From Blessing to Curse
By Ofri Ilani
The kabbalistic pulsa denura curse entered the parlance of the broad Israeli public in October 1995, after the airing of a film depicting its being cast against prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. One month later Rabin was assassinated. Most people assumed that the curse was of ancient mystical origins, but a recent study shows it was in fact invented and used to political ends by officials within Israel?s ultra-Orthodox community.
The curse placed on Rabin’s head that October 2, as punishment for having relinquished parts of the Land of Israel to the Palestinians, was described as a "kabbalistic ceremony for the casting of sinister curses,? adapted by three nameless Jerusalem sages from the Zohar, the principal text of kabbalistic mysticism.
Since then, both former prime minister Ariel Sharon and his successor, Ehud Olmert, have been subjected to the decree of pulsa denura (Aramaic for ?lashes of fire?). So have the organizers of the Gay Pride Parade in Jerusalem. Texts describing the ritual describe 10 sages who gather at midnight, following a three-day fast. As they blow on a shofar, they extinguish black candles. Those invoking the curse are required to name the guardian angel entrusted with safeguarding the condemned. The process of invoking the pulsa denura carries the danger of transforming it into a blessing, or even worse; of causing the curse to be turned back onto themselves.
The hype around the pulsa denura, and its strangeness, led some researchers to question its origins, and its place within Judaism. Dr. Zion Zohar, of Florida International University?s religious studies department, claims to have discovered that the ceremony in its current form ?is not of Jewish origins.?
According to Zohar, who published his findings recently in the periodical Modern Judaism, the ceremony took shape in Israel in the first years after the state?s founding. It had its beginnings in disputes within the ultra-Orthodox community.
Zohar says he sees no evidence of the pulsa denura having been performed prior to 1948. The first instance ever recorded, he says, was in the 1950s, when members of Jerusalem?s tiny anti-Zionist Neturei Karta sect cast the curse on a burial society undertaker who had agreed to relocate graves from the site that later became the government complex at Givat Ram, in the capital.
’It was a political tool, which the extreme right later adopted for its own purposes,? Zohar says. Although the term "pulsa denura" does appear in the Zohar, the Florida researcher says that its original meaning was the opposite of its modern understanding. "Pulsa denura" appears there as a divine force that protects from evil,’ Zohar says.
Haaretz.com