Against the Uwuification of Sheydim
"'I've upset you. I see that. But you know what it is to carve out your place in the world, to have to fight for your life at every turn. You can't imagine how much worse it was in my time. Women were sent to madhouses because they read too many books or because their husbands tired of them. There were so few paths open to us. And mine was stolen from me so I forged a new one.' Alex Jabbed a finger at Belbam. 'You don't get to turn this into some kind of feminist manifesto. You forged your new path from the lives of other girls. Immigrant girls. Brown Girls. Poor Girls.' Girls like me. 'Just so you could buy yourself another few years.'"
-Galaxy Stern shutting up a soul eating revenant Source: Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
First off this is my first post on Tumblr so please forgive any issues with formatting. I'm still getting used to this site's layout let alone writing anything that isn't solely for my own addled and deranged mind. Still, I hope that this is at least somewhat insightful.
Over the last few years I've noticed that there has been a tendency among young Jews online to make our folklore and mysticism 'cuddlier'. To suggest that not only do we have a hell but that quite literally everything in our cosmos is friendly and misunderstood. Sheydim become relatable mascots of groups traditionally marginalized within the Jewish community. The leviathan is treated as G-d's pet who isn't dangerous whatsoever and is instead merely a big fish. Malachim generally like humans and are on good terms with the Jewish Community. And Lilith becomes an empowered girl boss with her malewife Ashmedai. A lovely story that makes great fanfiction and Jewish aus, the only problem is that it's completely ahistorical and utterly misses the point of these stories.
Sheydim while not exactly ontologically evil were usually depicted as predatory, amoral and capricious. A good portion of Bava Batra 74-75 is dedicated to describing how pants shittingly terrifying the Leviathan is and how it could theoretically destroy the world. Malachim are often depicted as threats and enemies of Israel especially in narratives regarding the revelation of the Torah at Sinai (Exodus Rabbah (41.7; 44:8), Tanhuma (Ki Tissa 20), PdRE 45, and Deut. Rabbah (3.11). And Lilith as well all know kills newborn children and was the terror of expectant Jewish Mothers for centuries. With the origin of her being 'Adam's first wife' coming from the Alphabet of Ben Sirach. A satiric work written in the late Middle Ages centuries after the first attested use of amulets and incantation bowls to ward of Lilith or lilin in Mesopotamia. Even Ashmedai for all his honor and piety was still treated as an enemy of mankind on average even if he was by no means an enemy of G-d. Of course, that is not to say that Jews haven't worked with spirits in fact the opposite is true. Merely that these spirit workings were often treated as incredibly dangerous works that were a mixture of lion taming and nuclear engineering. Descenders of the Merkavah had to battle through throngs of angels to reach the throne. Sar Torah mystics had to gird themselves with spiritual armor not to be annihilated by the angels for the crime of existing in a similar dimension to them. Even the act of Indulcio or sweetening the spirits often performed by wise women in many Sephardic communities was very much akin to paying off the mafia or in more historically accurate terms, paying Jizya.
My personal opinion on the reason for this trend is specifically because most Jewish content creators have been immersed in culturally Christian environments their whole lives. So, it would make sense for them to want to participate in the modern trend of telling things from the monster's side of the story. Something that is intrinsically tied to the fact that most of these monsters were metaphors for or linked to the powerless and the marginalized. In these scenarios, to show the story from the monster or demon's perspective would be an easy way of challenging societal narratives that do have real harmful impact even if very few people use the literal threat of werewolves and Medusa as bludgeons against marginalized communities.
Second of all there has been a major trend in making Judaism 'the leftist religion'. The religion without the fire and brimstone ideas of sin and hell that turned so many people to secularism. Progressive Judaism often advertises itself as the religion where evil is simply a misunderstanding and that's all cleared up there will be no more evil. We prided ourselves for years for fighting people who wanted to annihilate use with compassion and understanding. That surely rather than being bad they were merely tragically misguided souls who needed our help.
The problem with this in a Jewish context is that from the destruction of the Second Temple onwards our monsters were usually much more powerful than us in every sense of the word. In our stories, the were-panther who preyed on children was not the despised woodsman but the local bishop who no doubt incited very real pogroms against us. In our folklore, the heretical necromancer wasn't some liberated free thinker but someone who converted to the dominant religion and helped to persecute their former compatriots. Even Lilith who has become the mascot for a sort of 'persecuted heterodox' Judaism was by no means persecuted on the world stage in most Kabbalistic Treatise. In these works, Lilith was not the despised vagabond crushed by a patriarchal power system but the consort of Samael and the Princess of the realm of Edom. Symbols of the Christian and Islamic empires that have persecuted us for thousands of years. Or to put it in a snappy manner, the Lilith of the Zohar has much more in common with Margaret Thatcher than Rosa Luxemburg.
Now is there sexism and xenophobia in our own stories of monsters and demons? Unfortunately, yes. The amount of sexist and ethnically chauvinist tropes applied to Lilith in the Zoharic corpus alone are almost impossible to count and deeply troubling for modern readers. But that doesn't change the fact that Lilith was first and foremost a metaphor for SIDs and later on the non Vatican sanctioned medieval Marian Cults that replaced the drinking of sacramental wine with the spilling of Jewish blood as their main devotional acts.
Nor do I think that having progressive or universalist values in Judaism is at all a bad thing. I fully believe in the inclusion of those marginalized by the Rabbinic establishments in the past and do not wish to see us delight in cruelty. In fact, one of my biggest fears is that we might begin to ignore the suffering of gentiles because we rightly or wrongly assume they hold strong antisemitic biases. It's just that now, in an era of increasing antisemitic violence from all sides of the aisle it doesn't seem like a good idea to try and fight people who want to destroy us with beatific compassion and understanding.
