When the rabbi had, to go with the robot analogy, turned the golem off, he’d locked the manitou in an artificial and uncomfortable existence. Dead but not dead. Partially, I thought, by the way the off switch had worked. Depending upon the story—probably because there were several ways to power a golem—Rabbi Loew had carved into the golem’s forehead the word “emet,” which is the Hebrew word for truth. When the rabbi deactivated the golem, he removed a letter and left the word “met,” which is dead. The problem with this, as I saw it, was that a manitou cannot die. It just is, like the sun and
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