Spiritual Entity known as Dybbuk
Demons and spiritual entities are real forces capable of influencing human thoughts, emotions, decisions, and life trajectories. Under that premise, the word dybbuk is not a figure of speech but a named type of attaching spirit that behaves like a persistent pressure on a host. The 12‑page New York Magazine cover story from August 5, 1985 by Julie Baumgold, titled “The Bachelor Billionaire: On Pins and Needles With Leslie Wexner,” does not treat the dybbuk as a casual metaphor. It introduces it immediately, returns to it repeatedly, and uses it as the organizing lens for understanding Wexner’s personality, ambition, restlessness, and success.
The article opens with the force already active. “On the morning Leslie Wexner became a billionaire, he woke up worried, but this was not unusual. He always wakes up worried because of his dybbuk, which pokes and prods and gives him the itchiness of soul that he calls shpilkes. Sometimes he runs away from it on the roads of Columbus, or drives away from it in one of his Porsches, or flies from it in one of his planes, but then it is back, with his first coffee, his first meeting, nudging at him.” The dybbuk is not background color. It is the first explanation offered for his anxiety, drive, and behavior.
A dybbuk, also spelled dibbuk or dibbuq, derives from the Hebrew root dāḇaq, meaning to cling, adhere, or attach. In Jewish folklore and Kabbalistic mysticism, it refers to a malicious, disembodied human spirit, the restless soul of a deceased person, usually sinful, that possesses a living host by clinging to their body and soul. It is not a shed or mazik in classical Jewish demonology but a ghost‑like soul seeking resolution. The dybbuk temporarily inhabits the body, causing mental and physical distress, sometimes speaking through the victim in an alien voice or personality, until it departs voluntarily or through ritual expulsion. This distinguishes it from general demonic possession traditions and from positive soul imbuement known as ibur neshamah, in which a righteous soul temporarily aids a living person.
Historically, the fully formed dybbuk concept crystallized in sixteenth‑century Safed within the Lurianic Kabbalistic school of Rabbi Isaac Luria and his disciple Hayyim Vital. Luria’s doctrine of gilgul, the transmigration of souls for purification and repair, provided the theological foundation. Souls too sinful for immediate entry into paradise or judgment were believed to wander as denuded spirits.
If unresolved, they might attach themselves to the living. Early documented cases appear in Safed around 1571, preserved in Vital’s Sefer ha‑Ḥezyonot and later in Sha’ar ha‑Gilgulim. From there, the belief spread through Eastern European Jewish communities in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, preserved in Hebrew and Yiddish chapbooks and in Hasidic accounts. Ba’alei shem and tzadikim were said to perform exorcisms in synagogues before a minyan, using Psalms, shofar blasts, Divine Names, ritual circles, and promises of tikkun, spiritual repair, for the wandering soul.
The ritual was never framed as mere expulsion. The exorcist interrogated the spirit, eliciting its full name, sins, and reason for clinging. Through fumigation, coercive prayer, and invocation of Divine Names, the dybbuk was compelled to speak. Seven black candles might be lit; seven Torah scrolls removed; Psalm 91, Psalm 20, Psalm 90, and Ana B’Koach recited; specific shofar blasts sounded to shake the spirit loose. The exorcist promised or enacted a tikkun on the dybbuk’s behalf, charity, Torah study, prayer, or mitzvot performed in its name. In Lurianic theology this produced dual benefit: the host was freed and the wandering soul redeemed. The extracted sparks of goodness were returned to the Treasury of Souls or permitted purification, while the remaining evil residue was annihilated. Signs of successful departure sometimes included violent convulsions, a bloody fingernail or toenail marking the point of exit, and the victim’s sudden return to full normal consciousness.
In classical accounts, dybbuks were most often described as male souls possessing female hosts, especially brides on the eve of marriage. Symptoms included altered voice, convulsions, secret knowledge, swellings, paralysis, hysteria‑like states, and the speaking of information known only to the deceased. Entry was not random. Protocol literature repeatedly states that a dybbuk attaches through a spiritual opening created by the living person’s own secret sin, neglected mitzvah, improper mezuzah, or unresolved transgression. In some accounts, the spirit enters through the mouth; in female victims, especially on the eve of an unwanted marriage, entry through the vagina is explicitly recorded. Improper burial of the deceased or unfinished atonement could also produce a wandering soul seeking attachment. Physical signs of presence sometimes included localized swelling, markings on the body where the spirit clung, or dramatic changes in voice and demeanor.
The Zohar, as expounded in later Kabbalistic tradition, emphasized protective measures such as properly affixed mezuzot bearing the Divine Name Shaddai, pious observance, prayer, Psalms, and amulets. Folklore preserves stories in which dybbuks identify neglected or empty mezuzot as entry points. Unlike Christian grimoires or Solomonic demon catalogues, dybbuks are not structured as named infernal hierarchies but as human souls trapped between worlds. They may temporarily inhabit animals or even cling to objects while moving between locations before attaching to a human host.
Against that historical backdrop, the article explicitly names Wexner’s dybbuk a demon. “And now, perhaps, it is time to reintroduce Leslie Wexner’s dybbuk, the demon that always wakes up in the morning with Wexner and tweaks and pulls at him. When he was a boy, his father called it tummel [Yiddish for commotion/turmoil/churning], a churning, so he feels ‘molten’ and unformed, pricked by these spiritual pins and needles. He met this demon again when he was 40 and already worth half a billion, when he climbed the mountain in front of his house in Vail and almost froze to death and decided to change his life. This demon he calls ‘terminal shpikes’, which makes him wander from house to house, repeating the pattern of his childhood on a luxurious scale, wanting more, swallowing companies larger than his own.”
Within the article, the dybbuk explains why satisfaction never arrives. It is tied to bachelorhood, to six homes with a seventh under construction, to planes and cars and multiple relationships. It connects to his refusal to feel like an adult. He says, “I hate to think of myself as an adult, because when you do, you die.” The profile states that his shpilkes keeps him out of balance, emotionally stunted, a part of him, the treasured boy‑son, lagging behind. The demon is presented as both wound and engine.
The business consequences are direct. The dybbuk whispers expansion. It is described as the force behind rapid growth, over‑expansion in 1979, acquisitions like Lerner and Lane Bryant, and even the hostile takeover attempt on Carter Hawley Hale. The impulse is summarized as a pressure that says, “More. What next?” In a literal reading, this reflects an attachment entity that feeds on motion and escalation. Success does not quiet it. Success fuels it.
The article reinforces this through patterns of behavior. Music plays constantly in his homes, offices, and stores because he hates to hear nothing. Silence creates space, and space threatens stillness. He keeps a daily organizer that tracks every half hour, ten goals per day, evaluations of each meeting, yet he still feels he has wasted time. Physical escape appears in jogging, travel, planes, constant movement. Comfort is treated as proximity to death. Stillness is avoided.
If demons are real, attachment implies extraction. The dybbuk does not need to destroy its host. It needs anxiety, ambition, restlessness, and identity fusion with expansion. It thrives in secrecy, overwork, isolation, and ego‑driven environments. It weakens under grounding, accountability, spiritual discipline, stable relationships, and rest. A calendar that never ends becomes ideal terrain.
The mountain incident described in the article marks an intensification. A brush with freezing death becomes a turning moment. In spiritual attachment models, trauma and mortality awareness create openings. Shock destabilizes defenses. The text frames that event as the moment he met the demon again, suggesting not removal but deepening integration.
The profile does not condemn the dybbuk. It romanticizes it. On page 10 of the article, it references a Jewish saying that everyone has a little pekl, a bundle of trouble. If all bundles were thrown into a ring, one would pick up one’s own again. The article states that Les would pick up his dybbuk, his shpilkes, because it is part of his genius. It fuels creativity. It fuels vision. It aligns him with figures like Michelangelo, whose agony produces greatness.
The closing lines cement identification. “Les Wexner picks up his heavy black case and flies off in his Challenger, with his dybbuk sitting next to him, taunting and poking him with impatience, that little demon he really loves. The dybbuk turns his face. What does he look like? ‘Me,’ says Les Wexner.” The article ends not with distance from the entity but with fusion. The dybbuk is not expelled. It is embraced.
Modern scholarly treatments of the dybbuk, including J.H. Chajes’ Between Worlds, Matt Goldish’s collected studies, and Morris M. Faierstein’s 2024 monograph The Dybbuk: Its Origins and History, confirm the historical development outlined above and preserve translations of original sixteenth‑ and seventeenth‑century possession protocols.
The dybbuk functions as a clinging intelligence that thrives on motion, ambition, imbalance, and perpetual dissatisfaction. It humanizes him while simultaneously explaining why stillness never arrives. Even with planes, mansions, acquisitions, philanthropy, and recognition, the dybbuk wakes first and boards the plane beside him.
