Spirits of the Dark
Sermon for Halloween
Eve
By Rabbi Boaz D.
Heilman
Shabbat Lech L’cha,
5775
Though there are many theories about the origins of
Halloween, one thing is certain: It is
NOT a Jewish holiday. Of course, one
could say that Sukkot shares a few elements with Halloween. Both are fall festivals, both mark the end of
the harvest season and the beginning of the period of shorter days and longer
nights. In ancient times, in a world awash
with ignorance and superstition, fall was the time of year in which malignant
and malicious spirits were more prone to emerge from the darkness, from under
the foggy underbrush of a world that science could not yet explain.
Some beliefs held that these malicious spirits of the
underworld needed appeasement in the form of acts or gifts that would bring
about their favor and avert divine retribution. A treat, if you will, to ward
off the trick.
The Jewish world that emerged out of the superstitious murk
of ancient cultures is not devoid of spirits and ghosts. The Patriarch Jacob, for example, on several
occasions, sees spirits. At the time of
his return to his homeland, following a 20 year exile, he has an overnight
wrestling match with someone or something that was both more and less than
human, a being that could cause harm but could also bestow blessings; a
creature that could appear powerful at night, but for whom exposure to sunlight
brought terrible consequences.
The custom of appeasing one’s demons could also explain
Jacob’s act of sending generous gifts of livestock and money to Esau before his
reunion with the dreaded twin brother who, twenty years earlier, had sworn to
kill Jacob.
And though the modern world associates witchcraft mostly
with women, in ancient time this was far from a female-dominated realm. Goblins, gnomes and elves were often of the
male variety of demons; and Satan, of course, the head honcho of all evil
spirits, was definitely male. If he
weren’t, Rosemary would never have her baby and the entire genre of horror
movies would look very different today.
In the world of Jewish demonology, in fact, Satan is not a
fallen angel. He is the cynic, the one
who has little faith in the creatures called human beings. To prove that, Satan—whose name means “the
one who misdirects”—tempts people, throwing obstacles and enticements in their
way so as to prove to God that God’s faith in us was misdirected from the
start, that the chance God took in creating a being that could destroy as carelessly
and gleefully as he could create, was a bad choice.
In Jewish folklore, the underworld over which Satan rules is
made up of little trolls whose job it is not only to keep the flames of hell
burning, but also to entice and tempt people, to play with and cause them to
trip up. Far from being demons or devils, Satan and his little helpers are not
excused from God’s laws; then must even observe Shabbat, giving all tortured
souls a day-off from the eternal flames of Gehennom,
the place where souls were scrubbed clean before they returned to the loving
embrace of the Heavenly Creator of all souls.
But the Torah is full of witches and sorcery, as is obvious
from the commandments stated in Leviticus and Deuteronomy: “Thou shalt not permit a witch to live.” Witches negated the God-given gift of choice
and free will. Associated with the dead,
having the power to communicate with the world beyond, with channeling the
immortal souls of dead people, witches had unique and undue power over the
living.
The most famous witch in the Bible is probably the Witch of
Endor. As told in the book of Samuel,
King Saul took it as one of his holy missions to exterminate all witches from
his kingdom. Yet one somehow survived,
and it is this witch that Saul goes to visit and consult with before his final
battle with the Philistines. He asks her
to raise the spirit of the prophet Samuel.
In those days, it was the belief that for commoners, the spirits of the
dead appeared upside-down. Only for
royalty, presumably out of respect, did they appear right side up. So when Samuel’s spirit appeared upright from
within the smoke of her cauldron, the witch knew that her anonymous visitor was
King Saul, and she is terrified that he will kill her now as he had done to all
the other witches of the land.
Samuel has some pretty harsh words to say to his erstwhile
protégé, and the king, ashen and downfallen, returns home without doing the
Witch of Endor any further harm.
The Talmud and Midrash, Judaism’s great texts of the first
millennium of the Common Era, also speak of witches and other spirits of the
Other World, as well as of their evil influence on the Real World. Chief among those was Lilith, a night spirit
who, in one ancient text, appears as Adam’s first
wife (a version derived from the two seemingly separate stories of the creation
of woman in the story of Genesis). Lilith,
it seems, was a bit too adventurous for some prudish rabbis who saw her as
sexually promiscuous and domineering. In
speaking of Lilith in such a way, these early Rabbis took an even earlier
belief and wove stories that helped shape Jewish gender ethics for the next two
thousand years.
The red string of Kabbalah, the red ribbon or string tied to
the post of a male baby’s crib, are among the amulets and antidotes that are
said to ward off the malicious Lilith, whose revenge for being cast out in
favor of Eve was her insatiable demand for male babies and for the seed ejected
in nocturnal emissions.
Ghosts and evil spirits also appear in Jewish folklore,
among them dybbuks, ru'aḥ tezazit and ru’ach ra’ah. All of these are disembodied spirits that
invade living bodies, taking control of them and acting out their own desires
through the possessed body. The mystic
philosophy, Kabbalah, contains many rituals and protocols relating to exorcism
of a dybbuk.
Then,
of course, to counterbalance the soul-without-a-body, cue the golem,
which is a body without a soul. In
modern retellings, the soul is replaced by a brain, but originally it was a
soul that the creature lacked. An
effective retelling of this story can be found in the Kaddish episode of
the TV series “The X-Files.”
In
our own time and place, Halloween has lost much of its religious
connotations. I suppose we can thank
Hallmark and the candy industry for this particular transformation—though it is
just as likely that science and secularism are as guilty of this as anything
else. Yet, superstitions still abound,
especially around cemeteries and graveyards.
Despite the huge advances in knowledge and learning, fear of the unknown
is still prominent in the human psyche.
Laughing in the face of darkness is just one way in which we ward off
the dangers. Taking delight in tricking
malicious spirits is our way of showing them who’s in charge in this world.
And
treating with sweets and candies those little children who appear at our
doorsteps, dressed in the most creative, imaginative and colorful costumes, is
but one way in which we adults attempt to propitiate and pacify a frightening future.
The
historical roots of Halloween are, indeed, not Jewish. However, the spiritual world is actually deeply
interwoven with the Jewish world. And though
some rabbis forbid any and all customs and celebrations associated with
Halloween, it’s probably the least harmful way in which we can try to ward off
darkness and fear. At least this way we
make our children happy, as we teach them that, though there ARE legitimate
fears in the world, they CAN be conquered, that we have unbound abilities that
far outpace the malicious scheming of any number of goblins and demons. God knows the terrors of the real world are
not half so easy to placate, but the children don’t need to know that. Not yet at any rate. Let them remain innocent but a while longer.
May
the taste of Torah always be as sweet as candy in our lives and in the lives of
our children.
Kein y’hi
ratzon—may
this be God’s will.
©
2014 by Boaz D. Heilman
