L ifestyle /C ulture
Ditch Werewolves, Vampires: Judaism Has Own Monsters
CULTURE SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
DURING THE SOPHOMORE
season of the NBC comedy “30
Rock,” Tracy Morgan and Donald
Glover perform “Werewolf Bar
Mitzvah,” a “Monster Mash”-
style tune that one can’t help but
tap their toes to.

“Boys becoming men; men
becoming wolves,” they growl.

With Halloween around the
corner, it can be easy for some
Jews (and gentiles) to grasp at
pop culture straws by trying
to cram Jewish culture into a
holiday with pagan roots. Others
reject Halloween altogether.

But Jews needn’t try to
search for specks of Jewish
lore in the stories of vampires
and lycanthropy, as we have
our own wealth of folklore
and mythology that not only
heavily draws on the presence
of monsters and demons, but
that pervades Jewish thought.

Ilan Glazer, a maggid, or
Jewish storyteller, based in
Baltimore, argues that these
stories are at the center of Jews’
religious values.

“All of these legends and all
these stories are really trying
to answer universal questions,
which are: What do we do
when they come for us? And
how can we be stronger than
we are? And how can we take
care of ourselves? Where are
women’s voices, and what is
our connection to God? And
what’s our responsibility to
each other?” Glazer said.

Artist Teddy Poneman used
the story of the Golem as a way
of making sense of contempo-
rary politics in his 2019 Temple
University master of fine arts
thesis. The Golem originally referred
to a “figure from clay that God
created before God injected into
it the breath of life and created
Adam,” according to University
of Pennsylvania
folklore Professor Dan Ben-Amos. More
recently, the story of the Golem
is that of 16th-century Rabbi
Judah Loew ben Bezalel, who
created and erected the clay giant
to protect a Prague ghetto from
antisemitic pogroms ravaging
the area. In many iterations of the
Golem story, the giant becomes
too powerful and turns against
the person who tries to control it.

Poneman, however,
stumbled upon the Golem in
a completely different context:
as a meme on an anti-fas-
cist Jewish Facebook group.

Someone had created a patch
with the Golem of Prague that
read, “Goodnight alt-right.”
“It was this thing that I
wanted to use as this culturally
specific, historical precedent
for anti-fascist organizing and
activism,” Poneman said.

The Golem, once a symbol
of Jewish resistance 500 years
ago, was reconceptualized —
through Poneman and other
young, left-leaning Jews — as a
symbol of Jewish resistance in
modern times.

But reinterpreting Jewish
creatures for political causes
isn’t new.

Though not exclusive to
Jewish folklore, Lilith, who in
a midrash is said to be Adam’s
first wife, appears in the Zohar,
a Kabbalistic text, as a demon
and wife of the king of demons.

She was interpreted as a femme
fatale who eats babies, the
origin of the Jewish supersti-
tion of tying red string around
a baby’s crib to prevent Lilith
from stealing the child.

Maggid Andrew Elias
Ramer, author of “Queering
the Text: Biblical, Medieval,
and Modern Jewish Stories,”
argues that this version of
the story was created by men
who “try doing things to keep
Teddy Poneman’s Golem completed for his 2019 Temple University
MFA Courtesy of Teddy Poneman
women in their place.”
In the past 50 years, the story
of Lilith was reinterpreted.

“In modern times, she was
adopted symbolically by the
Jewish feminist movement,”
Ben-Amos said.

One midrash, by Judith
Plaskow, has Lilith returning to
the Garden of Eden to befriend
Eve, despite Lilith’s demon
status. The two become friends
and allies. In others, Lilith is a
symbol of sexual liberation.

And while some demons
can help strengthen a polit-
ical movement, others, such as
the dybbuk, remain personal
to Jews and Jewish traditions
surrounding death.

The dybbuk, which first
appears in Jewish texts 500 years
ago but was made popular by S.

Ansky’s play “The Dybbuk,” is
a malicious soul who possesses
another’s body. The dybbuk’s
foil is an ibbur, a soul that
cohabitates a body intending to
complete mitzvot.

The two spirits point to the
Jewish esoteric concept of gilgul,
reincarnation, which, more
broadly, is a way of making sense
of death, according to Ramer.

“It’s a big part of Ashkenazi
Jewish culture,” he said.

With Judaism being replete
with stories and legends, why
turn to monsters to teach us
about life and our values as Jews?
Ramer offers that because
Judaism is a monotheistic
religion with a benevolent God,
it is challenging at times to
make sense of bad things that
happen to the Jewish people:
antisemitism, death, suffering.

The use of demons and
monsters to explain why bad
things happen to us is a way of
making sense of that pain.

“Having an intermediate evil
is a useful tool in the monothe-
istic faith where you don’t want
to have a bad God,” Ramer said.

“Some of our experiences of life
are so often bad — where does
it come from? To me, all these
stories are reconciling life and
experience.” l
srogelberg@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0741
20 OCTOBER 28, 2021
JEWISH EXPONENT
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