On Reading the Play ‘The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds’
Dr Kenneth Soddy, a child psychiatrist for whom I worked in the early seventies, held that it was easier to personify evil than good. Coming from a Christian tradition and with an anthropological bent to his thinking, he suggested that in most cultures, especially in times of uncertainty or crisis (and when are there not such times?) demonic figures spring to mind more readily than angelic ones. Even God as an elderly male with a flowing beard or Christ with his halo are slower to materialise than Satan and his minions. The point is debatable, but Soddy argued persuasively that the tendency to summon up concrete images of evil has been aided and abetted for centuries by theologically minded poets (Milton, for example) and artists like Brueghel. I would add to the list the whole genre of horror stories and films which have followed us into the 21st Century.
In the analytic world, I believe that it was the Kleinians who pioneered our thinking into these realms, taking us from a religious to a psychological understanding of the split between Good and Bad. By means of disowning and projection it is easier and simpler – if more primitive – to arrive at an explanation for the horrors which life throws at us. Ambivalence and depression come later, both developmentally and culturally.
As a group analyst, I was brought up, professionally speaking, in the idyllic, a-historic, a-cultural world of S.H. Foulkes, who steered us through choppy waters in which The Group was shown to be the panacea for mankind’s problems. Foulkes deftly avoided all the anthropological rocks on his journey, which could not have been easy for him, given his flight from Hitler, the man who came to be regarded as one of the personifications of evil in our age.
My own introduction to the concepts of Good and Evil comes from a Jewish tradition, not strongly religious by any means, but embedded in a respect for Jewish values, customs, history and traditions. It was therefore with considerable interest that I recently discovered a play by S. Ansky, titled, ‘The Dybbuk: Between Two Worlds.’ The play is set in the 1850’s, in a tiny Jewish town, (or Shtetl, as it was called) in Eastern Europe, a landscape familiar to my parents, who were born in Lithuania.
A Lost World: Harold Behr’s father (centre with badge on his hat) and his rabbinic grandfather (2nd adult from left, heavily bearded)
The play presents a particularly Jewish demon from folklore, the Dybbuk, a creature who enters the body of its victim and takes possession of it. The word ‘dybbuk’ means something that sticks to a person and in effect takes over the soul of its victim, a truly horrific scenario. Usually the dybbuk is a malign creature with no particular relationship to its chosen victim other than the need to contaminate a pure and innocent soul. Ansky’s dybbuk, however, is a more complex character, representing a poor Jewish scholar who has dabbled in the dark arts after falling in love with a young woman whose wealthy father has rejected him as an unworthy suitor for the daughter. Rejected, the student collapses in a state of ecstatic grief (a strange contradiction) and dies, or so we think.
In fact, the student is by no means dead, but has entered the body of his beloved and taken her over on the eve of her wedding to the intended suitor. The dybbuk’s presence is announced when she speaks in a harsh male voice and pushes her suitor away, declaring that she will not marry him.
The elders of the community announce that she has been possessed by a dybbuk and solemnly proceed with the rituals of exorcism. At first these fail, but ultimately the power of rabbinic authority prevails. The dybbuk yields, but there is a terrible price to pay. In the closing scene (spoiler alert) the dybbuk, in the form of the scholar, walks towards the young woman and they embrace, to die in each other’s arms.
In this way the hopes and values of the wealthy father are thwarted, and a blow is struck for the triumph of love over paternal power, but the tragic ending of the play also speaks to a plea for reality. Can magical devices really overcome the power of the self? Perhaps this is what Ansky meant by his sub-title, ‘Between Two Worlds.’ The story hovers between the world of fantasy on the one hand and the world of reality on the other. But who can partition that world into Good and Bad?
Harold Behr
harold.behr@ntlworld.com