Just as the Jewish soul in exile will never find rest, so too its text will never be made whole. But Chelmitesand here their foolishness is indeed debatableseem not to mind, for they are used to minor verbal miracles: "The men of Chelm do not despair: / they lift their lances in the air / and leave them there" (11).
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In their textual exile, the men of Chelm can also take solace in a greater miracle: the appearance among them of the Perfect Woman. The singular muse of
Chelmaxioms,
the Perfect Woman is also a lovely foil to the men of Chelm, who, divided into eleven pedantic tribes (spinozists, kabalists, metamorphosists, ecclesiastesists, etc.), spend their time in endless dispute. Intellectually equal to the men (one important section of the poem is devoted to her reading of a page of Kant), but infinitely more graceful, she is Mandelbaum's figure of the Shekhinah, the kabbalistic emanation of divinity known as the "Bride of God," about whom numerous myths, traditions, and rituals have developed.
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Associated with Israel in its condition of exile, the Shekhinah is also the Sabbath Queen, for on the Sabbath God and Israel are united, providing a foretaste of messianic redemption and cosmic union. One of the most beautiful lyrics in
Chelmaxioms
celebrates her coming to Chelm:
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 | | A port beyond our portulans,
a bay too brilliant for man,
where light alone can dwell:
from that elusive harbor
the Sabbath Queen sets sail
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| | and reaches usalways as dusk
would touch the patient foothills
some three days after she began
her journey out of speechlessness,
her pilgrimage to Chelm. (43)
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In Mandelbaum's version of the myth, the Sabbath Queen sails from a realm of divine "speechlessness" to Chelm, the all-too-human town of endless verbiage. This speechlessness, however, is not to be understood as silence. Just as the divine point of origin is a light "too brilliant for man," it is also an absolute word, incomprehensible to us in our fallen human state. As Gershom Scholem observes:
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| | This absolute word is originally communicated in its limitless fullness, butthis communication is incomprehensible! It is
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