You don’t need to watch the whole thing; two minutes is enough.

I watched two minutes. What’s the question? Did they say chapters of Psalms there? They did.

Uri, do you mean to ask whether what we see there proves that there really is such a thing as a “dybbuk”? If this isn’t staged, then it’s a poor guy suffering from some mental disorder, but at no point in the video is it clear that this disorder actually left him.

If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck—it’s a duck. Uri, are you asking whether Rabbi Michael Abraham is capable of disproving this? Even if he is, it would be a huge stretch.

Yerachmiel, what does what you’re saying have to do with anything, if his father reacts in tears to the son’s crying, which had never happened before?!

Fine. It’s not staged.
In any case, there is no indication whatsoever that a dybbuk entered him.

An indication? So what’s your plain explanation then? Your explanation is that it requires further investigation??

There are many more phenomena like this among fundamentalist Christians—and even stranger things, like speaking in tongues, receiving the Holy Spirit, and even cases of healing the sick by faith alone. The religious videos and websites here in Israel are not all that different from evangelical and Pentecostal sites. Sometimes they’re even a one-to-one copy.

I also remember a video from a few years ago about someone who grew up secular, had a near-death experience, and said the end of the world was near. In the end it turned out to be a fraud by a rabbi looking for publicity. Among evangelicals too, some cases turned out to be fabricated, and every charismatic preacher who wants to build his name and get rich does events like these.

I know lots of people who want to get rich and therefore cheat—Ponzi or pyramid schemes, or swearing falsely in order to extract money from someone else. And that also exists in other religions. So should I therefore cast doubt on and question every business offer or oath and trust absolutely nothing at all?
If there’s a video you don’t know how to explain, do you refute it because others were refuted, even though there’s no connection? Personal interest is always a factor. The question is how you explain facts that were observed with one’s own eyes.
The very fact that this is done in Christian circles too is, in my view, further evidence. It’s not that, as far as I know, if there is such a thing as a dybbuk that can be expelled by forces of holiness, it can’t be expelled by forces of impurity. (Or maybe they used forces of holiness…)
If I’m not mistaken, the woman filming even emphasizes that this was done only through forces of holiness… meaning that even they admit there is another path, as you noted.

Whoever claims that these phenomena are real bears the burden of proof. To this day there is no evidence at all for such phenomena. Science has examined thousands of phenomena and found nothing. Because of that, and because of the large number of entities involved, it is more reasonable to assume that these are mental problems or fraud.
I think these are natural phenomena with a sensible scientific explanation, where especially religious people make mistakes in interpretation.

There is no difference between exorcising dybbuks and Franz Mesmer’s magnetized water. Both succeeded in healing people with problems, and both were mistaken in their interpretation.

It is also a fact that most Jews and Christians today reject this approach and prefer conventional medicine because it has more successes.

I also don’t think Christianity’s success really explains anything if one accepts the Orthodox Jewish conception (in the sense of the outlook of classical Judaism, not in the sense of the Orthodox denomination, though they overlap to some extent). The Christian drives out demons in the name of Jesus Christ and the Son of God, or in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Judaism does not recognize this approach. You think that is a path of impurity, but they can claim the same—and they too have evidence and explanations according to their own method.

“Whoever claims these phenomena are real bears the burden of proof”—but what greater proof is there than seeing it?
Scientists can go on looking for spiritual phenomena. People made of mere matter are not capable of grasping the very appearance of a spiritual phenomenon.
If Christians have claims, that’s not what I’m talking about. I was talking about your claim.

Unlike the magnetized water, which was disproved in experiments. And today they say the treatments helped because of the placebo effect. They just replaced one cow with a donkey… The placebo effect too is not scientifically understood, and yet it is still a legitimate term today.

We’d be happy if someone could share what happens in the video, for those blocked by Etrog.

A. Did you see the last episode in the Netflix series about life after death? There are testimonies there backed by researchers’ investigations about reincarnation. I’m interested in your opinion. There are demonstrations there showing that children know, in minute detail, murder scenes and personal details of what happened to them in previous incarnations. Take a look there. It’s clear to me that someone tried to refute it; I’m just interested in your opinion—what is the path to refuting it? What these testimonies seem to show, in my view, is that there is at least room for doubt, because if these were inventions it would be easy to catch the fabrication. There it looks pretty complicated—unless you come with the approach of corona deniers, who invent some conspiracy for every testimony.

Gil, is this directed at me?
My opinion is that, in principle, these phenomena could be real. I don’t dismiss them a priori, but I’m very suspicious of these reports, which usually turn out to be lies or misunderstandings. If there is clear evidence, there is room to discuss it. I’m not one of the closed-minded rationalists (or at least I try not to be).

Judaism too, like all religions, generally does not see these phenomena as real, except for the mystical factions. If tomorrow a person had a near-death experience or a revelation, and up above they gave him a detail that could make a difference in a religious court, would a religious court accept that evidence? For example, disqualifying a witness in a marriage ceremony or anything else.

Dybbuks too have been disproved. Psychiatric treatments produce the same results, and even better ones. Today almost all religious figures send mentally ill people to psychiatrists and do not take them for exorcisms.

It reminds me of a story about a man in Jerusalem during the Crusader period who became severely dehydrated. The Muslim doctor said he was dehydrated and began treating him; the Christian doctor said a demon had entered him, performed rituals, carved a cross into his forehead, and the patient died.

Videos are evidence of nothing. There are quite a few phenomena of optical illusion, human sensations, implanted memories (look up Elizabeth Loftus), Clever Hans (the horse that “knew” arithmetic), and more.

According to your logic, idol worshippers too can claim miracles, revelations, and things that support their approach. There are people who had near-death experiences and saw idols who told them they were idols. Arguments like these are not accepted in Judaism at all. If so, why are idol worshippers liable for death according to the Torah, Jews and gentiles alike?

Anyone interested should read about Elizabeth Loftus’s research on implanted memories. People who underwent hypnosis treatment invented memories out of their own minds and complained of sexual abuse by family members that never happened. People even went to prison because of this.
There is even a story about Christian pedophiles kidnapping children in Jerusalem. The police found nothing, and quite a few professionals claim that memories were implanted in the children.

Memory and the brain deceive us. There are quite a few optical and cognitive biases that prove this. In my opinion, this can explain a large part of all the reincarnation experiences people have.

I’m sorry. There is no reason to believe something if it has no evidence. And I’m not talking only about empirical evidence.
There are some good arguments on the site that raise a decent probability regarding quite a few things. But in the absence of any reasoning, any evidence, or any explanation, the claim cannot be accepted.
Otherwise one could also accept the existence of invisible unicorns, dragons, jinn, gods, mythological creatures, claims of other religions, and so on.
That does not mean these things do not exist, but in the absence of evidence the claim cannot be accepted.

It’s about a guy who got accepted to theater school and then corona ruined his dream, so he decided to make a video in order to become famous.
The thing is, which many people don’t get, that the rabbi-sensei there has much greater acting skills than the guy.

I really don’t understand the excitement over the video. This is a question for a psychiatrist, not a philosopher. I can only share that I’m a social worker who works with psychiatric patients (most of them schizophrenics), and this is something you can see from time to time. One of the people I accompanied was also “possessed by a dybbuk” that would take over his body, except that it would attack him when he stopped taking anti-psychotic medication. He occasionally goes to kabbalists to do “repairs” and other things for him (the “dybbuk,” of course, started crying, etc.). When he went to Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky to have him drive out the dybbuk, he told him, “Go to a psychiatrist.” There is also reference to this in the DSM under the category of schizophrenia.

Shai Zilberstein, how do you explain the father crying because his child had never cried before?

Yitzhakov, I really don’t know the case in all its details, but it doesn’t seem reasonable to arrive at the explanation that there is some external soul that took over the child before ruling out more familiar and closer explanations from psychiatry. There are really strange psychic phenomena in the human mind, but there are still more ways to explain the data before assuming various unnecessary assumptions.
There are case descriptions in the psychiatric literature of people who suddenly lost mental and physical abilities because of emotion. For example: a woman who was unable to drink water because of an old repressed experience that prevented it, or a person who stammered whenever he had to pronounce a syllable that reminded him of his father. The mind is very surprising…

Shai, I recommend you read the psychiatrist Brian Weiss’s book “Only Love Is Real.”