Israel’s Dybbuk

I studied Ephraim Moses Lilien’s black-and-white print, Dybbuk. Not knowing who Lilien was, I did what most curious people do—I Googled him.

Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874–1925) was a Polish-Jewish Art Nouveau illustrator, photographer, and printmaker. I recommend exploring his work on Wikipedia. Lilien was known as the “first Zionist artist,” a title I had never encountered before. He profoundly influenced early Israeli visual culture and helped found the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design.

As a member of the early Zionist movement, Lilien traveled several times to Ottoman Palestine between 1906 and 1918, although he never settled there permanently.

He attended both the Fifth and Seventh Zionist Congresses in Basel, where he became known for his famous photographic portrait of Theodor Herzl. Yes, that Herzl—the black-bearded visionary standing on a hotel balcony overlooking the Danube, contemplating the birth of a Jewish nation. Lilien frequently used Herzl as a model, believing his features embodied the ideal of the “New Jew.”

Now, back to Dybbuk.

In Lilien’s drawing, I saw a handsome young man—the State of Israel—with a black-caped dybbuk—the State of Iran—clinging to his back. The young, virile man strides forward with a staff in his hand, like Moses journeying toward the Promised Land. He walks from his tent toward a cemetery. There, a shovel stands planted in the earth, waiting for him.

A shovel for digging a grave.

A grave into which he must cast the dybbuk that clings to his back and bury it beneath six feet of sand.

I understood how difficult such a task would be. I have spent much of my life fighting off dybbuks of my own.

As I studied the image, I could almost feel the skeletal demon attached to my back, trying to invade my body through every opening. Like an earwig crawling into my ears and laying eggs of doubt mixed with eggs of fear. Those eggs hatch into larvae that wriggle past my eardrums and feed upon my anxieties, like earthworms devouring a fallen apple.

I found myself wondering: How does Israel excise such a demon?

In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a wandering spirit that leaves the body of the dead and seeks refuge in the living. Looking at Lilien’s image, I imagined this malicious spirit entering me, feeding on my fears, filling me with dread, making me paranoid, and threatening to drive me mad.

Then a thought struck me.

In the current Iran-Israel conflict, Iran has been thrown from the back of the young man and cast into the six-foot pit. But the grave remains unfilled.

The dybbuk has fallen, but it has not been buried.

And so it lives to fight another day.