Ep 44: The Dybbuk, Its Origins and History with Morris M. Faierstein
Have you heard of the Dybbuk of Jewish folklore? It is a malicious possessing spirit most well-known in Yiddish Theater, Between Two Worlds. The play was written by S. Ansky in 1914, a playwright and enthographer. The tale centers on a young woman possessed by a dybbuk- that of her deceased lover. The play became a canonical work of both Hebrew and Yiddish theatre, being further translated and performed around the world. Dr. Morris M. Faierstein joins us in episode 44 to discuss his upcoming book The Dybbuk, Its Origins and History. In this fascinating episode we discuss possession, exorcism, reincarnation, mental illness, rituals for helping spirits move on to Gehenna (a temporary place of punishment), and more modern examples of alleged possession cases being debunked as frauds or diagnosed as mental illnesses. Don’t miss it!
Pre-order book: Dybbuk, Its Origins and History- https://sunypress.edu/Books/T/The-Dybbuk
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00:10
Vanessa Rogers
Welcome, welcome, folksy folks. Welcome to Fabrica Folklore. I am your hostess, Vanessa Y. Rogers, and this is the podcast where we unravel the mysteries of folklore. And this podcast is about folklore, but more specifically following the roots of the folklore tree, discovering what all the roots have touched and how it has evolved into the tree it is in modern times. We explore the history, context and hidden meanings behind folktales, legends, and mythology. We interview folklores, authors, historians, and those who use folklore in their work, such as in episode 22 with therapist Ben Simpson. Exploring folklore isn’t just fun, entertaining, and educational, but my hope is that it will act as a bridge when we explore our own culture and that of others. We grow in understanding and empathy of ourselves and each other. This podcast is about growth and connection.
01:03
Vanessa Rogers
So if that is a podcast that you want to continue to listen to, make sure that you’re hitting that subscribe button, whether you’re watching on YouTube or you’re listening on your favorite podcasting platform. And if you’re a longtime listener, make sure that you have consider giving us a review, giving us stars and writing a written review that is so helpful for ending podcasts like ourselves. We have a fascinating show for you today. We’ll be talking about the debuk, a malicious, possessing spirit in jewish folklore. We’ll be talking with the author of the upcoming book, the book its origins and history, which comes out in June 2024. So keep an eye out for that. Our guest today is the author. Morris M. Firestein has his phd in religious studies and was awarded an honorary doctorate of Divinity by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
01:56
Vanessa Rogers
He’s author or editor of 15 books and has published more than 130 articles and reviews in a wide variety of scholarly journals. He’s currently an independent scholar and he has lectured and taught in a wide variety of settings in the United States, Europe, and Israel. So thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having so I always like to ask a question at the beginning of how you got started on this journey. How did you get interested in this topic?
02:31
Morris Faierstein
Okay, my journey to this topic is quite long and convoluted. It started way back in 1970, long time ago, when I was a very young student. I had just graduated college and had gone to Israel to spend some time at the hebrew university, beginning my graduate studies. Having a background in yiddish literature and being a native speaker of Yiddish, I had heard about the famous play that was written about the dibuk. That is the thing that most people know about it. Written in 1920 and became one of the great hits of the yiddish theater. Also, it’s been performed in other languages, and a movie had been made about the play. The performance had been filmed in 1938 in Warsaw.
03:31
Morris Faierstein
I had heard about it, but back then, before the days of streaming and dvrs and all kinds of things, the only way you could see an obscure movie was if somebody put it on in a theater or some organized group. So one day I see a sign on the campus that is one of the auditoriums. They’re having a screening of this film. So I got very excited. I heard a lot about it. I went to see it and had great hopes. From everything I heard, it was supposed to be this great classic, et cetera. I walked out of the screening shaking my head. I couldn’t believe what I’d seen. The reason being that you have to understand that I come from an east european jewish background, and I’m a native speaker of Yiddish. So what did I see?
04:23
Morris Faierstein
First of all, with the exception of the narrator, who was sort of the main character, who keeps the plot going, it’s clear to me all the other actors didn’t know how to speak Yiddish. You think in Warsaw you could find yiddish speaking actors? Yeah, this stiff, wooden way, the clothing, everything about it was wrong. It was supposed to take place in a hasidic community, and whoever put it on didn’t have a good technical advisor, let me put it that way. So it didn’t look very particularly authentic at all. So I just walked out and I said, this is crazy. Anyway, then we go forward 25 years, and I sort of was in the back of my mind, I’d forgotten about.
05:15
Morris Faierstein
Then about 25 years later, in the mid 1990s, by a variety of circumstances, I find myself working, editing, translating a book which was the mystical diary. It’s called the Book of visions, the mystical diary of a famous 16th century kabbalist called Hayim Vital. Vital was the most important kabbalist in the soffit revolution, the 16th century. There was a great explosion of mystical activity in the small galilean town of Saffid in Israel. The most important kabbalist of that period was Isaac Luria, and Vital was Luria’s most important disciple. Now this diary was a very interesting document, sort of very intimate, very personal, but it has not been published. It remained in manuscript till 1954. So I wound up translating this text and later on putting it out, a new hebrew edition.
06:29
Morris Faierstein
So when I was translating the text, I come across a story about an exorcism, about a dibuk. That’s a very brief story. But there are other several sections in his diary that talk about a dibuk. And the reason for that being people don’t realize that the first exorcism of a dibuk and the concept of a duke. And we’ll have to explain what a dibuk is because there’s a lot of confusion about. That. Actually takes place in 1571 in Safid and Hayam. Vital is the first exorcist.
07:18
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
07:21
Morris Faierstein
So when I did the book, there were also other aspects in his book relating to exorcism and possession and such, which some articles about, et cetera. And then slowly, over the years, over the next ten years or so, I thought about it. And then about six or seven years ago, when I did some other projects in between, I decided I wanted to return to this concert with the Dib book. And fortuitously, there was a annual conference at Creighton University which, like many conferences, they have a topic, a theme of the conference. If you have a paper, something to talk about, you can say, I’d like to come and give my paper. So the topic that year was from this world to the next world. So I thought that would be an appropriate place to talk about the Dibble.
08:18
Morris Faierstein
So I put together a paper which was published as an article from the proceedings of this conference. And I sat down and thought about it quite seriously and figured out, tried to answer some of the key problems. Why a di book? What is a dibuk? Why does it happen in spot and nowhere else before, et cetera? And I came up with a theory, an organizing concept. I presented it and the other people at the conference were very positive about it. They thought that their feedback was positive. So I said, okay, good. Let me take it now and turn it into a book, which is what I. Okay, now, I think it would be helpful because it’s an exotic topic and there’s a lot of misunderstanding. I think it might be easier to begin with the whole concept of possession and exorcism.
09:15
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
09:18
Morris Faierstein
Possession, exorcism means a person is possessed by a being that takes them over, like, turns them, like, into a bot or a zombie. It occurs in every culture in the world, different forms, in different ways. In Judaism, it’s very interesting. I did in my book, the earliest known example of an exorcism and a person being possessed. I found in the writings of Josephus, the first century jewish writer who wrote after the destruction of the Second Temple. In his antiquities of the Jews, he has this story. He tells that a person was possessed by some demon or spirit and a jewish exorcist by the name of Eliezer. Exorcised, which means forced this demon to lead in the presence of the roman emperor Vespasia. And he describes what he did and how he did it. And it’s very interesting.
10:38
Morris Faierstein
Now, it’s interesting when people are possessed in many cultures, it’s not unusual that a possessed person, in modern terms, to translate into what’s wrong with this person in modern terms. Often it’s some kind of bizarre behavior. For example, in the case of Josephus, he says that this form of possession that this person had was what we would call epilepsy. He was having an epileptic seizure. And since they didn’t understand the medical concept of epilepsy, they thought having an epileptic seizure was possessed by some demon that’s forcing him to do all these strange things and make strange noises and behaviors, et cetera. Other very common form of possession. What people thought was possession in modern terms, what we would call mental illness. In other words, people who are manic depressive, schizophrenia. In other words, anybody exhibiting unusual movement, behavior, et cetera.
11:56
Morris Faierstein
Much of human history, in almost every culture, pre scientific cultures, it was not unusual to think of this as some sort of possession by the demon, by the devil, et cetera. And it’s also very interesting that many of the different cultures, the methods of exorcism are very similar. For example, very common. One that’s almost universal is to burn something like sulfur or something strong smelling and stick it onto those of the person being possessed to irritate the demon, to let them leave, to force them to leave. Incantations, amulets, spells, all these things are all very common in almost every culture. So that sort of. You find that everywhere. But the Dibbook is something very different.
13:04
Vanessa Rogers
Okay?
13:07
Morris Faierstein
The DibbooK is very unique and comes with a whole set of parameters. And there’s a reason why it occurs specifically in one place at one time. So let me try to sort of go back and explain because it gets a little convoluted how and why it occurs.
13:30
Vanessa Rogers
Okay?
13:33
Morris Faierstein
There are two steps in the story. First step, there’s a story in a post Talmudic rabbinic work called Tractate kala. There’s a very fascinating story. It’s a ghost story, you might say.
13:48
Vanessa Rogers
Okay, we love ghost stories.
13:51
Morris Faierstein
Who’s one of the great Talmudic sages, is going down a road, walking down a road, and suddenly he’s passed by this person who seems carrying a large load of wood, large bundle of wood. And he’s rushing very fast, and he looks terrible. He’s blackened with Soot, and his clothes are TorN and just terrible. And Rabbi Kiva sees him and runs over to him and says, what’s going on with you? Where are you running? Why are you so. Looking so terrible? Are you a slave? If you are, I will redeem you. I want to help you. And this person says to Ravikiva, you don’t understand. I’m not alive. I’m dead. And the reason I look like this and why I’m carrying this load is in my lifetime. I was a very terrible person.
14:51
Morris Faierstein
I was so terrible that when I got to Gehenna, after my death, the inhabitants of Gehenna said, we don’t want to let this guy in here. You think we’re bad? This guy’s ten times worse than us.
15:06
Vanessa Rogers
What is Gehenna?
15:08
Morris Faierstein
Hell.
15:08
Vanessa Rogers
The Jewish. Okay, yeah.
15:16
Morris Faierstein
So his punishment instead was that he wanders the earth being pursued by a group of avenging angels who sort of force him to run and beat him. And this load of wood is also interesting. He says, at the end of the day, he carries this load of wood for a day. And then these angels, at the end of the day, take the wood, build a fire, burn him to ashes. The next day, resurrect him, and the process starts all over again.
15:54
Vanessa Rogers
Oh, man.
15:55
Morris Faierstein
Endless punishment. So Rabbi Kiva says, well, there must be some way of helping. So he says, well, you know, I heard the angel say that if my son would go to the synagogue and say a prayer on my behalf, then that would be enough atonement that I could at least get into Ghana and get the normal punishment like everybody else. So Rabbi Kibi says, well, where were. So he says, you have a son? Says, I don’t know. My wife was pregnant when I was died. So he gets his name in what city? And he goes to the city. And he comes to the city. He goes to the synagogue, and he says, does anybody here know the relative? He mentions the person’s name, and they all look at him like he’s crazy. You mean that terrible, disgusting sinner, murderer, whatever, et cetera.
16:57
Morris Faierstein
Finally, he convinces them, says, yeah, he has a son. But the son doesn’t know. Aikiva takes, like, six months, teaches the son to say the prayer and learn enough Hebrew to say a prayer. And the next night, Rabbi Kiba has a dream where this person comes to him as dream and thanks him and says, you’ve saved me. I’m now happily ensconced like any other evil person. And my eternal punishment has been withdrawn. So this is one story, the other part of this story that’s very interesting from a jewish historical perspective. There’s a very famous prayer called the Mourner, scottish the prayer for the dead, which is created in the Middle Ages.
17:48
Morris Faierstein
And one of the sources for this idea that by saying a prayer in the Synagogue in memory of the dead, you can sort of help the dead in their post life journey if they’re being punished or whatever out of this story. So that’s one source. The second source for the Debuk is a concept of transmigratioN. Transmigration, reincarnation, menum psychosis. The idea of the soul lives on beyond one life. Now, this concept is very interesting. It occurs in a lot of cultures. But let’s restrict ourselves to what I call the western. In other words, the indian buddhist tradition is very important, but very different than the way this concept plays itself out in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
18:42
Vanessa Rogers
Okay?
18:43
Morris Faierstein
And it’s very interesting. It goes all the way back to the Greeks. There’s a dispute between Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle says, the soul only lives once you have one life. That’s it. The soul does not get recycled, so to speak, says, yes, the soul can be recycled. So as a result, when we get to Christianity, Islam and Judaism, depending on which side and which part of the religion is influenced, either they don’t believe in this concept of reincarnation, or they do. In other words, those aspects, for example, of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, that come out of an aristotelian philosophical tradition, reject the idea of reincarnation, whereas those aspects that accept it also come out of neoplatonism, accept reincarnation. So in Judaism, well, let me start with Christianity. Islam, very quickly. Christianity does not accept reincarnation, both Catholic and Protestant, because all arabilian.
19:57
Morris Faierstein
So things like ghosts and demons are not reincarnated people. A whole different category. So if you have ghosts, has nothing to do with reincarnation.
20:08
Vanessa Rogers
Right.
20:09
Morris Faierstein
Islam is interesting. Sunni Islam, the main Sunni Islam, also is aristotelian and rejects reincarnation. Certain aspects of Shiite Islam, like the Alawis, the Druze and Ismailis, certain other subgroups, offshoots of Shiite Islam, do accept reincarnation, and it plays a very important role. For example, the Druze, who are very interesting and unusual sect, their central religion, is based around the concept of reincarnation.
20:58
Vanessa Rogers
Okay?
20:59
Morris Faierstein
Now, in Judaism in the Middle Ages, this question comes up, and we have a divide in Judaism. Also, the more rationalist, maimonidean, aristotelian segments of Judaism reject it. Kabbalistic tradition, which is influenced by neoplatonism, accepts reincarnation, and it becomes an accepted kabbalistic concept. And there are even various religious disputes based on certain religious ideas that the Kabbalists say, certain things should be done because of reincarnation. And other people say, no, we don’t believe in it. We don’t do it that way. When we get to the Dib book, the two core preparatory ideas are, one, this notion, the story of Rabbi KIva and a dead man, the idea that after you’re dead, you can be punished eternally, you don’t go to Gehenna. And also the idea that there is a concept of reincarnation. Let’s now move on.
22:18
Morris Faierstein
And all these are sort of theoretical concepts until we get to the 16th century in soffit.
22:25
Vanessa Rogers
Can I ask you real quick what a kabbalist is?
22:29
Morris Faierstein
That’s jewish mystic.
22:31
Vanessa Rogers
A jewish mystic.
22:32
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
22:33
Morris Faierstein
Yeah. Kabbalah is the hebrew name for the jewish mystical tradition.
22:37
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
22:40
Morris Faierstein
So when we get to Safid, all kinds of interesting things happen, and as a result of some of the things that happen, these two ideas come into reality. So here it gets a little bit technical. Safid was a great revolution in jewish life and practice, and one of the ways that you can introduce something new. There are several ways. Every religion, when you want to introduce a new idea, there has to be some sort of connection to the tradition, to the sacred texts, et cetera. So the two basic ways in Judaism is the authority of tradition, meaning we have traditions that this has been done forever and ever, going back to the rabbis, to the rabbinic period, to the Bible, et cetera, or know I heard from.
23:43
Morris Faierstein
In the JewIsh tradition, for example, there’s a tradition that the prophet EliJah never died, and he appears to people heavenly revelations. So there’s a third way, Though, a kabbalistic way. And that is a direct connection with a dead ancient PrEdecessor, you might say, a meeting of souls. So, Safid in the Galilee is very close to a small town called MehRon, M-E-R-O-N-A couple of miles away. Mehron is famous as being the burial place of a significant number of talmudic figures, ancient rabbis who were sort of the great teachers of the rabbinic tradition.
24:49
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
24:50
Morris Faierstein
One in particular, called Shimon Variohai, who lived in the second century, died around the year 150 or so. And he is purported to be the author of the Zohar, which is the classic kabbalistic text.
25:07
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
25:10
Morris Faierstein
Modern scholars think it was written in the Middle Ages and attributed to him but in those days, they believed that he was the author, and this was the ultimate authoritative text of kabbalistic ideas for teachings. So Isaac Luria would go, we have descriptions of this. He would go to the grave of Shimonbayo chai. It’s like an hour or two walk, not a big deal. Lie down on his grave. And with various mystical incantations, prayers would basically invite his soul to come down into Luria’s body. So the two souls could meet. They would have a conversation, and then Luria could come back and say, well, I spoke to Rabbi Shirom BaYohai, and he know this thing in the Zohar says this and this.
26:15
Morris Faierstein
He explained to me exactly what that means and what we should do in terms of practices and new traditions that they were innovating. The authority for these new innovations says, well, I got it straight from the source, from the second, who’s an authority now, chaim, vital in one of his books, describes going with Luria to the grave, and he describes exactly what he saw and heard. He says he saw Luria lying on the grave, speaking to Shimon Bayokai. But he only heard the one conversation. In other words, he didn’t hear both sides of the conversation. He only heard, yeah. So what does this have to do with the dibbook? So the dibbook, in my theory, and nobody so far, is maybe somebody will say I’m wrong. I don’t know. The book isn’t out yet.
27:19
Morris Faierstein
So my theory of the Dibbook is essentially, if you think about it for a minute, what the Dibbook is, the Dibuk comes into a person involuntarily, because the Dibbook is one of these souls that’s been wandering around, being eternally punished, who is looking for a place of rest, and in theory, can rest in animal, in a stone, anywhere. But the most comfortable would be within another human being. And when he takes over the person becomes like a zombie. They become catatonic. But when the rabbis come to find out what’s going on here, the dibbook speaks through the person being possessed. So what you’re hearing is the dibuk. In other words, it’s the other side. Like when Luria goes to the grave, you hear Luria’s thing. You don’t hear the response here. You’re seeing the other side.
28:19
Morris Faierstein
You’re hearing the being that’s doing the possessing, speaking and making themselves heard. So that this idea of that two souls can be combined in one person, and that there can be dialogue. People can actually see and hear it, because when we read the story, when the first Dibbook happens, he enters this widow, causes a great uproar in the town. Everybody comes to see and hear what’s going on. And so, in a sense, gives validity to these statements about, well, yes, that a great man with great mystical powers can go and converse with ancient worthy who’s been dead for 1500 years. But on the other side, the same great kabbalist mystic can also has the mystical powers do the opposite, to extract an unwilling guest, so to speak.
29:29
Morris Faierstein
So that’s what a dibuk is one of these dead, terrible people who’s looking for a host like a virus, say. And, of course, the job of the kabbalist or the rabbi, the exorcist, is to force him to leave. And so this is the first time this happens, is it happens in sephat. And it’s very interesting. Tal talks about it in very brief terms, but then another rabbi comes 30 years later. This happens in 1570, a rabbi from Bohemia Moravia, near Prague. He’s heard about Isaac, glory and all the great things going on in Israel in Safid, and he wants to learn more about. He comes to Safid. He has conversations. There are still a few disciples who still remember that period. Most of them are dead left.
30:45
Morris Faierstein
And he writes a series of letters to a friend back in Europe, telling him about what is seen and heard. And in one of these letters, he gives this long description of this whole story of this woman being possessed and what happened and all the rest of it. And that’s really the first debut story that’s printed that we know about.
31:03
Vanessa Rogers
Okay, and what year was that?
31:05
Morris Faierstein
That’s 1630.
31:07
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
31:10
Vanessa Rogers
But you said that most people who are familiar with the book are familiar with the play.
31:16
Morris Faierstein
Right. Now, the play is a whole different thing. So let me get to play very briefly. Okay, so what happened? Let me just briefly summarize what happens.
31:24
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
31:24
Morris Faierstein
What happens is the historical dibbook. Now, let me explain what I mean by historical dibbook. To me, a historical dibuk is a dibuk story where I can verify that the people involved were real people, historical figures, that it was a firsthand, like the story with vital. It was a firsthand account told by people who saw it, who heard it. I’m not judging whether they were having hallucinations or whatever, but simply that it wasn’t like somebody read a story in a book and retold the story three generations later.
32:05
Vanessa Rogers
Right.
32:06
Morris Faierstein
So firsthand accounts is very interesting. The first one is this one in 1571. The last one that I consider to be authentic. That’s a firsthand written by the guy who was the exorcist at the time of the events, is 1695. And there’s about seven or. Well, altogether, I found eleven incidents in those, I guess, century and a half. Okay, 1701. Very important thing, also relating to the play, since a young woman is sort of the victim, the person possessed in the play. There’s this whole feminist analysis relating to women that the whole psychosexual thing. Men, women, because Dibbook is always a man, okay? No female dibuks, and the possessor is a woman. So therefore, this whole feminist analysis, et cetera. The interesting thing is I did a little survey of all the historical events that I could find.
33:18
Morris Faierstein
There are eleven of them that mentions lesser or greater accounts. Of the eleven, six relate to women being possessed and five related to men. So basically, just as many men as women. There’s this idea that’s a feminist thing, only women. That’s all based on the play. So now how we get to from the historical dibuk, from 1700 until Anski’s play, in the early 17 hundreds, Israel Balshemto, who’s the founder of a movement called hasidism, which goes on till today, but he was the founder. He was born around 1700, died in 1760. The first half of his life is very obscure. Somewhere in the middle of his life, according to the traditional biography, he becomes a public figure and shows his great talents. And he’s like Isaac Lori in terms of having great mystical powers and talents, et cetera.
34:31
Vanessa Rogers
Okay?
34:33
Morris Faierstein
And he reveals himself at the age of 36. Till then, he’s sort of this. Nobody knows who he is. He’s just sort of this marginal figure who does everything in secret. So according to this biography, at the age of 36, he becomes a public figure. And why 36? Very simple. According to the biography of Isaac Luria. Luria lived in Egypt, in Cairo, till the age of 36. And at 36, the prophet Elijah comes to him and says, the time has come for you to go to Safid. He’d been a secret mystic, studying all kinds of things on his own and with the private help of Elijah. And then at 36, Elijah says to him, it’s time for you to go to Safid and become a public figure and make all these teachings and things you’ve studied and learned, et cetera.
35:27
Morris Faierstein
Start teaching others and becoming a public figure in terms of having a school, disciples, et cetera, in hoslism the Balshantov also becomes a public figure at exactly 36, because the biographies are sort of hagiographies, and they’re sort of modeling the hagiography of the Balshemtov on the biography of Luria to make them parallel. Here’s what’s interesting. So how does the Tov show that he’s this great mystic? And the answer is, out of the blue, somebody’s possessed by a dibuk, and he’s still hidden. Nobody knows who he is. His brother in law, who’s a great rabbi, thinks he’s just this ignoramus who, by some quirk married his sister. So he says, I’m going to take you. There’s this dibuk appeared in town, and you’ll see this dibuk, and that will sort of give you a little piety and a little respect for religion.
36:34
Morris Faierstein
They walk into the room, and immediately the dibuk turns to the BaLSHEMToV, who, remember, nobody knows who he is. And he looks at him and says, I know who you are, and I know what you can do, but you can’t do anything to me, because you can’t do it until you’re 36. And so the shem to withdraws very quickly. It doesn’t want to be revealed before your time. That night he has a dream, and dream says to his dream, tomorrow is Your 36th birthday, wakes up, does a calculation, says, yes, he’s 36, goes back, exercises a dibuk, shocks everybody, and that’s the beginning of his public career. There’s also a second Dibuk story in this book called in praise of the Tov, which is the Shivcha Habesh in Hebrew.
37:34
Morris Faierstein
There’s a second story about a dibuk, which is also interesting, and it’s a transition in the second story, also about a dibuk. The BALSHEM Tov is called that a person has a dibuk in ThEM. And he goes and looks at him and talks to him and says, this person does not have a dibuk. He’s just mad. He’s mentally ill. What is interesting about this is that from then until basically the 20th century, there are no real first hand, verifiable dibuk accounts. All we have are stories. Comes like a folktale.
38:18
Vanessa Rogers
Yeah.
38:19
Morris Faierstein
And what happens in Eastern Europe is they have people who are mental problems, epilepsy, things that manifest bizarre behavior, et cetera. And it sort of becomes like a folk saying he’s possessed by a dibuk, and that’s what’s wrong with him. So the idea that anybody who, and they have stories that are second and third hand, like, for example, hasidic masters, many of them tried to emulate the founder. Like one of the amusing things was they would all smoke a pipe, because it was told he used to smoke a pipe all the time.
39:01
Morris Faierstein
When you get these hage graphical collections, mostly at the end of the 19th century, when they start collecting these wonder stories about the famous rabbis, and they model them on the Balshem Tovan, the founder, so of course, since he exercised the Dibuk, you have all these stories about these other rabbis, but they’re not late hagiographical collections, they’re not firsthand real stories. So it’s sort of in the air. Now we come to Ansky. Anski was a very interesting character. He was a journalist, he was a socialist activist, he was all kinds of things polymath, and he was also a writer. And in 1912, 1913, he gets a grant from the richest jew in Russia to do an ethnographic expedition.
40:01
Morris Faierstein
By then they were realizing that the traditional lifestyle, the Stettle, if you’ve seen Fiddler on the roof, that world with Tevia and all that, by 1910, 1912, people are realizing that world is fading. It’s disappearing, as we have the little old fashioned, everything is becoming modernized. Gets this grant to take a group of people with him, various skills, a photographer, somebody to make musical recordings, et cetera, to document sort of what’s left, the embers of the dying sort of folk culture of Eastern Europe. And of course, he does it up to World War I. World War I intervenes, and he has to stop in the middle. And then around 1917, 1918, for whatever reason, I forget exactly why, he decides to write a play which sort of, I guess, summarizes, in a sense, many of his experiences, thoughts, observations.
41:08
Morris Faierstein
And this is how this play, the official name of the play is between two worlds, but it’s become known as a dibble. He writes the play, finishes the play. It’s interesting. He wrote it in Russian and it was translated into Yiddish. He himself, so assimilated he could speak Yiddish, but his most comfortable language was Russian. So anyway, this play gets written and he’s trying to find some group or somebody to put on a performance, and he dies in the middle, and he’s in the city of Vilna in Poland, and after his death, a group of friends. There’s a tradition in Judaism that you have sort of a commemoration of somebody’s death on the 30th day of the death. There are stages in the process of mourning. There’s the first week of mourning. Then there’s the first month of mourning, and then the first year.
42:15
Morris Faierstein
So one of the stages is the 30th day. So some of his friends say, gee, wouldn’t it be great to memorialize him? Let’s put on this play that he wrote, make a special performance of this play. The play is performed. It becomes an incredible hit. Then it goes on to be the great warhorse of yiddish theater that translated into Hebrew, into all kinds of other languages, and becomes the great classic of yiddish theater. Through this play is how most people, I mean, people have heard the term dibble, but really don’t understand all the ins and outs of it, but so they identify it through the play. They see the play, and the plot of the play is really Romeo and Juliet. And the. I’ll very briefly, I’ll give you the plot, okay?
43:16
Morris Faierstein
The plot is that there’s these two friends who went to yeshiva together, very close buddies, okay? And they get married. And one says to the other, if you have a son and I have a daughter, our children will marry. And they make an agreement. One of the two of them dies very young. The other one goes on. They have a son and a Daughter. The father of the daughter, I think, is the one who dies. And the father of the son goes on. And then the son hears that this of the story, and that this young lady was supposed to be his intended bride, but things intervene and she winds up marrying somebody else because he’s older and richer and all kinds of things, and he studies Kabbalah, and I forget the exact details. He dies, he starves, or something happens to him.
44:26
Morris Faierstein
He dies very young, and after his death, he possesses. He becomes the dibuk to the young lady. He possesses her. And then there’s a whole next, and then the whole play goes on, and there’s an exorcism and this and that, and the end of the play, they try to exorcise him from her, and he refuses to leave. And the end of the story is that as a result of the exorcism, she dies, too, which is actually interesting because that’s accurate. Most of the exorcisms, historically, in Safid and the other places, times the person who was possessed, the Dibuk essentially kills them as they leave, strangles them. So that part of it is actually historically accurate.
45:29
Vanessa Rogers
Okay?
45:30
Morris Faierstein
But what’s not accurate is everything in between, because it’s implied that he died, because he studied Tabbalah, he delved into the mysteries, and that’s what killed him delving into the mysteries doesn’t kill you. Kabbalists who died because they studied Kabbalah. I know quite a few, yeah. Now, the other interesting thing, this is something that sort of. I’m still playing with. I’m not 100% certain, but I have some ideas, and if I could prove, this would be most amusing. There is one very old pamphlet from around the year 1700 that I found. I didn’t find it. Somebody else found it. It exists in one copy. It was published. It’s a story of an exorcism. Now, what’s interesting about this exorcism is two things. First of all, I think it’s a parody for various reasons. It looks like it has a feel of a parody.
46:44
Morris Faierstein
The other thing that’s interesting about it to me, in terms of the Dibbook. In the Dibbook, the young woman who’s possessed has all kinds of dialogue and actions and all the rest of it. This is completely in every other Dibuk story except for this one that I mentioned that I believe is a parody. The person who was possessed is catatonic from beginning to end. Even if they survived the exorcism, they have no idea what happened to them. It’s like they’re in a coma and they won’t. But in this parody, there is a young woman who is possessed, and she gets up and dances and sings, does all kinds of things, which is completely impossible in every authentic Dibuk story. Which is why I’m wondering, even though right now, as far as I know, this pamphlet, a scholar published it about 1982.
47:46
Morris Faierstein
She found that there’s one copy in Oxford, in the Bodleyan Library, that survived. But I keep asking myself, is it possible that Ansky in 1900 saw this pamphlet and used this as gave him some ideas? Why would he, reading all the traditional Dibuk stories, that the person being possessed will get up and give a speech and engage in all kinds of behaviors? He just did it sort of, for the dramaturgy of it. I don’t know. One thing that I’m still looking at, and if I can show that he got his ideas from this parody, I would find that personally quite amusing.
48:32
Vanessa Rogers
You said that the person who was being exercised often died during the process.
48:41
Morris Faierstein
In the process of the dibuk leaving.
48:43
Vanessa Rogers
Okay, and the dibuk leaving.
48:47
Morris Faierstein
One of the aspects of the exorcism is that the exorcist tries to force the dibuk to leave. They always choose the big toe of the foot, and they say, you have to leave through that point in the body, not through the throat or any other organ. And they always say when they’re successful in that they know that the dibuk left because that big toe has been damaged, bloodied like a hammer hit it. But the dibuk always wants to lead through the throat, out the mouth in the process. And this is how the people usually die. They sort of strangled to death or choke to death.
49:41
Vanessa Rogers
Do you have any sense how the death actually occurs?
49:50
Morris Faierstein
They don’t give us too many details about these things. They just say the dibuk left and the person died. Sometimes the person dies a few days later, depending. Each story has its own peculiarities, its own quirks.
50:06
Vanessa Rogers
I’m also curious if you’ve seen this in other religious exorcisms. Is it common in other religious exorcism practices for the person possessed to die in the process as well?
50:21
Morris Faierstein
I’m not an expert. Now, you have to remember, when you say other exorcism in other religions, in Christianity, for example, you basically talking about Catholicism. And it’s not a did book, it’s the devil or a Demon, the movie the Exorcist.
50:43
Vanessa Rogers
Right.
50:46
Morris Faierstein
But you see the difference, for example, in the catholic exorcism is that it’s the devil, it’s not a human being. And it’s sort of the battle of good and evil, God versus the devil. And it’s a whole different process. And the reason why the person is being possessed, on the surface they look similar, but when you get to the technical details, they’re actually quite different because the motivation is different. The being doing, the possessing. In most other traditions, for example, in Islam also, you can have a person being possessed by a demon or what they call a jinn. In fact, there’s one very amusing Dibuk story, the son of Chaim vital. This takes place in 1666, and he writes about it himself. He was called to a person’s house that this person’s daughter was being possessed by a dibuk in Cairo.
52:05
Morris Faierstein
Was it Cairo or Damascus? One or the other. Not important in a muslim country. That’s what’s important. And he comes there and he starts talking to this, what he thinks is a dibuk. And the person being possessed, being like the puppet under control, gets very violent and hits them and beats them and gets very aggressive. So he runs away and says, I’m not going to deal with you. It’s dangerous. And then he says to the father person, are you sure this is really a jewish dibuk? Maybe it’s something else. He says, consult with my muslim equivalents, the muslim exorcist. It turns out the whole story is in my book, by the way, one of the things I do in the book has two parts, just so people will know.
53:06
Morris Faierstein
The first part is sort of a narrative description of the process, the history, et cetera. The second half is I translate into English the primary sources, the actual texts, because many of them are in Hebrew, some are in Yiddish, some of them are hard to find, so that everybody’s an expert in all these languages. But for the interested reader, they can also be able to read the primary. Exactly. The dialogue, everything, the originals. Anyway, so what happens in this story is he goes to the Muslim. The Muslim comes, and it turns out that this girl was possessed by a muslim demon, a jinn. So the Muslim knows how to deal with jinns. He exercises him and gets rid of him. The next day, the girl is still acting strangely, and the Dibuk insider says, wait a second. Wait a second. I’m in here too.
54:10
Morris Faierstein
In other words, she’d been possessed by both a muslim jinn and a jewish dibuk. And he says, call Rabbi bittal. I want him to get me out, and I want him to help me get to Ghana and get my. Repair, my spiritual salvation, so to speak. And vital doesn’t want to come. And then finally they beg him. And he comes, and vital says to him, why did you so aggressive yesterday? You were beating me, trying to kill. No, no, that wasn’t me. That was the other guy. And I’m here begging you to help me. But he was stronger than me. And when I tried to stop him, he overcame me. So here was a case of where you had in the same person possessed at the same time, a muslim demon and a jewish dibble.
55:00
Morris Faierstein
And the story ends that since this was a willing dibuk, who was willing to follow orders and wanted to because the end of the Dibbook, how do they get him out? Promise him is that if you leave quietly, we will end your suffering, your eternal wandering. We will pray on your behalf. We will do various other religious rituals with the result that you will now be allowed into Gehenna. And one thing is very important to remember. Gehenna, unlike the Christian, Hell, is not eternal.
55:46
Vanessa Rogers
Oh.
55:47
Morris Faierstein
In the jewish tradition, Gehenna is sort of like what the Christians call purgatory.
55:52
Vanessa Rogers
Okay?
55:54
Morris Faierstein
You go there to pay for your sins. And once you’ve atoned for your sins, you’ve served your sentence, so to speak. And the sentence depends on what you’ve done, how bad your sins were. But the maximum time that anybody normally spends in Gehenna is a year. So what they’re offering the dibuk is if you go quietly, we will intervene in your behalf. You’ll get into Ghana, you’ll go to Gehenna, you’ll do your sentence, you’ll get your punishment, but then you go to heaven with everybody else. Okay, the incentive, but not every dibuk. A lot of them were sort of what you’d call hardened criminals. Says, I don’t care. I’m happy you’re doing this. Leave me alone. I don’t want to do it again. Depended on the individual.
56:58
Morris Faierstein
But that was the process, that was the inducement that if you leave quietly and cooperate with us, we will help you in your afterlife, gain the ultimate afterlife.
57:13
Vanessa Rogers
But even if they were willing, they needed assistance in detaching.
57:19
Morris Faierstein
They needed. Because remember the story of the original story of Rabbi Keeb and the dead man? Dead man needed somebody else. In his case, it was his son to do something pious on his behalf, to help him get through the doors of Gadna.
57:39
Vanessa Rogers
Right?
57:40
Morris Faierstein
In the later cases, the exorcist would say things like, they would engage in all, for example, the morning rituals. Like in one famous story, the rabbi who’s the exorcist says to the Dibuk, if you do what I tell you, I will promise you that I will follow all the rituals. I will do the mourners Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer for a year, like as if I was your son, study in your memory. I would recite psalms. I would go to the synagogue, do all the rituals that one would do in mourning. And some of these rituals also, even just in general, there are sort of traditions that one does these things to help the soul achieve a higher level in heaven. That helps the soul ascend to heaven and to ascend to a better place.
58:46
Morris Faierstein
If you pray on their behalf, if you study religious texts on their behalf, give charity, do pious things, in other words, you do the pious act and they get an eternal in heaven, they get credit for it. And this is standard traditional jewish traditional belief. So for the dibuk, since normally they would not have children or family to do this for them, so the exorcist would normally be a well known, famous rabbi would say, I guarantee you I will do all these rituals on your behalf to make sure that you do get to the right place in the end and you won’t have to continue wandering the earth endlessly.
59:42
Vanessa Rogers
Right?
59:45
Morris Faierstein
But sometimes they accepted it, but many times not. They said, I’m happy you’re here.
59:54
Vanessa Rogers
Yeah.
59:55
Morris Faierstein
In one famous story, the last famous one, the dibuk says to the rabbi, according to what I’ve been told, I have 26 more years to wander, and I’m perfectly happy doing it. So leave me alone, man. That was one of the negotiations seed in getting rid of them. But it wasn’t easy. Yeah, it was that easy. They would just say, hey, here’s your reward. As I say, most of these debuking were rather hardened cases, because to become a debook, you had to do really bad things. It wasn’t just your run of the mill evildoer.
01:00:46
Vanessa Rogers
And so for the time frame for your book, what time frame did you look at for primary sources?
01:00:54
Morris Faierstein
Okay, so I started, as I said, the first recorded Dibuk story is 1571 in soffit. Then what I did, there’s a book in Hebrew by a scholar called Gadalia Nigal. About 25 years ago, he did something very interesting. He collected every Dibuk story that he could find up to the present, up to the 20th century.
01:01:25
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
01:01:25
Morris Faierstein
But the problem from my perspective was he was not critical. In other words, like, if he saw a story in some hage, graphical collection of stories about great rabbis, and he said, 100 years ago, this rabbi exercised the Bible, and the story would follow a standard. Certain folklore stories that they have to follow a standard pattern that’s been repeated many times, he would just add. And so I decided that I would only deal with stories that I could verify the people involved were real people, that the account was contemporaneous, or at least close enough that something happened.
01:02:18
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
01:02:18
Morris Faierstein
I mean, I don’t want to judge, was this really there happened or people imagined, but there’s a contemporaneous account of some incident happening, as opposed to a story that somebody. I heard a story from Rabbi so and so, that 100 years ago, the famous rabbi.
01:02:38
Vanessa Rogers
Yeah.
01:02:39
Morris Faierstein
So the transition, in a sense, is the stories about the Balshemtov, founder of hastism. He lives in 1730s, is when it supposedly happened. It’s not published until 1814. But I see that as sort of. That’s the transition from the historical events to these sort of hagiographical stories. Add one other thing that you’ll find interesting. There’s another approach, of course. Mine is very sort of academic, scholarly. There are also folklorists who’ve written about this using the methodologies of folklore and anthropology. One in particular is an israeli scholar called Yoram Bilu. Biluoyoram his first name, Yoram Bilu. He’s anthropologist.
01:03:35
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
01:03:36
Morris Faierstein
He’s also written, even though he’s israeli, he’s written in English. And the reason I mentioned him specifically, because he has written about modern stories about possessions and exorcisms. One very famous case, I want to say, maybe 20 years ago, something like that. There was a. I think it was moroccan or anyway, a modern contemporary kabbalist in Israel who wanted to show how great a kabbalist he was. He found a woman who he claimed had been possessed by a dibuk, and he was going to exercise the dibuk and he had it filmed. There’s a film of his exorcism. And of course he successfully exorcises her. The problem is that about six months later, several journalists do a little investigation, discovered the whole thing was a fraud. Why did he do it? Very simple. For fame and money, right?
01:04:54
Morris Faierstein
To show how great a mystic kabbalist he was, to get customers for his amulets, for his mystical consultations, whatever. I don’t remember. You might find it on YouTube somewhere.
01:05:08
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
01:05:10
Morris Faierstein
But if you’re interested in sort of scholarly from a modern anthropological, which is very different from my perspective, there’s Bilu, and I think one or two other scholars of folklore wrote about this, but they write about it from sort of different social scientific, methodological approach. I don’t have. I’m basically a historian, a student of jewish mystical texts. So I approach it in a somewhat different way. They would approach it, but different way of looking at the same thing. And also I end basically with the Balshemtov, which is 1730.
01:05:57
Vanessa Rogers
Okay?
01:05:58
Morris Faierstein
And they would pick up stories in 19th century, 20th century, because there are stories, okay, thing I haven’t looked at, which might be of interest, a scholar of east european jewish history recently published a book about madness and illness, mental illness and such. Physical and mental illness in eastern Europe in the 19th and early 20th century, and haven’t had a chance to look at the book. But I wonder if he doesn’t have a section when he talks about mental illness, that there’s also, by the way, an interesting scholar. Let me talk about mental illness. The second story, the Balshemtov says, no, this person is not possessed by just mentally ill. So there’s a scholar called Svimar. There’s a book, by the way, on possession. Matt Goldish, I have the books. Give me 1 second.
01:07:10
Morris Faierstein
Let me just run to the other side of the room, get the book, I’ll give you the details. That’s something that would be very interesting. Come on. This is the classic volume on the subject spirit, possession and Judaism.
01:07:38
Vanessa Rogers
Okay.
01:07:40
Morris Faierstein
It was published in Wayne State University. Matt Goldish. M-A-T-T-G-O-L-D-I-S-H. It’s a very nice fellow. It’s got like 20 chapters, different aspects on possession in Judaism, exorcism. I have an article in here also, so I can recommend it.
01:08:01
Vanessa Rogers
Yeah.
01:08:04
Morris Faierstein
But this is also very interesting. So in here, one scholar called Svmark has an article taking this idea of this Dibuk story where the Baltrantov says he’s a madman, not a dibuk. And he has a whole very interesting article on the connection of madness and such relating to possession, exorcism in the hasidic tradition, following up on that into the 19th century and such. That’s another interesting resource that for anybody’s interested in the subject, this is probably the most comprehensive book that I’m familiar with, and really the only major one that’s been written on the sort of anthology of articles on possession, exorcism and Judaism.
01:08:49
Vanessa Rogers
But that answers my question in that we still see examples of the book in modern day people are still. No, not today.
01:09:01
Morris Faierstein
I’m not aware, and I could be wrong. I don’t follow with everything, but really, in the 20th century and to the present, somebody who thinks they have a dibbook would probably be taken to a psychiatrist and they discover they’re schizophrenic or they’re manic depressive. It would not be considered to be a dib book. But back before modern medicine and modern science, when they saw these strange behaviors, not just in Judaism, but in most cultures, they attribute these to some sort of demonic possession, spirit possession. In some cultures, people who behave in these strange ways were thought to be holy in some ways, depending on the culture, because they had a phenomenon that did not make sense, right?
01:10:07
Vanessa Rogers
And that couldn’t be explained.
01:10:12
Morris Faierstein
So the only thing that they had to explain this behavior was possession by some external force, was doing terrible things to them, maybe good things, maybe it was. For example, if you think in the Catholic Church, you look at some of the saints, particularly some of the early saints, their strange behaviors, which were interpreted as great holiness and such. If you went today to a psychiatrist and took a book of the Hague graphic of the saints and read the description of some of the behavior of some of the early saints and said, I know this person. He’s got these knee symptoms, and he talked to a psychiatrist saying, oh, that person has, I don’t know, this form of schizophrenia. Whatever it’s your frame of reference.
01:11:14
Vanessa Rogers
Right.
01:11:15
Morris Faierstein
So in the modern frame of reference, the idea of being possessed by a dibuk doesn’t make sense. As I say, there was this kabbalist, and I believe there were Bilu. I believe it’s been a long time since I read his work. He, I think, did some ethnographic work about dib possession in Morocco. Like early 20th century, something like that. There were still cultures that were not quite modernized, even pre World War II. Some of them did have, I believe, in Morocco and other place. They did have some stories, but since from my perspective, they didn’t make sense, so I didn’t follow up on them. But anybody’s interested in following up on it, there is some research out there that, again, from anthropological perspective.
01:12:23
Vanessa Rogers
Yeah.
01:12:24
Morris Faierstein
But post World War II, I’m not aware of any other than things that did book stories that when you get below the surface an inch, it turns out to be a fraud. It’s not authentic.
01:12:43
Vanessa Rogers
Right. Well, this has been absolutely fascinating. I really appreciate you coming on to explain all this.
01:12:52
Morris Faierstein
I enjoyed it.
01:12:54
Vanessa Rogers
This is a topic I wasn’t really familiar with, but. Yeah, go ahead.
01:12:58
Morris Faierstein
Yeah. Well, spirit possession, of course, is a universal thing, but the dibuk is even within the jewish tradition, it’s a particular type. It’s a little bit exotic.
01:13:11
Vanessa Rogers
Yeah.
01:13:12
Morris Faierstein
The book, I don’t know. I’ve done everything. It’s in the hands of the publisher, and I saw that this week the first time they put it in their list of forthcoming books.
01:13:25
Vanessa Rogers
Well, we’ll put the link up in our show notes for anybody who’s interested in getting it. I think you can pre purchase it at this point.
01:13:39
Morris Faierstein
I don’t know if it’s available for purchase yet. Once I finish my thing and it gets the hands of the publisher, it’s out of my hands and have to.
01:13:51
Vanessa Rogers
Wait for them to do whatever they do their thing. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
01:13:58
Morris Faierstein
Thank you for inviting me and I appreciate it. It was very interesting and enjoyable.
01:14:03
Vanessa Rogers
And thank you, folksy folks, for joining us on this spirit possessing journey. We want to hear from you. Did you know about the book before this episode? What did you learn from today’s episode? If you’re watching on YouTube, drop us a comment down below. Or you can continue the conversation on our Facebook group page where we like to hear from our audience members. You can follow us on most social medias, Facebook, Twitter, x, Instagram. And if you haven’t subscribed, make sure you do that. So you’re getting the weekly episode notifications every week. And if you’re enjoying the show like I said before, more, please consider reviewing and giving us stars that really helps indie podcasts like ourselves. Thanks for unraveling the mysteries of folklore. I’m fabric of folklore once again. I’m Vanessa Y. Rogers, and until next time, keep the focalized.