Dybbuk: A Play Book

I read this play because I was curious as to how literature embraces Jewish mystical concepts, but it turned out that the author's biography interested me more. He was raised religious in Eastern Europe, and it's clear that he knew Hasidic history and thought. In the very first scene, the characters are arguing about the splendor of the Rizhiner Rebbe versus the poverty of the Rebbe, Reb Zusia. Another religious argument that I liked even more came a few pages later. "Talmud ties you too much to this world," says the 'hero' of the story, Elchonon. "Kabbala lets your soul soar." As Elchonon comes to a bad end, I'd say Talmudic earthiness is a good thing. But the author, S. Lansky, rebelled against Judaism for a long period of his life, so he might regard Elchonon as heroically defiant. Religious Jews protested the play in its time, and if you're Orthodox and you read it, you'll understand precisely why.

But as I said, I was most fascinated by S. Lansky, first a Hasid, then a maskil, and in the end, not just a Jewish ethnographer and folklorist, but someone who loved his people enough that he advocated and fundraised for them through World War One, which wasn't as devastating as the Holocaust of World War Two, but was most definitely the precursor to it. So while I didn't think the play was all that great, it did give me what I was looking for: an example of a writer who could weave Jewish faith and legend into his work.