The "Sacred Fool" in Judaism

From Jill Hammer and Holly Shere's forthcoming book, The Hebrew Priestess:

"The Fool", Pat B. Allen

One role of the sacred fool is to bring sexuality into the public sphere—to name that area of life and make it visible.  At the ancient celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries, women celebrated Demeter and Persephone by telling bawdy jokes and stories.  In Japan, the goddess Uzume lured the sulking sun goddess Amaterasu out of her cave by telling bawdy jokes and dancing lasciviously—thus saving the world from chaos and darkness.  In sixteenth century Europe, Jewish women would tell bawdy jokes to the bride on the night before her wedding.  The bride would sit with a bowl in her lap, and as her hair was braided, people would throw money and presents into the bowl.  Women would sit around the bride, “chatting with her to make her merry, and telling her about naughty things to make her laugh.”  This ritual would have defused the bride’s fear and tension, and perhaps
also taught her something about the sexual realm.

At the wedding, the foolery continued. The koyletch tanz (challah dance) might be performed by the grandmother of the bride—she would dance with loaves of bread and ask the groom: “What do you want, the challah (bread) or the kallah (bride)?”   Another wedding custom was the dance of the mothers-in-law, who pretended to fight with one another and then make up.

In another humorous ritual, performed on the Sabbath after the wedding, the bridegroom would throw the bride his prayer shawl after morning services.  She would throw them back to him.  In some communities, many other women would join in tugging and throwing the prayer shawl.  Again, this was a way of defusing the tension between the newlyweds and bringing the bride into the community of married women.

In medieval Europe, the fool was an important part of Jewish weddings, in spite of the disapproval of rabbis. The marshallik was a humorous master of ceremonies.   The letz was a clown: a juggler, acrobat, and entertainer.  A badchan or jester performed at Jewish weddings to delight the bride and groom, and acted as a dance leader, encouraging the guests to dance before the bride.   Sometimes the badchan composed satirical verses about the guests to make the bride and groom laugh.  These sacred fools performed in tanzhausen or dance-houses, buildings built especially for weddings.  Sometimes male fools dressed as women.  These traditions date back to the 1300’s, and to the troubadours who entertained at medieval Jewish weddings.  Mostly they were men, but sometimes they were women.   Jewish women even formed their own klezmer bands and would go to weddings to “contribute to the festivities.”  The fool was a much more popular figure at the wedding than the rabbi or cantor.

We can see a female badchan (a badchanit) in the wedding scene of the movie The Dybbuk.  In 1914, S. Ansky, a Yiddish playwright, published a play called The Dybbuk.  In this play, a bride, Leah’le, is possessed by a dybbuk, a spirit that houses itself in a human body.  The dybbuk is actually the spirit of Hannan, who was destined to marry Leah’le.  Leah’le’s father Sender had promised Hannan’s father that their children would wed.   However, Leah’le’s father reneges on this deal and plans to marry Leah’le to a wealthy man instead.  Hannan, who loves Leah’le, dies upon hearing this news.   At her wedding, Leah’le becomes possessed.  A Chassidic sage conducts a grand exorcism ritual, during which Sender’s treachery is exposed and the souls of Hannan and his father are propitiated.  The dybbuk is supposedly appeased—but then the bride Leah’le sees Hannan appear before her, and steps out of the magical protective circle to reunite with her beloved in death.

The movie version of this play, filmed in 1937 in Poland, is a window into Jewish culture before the Holocaust.  We see the guests entertaining the bride on the day of the wedding.  A badchanit encourages the guests to frighten the bride by pretending to be ghosts, demons, and zombies.  Judith Berg, who is also the choreographer of the movie, plays the badchanit.

The Dance of Death (toytntants) in the movie is preceded by a cantor’s incantation of a Yiddish prayer admonishing the wedding guests that they all must face death: ‘From dust you came and to dust you will return… in the end your bones will be carried to the grave.  Everything which lives must finally pass away.”  As the Dance of Death begins, the guests bob up and down, their erratic moves lending eeriness to the scene.  The badchanit, dressed in a skull mask and a garment with white wing-like sleeves and a striped overtunic, cavorts and gestures before the terrified-looking bride.  The women guests look on, entertained, as Death reaches out again and again to try to touch the bride.  Finally, Death takes Leah’le’s hands and dances with her, while the bride imagines the face of her true bridegroom, Hannan.  The bride puts her head on Death’s shoulder and is led away in a dreamy embrace.

According to Berg’s biographers, this Dance of Death is a traditional Jewish wedding dance that Judith Berg choreographs for the movie. In its usual context, the dance would have served, in some way, to remind the couple of the reality that life leads to death, and also to propitiate death and keep it away from the wedded couple.  In that sense, although the dance was meant to entertain, it had a magical purpose.

Judith Berg is acting as a priestess: a sacred fool who frightens the bride and also presumably offers protection from the forces of death.  The dance of the woman Death with the woman Bride is a folk representation of the repressed sacred feminine, which encompasses creative and destructive forces.  In the end, Life and Death dance together and are merged.

This theme emerges in other Jewish weddings as well: in some Ashkenazi weddings, musicians played Kol Nidre (the most solemn Yom Kippur liturgy) as the groom walked to the chuppah, and then a “light” piece for the bride, while wealthy women of the town danced around her.  The combination of death and sex, the two untouchable topics (and from earliest time, subjects connected to women), was often the province of the Fool.

The “sacred fool” tradition is preserved today in the “shtick” or funny dancing that still occurs at some Jewish weddings to entertain the bride and groom, and also in the “tisch,” a table where a groom, or both members of a couple, attempt to give a sermon while the guests laugh and sing silly songs.  All this foolishness helps the couple not to feel nervous, which is part of its intent.

The fool’s job is to mention the unmentionable: to call to mind the “elephant in the room.”   At a wedding, the elephant in the room is death.  Weddings are about joy, love, hope and the future.  Death is the guest no one wants to invite.  So it makes a great deal of sense that one role the badchan played was that of Death.  The Fool enacts Death to release the tension inherent in a ritual creating an “eternal bond” between mortal people.

The custom of the Jewish sacred fool gave rise to Yiddish theater (in which many women actors thrived), Jewish Borscht Belt entertainers, and eventually modern Jewish comedians and comediennes.  In the modern synagogue humor is often confined to costumes and plays on the holiday of Purim, but sacred foolery is still alive and well in Jewish performers.

Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD is an author, educator, midrashist, myth-weaver, and ritualist. She is the co-founder of Kohenet: The Hebrew Priestess Institute, and the director of Tel Shemesh, a website and community celebrating and creating Jewish earth-based traditions. She is also the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic Jewish seminary.


Holly Taya Shere is a folklorist, ritual artist and educator on women's spirituality and Renewal Judaism.   Holly received her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania in 1998—her Master's thesis was titled "Everything She Touches Changes: A Feminist Ethnography of Women Integrating Spirituality, Politics and Creativity." She spent several years priestessing in earth-based spiritual communities and working as a healer before returning to Judaism and becoming a student, teacher and organizer in Jewish spiritual communities.