Modern Tales: A Commitment to History

Retelling the Story of the Golem Shows a Creative Response to Jewish Persecution

Nov 19, 1981

Fifteen years of 92Y lectures means sixty lectures; the focus tonight is the soon-to-be-published retelling of the Golem, the Maharal of Prague’s creative response to persecution of the Jews. Indeed, each of the year’s lectures highlights such a response. Reviewing the fifteen years: Job linked to the Akedah; Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Shimon: “We felt in touch with so many [great figures] that all the dangers of solitude were attenuated.” The year’s topic is tales of commitment: to beauty combined with truth; to Israel; to fervor. We rarely touched on the Holocaust. But via passages from The Oath and Town Beyond the Wall, we learned that the last 15 years was meant “to draw from one another a certain strength to fight indifference.”

Selected Quotes:
Books:
Subthemes:
1) Commitment to humankind
2) Commitment to history
3) Commitment to Mitzvot
4) The Golem
5) Commitment to Israel
6) Rabbi Yehudah Leib of Prague and the Golem
7) Blood Libels
8) Job’s Silent Rebellion
9) Sin of Human Apathy
10) The Akedah and Isaac’s Pain
11) Storytelling as Commitment to Jews and Jewish History
12) Repetition of Jewish History
13) Search for Truth
14) Bond of God, Torah and Israel
15) Omnipresence of Anti-Semitic Acts
16) Existence is Hope in Despair
17) Existence is Unanswerable Questions
Names:
Key Words:
Categories:
Tags:

© 2026 The Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association

All Rights Reserved.

All material accessed via the 92NY website (“content”) is protected by copyright under U.S. Copyright laws and is the property of The Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association or the party credited as the provider of the content. You may not copy, reproduce, distribute, publish, display, perform, modify, create derivative works, transmit, or in any way exploit any such content, nor may you distribute any part of this content over any network, including a local area network, sell or offer it for sale, or use such content to construct any kind of database. You may not alter or remove any copyright or other notice from copies of the content accessed via 92NY’s website. Copying or storing any content except as provided above is expressly prohibited without prior written permission of 92NY or the copyright holder identified in the individual content’s copyright notice.

If you are a rights holder and have found your material on our website for which you have not granted permission (or is not covered by a copyright exception under US copyright laws), please contact us so that we may obtain and document accurate rights-related information. Upon email request to archive@92ny.org, we will temporarily remove material from public view while we address any rights issue and will honor takedown requests from authors who do not wish to have their work published.