The golem is the creature par excellence of Jewish fantasy, the one that gets all the love. But living in its shadow is a shadowy creature with a pedigree at least as distinguished: the dybbuk.
The spirit that takes possession of the living dates back to Hebrew Scripture and the Talmud, according to Gershon Winkler. He cites the possession of King Saul by an evil spirit in I Samuel, Josephus’s report of an exorcism performed by the first-century Sage Rabbi Eliezer, and the rabbinic legend that the serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden was possessed by Samael, the archangel of evil (an idea that appears, in altered form, in The Hidden Saint).
The tradition of Jewish secular literature isn’t nearly as ancient of course but, once it began, dybbuks started popping up there, too. One of the oldest works of Jewish secular literature, the Book of Stories (1602), features the spirit of an adulterer that possesses an unsuspecting young man. The idea of the dybbuk found fertile ground in the superstitious soil of Eastern Europe in the following centuries, so much so that it inspired what remains the greatest work of Jewish theatre—and one of the greatest works of all theatre—to this day: The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, by S. Anski.
Anski’s dybbuk was a unique creation in that the spirit possessed the body of someone it knew—all too well—during its life. That had never happened before; spirits and victims had always been unknown to each other. When the poor kabbalist Chonnon becomes obsessed by Leah (“falls in love” doesn’t begin to cover it), her rich father arranges what he regards as a more suitable match. Chonnon learns of the betrothal and dies from the shock—only to return as a dybbuk and possess his bride on her wedding day.
The rabbi learns that Leah was in fact Chonnon’s predestined bride, the result of their two fathers having made a pact to that effect even before their children were born. He decrees that Leah’s father must forever recite the memorial prayer for Chonnon—the only justice he can offer the dead boy—and, in the play’s climax, conducts the terrifying ritual that exorcises the spirit. Chonnon departs—and Leah drops dead.
I read the play before I ever saw it performed, in a lyrical translation from the Yiddish by S. Morris Engel who, later, graciously allowed me to use his text as the basis for my own version of the play for actors and puppets, which I co-produced with Washington State’s Tears of Joy Theatre. When I decided to adapt and produce The Dybbuk, it wasn’t because it was a Jewish play or even a “religious” play. It was because it was a love story. It is still, to my mind, one of the greatest love stories of all time.
It was in the aftermath of a failed romance of my own that I came to The Dybbuk and Chonnon’s pain was mine. While I had no desire for life to imitate art, I was drawn to the play’s merging of souls, which seemed the essence of romantic love. If only I could reveal my soul as plainly and fully to my beloved as Chonnon the dybbuk was able to reveal himself to Leah then, surely, she would have understood and all would have been different.
The Dybbuk has seen life in film, opera, and ballet but never before in puppet theatre (with the exception of a brief satire by the renowned Yiddish puppet theatre artist Yosl Kotler in the 1930s). But puppets and actors were the ideal performers with which to tell this story, allowing us to create an analogy between the relationships of puppeteer to puppet on the one hand, and spirits to human characters on the other. When the actor playing the spirit of Chonnon wrested control of the Leah puppet from the performer who had been animating it, Chonnon’s possession of his love was visual and visceral in a way not possible in the human theatre.
The combination of puppets and actors also gave us the opportunity to turn a tragic ending into, if not a happy ending, at least a bittersweet one. As Leah dies, the puppet’s operator lets it sink to the floor, out of her hands and her control. Now, as though freed from human life, the performer looks up and, for the first time, sees the performer who embodies Chonnon. The two performers, the two spirits, embrace for the first time in either of the two worlds in which the story takes place. They are together at last, even if in the only way that man has left to them.
A beautiful love story. A chilling supernatural tale. And a worthy fixture in the firmament of Jewish fantasy.