Rabbi Josh Fixler loves Halloween, and he isn’t shy about it. He’s happy to wear a costume any chance he gets, and sometimes when there isn’t one. He loves Jewish folklore just as much. So on Shabbat, October 30, the night before Halloween, he tried something different: he told three Jewish ghost stories from three parts of the world and three periods of Jewish history.
“Halloween’s no Purim,” Rabbi Fixler joked, “but I like it a lot.”
Rabbi Fixler starts by explaining that Jewish folklore has more than one kind of ghost. Many people have heard of a dybbuk, a spirit that haunts a person. His first story is about a gilgul, a wandering soul.
On a hot day, while the community is burying one of its members, the town’s rabbi sits down to rest in the shade of a tree. Then he hears a voice from inside the tree call his name. It belongs to Menachem, his neighbor who died years earlier. Menachem’s soul is caught in the tree’s fruit, and he needs the rabbi’s help to reach paradise.
Rabbi Fixler follows the rabbi as he takes on a strange request involving a sheep, a blessing, and a feast with his students. That one kind act leads to a dream, a hidden treasure, and a connection he never saw coming.
The second story is spookier, and Rabbi Fixler says so up front. Most Jewish ghost stories, he explains, are really about demons, which play a bigger role in Jewish tradition than most people realize.
A sofer, a Torah scribe, is racing to finish a scroll by Simchat Torah. Every letter has to be perfect. One mistake makes the whole scroll unusable. Worn out and short on sleep, he forgets the psalm a sofer recites to keep demons away. Before he falls asleep, he makes a wish out loud.
“A wish might be heard by an angel,” Rabbi Fixler says, “but it might be heard by a demon.”
The mezuzah, written perfectly, keeps the demon out of the front door. So the demon finds another way in, and he is more than eager to help. What happens next is best heard from Rabbi Fixler himself. Fair warning: this is the darkest of the three.
The last story comes from a collection of folklore from the Jewish community of Kurdistan. A wealthy family credits its fortune to a grandmother who was a midwife. That’s an unlikely source of riches, as Rabbi Fixler points out.
After a long day of delivering babies, the young midwife sees a pregnant red cat and wishes she could help it. Soon there’s a knock at her door. A carriage pulled by two goats carries her deep into an unfamiliar forest, to music, dancing, and a birth that is anything but ordinary.
Rabbi Fixler builds the suspense as the midwife finds out who she has been called to help, what she gets in return, and why people say travelers on that road still sometimes find a little gold along the way.
Rabbi Fixler tells all three stories with humor, suspense, and a real love of Jewish storytelling, and the twists land best in his own words. They show a playful, lesser-known side of Jewish cultural heritage, just right for the spooky season.
[Watch on YouTube] | [Listen to the podcast]
Content note: One story has a dark, implied gruesome ending.
