{"id":3392,"date":"2015-09-19T22:41:00","date_gmt":"2015-09-19T19:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/?p=3392"},"modified":"2015-09-20T11:33:52","modified_gmt":"2015-09-20T08:33:52","slug":"magic-demons-and-judaism-what-to-do-with-troubling-texts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/2015\/09\/magic-demons-and-judaism-what-to-do-with-troubling-texts\/","title":{"rendered":"Magic, demons and Judaism: what to do with troubling texts?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Amulet<\/a>Dr. Robin Stamler is a magic buff. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not magic tricks that interest him so much as the intersection between Jewish tradition and the mysterious and inexplicable. In a brisk one-hour session at the recent Limmud Jerusalem<\/a> conference, Stamler laid out some of the more esoteric examples of Judaism\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quirkier, some would say, darker side.<\/p>\n

What is clear is, that by the time the Talmud was being redacted, magic was very much a part of Judaism; not just a tangent, but an accepted reality in the daily lives of our ancestors.<\/p>\n

Warding off demons, particularly through the writing of protective amulets, plays a large role. Stamler shared a story from the Talmudic tractate of Pesachim that discusses a man who was set upon by sixty demons that were living in a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sorb-bush.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d The man went to a rabbi who was also a local amulet maker. The rabbi wrote for him the necessary text, but it was mistakenly only for a one-demon bush. It didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t work, naturally, and the demons \u00e2\u20ac\u0153laughed at his expense,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d so another scholar was called in. He wrote the correct sixty-demon amulet and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the demons fled at once.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Archaeologists have found many amulet \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bowls,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d particularly in Babylonia, confirming that this was not an infrequent practice. (See picture above.)<\/p>\n

Stamler also gave examples of protection against Lilith who, unlike the feminist hero she has become in recent years, complete with her own magazine, has a much bleaker backstory. Before Eve was created, Lilith was said to be Adam\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first partner, but she was expelled from the Garden of Eden over a difference of opinion on sexual positions (she wanted to be on top). During her flight, she turned to the dark side and, by the Middle Ages, was widely feared as a killer of infants \u00e2\u20ac\u201c so much so that countless amulets at great cost were written to ward off the dangers of this terrible demon.<\/p>\n

To my modern eyes, it was all rather amusing. Ah, how primitive our forefathers were! And how foolish they were to spend good money on such things. We of course know better these days.<\/p>\n

\"Rebbetzen<\/a>That is, until Stamler got to Rebbetzen Aidel Miller, a master of the art of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lead pouring,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d a relatively modern feat of Jewish magic that originated in the late 19th<\/sup> century and is also known by its original German name Bleigiessen<\/a><\/em>. Rebbetzen Miller is operating today<\/a>, in 2015 not hundreds of years ago, charging a tidy sum ($101 per session \u00e2\u20ac\u201c after the 101 shofar blasts some congregations blow on Rosh Hashana) for a procedure that involves heating lead until it melts, then pouring it into a bucket of cold water placed near the sufferer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s head, discerning the shapes of the bubbles and globules that result, and using her knowledge to subsequently remove ayin hara <\/em>(the evil eye), <\/em>bypass child bearing blocks, or improve success with shidduchim<\/em> (finding a marriageable partner). Rebbetzen Miller will come to your home or even do the procedure over the phone<\/a>, apparently.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t just the lead that was boiling now. I felt a burning sense of theological indignation. How could this be a part of Jewish tradition? This was no better than reading tea leaves or palmistry. Why not just whip out the old Ouija board? Magic belongs to the pagans, not the Jews, right?<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Why does it bother you so much?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d my wife Jody asked as I recounted Stamler\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s presentation and my surprisingly strong reaction to it. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153So some people believe in magic. You don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the big deal?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It goes against everything I was taught about Judaism, back from when I first started becoming observant thirty years ago,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I replied.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Like what?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Jody said.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Like God is real, Moses wrote the Torah and halacha<\/em> is binding,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I sputtered. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Judaism was supposed to be free from the make believe and mumbo jumbo of other systems. It was supposed to be true with a capital T. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what attracted me in the first place. If magic is rampant in our tradition, does that make the entire enterprise suspect?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153You\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve changed an awful lot since the 1980s,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Jody said kindly. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Do you still believe that?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

At some level, I still do. It has a lot to do with how I got into Judaism in the first place. I grew up entirely secular and came to observance in my twenties through the kiruv <\/em>yeshivas of Aish HaTorah and Ohr Somayach (I went to both). And even though my Jewish expression is much more nuanced now and I no longer run my life strictly according to Jewish Law, the messages from those first days stuck: true Judaism is all or nothing. If you light a flame to heat up some soup on a Saturday, you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re breaking <\/em>Shabbat. Not just doing it differently, but transgressing a clear set of timeless, unchangeable commandments.<\/p>\n

Maybe if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d become religious more organically, if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been raised with some Sunday School, a little Hebrew, and slowly moved into observance, rather than become a full on ba\u00e2\u20ac\u2122al teshuva <\/em>out of nowhere, <\/em>it would have been different. But as I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d come to understand it, Judaism was 100 percent pure; it was the real deal and there was no room for demons and superstition and other supernatural beings other than the one true God. The rabbis knew what they were doing. They were infallible and righteous.<\/p>\n

Maybe that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why, every time I learn something about Jewish tradition that contradicts those early fundamentalist messages, it stings. Magic in Judaism \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t be! Women being ordained as rabbis – never! Observant Jews at a music festival on Shabbat (see my previous column \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Pick and Choose-daism<\/a>,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d June 19, 2015) \u00e2\u20ac\u201c what is the world coming to? Sex before marriage \u00e2\u20ac\u201c yikes.<\/p>\n

It seems that my current religious practice and my original Jewish belief system is out of sync. And it was getting me hot under the collar, even with the heavy air conditioning in Robin Stamler\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Limmud classroom.<\/p>\n

It was another session at Limmud that helped provide some answers. Calev Ben Dor led a session with the provocative title \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Approaching Troubling Torah Texts.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Ben Dor, a member of the David Cardozo Academy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Jerusalem Think Tank<\/a>, analyzed a number of biblical texts that seem to conflict with our modern moral standards. As an example, what do you do with the command in Deuteronomy to stone to death a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153stubborn and rebellious son?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Surely we wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t do such a thing, not today or even thousands of years ago.<\/p>\n

Ben Dor described three ways the rabbis of the Talmud tried to deal with such texts. One was essentially to ignore the text and to leave the judgment to God in the world to come. Another was to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153neutralize\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the text; to limit the specifics in which a law is applicable so much that it becomes unenforceable. The Talmud\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s tractate Sanhedrin stipulates that the rebellious son must be a boy not a girl (exempting half the population at the get-go), a minor, not a mature adult, and that it only applies if the rebellious son consumes \u00e2\u20ac\u0153a tartemar<\/em> of meat and drinks half a lug of Italian wine.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

The approach I liked the most, though, and the one that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d say is arguably the most applicable today, is that the troublesome text was never meant to be acted on in the first place; it was brought entirely for the purposes of study and interpretation. Rabbi Simeon, referring to the improbability of the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tartemar<\/em> of meat and half a lug of Italian wine,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d decrees that, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Such a thing never occurred nor ever will be, and it is written only for studying.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Rabbi Yehuda agrees.<\/p>\n

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks updates that understanding for the modern age. Writing in his book The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning,<\/em> he says that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153every religion is based on a body of holy writings [which] contains hard texts: passages which, if taken literally and applied directly would lead to results at odds with that religion\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s deepest moral convictions. Such texts need interpretation. The classic form of fundamentalism is belief in the literal meaning of texts. Interpretation is as fundamental to any text-based religion as is the original act of revelation itself.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

I would go one step further: it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not just ancient texts about rebellious sons that trouble us today \u00e2\u20ac\u201c it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all of the other illogical tangents that have seeped into and continue to hold sway over our tradition. Rabbi Sacks and the scholars of the Talmud seem to be saying you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to believe that magic literally works just because it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in there. Maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s there for us to learn something \u00e2\u20ac\u201c about human psychology or the history of religion.<\/p>\n

Maybe the Rebbetzen Millers of the world exist so we have a baseline of charlatanism to compare all the good stuff against. Or to teach us that, if you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like something in Jewish tradition, you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t always have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Sometimes the magic bubbles are enough.<\/p>\n

I first got all hot and bothered by my magic bubbles at The Jerusalem Post<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Robin Stamler is a magic buff. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not magic tricks that interest him so much as the intersection between Jewish tradition and the mysterious and inexplicable. In a brisk one-hour session at the recent Limmud Jerusalem conference, Stamler laid out some of the more esoteric examples of Judaism\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quirkier, some would say, darker side. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[55,32,53],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3392"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3392"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3392\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3397,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3392\/revisions\/3397"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thisnormallife.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}