Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes
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For those who witnessed this incursion of the dead into the land of the living, several points emerged with palpable clarity:56
• Life persists after death. No one could scarcely have imagined otherwise then, but the appearance of the dead made the conclusion inescapable. In a later period, when this tenet became contentious, Falcon’s account, along with others, was called upon to prove decisively what had once been obvious.
• The wicked are punished after death. Judging from Falcon’s introduction alone, this tenet was all too imaginable. During the case itself, the exorcists did not miss the opportunity to ask the spirit to describe the punishments he suffered after death.
• The dead are at close proximity, still embedded in networks of association with the living. Not only in the graveyard a few paces away, they are in and about the synagogue, blocking Samuel’s path as he sought respite within its walls. New associations with the living may also be formed, as with the exorcists who were called in to rectify the spirit’s soul even as they ejected it from the victim’s body. A certain dependence of the dead upon the living is thus apparent.
• The dead cast social and ethical ideals into relief by articulating their transgression. These transgressions emerge in the course of the revelations that the spirit made, including the sins that brought him to his insufferable limbo state and, in other cases, the sins of many in attendance. The spirit’s flagrancy encouraged sexual propriety, yet for Falcon at least, there is no more serious violation of communal codes than the subverting of Judaism’s exclusive authority. The spirit, in denying this exclusivity and the traditional claim of Judaism’s singular truth, and in disregarding the most solemn oaths of the Torah, had placed himself beyond redemption. His inability to enter Gehinnom signifies this unredeemability—rectifiable only through the intercession of the living saints, the kabbalists.
The kabbalists do not, however, always succeed. “One can search in vain,” wrote Midelfort, “for Catholic accounts of unsuccessful exorcisms.”57 Not so in the Jewish literature of the period, which begins with failures and is thereafter regularly punctuated with them. The didactic punch of these early accounts might even have been weakened by success, for in becoming a hagiographic genre, the fear of heaven inculcated by the spirit’s travails could be supplanted by the hope for miraculous, salvific intercession, regardless of one’s sins. For writers like Falcon, religious authority could be strengthened no less by the didactic inculcating of its values (through fear) than by the hagiographic amplification of its leading personalities.
The Young Man in Safed
Sambari’s text appends another possession episode to the Falcon account.58 This second case does not seem to have been part of the original broadsheet, because the signatories on the latter appear immediately after the recounting of the woman’s death. The case, as we have noted, is said to have taken place contemporaneously in Safed by Sambari; other versions omit its location. It certainly pairs well with the Falcon account, in any case, with which it has much in common. This time, the victim is a young man, into whom the spirit of another dead young man entered. The spirit’s greatest lament is not his own cruel fate, but that of his young widow. Having died at sea, the young bride is trapped in ‘agunah status. Such a status applies to the wife of a man who has disappeared without granting her a divorce; it is forbidden for her to remarry unless reliable news of his death arrives.59 Although we are given no details, the account relates that the spirit argued assiduously with the assembled rabbis to permit her to remarry, even invoking rabbinic literature in defense of his position.
Then come the disclosures and revelations: the woman, unable to remarry, is engaged in illicit sexual relationships; the spirit’s bitter fate is also a punishment for his having had intercourse with a married woman in Constantinople, a transgression punishable by death in classical Jewish sources beginning in the Bible (Lev. 20:10). His death by drowning thus fulfilled the requirement that one guilty of adultery die by choking, a neat fact that may bespeak the learned construction of the whole account.60 When a group of young men comes in to examine the possessed, the spirit is quick to reveal clairvoyantly that they too were guilty of adulterous activities, which they immediately confess. Like the Falcon case, then, the case of the possession of the young man in Safed suggests a network of sexual intrigue on the part of the victim, his spirit, and his family—here his wife. If the account is at all factual, it is hard to allay the suspicion that the possessed man was sexually involved with the widow. From a psychodynamic perspective, the appearance of the dead husband made it possible to demand the woman’s release from the accursed ‘agunah status, while allowing for the transference of the possessed’s feelings of guilt at his involvement with a married woman upon her husband and all the young men who come to see their peer. The ability of the possessed to argue with the rabbis bespeaks a degree of engagement in Jewish sources that would likely have prompted guilt over adultery, if not its avoidance.61 We ought to note as well the gender of the possessor and the possessed. In this case, we find an example of the somewhat less common scenario, in which male “impregnates” male; the male-in-female scenario is the more common in Jewish accounts, by about a 2:1 ratio.62
Although sexual transgression may be most prominent in this account, the Torah is also championed: by the dead who would still abide by its rules and by the implementation of its statutes even when lack of evidence, let alone judicial autonomy, prevented ordained penalties from being carried out. The Torah called for the choking of the adulterer, and choke he did. Thus the dead man continued to live; he was punished; he made claims of, and was dependent upon, the living; and his sins, manner of death, and ongoing participation in learned dialectical modes of argumentation reestablished core values of the religious tradition and its overall cogency.
The Luria Cases
Although already in Safed, neither Luria nor Vital participated in the exorcism documented by Falcon. They did, however, participate in other exorcisms in 1571, including one or two involving a possessed woman,63 and another involving a possessed young man.64 The reports of these cases became standard inclusions in seventeenth-century hagiographic works dedicated to Luria and his circle. R. Naftali Bacharach even went so far as to relate the case of the possessed widow of Safed twice in his 1648 work, ‘Emek ha-Melekh.65 The other oft-published case involving a woman is so similar to the account involving the widow that it is likely a reworking of the same material. The two cases were not printed alongside one another until 1720, when a collector of these accounts, Shlomo Gabbai of Constantinople, failed to note their essential similarity. In addition to these widely circulated accounts, Vital’s “private” diary, Sefer ha-Ḥezyonot, provides some external corroboration of this case.66 Indeed, although the report of the possession of the widow is presented by an anonymous narrator, the other reports purport to be first-person accounts authored by Vital himself.
The possession of the young nephew of R. Yehoshua Bin Nun is preserved in two distinct forms, one reported by an anonymous narrator, the other ostensibly reported by Vital. The two versions have much in common: a young man, suffering for years from a recurring illness, is diagnosed by Luria as possessed. In each, the spirit speaks at Luria’s command, and explains that he has possessed the nephew to avenge the wrong committed against him by the young man in a previous incarnation. In that previous life, the spirit had been a pauper in Rome; the young man, a charity warden. The refusal of the latter to provide the pauper with adequate support ended tragically, with the pauper’s death. The possession of Bin Nun’s nephew, then, is the pauper’s revenge. Yet Luria prevails upon the spirit to abandon his quest for vengeance and decrees that he leave the young man voluntarily. The spirit agrees, but on one condition: that the young man have no contact with women for a full week. While recognizing the difficulty of these terms, Luria accepts them. At this point, the spirit departs, and Luria establishes a watch over the boy. According to both accounts, the young man is left alone mistakenly in the course of the watch; during that time, his aunt arrives to celebrate his recovery. Finding the young man, she kisses him with joy. At that moment the spirit returns and chokes the lad to death. Having been associated with the episode, Luria quickly departs from Safed to escape punishment from the Turkish authorities in connection with the young