Seeking, losing, hiding, finding one's identity

Shabbat and Halloween: A guest post by Miranda Munro

This might be one of those “I’m the mom and maybe not exactly unbiased” moments, but I have permission to share the drash my daughter, Miranda, read at her synagogue this evening. It is not completely polished, but it is still Halloween and I wanted to post it during that time it was still both Halloween and Shabbat. So here it is. Hope you enjoy!

Good evening. I’m Miranda Munro, I’m a member of the Bet Haverim Board and liaison to the Ritual Committee, which works to set and maintain our communal ritual practice. Tonight, I have the honor of giving the drash.

The portion this week is Lech Lecha, in which God tells Abram to take his household and “go out to a land that I will show you.” The purpose is to “make him a great nation.” This is a theme: Abram, later Abraham, is repeatedly told to do things by God and then told that he will be a great nation. This is Abraham’s identity, a patriarch. He goes out and transforms into the person he is supposed to be by building a relationship with God, with the land, and with the people he encounters over the course of his life. This is the example he sets for us: go out and become more yourself through engaging with God, land, and community.

But what happens when we are not true to our identities? In addition to tonight being Shabbat, it is Halloween, secular holiday of creepy and spooky when we go out transformed to hide our identities. There are many spooky and creepy stories and characters in Jewish folklore and mis-identity is a common thread among them.

Let’s start with the Corpse Bride. It’s a story of both falsifying identity and mismatched identities and yes, it’s the story that Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride is based around. A young groom is walking around the woods the night before his wedding and he sees a finger poking out of the ground. As a joke, he puts his wedding ring on the finger and says the marriage vows 3 times, whereupon, of course, the corpse comes to life and chases the groom back to the city, interrupting the actual wedding the next day. A beit din is convened and after careful deliberation, the groom’s foolish act of marriage to the corpse is deemed invalid due to his already being betrothed (misrepresenting who he was), his making the vows as a joke (misrepresenting his intentions), and most importantly, the dead and living being unable to be married because death has already parted them. In other words, the identities as someone who is alive and someone who is dead make a legal marriage impossible.

But what happens when your identity does not fit the social norms that you live in? Let’s talk about Lilith. For centuries Lilith was portrayed as a demon who seduced men, killed children, and harmed pregnant women. There are amulets to protect against her and some people claim the term lullaby comes from Lilith-abi, Lilith away. I looked it up, and there’s actually several possible etymologies for that word, so probably not. But it’s a cool idea. Lilith was Adam’s first wife, from the first story of the creation in which the man and woman are both created from dust at the same time, as opposed to Eve who is from the second story and created from Adam’s rib. Lilith refused an identity as subservient to Adam, sprouted wings, and left the Garden of Eden. God sent angels to retrieve her and when she refused to return, she was turned into a demon. In a world with strict gender roles, the refusal to bend one’s identity to those roles would indeed seem spooky, while today she is viewed as a feminist icon.

Lilith’s identity and story has been reframed into a story of resilience and staying true to her identity, but there are other demons within Jewish folklore. Let’s turn to Ashmedai, the king of the demons and a master of illusion. He has various origin stories, but my favorite story about him is that he was captured by King Solomon and tricked into assisting in the construction of the Temple. His creepiness doesn’t come from any lack of clarity in his own identity, but rather in his ability to destabilize the identity of his adversaries. He tricked King Solomon into being thrown out of his palace and wandering for years before Solomon was able to come back to his own identity as King of Israel. What is more terrifying than a demon that can make you believe you are other than what you are?

How about a demon that can literally remove you from yourself through possession? Dybbuks are the souls of people who have recently died and which are guided by a demon to a living human body. The soul can inhabit the human body, while the demon possesses it. And in the vein of “there’s a blessing for everything,” yes, there is a Jewish way to do an exorcism. You get ten men who have recently taken a trip to the mikvah and a rabbi who must speak to the demon and, using seven of God’s names, tell it to leave. If everything goes right, the dybbuk leaves through the space between the nail and nailbed of the person’s big toe. We love that oddly specific detail. Hopefully at the end of that ordeal, the person whose body was possessed can come back into their body, but I wonder what that experience would do to your sense of self.

A dybbuk exchanges your identity for its own, but what happens if the creature has no identity? The Golem of Prague is a character that fundamentally does not have its own identity, but is given an identity by the person controlling it. The story originates around 500 years ago, during a particularly virulent outbreak of European antisemitism in which the local priests invoked the blood libel, the idea that Jews were killing Christian children and using the blood to make matza. In order to protect the ghetto in Prague, Rabbi Maharal Yehuda Leow shaped clay into a man’s form and used a secret Kabbalistic formula to bring the clay to life as the golem. The golem does whatever it is told to do, but you’d better be careful about your instructions or you could wind up with more than what you bargained for. The golem doesn’t act from malice or mischief. Any mishaps are all about the person controlling the golem, and so the creepiness of the character really stems from an absence of identity and the ability of its master to fill that absence with their own identity.

Lech Lecha reminds us of the importance of searching for our identities by going out and connecting to ourselves by building a relationship to God. Our creepy and spooky stories show us the ways in which that search for self can go awry. So, in this intersection of Shabbat and Halloween, I encourage you to go out, having fulfilled your Jewish obligation to remember Shabbat, and have a good time in the secular world party that is tonight, while always remembering to be like Abraham and come back to yourself, the self that has a good time with friends both Jewish and non-Jewish, and the self that remembers Shabbat and finds ways to keep it holy.