TY - JOUR
TI - The Powerless Godhead and Wandering Souls. The Dybbuk’s Divine Paradigm in the Russian Original of Between Two Worlds by S. An-sky
AU - Kornacka-Sareło, Katarzyna
TI - The Powerless Godhead and Wandering Souls. The Dybbuk’s Divine Paradigm in the Russian Original of Between Two Worlds by S. An-sky
AB - 
	The Powerless Godhead and Wandering Souls. The Dybbuk’s Divine Paradigm in the Russian Original of Between Two Worlds by S. An-sky

	In this paper I demonstrate the concept of the Jewish godhead as presented in the drama Between Two Worlds: The Dybbuk by S. An-sky (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport), and analyses the phenomenon of a dybbuk, which was very popular in the culture of Hasidim. It should be mentioned that the research subject became the Russian original of the text of An-sky’s drama. The text was found in St Petersburg in 2001. The original differs significantly from its Yiddish and Hebrew versions: the Russian version ofThe Dybbuk is preceded by a long “Prologue”, where the play’s author suggests its most important ideas to the viewers. Thus, the reinterpretation of An-sky’s drama, seen from a philosophical perspective, enables one to justify the thesis that theauthor was conscious of some incoherency intrinsically present in the realm of the religious beliefs of Hasidic communities, where both the God of Biblical and Talmudic narratives, and the impersonal godhead of Kabbalah were, simultaneously, worshipped. What is more: the author also focuses on the weakness of the godhead, as he or she has been deprived of his or her primordial, male-female, unity. At the same time, while analysing An-sky’s text, I draw attention to the fact that in this play a dybbuk, an evil spirit existing in a living person’s body, is portrayed as a much better entity: An-sky’s dybbuk is a soul of a man who died prematurely, and who is wandering and missing his earthly lover, similarly to Shekhinah, who is missing her lover in heaven, and is wandering in exile, together with the Jewish nation.
VL - 2016
IS - Volume 49 Issue 2
PY - 2016
SN - 0137-2432
C1 - 2084-4077
SP - 179
EP - 192
DO - 10.4467/20844077SR.16.012.5233
UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/studia-religiologica/article/bostwo-bezmocne-i-dusze-bladzace-boski-paradygmat-dybuka-w-rosyjskim-oryginale-pomiedzy-dwoma-swiatami-szymona-an-skiego
KW - Jewish theatre
KW - Jewish ethnography
KW - Philosophy of religion
KW - S. An-sky
KW - Between the Two Worlds: The Dybbuk
KW - the Dybbuk phenomenon
KW - Kabbalistic Godhead
KW - Shekhinah
KW - Heterodoxy in Judaism
KW - Hasidism