In Modern Hebrew, golem is used to mean "dumb" or "helpless", or a pupa. Similarly, it is often used today as a metaphor for a mindless lunk or entity that serves a man under controlled conditions, but is hostile to him under other conditions.[1] "Golem" passed into Yiddish as goylem to mean someone who is lethargic or beneath a stupor.[5]
During the Middle Ages, passages from the Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation) were studied as a means to create and animate a golem, although little in the writings of Jewish mysticism supports this belief. It was believed that golems could be activated by an ecstatic experience induced by the ritualistic use of various letters of the Hebrew alphabet[6] forming a "shem" (any one of the Names of God), wherein the shem was written on a piece of paper and inserted in the mouth or in the forehead of the golem.[7]
A golem is inscribed with Hebrew words in some tales (for example, some versions of Chełm and Prague, as well as in Polish tales and versions of the Brothers Grimm), such as the word emét (אמת, "truth" in Hebrew) written on its forehead. The golem could then be deactivated by removing the aleph (א) in emét,[8] thus changing the inscription from "truth" to "death" (mét מת, meaning "dead").
The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late 16th-century rabbi of Prague, also known as the Maharal, who reportedly "created a golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava River and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew incantations to defend the Prague ghetto from antisemitic attacks and pogroms".[16][17] Depending on the version of the legend, the Jews in Prague were to be either expelled or killed under the rule of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor. The Golem was called Josef and was known as Yossele. He was said to be able to make himself invisible and summon spirits from the dead.[17] Rabbi Loew deactivated the Golem on Friday evenings by removing the shem before the Sabbath (Saturday) began,[7] so as to let it rest on Sabbath.[7]
One Friday evening, Rabbi Loew forgot to remove the shem, and feared that the Golem would desecrate the Sabbath.[7] A different story tells of a golem that fell in love, and when rejected, became the violent monster seen in most accounts. Some versions have the golem eventually going on a murderous rampage.[17] The rabbi then managed to pull the shem from his mouth and immobilize him[7] in front of the synagogue, whereupon the golem fell in pieces.[7] The Golem's body was stored in the attic genizah of the Old New Synagogue,[17] where it would be restored to life again if needed.[18]
The existence of a golem is sometimes a mixed blessing. Golems are not intelligent, and if commanded to perform a task, they will perform the instructions literally. In many depictions, golems are inherently perfectly obedient. In its earliest known modern form, the Golem of Chełm became enormous and uncooperative. In one version of this story, the rabbi had to resort to trickery to deactivate it, whereupon it crumbled upon its creator and crushed him.[3]
A similar theme of hubris is seen in Frankenstein, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, and some other stories in popular culture, such as The Terminator. The theme manifests itself in R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), Karel Čapek's 1921 play that coined the term robot. The play was written in Prague, and while Čapek denied that he modeled the robot after the golem, many similarities are seen in the plot.[37]
The golem is a popular figure in the Czech Republic. The 1915 novel by Gustav Meyrink (The Golem) was briefly popular and did much to keep the imagination about the golem going. Several restaurants and other businesses have names that make reference to the creature. A Czech strongman, René Richter goes by the nickname "Golem",[17] and a Czech monster truck outfit calls itself the "Golem Team".[38]
A Yiddish and Slavic folktale is the Clay Boy, which combines elements of the golem and The Gingerbread Man, in which a lonely couple makes a child out of clay, with disastrous or comical consequences.[40]
Often in Ashkenazi Hasidic lore, the golem would come to life and serve his creators by doing tasks assigned to him. The most well-known story of the golem is connected to Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague (1513-1609). It was said that he created a golem out of clay to protect the Jewish community from Blood Libel and to help out doing physical labor, since golems are extraordinarily strong. Another version says it was close to Easter, in the spring of 1580 and a Jew-hating priest was trying to incite the Christians against the Jews. So, the golem protected the community during the Easter season. Both versions recall the golem running amok and threatening innocent lives, so Rabbi Loew removed the Divine Name, rendering the golem lifeless. A separate account has the golem going mad and running away. Several sources attribute the story to Rabbi Elijah of Chelm, saying Rabbi Loew, one of the most outstanding Jewish scholars of the sixteenth century who authored numerous books on Jewish law, philosophy, and morality, would have actually opposed the creation of a golem.
A golem is a creature formed out of a lifeless substance such as dust or earth that is brought to life by ritual incantations and sequences of Hebrew letters. The golem, brought into being by a human creator, becomes a helper, a companion, or a rescuer of an imperiled Jewish community. In many golem stories, the creature runs amok and the golem itself becomes a threat to its creator.
The best-known version of the golem legend takes place in Prague and revolves around the studious Rabbi Loew. The first practical instructions on creating a golem can be found in medieval commentaries on Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Creation). Originally, creating a golem was a way for medieval Jewish mystics to come closer to God.
Central to the golem legend is the human desire to create, together with a range of themes including creativity, control, power, and salvation. The golem also symbolizes each era's dreaded dangers and hopes for redemption.
Golem, as the name suggests, is based on a golem, an earth type elemental creature, more specifically on representations in modern role-playing games, which usually are ogre-like creatures whose bodies are covered in, or made of, stones. It could also have been inspired by the tsuchikorobi, a Japanese yōkai known as the 'tumbling monster', for its habit of rolling over travelers and crushing them, as Golem does.
This is, of course, a perfect encapsulation of the same anxiety that underlies so much of the mystical speculation about demons, dybbuks, ghosts, and golems: The power of life is so strong, that it brings both promise and terror.
I am familiar with R packages and I find it is easier to not use 'golem' and its myriad of functions. And on the other hand, I think someone not familiar with R packages will not understand what he/she does if he/she uses 'golem'.
You can add the CSS yourself manually, indeed. But for example for the JavaScript handlers, there is no "empty template" by default but golem provides one for you. Otherwise, you need to go to Shiny - Communicating with Shiny via JavaScript and copy and paste code.
Same goes for golem::add_module(), a function that provides both a module skeleton and a testing skeleton. Without these function, you'd have to copy and paste code from the internet, and remove parts of it to make it work. As someone who write a lot of shiny modules, that function has saved me a lot of time AND a lot of typos from copying and pasting stuff.
Conventional names and structure : golem tries to enforce you to follow a specific development pattern, so for example whenever I receive a golem app to debug, or I'm taking over a project from one of my colleage, I know exactly what the file contains and where to look for things. The good thing with shiny is that it will allow to build an "unstructured project" and the app still works on your machine, but it's basically a nightmare maintaining multiple apps that do not follow conventions.
And at the end of the day this is really what golem is about: standardization and automation, so that you can safely work on your app with your colleagues and with yourself in 6 months, and so that you don't waste time doing things that can be done in a safer and automated way, like the module addition, which I think is the greatest example of what golem tries to do: before golem, you had to go to Shiny - Modularizing Shiny app code, copy the code, create a file at the correct place, name it in a correct way so that you know it's a module, paste the code, remove the code that you don't need, rename the functions with the correct name, and start working on your module. Which is a recipe for disaster on the long run
So, to sum up: yes, you can do everything manually, for example you could use R in the command line, but you use RStudio button because you feel that it's easier and safer If your goal is to write "quick and dirty" app that will never be sent to production or that aims at being maintained over a long period, you probably don't need golem, but as soon as you're working on a "serious" app, it's safer to go with it.
That being said, calling library() inside the app server won't be the good practice for a golem app. For adding a dep, you can add them to your DESCRIPTION with usethis::use_package("package"), then add the correct roxygen tags where it's needed in the app.
The golem (Fay et al. 2021) package is a framework for building production-grade shiny applications.Many of the patterns and methodologies described in this book are linked to golem and packages from the golemverse.Of course, all the advice developed in this book will still be valid even if you do not plan to use golem.
Note: The current version of golem used when writing this book is 0.3.0, and some of the features presented in this book might not be available if you are using an older version, or be a little bit different if you have a newer version. Feel free to browse the package NEWS.
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