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All articles

- The Origin of Prayer

- Sexual Assault in Torah and Talmud

- Unproductive Desires

- Jewish vampires, ghosts, demon infestations and God's magic sword

- Spirit possession! 👻

- textual activism and the ancestral toolbox

- Ask the Community! (subscriber only)

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | NOV 13, 2025, 9:30 AM EST

The Origin of Prayer

It's a Deuteronomy Thing

Today we're going to talk about how liturgical prayer began– at least with regards to the tradition(s) that evolved out of the Hebrew Bible.

The answer is: Deuteronomy, most likely.

But first: our December Zoom Salon is on for House of Study members!

Sunday,December 7, 2-3:30 EST, 11-12:30 PST.

There's been a lot of desecration and devastation this last year, these last years, and knowing how to create holiness, once again, in the wake of so much ruin is essential.

In the season of Hanukah, we'll look at a couple of texts that might be able to show us how to reignite and purify that which seems like it has been entirely lost, whether in our polity or in ourselves.

Come and get the fuel you need. ❤️‍🔥

You may remember that a major feature of Deuteronomy's, and King Josiah's (ruled 640–609 BCE), agenda involved centralizing the Temple– that is to say, disbanding the local altars all around the country and getting everybody to schlep to Jerusalem three times a year for festivals to deliver their tithes.

This was a very big deal.

To Jerusalem

How Centralizing the Temple Changed Everything

Life is a Sacred TextRabbi Danya Ruttenberg

As Moshe Weinfeld, one of the foremost scholars of Deuteronomy, put it,

“the abolition of the scattered holy places created a religious vacuum.  This vacuum was filled by liturgy…. Prayer replaced sacrifice."

Does that mean that no people talked to God before then? Of course they did.

This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/the-origin-of-prayer/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 7:46 AM EST.

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | NOV 6, 2025, 10:52 AM EST

Sexual Assault in Torah and Talmud

complexities, some surprising insights + all the trigger warnings

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

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Today's missive requires serious trigger warnings. Quite earnestly: Today we're going to be talking about sexual assault, because we've come to those verses in the text, and because there's actually quite a lot to say about how the Rabbis understood this topic (including a bunch of surprisingly decent takes). It felt too important to skip.

With the caveat that we are dealing with the Ancient Near East, this is not as bad, misogyny-wise, as it could be. Which isn't to say that it's always great! However, for obvious reasons, this topic is not for everyone, so some of you may want to hit delete now, that's OK. We'll see you next week, and we all love you very much. 💗

(Image of flowers and sun that says take care of yourself)

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OK, Deuteronomy 22:23-29. I'll annotate as I go (with my notes before the verses to try to soften the trigger factor) and then we'll look at other takes, and a few bits from the Rabbis.

We begin with the starting place: A married woman who has consensual sex with someone else, aka adultery: They both die.

Case one: Betrothal (bride-price paid) is treated as adultery if it's consensual. How do we know if it's consensual? She didn't call for help in a place where people were around. Not the most evolved understanding of how flight/freeze/fawn trauma response works, or larger questions of safety, but.

It might tell us something, re: the assumption that if she called, she'd be immediately met with support and care. Is this the reality of ancient Judean society? Patriarchal delusion? I don't know.

When there is a girl, a betrothed virgin, and a[nother] man finds her in the town, and lies with her, you are to take-out both of them...so that they die—the girl because she did not cry out in the town and the man because he oppressed the wife of his neighbor. So shall you eradicate the evil from your midst!

Note that last line– we'll come back to that.

This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/sexualassault/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 7:46 AM EST.

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | NOV 3, 2025, 10:00 AM EST

Unproductive Desires

On "Crushed Testes," Transition, Jewish Continuity, and Who's Allowed in God's Community. A Guest Post by by Lexi Kohanski

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

It's my honor to present this powerful, important piece today by the extraordinary Torah teacher Lexi Kohanski. It will become, I hope, taught anytime Deuteronomy 23:2 comes anywhere near the conversation, as well as on many other occasions.

(Parts of it are... provocative. Keep reading. Strive to understand what she's really saying, and what she's not.)

Trigger warning: This deals with the verse about "crushed testes" in Deuteronomy, and though it is not graphic, I'm told it can be triggering to some people who might have had to experience, for example, chemical castration due to medical treatment. Your mileage may vary; as always, please take care of yourself. ❤️‍🩹

If you'd like to hear Lexi reading the piece herself on her podcast, T4Torah, you can do so at this button, below:

I, Alexandra Kohanski, hereby consent of my own free will to be sterilized by a method called Bilateral Orchiectomy.

It’s 2023. The man who will perform my bottom surgery asks me to wait in another room while they prepare the form. It’s something I need to sign as a formality, he tells me, and I don’t think anything of it. Even when the nurse brings in this form and apologizes for its “outdated language,” it still sounds like business as usual with trans healthcare. Misgendering is a daily sacrifice in the temples of medical bureaucracy. The form’s title, though, freezes my pen on the signature line: STERILIZATION CONSENT FORM.

A quick note on the history of this form. It arose from a pattern of coerced sterilizations on working-class women of color in the 60s and 70s. While these women were giving birth, doctors would pressure them into having tubal ligations–a eugenics of race and class. The Sterilization Consent Form, which requires 30 days to elapse before any such procedure, was meant to protect people from abuse.

But when I sign the form, I don’t know any of that. When the nurse called the form outdated, I assumed she meant that the focus on sterilization might offend or upset me. And it did upset me. Here were my gender desires, framed in direct opposition to my desire for children: Be myself, or be a parent. It was way too much to process–I just signed the form.

I was told about those temporary methods of birth control that are available and could be provided to me which will allow me to bear or father a child in the future. I have rejected these alternatives and chosen to be sterilized.

The choice I made not to have biological children is so overloaded with raw, unprocessed significance that it feels impossible to talk about it. Not only do I not know where to begin, but I don’t want to begin in the first place. I even have a literal scar from this surgery, stark and angry from a complicated recovery, that I’d rather mess around with than touch this question. So I begrudgingly acknowledge it as a gift that the Torah demands our engagement on topics that are incomprehensibly large, beyond us, easier left untouched–and it’s a second gift that Torah on those topics gives us places to start.

Unfortunately for me, Torah’s entry point on sterilization and reproduction is rough. I’ll spare you the verse’s context, but I won’t get around the verse itself:

לֹֽא־יָבֹ֧א פְצֽוּעַ־דַּכָּ֛א וּכְר֥וּת שָׁפְכָ֖ה בִּקְהַ֥ל ה׳׃

No one with crushed testes or a severed penis shall enter into the community of God. (Deuteronomy 23:2)

This sounds bad. The way the Rabbis understand this verse makes it both better and worse.* Worse, because they extend the kind of genital damage under discussion to anything that prevents you from having children–in other words, any sort of permanent sterilization, like my orchiectomy. Better, though, because what happens to a person with this kind of sterilizing situation is not actually exile from God’s community–it’s that you can’t get married. No shot at kids? Then no life partner for me.

*Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yehiel Michel Wisser (Malbim) summarizes the Rabbinic interpretation in his comment on Deuteronomy 23:2:

“Since the verse is speaking about a Jew, how can it say that he shall not enter–hasn’t he already entered?! From this we learn a general category: any time it says ‘shall not enter into the community,’ the meaning is not that he should not keep the commandments. Rather, it means that he shall not marry a Jewish woman. And the reason for the matter is that, since his genitals have been damaged by an act that renders him unfit to father children, he is therefore forbidden to Jewish women…”

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Okay, strictly speaking, this prohibition doesn’t apply to me. The technical parameters are, roughly, that a man does something  in the course of life to get sterilized. Not being a man, I’m off the Jewish legal hook. Here’s the thing, though, about loving the Torah–it’s not really about the legal bottom line, it’s about the conversation that happens when we raise the question. The final analysis matters–I got the surgery–but the point is the process. And this prohibition’s process goes through me. I went way beyond crushing my testes–I had them cut out and dissected by a medical examiner, and right in front of me there’s a signed form directly linking that choice to a sterile, childless future. I may not have violated this commandment on the technicality of my gender, but the punishment was something I signed onto in plain English.

I UNDERSTAND THAT THE STERILIZATION MUST BE CONSIDERED PERMANENT AND NOT REVERSIBLE. I HAVE DECIDED THAT I DO NOT WANT TO BECOME PREGNANT, BEAR CHILDREN OR FATHER CHILDREN.

Why do the Rabbis look at the words “God’s community” and decide that it must mean marriage, with its implicit promise of children? This prohibition only extends to marriages between a sterilized man and a woman who’s born Jewish, not to anyone who’s converted (or to now-Jewish freed slaves), so the twined threads of sterilization and eugenics show up on the rabbinic side of the tapestry, too. In any case, what’s community got to do with kids?

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as well as helping independent Torah to continue at a time when billionaires' agendas drive the broader media narrative:

Pronatalism, what pronatalism? RDR, here: This isn't to say that children aren't a blessing! I've got three of my own, and happen to be rather fond of them (to understate a thing)! But, as Second Wave feminists taught, the personal is political, and the question of whose agenda, when, where, why, to what ends, is something that we can and must unpack even as we make our own choices to the best ability that the State permits in 2025 for ourselves and our families. See here, here here. Collage of images about "Jewish continuity" "Jewish continuity and growth" "Jewish survival" "Always thinking about the Jewish Future" with images of children. "She issued a call to #MakeJewishBabies. Some are taking it t seriously" in the wake of 10/7. "Will we have Jewish Grandchildren?" A paper that begins, "Jewish fertility is of interest for its practical dimensions as well as its intellectual importance." An article that begins talking about the plummeting Jewish birth rate. An excerpt from a Jewish legal paper (tshuvah) encouraging Jews to have more than the minimum number of children mandated by Jewish law because "the Jewish community has not recovered numerically from the devastating loss of the Nazi era." and so forth.

One phrase comes to my mind that makes the connection: childless cat ladies. There’s a worldview out there called Replacement Theory. As Vox reporter Fabiola Cineas puts it, Replacement Theory is

“the racist conspiracy theory that holds that, through immigration, interracial marriage, integration, and violence, and at the behest of secret forces orchestrated by ‘global elites’...or Jews, white people are being disenfranchised, disempowered, and pushed out of ‘white nations.’”

During the 2024 election, future vice president JD Vance brought one specific aspect of this flavor of white supremacy to the forefront of public discourse:

“When you go to the polls in this country, as a parent, you should have more power, you should have more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic than people who don't have kids... If you don't have as much of an investment in the future of this country, maybe you shouldn't get nearly the same voice. Now people will say...well doesn't this mean that non-parents don't have as much of a voice as parents? Doesn't this mean that parents get a bigger say in how our democracy functions? Yes, absolutely.”

He’s saying that childless adults are not fully part of the project of society. If we’ve “chosen” not to participate, then we deserve to get marginalized. Note that he belongs to the administration that on day one declared in an executive order defining trans people out of existence that “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell” in an effort to “enforce all sex-protective laws.” Being a full member of this society requires your reproduction, and society must protect the kind of sex that produces–which is the kind of sex that my surgery meant I would never have.

In the reproductive sense, Great Replacement theory has many notes in harmony with the push to “rebuild the 6 million,” to have as many good Jewish babies as possible to ensure a supposedly secure Jewish future. The logic goes something like this: We must make sure–at any cost–that our members reproduce, so that we can continue to exist. Sounds fair enough, until you realize that while a person’s existence may be self-justified, a society’s existence is not. If the ultimate purpose of the project of Judaism is to keep on making more Jews–or if the point of the United States is to keep on making more white Christians–then those projects are nothing more than “the ouroboros, the self-cannibalizing serpent that eats its own tail,” where the tail is made out of people, consumed and killed so that the mouth can keep eating.

Is this kind of logic underpinning the Rabbis’ reading of “shall not enter God’s community”? It’s not so far-fetched. Jewish ritual life does center marriage and children. One of our 3 wishes for a newborn is marriage, on par with Torah and good deeds; 6 of 63 tractates of Talmud explicitly focus on marriage issues. Synagogue social life is usually either for young singles or children and their parents, with nothing between or beyond. It really can be true that a single and sterile 29-year-old is less a part of her Jewish community on account of those two s-words. When I “consented of my own free will to be sterilized,” was I relegating myself to second-class citizenship? What was I thinking?

I understand that I will be sterilized by an operation known as a Bilateral Orchiectomy. The discomforts, risks and benefits associated with the operation have been explained to me. All my questions have been answered to my satisfaction.

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Nicki Green, "Drifting Upon Swollen Water (Gavriel)," 2024. Glazed stoneware. (IG) (Sculpture of a sitting figure facing front, but with two faces, each facing sideways in a different direction, with dark hair up in a bun that meets in the middle, down her neck. She wears a green short-sleeved dress that hangs loosely off one shoulder; her hands meet in the front of her body, around her solar plexus region.) LL

The first time I had to think about how my transition conflicted with my desire to have children was when I started HRT. Before prescribing, my NP said if there was even a chance I wanted kids, I should look into fertility preservation. I called my insurance, but they didn’t cover it for this kind of “voluntary treatment.” My other options were fertility clinics featuring pictures of fathers cradling smiling infants. At the time, I didn’t know there was even a chance that HRT wouldn’t be permanently sterilizing. I thought this decision was final, and I chose not to put myself through fertility preservation. I told myself it was too expensive, but really it was because the idea of having my sperm sitting in a freezer waiting to impregnate someone was too dysphoric to think about. I shoved the desire for children down and told my NP to sign me up for estrogen.

Three years later I looked back on this moment and wrote that if you have to choose between the mitzvah of transition and the mitzvah of procreation, you should choose the one that’s in front of you. I did not write anything about how the loss of one mitzvah for the sake of another might affect you. I ignored the loss–it was too big to grasp anyway–and chose towards myself.

After I learned that HRT isn’t necessarily sterilizing, I told my therapist it would make me feel too horrible to conceive a child through penetrative sex–or having my semen in the picture at all. He said, based on other trans patients’ experiences, that despite a dysphoric conception I would love my child. How they got there wouldn’t matter. Maybe sometimes the final ruling really is all that counts, but that option still wasn’t available to me, and the woman inside me was demanding that I manifest her, now. It was time for bottom surgery.

When I told my father about my surgical plans, he admonished me that I need to find a life partner. It was like he was channeling the verse: don’t sterilize yourself, Lexi–don’t you want to get married? But my dad wasn’t making a legal proclamation like the Torah, or a moral and political condemnation like Vance. I heard in his words an implication that the surgery would make me undesirable, a Frankenstein’s monster fit only for other freaks like me, if that. If I sterilized myself for the sake of my gender, I wouldn’t be able to find anyone to marry.

I did not react coldly to Dad’s admonition–in fact, I broke down crying. I said that’s why I was moving to New York, to have a better chance of finding a partner. Of course I wanted children, of course I wanted love. I never cried so hard in front of my father, before or since–so hard that it reached across the Zoom screen and made him start crying too. I took his comment so badly, probably because I believed what I thought he was implying: that choosing towards my womanhood meant no one would want me.

I have asked for and received information about sterilization from the doctor. When I asked for the information, I was told that the decision to be sterilized is completely up to me.

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There’s a scene in The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang where the main character, Rin, takes what the Rabbis would call a “cup of castration” so she wouldn’t be dragged down in her elite military training by her painful menstrual periods. People took this scene as a stark example of female empowerment, but Kuang meant Rin’s choice to be problematic. The adults responsible for Rin encouraged her to take the most extreme way out, in order to build her into a perfect soldier. It turns out later that her decision means that she and her male counterpart will be the last of their race. It’s a complex moment: Rin chose herself, and she also chose towards a system that wanted to use her. So what’s the system in which I made my choice?

The Torah tells me that–insofar as it’s about sterilization–my transition is happening in the context of “God’s community,” which to hear the Rabbis tell it is a communal system about marriage and children. Almost ten years ago I read a story about someone called “the true child” that’s been sitting with me for just this moment:

One Shabbat, after the third meal, [the Jew of Pshiskhe] averted his face, and in a voice echoing his distress, addressed his guests: “Tomorrow you will be going back to work—and you work hard, I know. If I asked you why you work so hard, you would tell me that it is not for your sake, but for the sake of your children; that you wish them to grow up to be good Jews, loving [humankind] and fearing God. Yes, that is what you would tell me. That is what, for thousands of years, [people have] been saying in every language. [People] work and work, never for [themselves] but always for [their] child, who in turn will work for [theirs] . . . As for me, I am waiting . . .” He paused, before continuing even more sadly: “I am waiting for the true child.” (Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire, “The School of Pshiskhe”)

Wiesel explains what the Jew of Pshiskhe meant by “true child:” Whom did he mean? The Messiah? Perhaps. But it is also possible he simply meant the father who would admit in all honesty that he was working for himself. I think Wiesel is wrong. The Jew of Pshiskhe was not talking about any father, honest or otherwise–he was talking about someone who, in the face of the world’s systems and their superhuman pressures, remains as true to their holy desires as a child. They do not give in to the ouroboros of re/production; they will not sacrifice their inner light on the altar of mere continuity.

It’s no coincidence that the Jew said this on Shabbat, the weekly break from work–the true child does not labor or reproduce for the sake of production. In workaday life, we labor for the sake of our children, who will labor for their children, no one ever standing up for their irrational inner child. I rejected this system. Instead, at age 25 I chose to upend my life for the sake of a girl whose childhood never happened; I acted in the memory of desires so nonsensical that they were barely real. I centered my world around the unproductive desire to transition, a desire that served no interests except for the hazy dream of a woman who didn’t exist. Hillel said it–if I am not for myself, who will be?

The love I felt–still feel–for that dream woman has no point beyond itself. It doesn’t arise from or belong to any system; it has so little grounding in reality that I often wonder if that love is what structures reality itself. My transition has taught me about this world-shaping, purposeless love. In the essay “Expressions of Love,” the author Mick suggests that historically children were brought into the world for specific purposes: an heir to the family title, someone to pass on the name, another pair of hands for the family farm–or for the master’s. And if children are born to play certain roles, their lives become failures when they do not fit those predestined purposes.  Purposeless love, on the other hand, means that the beloved signifies in their own right, not as a scion or scar of the lineage. Our verse, and much of Jewish communal life, make it seem like the value of my membership in God’s community is based on producing children, with entry granted to those who can maintain the line of descent. That doesn’t sound like the community of the God I love–or the God of the prophet Isaiah:

Let not the foreigner’s child who comes to God say, “God has fully separated me from God’s people!” And let not the castrate say, “Behold, I am a withered tree!” For thus has God said to the castrates who keep My Shabbats and choose what I desire and cling to My covenant: “I shall give them in My home and within My walls agency and recognition–better than sons and daughters–everlasting recognition I shall give to the one who will not be cut off!” (Isaiah 56:3-5, my translation)

God’s own recognition to the childless castrate who will not be cut off–from their own desires, from the community of God that has nothing to do with productive families. Isaiah is speaking to the true child.

My consent expires 180 days from the date of my signature below.

I absolutely did the right thing for myself by getting that surgery. So why can’t I shake this shadow of regret? I feel it whenever I see parents playing with their children at kiddush, when all the shul programming is for children and their caregivers, when my friends talk about their plans for IVF or adoption. It’s like the verse is slamming its staff down in front of me and declaring: “You might pass, but you shall not enter the community!”

My best guess is that it’s not regret about the past. I chose towards myself in a way that everyone should be able to. No, it’s regret about the future, a future for myself that I don’t believe will arrive. I don’t believe that children are coming my way, even though I want them. Partly that’s because I’ve been told–by the Torah, the commentators, the right-wing eugenicists, my own loved ones–that I won’t be wanted. Those things set me up to not believe. But the actual cause of my defeatedness is that I’ve never chosen towards it. Just like with my transition, the more I drag that non-existent dream into being, the more I’ll believe that it will be real.

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As I write this, I believe it as little as I believed six years ago that I could be a woman. And just like with my transition, I imagine I’ll need other people to believe it for me first–a community of believers. God’s community.

I have received a copy of this form. Alexandra Rose Kohanski 5/10/23

There’s another verse that constantly calls out to me:

“Go eat your food with joy, and drink your wine with a good heart, for God has already wanted your actions.” (Ecclesiastes 9:7).

I called this piece Unproductive Desires, because the yearnings that have driven me for the past 5 years have led me to giving up my ability to reproduce. But in God’s community, our actions are already wanted–the shining cores of all our desires are productive, moving us towards the community’s purpose. The more we transform into ourselves by turning our deepest desires into action, the more we know God. Each of us is already wanted. And if I haven’t yet taken steps towards children, maybe it’s because God wanted me to step into myself first.

We conclude many of our prayers with the wish כן יהי רצון, may it be Your will. But those words literally mean “May such a desire exist.”

We are not living in a system that wants queer or trans desires to exist. For all my struggles to reconcile my transition with a Jewish culture that prizes reproduction, trans people also struggle to transition in the first place. As politicians work to take away our rights, we find ourselves in a society that wants to dehumanize and eliminate us. When our survival is at stake, it can feel irresponsible to consider the spiritual fallout of gender transition. But even as we focus our efforts on defending our rights and our lives, we need to remember, constantly, why we are in this fight. We need to talk loudly about the sacredness of our desires, because what keeps us human in the face of their dehumanization is our ability to yearn. So I write and dream of God’s community, a world where we are already wanted. God wants us to make our desires real through action - that is my reason for fighting, just as it is my reason for living.

May we come to know all the desires God has given us, and may we build communities that want us to manifest every one of them, because our desires lead us to who we really are.

And who are we really, if not true children of God?

🌱 ❤️ 🌱

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Lexi Kohanski is a trans Jewish writer and educator who focuses on empowering those who have not felt at home in Judaism. She is a leader in the realm of trans Torah, creating Torah study spaces that are intergenerational, identity-spanning, and full of joy. Her work has appeared in Gashmius Magazine, Approaching, and the Trans Halakha Project, and she regularly publishes through the T4Torah Patreon. Lexi’s cornerstone halakhic essay, Be Whole: A Halakhic Approach to Gender and Transition, lays out a pathbreaking halakhic framework for relating to Jewish gender transition as a sacred undertaking. Lexi gives regular sermons on spiritual resilience and survival through her podcast, Torah for Trans Lives. She is also the author of Worlds To Come, a first-of-its-kind tabletop roleplaying game for learning Hebrew. Before finding her calling, Lexi was an actor, ESL teacher, and farmer. Lexi’s home as an educator is at the Torah Studio, where she serves as the organization’s Director of Online Learning.

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This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/unproductive-desires/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 7:46 AM EST.

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | OCT 30, 2025, 9:30 AM EDT

Jewish vampires, ghosts, demon infestations and God's magic sword

Because it's Spooky Talmud Season, is why

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

It's Secular Spooky Season!

And this year Scary Shabbat is happening on the actual day of the thing, so, Yidden, all the better to make your bat-shaped challah, severed finger cheese sticks and ghost meringues– or, even better, base your whole Scary Shabbos experience on the complete Jewish Monster experience:

Make a golem challah, put those chickenfooted demon tracks in the hummus, cast off the evil eye with protective cookies, do an edible Hebrew abracadabra amulet (even though it's probably absolutely narishkeit / stupidity that the word comes from Jewish sources), make biblically accurate angel soup, snack on the leviathan, the whole deal. Go hard.

Don't forget to go here for inspiration:

GUEST POST: 🪽😈👹 Let’s Talk about Angels, and Shedim, and Giants

A Pep Talk From the Jewish Monster Hunter

Life is a Sacred TextRabbi Danya Ruttenberg

Next week we'll look at historical spirit possession, and it's never a bad time to get some more Spooky Talmud, eh?

This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/jewishvampires/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 7:46 AM EST.

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | OCT 23, 2025, 9:30 AM EDT

Spirit possession! 👻

What to do when a dybbuks, zārs and other Jewish spirits turn up unexpectedly

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Given that next week we get Secular Spooky Day–

a time to metaphorically tell our own inner monsters that they don't scare us, or a time that was once, in a different culture and a different time, considered a liminal time when boundaries between worlds was considered crossable–

I thought it'd be a good time to share some stuff from an article by Professor Kate Miriam Loewenthal from the British Royal College of Psychiatrists on the topic of Jewish spirit possession.

Dr. Lowenthal is an Orthodox Jew herself, it seems, so this was written with the respectful insider/outsider perspective of someone trying to communicate to her colleagues what might happen if a Yid showed up on their doorsteps talking about such matters. Not because she thought that they were coming from an unfathomable place– or, notably, because they were necessarily mentally ill– for doing so.

I'm basically reproducing and condensing her work here, all credit to her.

Again, these are the words of Professor Kate Miriam Loewenthal.

But since I do have a comment or two of my own, I'll have her words in roman and my own notes in italics.

Dybbukim and other malign spirit visitors:

A dybbuk is the wandering spirit of a deceased person who has been unable to enter purgatory or paradise. The dybbuk usually enters a low-status member of Eastern-European Jewish society; women and children being most commonly possessed. The spirit is usually very badly-behaved, notably accusing respected members of the community of embarrassing sexual sins.

Same as it ever was. See also: Women and accusations of witchcraft, in Christian and Jewish cultures.

A still from the classic 1937 Yiddish-language film The Dybbuk, based on S. An-Sky's 1916 play The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, about a young bride possessed by a dybbuk, a spirit that is the dislocated soul of one who has passed. (Black and white photo of a young woman in bridal clothing hugging a clothed skeleton.),

The phenomenon was reported from the 16th -19th centuries, and disappeared in the early 20th Century.

My own mother was raised in the 50's by immigrant grandparents and their children – would tell me to hush if I ever talked about how well things were going or if I said that I was confident about something coming to pass. "The dybbuks are listening," she'd say, implying that they'd mess up any plans they heard about. This isn't the possession about which Lowenthal speaks, but in the world in which I was raised– 1980s suburbia!– dybbuks still existed, mattered.

At about the period when dybbuk possession became less common, the dybbuk theme was often deployed in literature and on the stage – the most famous examples are Ansky’s Dybbuk, and Bashevis Singer’s The Slave. Here is an example of dybbuk possession:

A Jewish woman in eighteenth century Poland was possessed by a "Baal Dovor" (demon) which spoke from her throat in Polish (not her first language), causing great physical pain. It would not allow her to pray, study sacred texts or otherwise use holy words (i.e. liturgical Hebrew), would not let her go to the synagogue, and created a shameful disturbance on the Day of Atonement when she did try to go to the synagogue. Three exorcisms by eminent rabbis were carried out. The first two exorcisms were only partially successful and the spirit returned. The final episode was not a typical exorcism. A third voice - not that of the victim or of the spirit - was heard, which sounded disembodied. Witnesses recognised the voice as that of a famous rabbi who had died some years previously. The voice said that the woman was a righteous, saintly individual, that she would get better, and would bear a son. She did get better and bear a son.

Criteria for Dybbuk possession:

- A dybbuk is the soul of a deceased person which has entered another person prior to heavenly judgment of the soul. (Possession by a soul after its judgment is said to be a gilgul (reincarnation) and involves a complete "takeover")

- Both the dybbuk and the victim remain conscious and co-exist in the same body. The victim is typically distressed.

- The victim is more likely to be female than male, while the dybbuk is more likely to be male than female.

What do we think this is about??

- Special means are necessary to expel the dybbuk.

Features which may be present (and not generally typical of Dissociative Identity Disorder or DID):

- The quality of the victim's voice is changed ("strange, high-pitched tone").

- Speech may not be accompanied by movements of lips or tongue.

- A mobile bulge, anywhere in the victim's body.

- While dybbuk possession may be viewed as a form of dissociative disorder, the state differs from DID in several respects. Apart from those mentioned above, the key feature of dybbuk possession is that there are normally only just two persona, whereas DID typically usually involves several or many sub-personalities, often with the number increasing over time.

Dybbuk became one of many derogated “primitive beliefs,” and malign spirits are not now reported among western Jews.

I want to just pause on this sentence for a second. Other people deride dybbuk possession as "primitive" and– surprise!!– the people who used to report experiencing such things no longer do.

Now, we can debate whether or not this phenomenon is more analogous to reporting sexual assault – not believed, so do not report, but that has no bearing on whether or not the thing is still happening, only on whether or not it is named, discussed in public spaces, visible. Or whether dybbuk possession was only possible in times and places where it was allowed as conceivable. Or, whether what had been once named as dybbuk possession was subsequently named as something else, as is suggested in work on possession in other cultures.

This article was downloaded from https://www.lifeisasacredtext.com/possession/ on Nov 14, 2025 at 7:46 AM EST.

RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | OCT 20, 2025, 10:00 AM EDT

textual activism and the ancestral toolbox

the story of the rebellious child shows us how we can face painful texts, our own problems, and the challenges beyond

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:

Remember how we were making our way through Deuteronomy??

Time to get back on it!

Today we're going to look at a famous case of Rabbinic activism, and consider not only what it can teach us not only about the art of textual interpretation, but what our interpretive choices show us about ourselves in a world of both theoretical and actual harm.

As we so often do, let's start with the Torah, which has some very, uh, strong advice on raising mouthy teenagers:

If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and who, when they have chastened him, will not listen to them;  Then shall his father and his mother lay hold of him, and bring him out to the elders of his city, and to the gate of his place; And they shall say to the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die; so shall you put evil away from among you; and all [the people of] Israel shall hear, and fear.  (Deuteronomy 21:18-21)

Who says screen time has to be the only consequence?!

While this passage has disturbed many for a long time – as we'll see in a moment– Dr. Rabbi Eliezer Finkelman notes that it's possible that this, like "eye for an eye," and other Torah laws, was indeed a step up from standard ancient practice. As he put it:

Consider the possibility that in some ancient societies, people took for granted that [parents] have the inherent right to put their minor children to death for any reason, or at least impunity for doing so. In such a society, a law requiring the parents to bring the child before the elders, who ultimately decide his fate, seems like an important and even ethical development.... Perhaps Deuteronomy expects the elders, or even obligates them, to protect the child from abusive and overreacting parents.

An improvement over what had been the default! And yet, if you still found the verses a bit discomfiting, you wouldn't be alone.

To review a few dates: Maybe the Torah was given by God to Moses on Sinai, or maybe it developed over a few centuries. Either way, everybody agrees that by the 6th-4th c. BCE, it was likely in its final form.

The Mishnah, known as the Oral Torah, was either (depending on your theology) told by God to Moses on Sinai or developed organically over a few hundred years. Whatever the case, we know that it was redacted (consolidated / edited / organized) after the fall of the Second Temple and the subsequent failed Bar Kochba revolt, ca. 150-200 CE. When we talk about Rabbinic Judaism, we talk about the Mishnah and the later Talmudic discussions of the Mishnah. (The Talmud was completed by the 6th c. or mid- 7th c. at latest.)

Let's look at the Mishnah's discussion of this Torah passage:

"A wayward and rebellious son: at what age does he become obligated [to be stoned]? From the time that he produces two hairs until the beard is full." (Mishnah Sanhedrin 8:1)

The Mishnah then clarifies:

"by which is meant the hair of the "lower beard," not that of the "upper beard."

So the time between pubic hair starting to grow, and its finishing to grow in. If the kid hasn't started puberty? You can't throw rocks at them for not listening to their parents. If the kid is done with that part of puberty? It's too late.

Maimonides says that this time period could not start before age 13, which has to do with legal obligation, and could only last for a maximum of three months. So at most, we're talking from age 13 to 13 1/3. (Mishneh Torah, Rebels, 7:5-6)

The Rabbis of the Mishnah (we're still in 8:1) do a veryyy close reading of the Torah verse, observing the specific language of the Torah and teasing out its implications:

"...it says [in the Torah] “If a man has a son” (Deut. 21:18) a son, but not a daughter; ‘a son’, but not an adult man."

Since kids couldn't be obligated by Jewish law, this kid has to be old enough to be a legal adult (that is, puberty–like bar mitzvah age) but not yet a full adult, since we're categorizing this in term of parent-child relationships.

Did you catch it? We've just narrowed the time frame that this kid could be killed wayyyy down. And, the Rabbis have cut the possible genders of this culpable teen by at least half, as well.

What's the crime?

"When does he become liable [to be stoned]? Once he has eaten a tartemar of meat and drunk half a log of wine. Rabbi Yose said: “A maneh of meat and a log of wine."* (Mishnah Sanhedrin 8:2)

*A log was a liquid measure equal to the contents (or space occupied by) six eggs. Understood to be half a liter by measures today. A tartemar, the Talmud decided, was about half a maneh based on Rabbi Yose's doubling the wine amounts. A maneh which was understood to be roughly a pound of meat.

He can't get killed for talking rudely, or flunking a test, or getting caught with weed.

The crime is very specific. The Torah says "glutton & drunkard!" so he has to be BOTH of those things, and, the Rabbis say, he must consume a very specific amount.

The Mishnah also tells us (I'll quote some and paraphrase some) that this can't be at a religious act– no holiday celebration, wedding, etc.– and that everything has to be kosher. More limiting conditions:

"He does not become a wayward and rebellious son,” unless he specifically steals from his father and eats on someone else's property. If he stole from Dad and ate in Dad's backyard, it doesn't count. And if he raided the neighbor's pantry and wine cellar and consumed the food on site, that also doesn't count. (8:3)

"If his father wants [to have him punished], but not his mother; or his father does not want [to have him punished] but his mother does, he is not treated as a wayward a rebellious son." (8:4)

Both parents have to agree about the kid getting punishment. And they have to still be together. And! Neither parent can be disabled in any number of ways, because the Rabbis decided to go ultra-literal when the text talks about them taking him to the city gate, about them identifying him (which obviously means visually, of course, of course), about the kid not listening to their voice, all these things that would rule out any number of parental setups in the ancient world.

And! The stoning can only take place if

a) the kid was warned in the presence of three people and

b) he does the EXACT SAME THING another time

c) DURING this little window in which his pubic hair is growing in AND

d) the original three witnesses are at the big full second trial!

And!

If he runs away and his pubic hair grows in fully before they have a chance to deal with him, forget it.

You see what the Rabbis have done?

They've come up with such a wild, specific, narrow, fakakte (ridiculous) case– now the only situation in which this law about stoning to death a mouthy teenager could apply!– that this would never really happen. They've limited the criteria of the crime to such a degree that the punishment for these verses could never be enacted.

No kids get hurt.

The Rabbis of the Mishnah are being profoundly activist in their interpretation, their exegesis.

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Implicit in the what's happening here is this:

They don't dispute the fact that Torah is our holy text, but they understand that what might have made sense in its Ancient Near Eastern context doesn't anymore, is no longer a sustainable way to create a whole, holy society.

(Or maybe it never made sense in the Ancient Near Eastern context; I'm not here to pretend that everything in Torah reflects human rights as we know them now. This is this same Torah portion in which we're told about the "more moral" way to assault captives of war and that we should stone to death a woman if she can't produce proof of virginity.)

But the Rabbinic approach is not to throw the whole thing away– because, the Rabbis teach, here, elsewhere, in a thousand ways:

Torah is a process and our relationship with it is a process.

And so the Rabbis read text with a wink. A glutton, huh? Must have been that he stole and ate meat– not just any amount of meat, but a whole tartemar of meat. And he must have eaten it.. not here, not there.. but ...

They choose to read this painful story by cutting off air where necessary.

As we've discussed before, the Rabbis also engaged textual activism in Talmud Bava Kamma 83b. The Torah says "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" etc, right? The Talmud's like, "literally? We're supposed to poke someone's eye out????" And then immediately responds: "OBVIOUSLY NOT! What kind of a question is that?? OBVIOUSLY 'eye for an eye' means that if you accidentally poke out someone's eye, you pay financial damages! Duh!"

So part of the process of Torah is one of refining, of bringing the idea of holiness into the now, into what we understand the work of caring for one another & serving the divine to be now, here, today.

Sometimes it's done by expanding possibilities. Sometimes by narrowing them.

But how we deal with problems in the text shows us a lot about how we deal with our own problems, too:

Sometimes we are able to transform them– like how "eye for an eye" suddenly means "monetary damages!"

Sometimes we practice what might be called malicious compliance, as the Rabbis do in the case of the rebellious teen– engaging in extreme literalism for the larger picture of justice.

Sometimes taking a bigger view – even a more abstract one – can help us find the way in. Like Maimonides' insistence that – following the Rabbis' repeated maxim that

The Torah speaks in the language of human beings" (Talmud Brachot 31b, Sifrei Bamidbar 112)

that all the (many) physical and other descriptions of God found in the Bible are just

"figurative... that G0d has no form or shape, that is beyond human intellect to investigate or comprehend" [the nature of the divine.] (Maimonedes, Hilchot Yesodei HaTorah, 1:9)

We can also creatively innovate based on what has been – such as when the Temple fell, we no longer had a sacrificial system available, no way to worship the divine through animal sacrifice. So the Rabbis instituted a new system of praying three times a day that paralleled the sacrifices once given in the Temple:

Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said that the prayers were instituted based on the daily offerings (Talmud Brachot 26b)

And, of course, we can, as we so often do, deny that what we're dealing with is a problem. In which case we ignore them, or even make them worse–as the case of the woman accused of not having a bloody sheet after marriage. The Rabbis had all the same exegetical tools at their disposal but chose, in this case, to focus on a grammatical detail in the verse, edge cases (how should we execute a woman without proof of virginity if she's a Jew by choice??), and worse.

As always, our biases about what matters– about who matters– inform our ideas about what's possible, about what solutions might be at hand.

The Torah can be a profound guidebook for human living, full of treasures and layers of meaning.

Depending on what we do with it. Or don't.

It's perhaps not a surprise that the more fundamentalist – indeed, fascist – elements of religion taking over the U.S. today generally (as fundamentalists so often do) tend towards the literal, preaching an unflinching obedience to text, and offering an authoritarian deity that paves the way for authoritarian relationships with clergy, the State. And that some of these people read the story of the wayward and rebellious son to propagate unthinking obedience, authoritarianism, and, yes, racist lynching (seriously: TW).

Just like our lives, our world: We can accept what is, or we can look beyond what we have been given to say: There must be more than this.

What tools do we have to bring more light, more hope, more care into this moment?

In the Talmud (Sanhedrin 71a) they bring another Mishnah-era oral text for discussion.

"There has never been a stubborn and rebellious son, and there will never be one."

The case narrowed by the Mishnah (and then the Talmud– I didn't even talk about how Talmud says the puberty time really only lasts 3 months, or how the wine must be extra-strong ITALIAN wine or anything) is so narrow it could never happen.

Because they decided that the harm was unnecessary, was optional.

So, Talmud asks:

"why, then, was this passage written in the Torah?"

And answers:

"So that you may expound upon new understandings of the Torah and receive reward for your learning."

That's the work: To go deep into sacred texts, to wrestle with them, to find new understandings.

It's so easy to stay trapped in our systems, to say that what is is all that can be. To say that there's no way out of how things are, to say that we must do things how we always have, because this is what we have.

Notably: the Talmud passage doesn't end there. Rather, after we're told that there never was a case in which a rebellious son was killed, we hear the haunting voice of Rabbi Yonatan saying hey, that's not so:

"I saw one. I sat on his grave."

Rabbi Benay Lappe explains:

Rabbi Yonatan was a Kohen, a priest.... A kohen may only enter a cemetery or be present at a gravesite for their most immediate family members: [parents, siblings, spouse, children]. [This] was most likely [the grave] of his own son…whom only he could have brought to the elders of the town to have stoned! …you can hear the pain, the anguish, the guilt, in his voice....

Taking problematic texts literally – following unjust rules in even good faith, doing what we're told without questioning whether or not it's the right thing, without asking why – means not only risking the moment of horror when we finally realize that this is not how it ever had to be.

It means risking committing atrocities along the way. And having to live with them, forever.

Everything we do is an opportunity to be complacent with the injustice that is everywhere or to encounter and serve the divine, to figure out how to bravely resist tyranny, to look at how to create a society that cares for the most vulnerable.

As with our texts, so, too, our lives.

With the stubborn and rebellious son, the Rabbis remind us that we can always find ways to seek more light, more holiness, and more justice now, here, today.

If we're brave enough.

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*With thanks for Rabbi Margo Hughes-Robinson for the phrase "the ancestral toolbox."

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RABBI DANYA RUTTENBERG | OCT 16, 2025, 9:30 AM EDT

Ask the Community! (subscriber only)

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Table of Contents

Life is a Sacred Text: 2025 Nov 13

All articles

The Origin of Prayer

Sexual Assault in Torah and Talmud

Unproductive Desires

Jewish vampires, ghosts, demon infestations and God's magic sword

Spirit possession! 👻

textual activism and the ancestral toolbox

Ask the Community! (subscriber only)