Today we're going to talk about that time that a bunch of Kabbalists tried to take down Adolf Hitler by means of chicken's blood and hijacking a British airplane.

Really, though.

Let's start here:

During WWII, several Kabbalists came to the home of Gershom Scholem,–a pioneer in the scholarly study of Kabbalah– and asked him to teach them to activate powers that would eliminate Hitler.

Scholem told them it is forbidden to awaken such powers.

Said kabbalists nevertheless tried, and, after Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess was captured in England, they reported they had almost succeeded.

This post is about that story, and a couple of others along the way.

By the summer of 1940, things weren't looking good in the Middle East. The French army in Syria and Lebanon decided they were loyal to the Vichy; Mussolini took his "parallel war" all over the region; the Nazis seemed to be making progress in both North Africa and Iraq; and, of course, things were horrific for Jews and many others in Europe and beyond.

Jews who'd been living in what's now the Israel (and remember, some Jews had been there for many hundreds of years, some got there to escape pogroms or other disasters, some had other stories) decided to take action.

There were a range of approaches. Rabbi Yehuda Fetaya (1859–1942), known in Jerusalem as a great Kabbalist, tried to defeat the Nazis a few ways, including bringing about 60 people to Rachel's Tomb with sackcloth and ashes, and shofars and

each one took an empty cup and circled the place seven times. Each time, all said in unison: “the adversary [Satan] and the enemy would not enter the gates of Jerusalem. The gates of tears are not locked.” And he told them that they should shed their tears into the cups in their hands … At the end all said seven times in unison: “He will not come.” … After the prayer, which went on for twenty-four hours, they conducted a seʿudat mitsvah [a commanded celebratory meal] and they sang and danced and thanked God asking for their prayer to be accepted.

Weeping into cups while reciting Talmudic verses. OK.

We also know (based on a letter by Rabbi Moshe Yair Weinstock,) that ca. 1940 Weinstock, the kabbalist Rabbi Shimon Leider and Rabbi Moshe Yemini performed a kind of ritual excommunication of Hitler and Goebels and their assistants. This apparently involved, among other things, taking out Torah scrolls, reciting the ritual blessing the MiShebeirach for the flourishing of the congregation, and reciting:

As decreed by the angels and by the saying of holy ones, we boycott, ban, excommunicate, execrate, and curse, with the agreement of God, may God be blessed, and of this holy congregation, the evil non-Jew Adolf Hitler son of Klara ruler of the Germans ??? the foes Goebbels and Göring with all their associates, enemies of Israel, may their names and memory be blotted out... with divine consent and with the consent of this congregation.... (and so forth...)

Weinstock reflected in 1967,

And until today I wonder how Rabbi Shimon knew the names of the mothers of those Nazis, may their names be blotted out.

(Knowing the names of the mothers of people is important for any Big Jewish Spiritual Stuff.)

And in 1933, a news story called “Bratslav Hasidim in Jerusalem Decided to Ban Hitler” had, in fact, included:

“A reliable source indicates that Bratslav Hasidim in Jerusalem wanted to ban Hitler by lighting candles and blowing a shofar at the Western Wall. But they retracted from it because they did not know the name of Hitler’s mother.”

The Chabad Rebbe also performed what seems to be a related type of ritual in 1953, amidst Stalin's vigorous persecution of Jews; Stalin died several months later. It's pretty clear from Chabad's telling who they think is responsible / gets credit for this.*

"...with a broad smile on his face, the Rebbe joined his two hands in the shape of a triangle, pointing upwards, and proclaimed three times, "Ho-ra, ho-ra, ho-ra"... **

And then there's the story of the chicken sacrifice in the British airplane.

Honestly, the version from the perspective of the British pilot (shared slightly via game of Telephone) might be the funniest, and there's nothing I can do to improve on Prof. Harari's recounting, here, so maybe I'll just quote him directly. (I'm sorry. This story is not very nice to the chickens. I've been a vegetarian for over 30 years, if it's any consolation?):

... A delegation of rabbis approached the Air Force commander in Palestine and offered to draw a circle around the land to protect it from the German forces. For that purpose, they needed a plane. Their request was passed on and “somebody approved it.”When the pilot telling the story landed his Dakota at the Atarot airport in northern Jerusalem, waiting for him beside a military truck was a large group of “holy men” accompanied by some army person who was in charge and instructed the plane crew. Three old rabbis boarded the plane, on which their friends loaded many cages with white hens. The planned circular route included a flight along the coast of Israel and Egypt up to Alexandria, southward along the Suez Canal, landing for refueling, onward to Aqaba, and northward to the Dead Sea along the Jordan River up to Jerusalem. Since the blood of the hens was meant to be sprayed along the route, the door of one of the plane’s loading docks was removed, a net was set in place to prevent falls, and the flight departed. The rabbis, who were covered in the fowls’ blood because of the air sucked into the plane through the opening, recited psalms and prayers all the time, slaughtered more and more hens and squeezed their blood through the opening. According to the pilot, a great deal of blood spread on the body and the tail of the plane, and the place was a mess of cages, blood, and fowls’ carcasses. At the end of the flight, the rabbis gave the crew some money “for beer,” and that was the end.

I mean, I hope there was a really, really good tip to the cleanup crew, too?

The backstory of the voyage may be explained by a note found by Professor Harari in the National Library addressed to Eliyahu Abraham Mizrahi Dehuki Abu Abdallah, an Iraqi-born, Jerusalem-based expert in practical Kabbalah, signed by "Abraham."

☠️ DANGEROUS. DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. FOR ACADEMIC USE ONLY. ☠️

It's translated (by Harari, with a few light tweaks by me) as follows:

To my dear friend, the god-fearing reliable honest and wise Rabbi Eliyahu
Abraham Mizrahi, ....The first of the commandments is... to blot out the memory of Amalek, may its name and memory be blotted out. Hence my friend I send out to him three proven charms [segulot] to kill the fool dog who wishes to exterminate the Jewish people and to observe [the commandment of self-defense] if someone comes to kill you rise early and kill them first. And these are the charms:

(1) They should take a white rooster that was chosen by the name [named after] of the evildoer Adolf Hitler and raise it at home for three weeks– that's twenty-one days– and then will slaughter it on a waterway and say seven times: as I slaughter this rooster so will Adolf Hitler the ruler of the Germans be slaughtered by Samael [aka Satan], amen may it be God's will.

(2) Another: Write on a burnt piece of limestone these names: ʿʿAniel, Lehaviel, Zeroʿiel, ʾAbahiel, Yehoel, Meṣiel, Teʾomiel, Vehahiel, ʾOriel, ʾAdoniel, Sarafiel* seraphs stand above God, that they should destroy the evildoer Adolf Hitler, ruler of the Germans, may his name be blotted out l'maher shalal ḥash baz (the spoil speeds, the prey hastens),** and bury it in an old grave. Proven.***

(3) Another [one]. To buy a rooster, for nine days one should keep it in the house and should call it by the name of the evildoer, as noted above, and should bury it with the pot in the dust and say, as I buried this rooster so did I bury the evildoer Adolf Hitler may his name be blotted out, ruler of the Germans.

You see the principles of substitution, in which the chickens serve as stand-ins for the bad guy; activating / invoking help by writing down names of fire-related messengers and then burning them in order to get their attention, if you will; and various other principles.

And you can probably see how we get from the substitutionary roosters– the roosters who are supposed to be symbolic stand-ins for the Führer–to needing to make sure that they are good and slaughtered. As well as, perhaps, needing to spill their blood all around the perimeter of the country, as a way of enacting something of a protective forcefield around the place, an attempt to protect the bad guy from entering. It's more complex than that (Harari goes into it in his extended journal article on this). But this might illuminate, in any case, some of the ritual logic undernealth what might otherwise seem like inscrutable actions.

In any case, in these days of fury, I know that we all fantasize about finding magical solutions to our problems.

But the thing is this: Not only is murder not the answer, it was never– not then, and not now– about just the one guy. (And really: he's not so tough. None of them are.)

It is about many systems and structures that have been resolutely in place for a long time that make it so easy for all of these horrors to come to pass.

But just as never again is now– so is the moment for us to remember that we have a more wide-ranging set of powers and possibilities in our toolboxes than we could possibly imagine.

I can't help but think about another use of Jewish tools in the tradition. The Talmud (Brachot 10a) teaches that there were some local goons who caused a lot of anguish for Rabbi Meir– so he began to pray for them to die. But his kickass wife, the brilliant Bruria, corrected him. Pray for an end to sins, not an end to sinners! He did, and they repented of their ways.

I know that this sounds less likely than, perhaps, many other outcomes these days, but as I mentioned on Monday– we must pursue justice justly, always. So as long as we're summoning, why not aim for the big guns?

As the white Jewish housing organizer Saul Alinsky put it in his book  Rules for Radicals,

Change comes from power, and power comes from organization. In order to act, people must get together.

Rather than looking for that one perfect rooster to slaughter, let's all come together as one great mighty force and bring into being– step by step, move by move– the society in which every single last one of us deserves to live.

No greater magic than that.

🌱

Especially without Substack's built-in network, word-of-mouth– forwarding emails, sharing on social media, etc– matters more than ever.

Please spread the word about this post and Life is a Sacred Text in general.

Thank you. 🙏 ❤️

THE GOOD TROUBLE CHECKLIST

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fortify inside

why spiritual practice matters during the rising authoritarian tide

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On Organizing

time to level up / an early draft of a playbook

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