Between Worlds. J. H. Chajes
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path-jumping technique known as kefiẓat ha-derekh.67
The Bin Nun account focuses upon the dramatic consequences of sin, exemplifying the indefatigable relentlessness of what we might call transmigrational lex talionis. Despite being blessed with magical gifts and extraordinary powers, even Luria is ultimately unable to rescue the poor young man from his deceased avenger. It may be no accident that this account is the only one in which Luria plays the active role of exorcist; in other cases, he provided others with the requisite instruction to expel unwelcome spirits. Despite Luria’s magical prowess, his effectiveness in this domain was limited, even he would assert, by his metaphysical nature, by his fundamentally gentle “soul-root.” As we will see below, an accomplished exorcist was thought to require the severity borne of more stern metaphysical sources. Moreover, the victim’s death could not be strictly attributed to Luria’s failure. This account preserves a depiction of the great master that does not detract from his awesome reputation. Luria’s account is more hagiographic than the possession accounts of Ḥallewa and Falcon: Luria manages in the course of this account to successfully diagnose the possession by means of his clairvoyant powers, to adjure the spirit to depart voluntarily without resorting to complex magical techniques, and to escape the authorities after the victim’s death by performing the famous path-jumping technique that spirits him from Safed to Tiberias “in one second.”
Although Luria’s role and its depiction in the Bin Nun account are fascinating, so too is the profile of the victim. The young eighteen-year-old is characterized as having suffered from chronic heart pain for a dozen years before Luria’s intervention and diagnosis. The victim is asked to cooperate in the exorcism process, an expectation that we have seen neither in the first early modern accounts nor in the classic tales of possession from antiquity. His full participation seems to bespeak the new level of involvement of the victim in the phenomenon, now reconceived as a transmigrational interaction in which possessor and possessed may be conceived as having been historically, even “karmically,” linked to one another. As in the account of the “Young Man in Safed” above, here again we have a male-in-male possession scenario. And although less sexually dramatic than the Falcon account, the Bin Nun account does have an obviously suggestive homosexual dimension. In this case, a psychodynamic reading of the story would note not only the male-in-male construction of the possession episode, but no less the terms of the spirit for a successful exorcism: the absolute isolation of the young man from women for a brief, albeit unreasonably difficult, length of time.
With the lengthy account of the possession of the widow of Safed, we return to a case of Falcon-like proportions. Unlike the Falcon report, however, this account opens without any didactic introduction.68 We are confronted immediately by the penetration of the spirit into a poor widow, which has caused her great suffering. Her suffering notwithstanding, however, we are told that the immediate consequence of this affliction was her transformation into a public attraction in Safed. Visited by many people, the widow answers their questions and reveals their innermost troubles and desires. In two of the three versions of this account, the scene is portrayed in terms that normalize her newfound clairvoyant powers and relationship to her community.69 These sympathetic versions reveal the spirit to be that of a learned rabbinic student, thus ratifying the integrity of the woman’s revelations, and lend support to the arguments in favor of regarding spirit possession as a potentially positive form of womens’ religiosity, arguments that will be developed below. In the version preserved in Sambari, however, the problematic nature of the possession episode never abates: the visitors do not cease to implore the spirit to leave the poor widow in peace so that she might support herself and her children. And the spirit’s clairvoyance is devoted to exposing the visitor’s sins, to their public embarrassment. When a sage finally visits the woman, the spirit indeed declares himself to be this rabbi’s former student, yet the spirit admits that he was often rebuked for his foul behavior.70 In a sense, we can detect equivocation on the narrative level no less than in the reception history of this account. The scenario, by all accounts, is both thrilling and terrorizing, with large crowds gathering to behold a widow with newfound clairvoyant powers. Borne of her “impregnation” by the spirit of a rabbinic student, her impressive powers can also be directed against these voyeurs who have gathered around her in her hour of misery, revealing their sins. And even the character of a rabbinic student-spirit seems to suggest something right that has gone awry.
Finally, according to all accounts, the woman’s sufferings become so unbearable that her family seeks out the services of R. Isaac Luria, whom they hope will exorcise the spirit. Unable or unwilling to attend to the matter personally, Luria sends Vital to the woman after empowering him through the laying of hands, and furnishing him with mystical intentions and threats that were capable of evicting the spirit against its will.71 Thus prepared, Vital makes his way to the widow’s house. Vital never forgot this first meeting with the woman, and included a description of the encounter in his diary decades later. This private journal entry reads very closely to the versions presented in the three “popular” accounts.
The year 5331. When I was in Safed, my teacher of blessed memory instructed me to expel evil spirits by the power of the yiḥud that he taught me. When I went to him, the woman was lying on the bed. I sat beside her, and he turned his face away from me to the other side. I told him to turn his face towards me to speak with me, and that he depart, but he was unwilling. I squeezed his face with my hand, and he said to me, “Since I did not face you, you struck me? I did this not out of evil, but because your face is alight with a great burning fire, and my soul is scorched if I gaze at you because of your great holiness.”72
The clairvoyant powers attributed to the spirit in the woman are unabated, even though she was clearly afflicted and indeed bedridden. Avoidance of face-to-face contact with Vital, the spirit explains, was due to Vital’s sublime holiness, a quality of Vital’s that seems to have been appreciated primarily by men and women gifted with clairvoyant powers. Although Vital’s spiritual stature was recognized by Karo’s Maggid, Luria, R. Lapidot Ashkenazi, the Shamanic Kabbalists Avraham Avshalom of Morocco and Shealtiel Alsheikh of Persia, palm readers, Arab seers, and a number of visionary women in Safed and Damascus, he appears to have been underappreciated by those lacking visionary powers.73 For Vital, this meeting with the possessed widow was recalled precisely because it constituted an encounter with yet another visionary capable of assessing his spiritual stature. Although Vital was quite willing to accept the testimony of visionary women to this effect, this short entry exhibits, through its fluid instability of pronouns, the volatility and ambiguity of customary conceptions of gender when confronting a visionary of this kind—demonic/clairvoyant/female/male: “The woman was lying on the bed. I sat beside her, and he turned his face away from me … [and] I told him” Clearly, in Vital’s view, the woman’s body is little more than a physical frame containing the soul of the deceased rabbinic student with whom he is trafficking. Yet it would be wrong to downplay the significance of this bodily frame or to exaggerate Vital’s sense of its exceptionality. Far from being a pathological exception, Vital’s discussions elsewhere of the problems associated with the “normal” transmigration of male souls into female bodies suggest just how complex his construction of gender was. Vital believed, for example, that his own wife Hannah was in fact a male soul, the reincarnation of Rabbi Akiva’s father-in-law.74
Vital perceived the refusal to face him as insolence and did not hesitate to use physical intimidation against the disrespectful spirit/woman, forcing him/her to face him. Positioned at the widow’s bedside, Vital “squeezed his face” to bring about the face-to-face encounter. Indeed, as he himself understood it, Vital’s soul genealogy inclined him to violence. Luria required Vital to be especially careful to keep this tendency in check, ordering him to avoid killing even fleas or lice. (Luria himself, Vital reports, killed no creatures intentionally.) Vital was also to remove knives from the table before reciting grace after meals and was never to function as a mohel (circumciser) or slaughterer-butcher (or even to observe them at work).75 In this journal entry, nevertheless, Vital hides neither his immodest approach to the woman’s bed nor his assault, albeit limited, upon her body. Moreover, the rare opportunity to compare a revealing first-person description by the exorcist himself with the later popular accounts is particularly telling.