The Image

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Title:     The Image
Author: Isaac Loeb Peretz [More Titles by Peretz]

Great people have been known to do great wonders; witness the time when they attacked the Ghetto in Prague, and were about to assault the women, roast the children, and beat the remainder to death. When all means of defense were exhausted, the Maharal[145] laid down the Gemoreh, stepped out into the street, went up to the first mud-heap outside the door of a school-master, and made a clay image.

[Footnote 145: "The great Rabbi Loeb" who lived in the sixteenth century, and who became the central figure of many a legend.]

He blew into its nostril, and it began to move; then he whispered a name into its ear, and away went the image out of the Ghetto, and the Maharal sat down again to his book. The image fell upon our enemies who were besieging the Ghetto, and threshed them as it were with flails--they fell before him as thick as flies.

Prague was filled with corpses--they say the destruction lasted all Wednesday and Thursday; Friday, at noon, the image was still at it.

"Rabbi," exclaimed Kohol, "the image is making a clean sweep of the city! There will be no one left to light the fires on Sabbath or to take down the lamps!"[146]

[Footnote 146: No Gentile to be hired for that purpose.]

A second time the Maharal shut his book; he took his stand at the desk and began to chant the psalm, "A Song of the Sabbath Day."

Whereupon the image ceased from work, came back to the Ghetto, entered the synagogue, and approached the Maharal.

The Maharal whispered into its ear as before, its eyes closed, the breath left it, and it became once more a clay image.

And to this day the image lies aloft in the Prague synagogue, covered up with cobwebs that stretch across from wall to wall, and spread over the whole arcade, so that the image shall not be seen, above all, not by the pregnant women of the "women's court." And the cobwebs may not be touched: whoever touches them, dies!

No man, not the oldest there, recollects having seen the image; but the Chacham Zebî, the Maharal's grandson, sometimes wonders, whether, for instance, such an image might not be included in one of the ten males required to form a congregation?

The image, you see, is not forgotten--the image is there still.

But the name with which to give it life in the day of need has fallen as it were into a deep water!

And the cobwebs increase and increase, and one may not touch them.

What is to be done?

[The end]
Isaac Loeb Peretz's short story: Image

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