While Halloween is certainly NOT a Jewish holiday, our tradition is not lacking in stories and lessons from ghosts, demons, and other spooky creatures. For a little pre-Halloween fun this week, we’ll look at some of the characters and stories that haunt—and help—in our texts.
And, if you want to know all there is to know about demonology and magic in Jewish tradition, check out the Throwing Sheyd podcast.
While Purim is not “the Jewish Halloween,” I think that there is a similarity beyond the costumes. On Purim, part of our task is to na-hafoch hu, to turn things upside down. In our masks and costumes, perhaps it is a day where we show the parts of ourselves that we normally keep hidden; my teacher, Dr. Assael Romanelli, would call them our shadow selves. By letting them show, we test their power—and learn to harness it.
On Halloween, in addition to the candy and the costumes, I think we in America shed light on the things that are scary. With sometimes literal illumination, we take away some of the power of the things that go bump in the night, the things that scare us. While certainly not my tradition, I love the idea that on Día de Los Muertos, the day after Halloween, the ghosts and the spirits are to be welcomed, even celebrated—not feared—as memories of departed loved ones.
The rabbis of the Talmud truly imagine the world to be full of demons, full of shadows and dangers that lurk. Again in Tractate Berachot, Abba Binyamin—one of the sages—comments that If the eye was given permission to see, no creature would be able to withstand the abundance and ubiquity of the demons and continue to live unaffected by them. Expanding on this, Rav Huna (another sage) says: Each and every one of us has a thousand demons to his left and ten thousand to his right.
What would happen, I wonder, if we invited our own demons into conversation—the way we do, to some extent on Purim. The way we do, playfully, on Halloween. What might we learn from them? And how might we use it to give ourselves power over them?
— Rabbi Sari Laufer