus chochma means “the potential of what is”, or “the potential to be”. Leonardo realises that that his fellow citizens have chochma because they are kind to each other and that, as well as fools, is what they are. Kindness is the highest type of human wisdom.
Two weeks ago, a surgeon made a small necessary hole in my head by removing a lump. He said it was a secondary intention. This contrasts to a primary intention, which the surgeon stitches together so the healing is greatly helped, as a secondary intention is one where the healing is up to the body to gather its resources and send them to that point in your anatomy where the hole is.
I like those two intention phrases. I think actions have more than one intention. The first might be your conscious intention, the second one becomes apparent quite quickly as events unfurl and the third is a hidden intention.
Last week I went to get the wound redressed and I asked the nurse what it looked like. He said that my secondary intention was a hole in my head a bit bigger than an old penny. When I thought about a hole in the head, a character from my Chelm tales popped into my mind: Yente Pesha, the wife of the hugely foolish Mayor of Chelm , Gronam Ox in my show. “Oi!”, Yente, constantly exasperated by Gronam, exclaimed, “You give me a loch in kopf (a hole in my head).”
So, the little op I had brought me back to my tales of fools and that was the hidden intention in my secondary intention. My show, A Sackful of Souls, was a new departure for me back then as is my current hole in my head now. Let’s see what awaits in Chelm (Aka Totnes. Aka the 21st Century. Aka my 70th year) now!
