This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshivah Rabbi Jonah Rank, has been dedicated by Alan Gotthelf in memory of Herb Weller.
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In the (fictional) television show Loki, Victor Timely, an inventor living in 19th century Chicago, has discovered how to control time—to return to the past, to speed ahead to the future. Mr. Timely however finds himself frustrated by his audiences who believe that his demonstrations at the World Fair are nothing but a hoax. In the face of those who believe that his breakthroughs amount to performative fakery, Timely retorts, “all science is fiction until it’s fact.”
Judaism, as a religion that is driven by wisdom, has long been forged by people who refuse to be fooled. The ancient rabbinic collection Bereshit Rabbah explains how Abraham became a monotheist of legend by smashing the idols his father built (38:13); Abraham knew that stones cannot be autonomous and certainly were not gods. When Greek philosophy resurfaced in the medieval Arabic culture where Jews enjoyed new societal privileges, Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) wrote his philosophical Guide for the Perplexed, assuring his fellow Jews that certain tales of divine intervention or ethically challenging messages in the Hebrew Bible were intended as allegories. Through such a lens the most sacred of Jewish literature could remain true to the critical thinker and reconstrued as part of a highly intelligent culture keeping up with the times. In a similar spirit, when Reform rabbis gathered in 1885 in Pittsburgh to solidify the dogma of their a Judaism that would conform with the rationalist spirit of their fellow Americans, the rabbinic Conference concluded that “men in miraculous narratives” constituted just a few of “the primitive ideas” that the Bible purported. Judaism would never fall for fiction, and the Torah would never succumb to the irrational.
Laying the groundwork for a logic-bound society holding its people accountable for their own actions, God delivers in Parashat Mishpatim a long string of laws. Some laws are short, and some are long. The connection between any one law and any laws adjacent to it might be loose at best. In this lengthy register of commandments, one very sparsely worded law, with no apparent connection to the laws preceding or following it, suddenly emerges in Exodus 22:17:
מְכַשֵּׁפָ֖ה לֹ֥א תְחַיֶּֽה׃
Do not let a sorceress live.
For Abraham, the Maimonideans, and a majority of voices at the Pittsburgh Conference, this law might have felt completely natural. Why should a culture that uplifts God as the only entity that could alter the fate of the universe allow for witchcraft or any other human who dare lay their hand on the laws of nature? A sorceress-free Judaism would allow people to devote their religious feelings completely towards God.
But the Jews have never been a fully united people. The Talmud witnesses one rabbi after another who responds to one challenge after another with yet another challenge. Just because we inhabit such a secular culture where God may appear to be very detached from our daily lives, who is to say that the supernatural is a realm that only God can influence?
A law that bans sorceresses from Jewish life might have made even more sense in the 19th century, when flocks of Jews across every nation in Europe distanced themselves from supernatural beliefs that rationalists and the champions of the enlightenment deemed backward or primitive. But scholars have demonstrated that Jews have been attracted to magic for thousands of years. Dr. Gideon Bohak’s 2008 book Ancient Jewish Magic records the earliest roots of Jewish magic, Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg’s 1939 book Jewish Magic and Superstition highlights just how naturally Jews integrated magic into their religious conscience, and T. Schrire’s 1962 book Hebrew Magic Amulets interprets and offers photographs of a recent and currently living Jewish material culture intertwined with Jewish magical beliefs.
For modern English speakers, the word magic likely invokes images of Harry Houdini or Penn and Teller, performers who admit—but rarely reveal how—their work is merely the art of the illusion. But that is more trademarked magic and less authentic mysticism. (The border between mysticism and magic is hard to locate. In his article, “‘Practical Kabbalah’ and the Jewish Tradition of Magic,” Dr. Yuval Harari notes that, in modernity, some Jewish circles have embraced practices that an anthropologist might label as ‘magic’ but Jews have generally preferred to call ‘Kabbalah.’)
For thousands of years, Jews have meditated (sometimes bringing to mind their ancestor Isaac meditating in a field in Genesis 24:63). Such meditation may incorporate the words from Jewish tradition bound in a prayerbook, words that freely arise in the heart of the seeker, or even no words at all. We can count Rabbi Joseph Karo (1488–1575) in Safed among the dozens, if not hundreds, of rabbis who reshaped Jewish law according to kabbalistic convictions. Few rabbis have introduced the words of our prayers as magical incantations; however, we can understand why influential kabbalists would gravitate towards a directive that a Jew recite Psalm 97:11 (“Light is sown for the righteous and joy for those upright in their heart”) not once but seven times when welcoming Yom Kippur before reciting Kol Nidrey. That same notion that words of prayer are imbued with power well beyond their literal meaning preserves a magical practice—even amidst as deeply enlightened a text as the Reform High Holiday prayerbook (Mishkan HaNefesh)—where Yom Kippur ends with reciting seven times, from I Kings 18:19, “Adonai is God.” If prayer were merely about speaking truths, we would never need to say these things more than once. Instead, through prayer, we dance our way through our people’s millennia-old mystical journey, accompanied by the soundtrack of an ancient language that animates the supernatural.
In truth, as Jewish history has marched forward, we have less and less frequently proclaimed the news of divine miracles that have saved the whole of the Jewish people. Miracles have nonetheless remained true and ever-present in smaller, more private, settings. There is hardly a mathematical formula to guarantee divine interventions in our lives, but we all know modern miracles: parents who gave birth after years of medical complications, patients who outlasted a doctor’s grim prognosis, wandering souls who finally found their partner, their home, their community, their job, or whatever missing piece had arrived just as hope had all but faded.
Sometimes God is the sole purveyor of the miracle, but sometimes not. Tanchuma Shemot, composed near the end of the 1st millennium C.E., when commenting on Exodus 35:1 (in the Warsaw edition), we meet (for perhaps the first time in Jewish literary history) ba’aley shem (בעלי שם)—miracle-workers and healers. Ever since then, these “masters of [God’s] name” have demonstrated that they could manipulate Hebrew letters, words, and verses to rewrite the laws of nature and open for those seeking God a portal to the supernatural. This phenomenon grew exponentially when the Ba’al Shem Tov (c. 1699–1760) traversed Eastern Europe and offered his healing skills and couched them in an ecstatic celebration of Jewish life; his charisma yielded different circles of Chasidic Judaism, motivated by his miraculous acts. Chasidic dynasties coronated their own rebbe’im (central ‘rabbis’) and entrusted them as ba’aley shem, bringing Heaven from above down to Earth every day. With time, the healing practices and meditations taught by these ecstatic masters was deemed too powerful to be reserved for just a small percentage of the Jewish people; in the 20th century, these teachings burst through the boundaries of solely Orthodox circles. Such masters as Rabbi Dr. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Rabbi Dr. Douglas Goldhamer carried forth these traditions and built on them, healing Jews whose prior worldview had often been otherwise divorced from mysticism. To be a modern Jew in the 20th or 21st century did not require disavowing an embrace of God and God’s partners in making miracles.
So what would God have had against that (hypothetical) sorceress in Exodus? Was her magic just a performance? Or did her magic exclude God? Was it a gender thing? (Probably not a gender thing: Both the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud figured that this was a law about sorcerers of any gender and that the Torah assumed for some reason that more women than men practiced sorcery; see Sanhedrin 67a and Sanhedrin 7:13 respectively.)
Our law in question has long bothered many a Jew—including, perhaps unsurprisingly, Chasidic masters. In his Yismach Mosheh commentary on the Torah, Rabbi Mosheh Teitelbaum (c. 1759–1841) of Ujhely, Slovakia, claimed that he saw “באיזה ספר” (“in some book”) that, a long time ago, in order to become a sorcerer or sorceress, one would first have to become physically intimate with an animal (an act prohibited just one verse later). (For the author of the book Rabbi Teitelbaum saw, incidentally, the context of the ban on sorcery actually did relate to the subsequent verse, due to its ban on bestiality!) The Torah commentary Avodat Yisra’el by Rabbi Yisra’el Hopstein (c. 1733–1814) of Kozhnitz, Poland, might have been Rabbi Teitelbaum’s source; in this book, Rabbi Hopstein attests, regarding this same teaching, “שמעתי בשם גדול אחד” (“I heard [this] in the name of some master”). Although we do not know which master this was, a similar teaching does appear in the anonymously authored 13th century Franco-German Torah commentary Hadar Zekenim. From the same century, the French Torah commentary Pa’ane’ach Raza by Rabbi Yitzchak ben Yehudah HaLevi noted on this verse “ שהמכשפות עושין עצמן לבהמות כמעשה אגג” (“that sorceresses make themselves like beasts, just like the incident with Agag”). Presumably referencing I Samuel 15, where Agag was the only spared Amalekite human after Saul and his trooped had been instructed to put an end to the Amalekite people and their possessions, including animals—Rabbi Yitzchak ben Yehudah HaLevi might have figured that Agag had survived this near-genocide by disguising himself as an animal (as Saul spared not just Agag, but also the Amalekites’ animals). Inasmuch as the Torah prohibited bestiality, for a sorcerer to dress up (like Saul) as an animal would demand that a Jew deny their humanity, even if temporarily. Humans might help God in miracles, but humans cannot get sheepish about it. (Pardon the pun.) Humanity is made in God’s image, and we are not here to deny that holy potential.
Magic may be most appropriate learned in depth and understood as one esoteric corner of our vast tradition. Before learning whatever secrets might help us move nature in our favor, a student should first develop a strong moral character and demonstrate their commitment to making their world a wiser, kinder, and holier place. For those trained to think like the hyperrational Italian Rabbi Umberto Cassuto (1883–1951), who read this portion’s law against sorceresses and concluded that Judaism has no place for magic whatsoever—magic might feel anathema to Judaism. It is in this vein that, in the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 67b and Chullin 7b), Rabbi Yochanan suggested that the Hebrew term כְּשָׁפִים (keshafim, “acts of sorcery”) is a clumsy abbreviation for the phrase “מכחישין פמליא של מעלה” (makhchishin familia shel malah, “contradicting the ministry above”). Still, the spiritual urge that invites us to perform acts that imagine something other than the pained existence we know inspires Jews to believe that there may yet be a purpose to Judaism. Whether or not magic tickles the fancy of the average Jew today, the idea that God requires human partners to make God’s greatest potential come alive poses no controversy. Our Torah cannot tolerate a miracle worker who negates the humanity, the godliness, and the Jewishness of the magic. Jewish magic should conceal neither its Jewishness nor its magic.
For this reason, Jews don’t conduct witch hunts. If reading our verse literally were all our tradition needed, then the three words that constitute our verse would not have empowered Rabbi Eli’ezer to derive from it 300 or 3,000 laws he feared no other Jew would have ever discovered. Instead, he, on his deathbed, began to impart this secret tradition to his disciple Rabbi Akiva (as per Avot DeRabbi Natan, Version A, chapter 25)—much in the same way that many kabbalistic secrets have never reached a page but have been transmitted only orally from teacher to student.
Can Jewish magic be part of an authentic Jewish tradition? Perhaps we can paraphrase Victor Timely and posit that any unprecedented spiritual yearning is heretical until it’s Jewish. Rationalists who accept the real possibility that there is some One out there who is our Divine partner must embrace the tried and true expressions of Jewish faith—rational or otherwise—and search for room in the tradition where we might fit in the creative urges of the Jewish heart.
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