Demons, Mazal, and Tzelem Elokim: What a Halakhically Observant Jew Must (and Need Not) Believe

What I am about to discuss will be fairly extensive, so I ask for your patience until the end. Please do not assume that I am taking any particular stance prematurely. My intention is simply to present the various facts and perspectives involved before we proceed to explore them more deeply, through the lens of their inner dimensions and divine mechanics.

If we look around us at the world of Torah-observant Jews today, we see clearly that there are people who believe in these concepts – demons, evil spirits, or, shall we say, negative spiritual forces that exist in the world – and there are also people, halakhically observant Jews in every way, who reject these ideas and these beliefs. We can find rabbis who accept these ideas, believe in them, and teach their students that these things are real and exist; and there are other rabbis who reject these ideas, discount them, and tell their students not to believe in them. So yes, it is a very valid question, and it is clear why many people might be a little bit confused as to whether Judaism requires that a person believe in such ideas.

If we look at the world of Torah literature throughout the ages—particularly works rooted in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism—we indeed find many references to demons, harmful spirits, and various negative influences said to attach themselves to people or objects under certain conditions. Such discussions appear frequently and are well-documented within that body of literature.

At the same time, when we examine the writings of more rationalist thinkers and authorities in Jewish history—such as Rav Saadya Gaon, the Rambam, and several others—we find a very different approach. These sages dismissed such beliefs entirely, regarding them as unfounded. According to their view, notions of demons, malevolent spirits, or spiritual forces that cling to or attack people were not accepted as part of their understanding of reality.

What emerges, therefore, is a simple fact: within the Jewish tradition across history, multiple viewpoints have existed on this subject.

It is also true that one can point to numerous examples—from the era of the Tanakh, through the Second Temple period, the Mishnah and Talmud, the age of the Geonim, the medieval period, and even into modern times—where Jews clearly believed in such phenomena. Archaeological discoveries, such as eighth-century amulets found in the Golan containing incantations intended to repel evil spirits, further demonstrate that some Jewish communities did subscribe to these ideas, just as others did not.

Today, many—perhaps most—educated individuals in contemporary society find it difficult, if not impossible, to accept the existence of demons or malevolent spirits. In this light, the positions of figures such as Rav Saadya Gaon and the Rambam appear more aligned with what is commonly regarded as a reasonable and informed perspective.

Thus, the claim that an Orthodox Jew must believe in demons or harmful spirits is not accurate.

It is true that the Talmud Bavli contains several references to shedim, spirits, magical practices, and the possibility of being vulnerable to sorcery under certain circumstances. These themes do appear within the Bavli. However, when examining the Talmud Yerushalmi, we find that such topics are virtually absent; demons and related concepts are rarely mentioned, if at all. This suggests that even in antiquity, differing approaches and sensibilities existed. Beliefs of this nature appear to have been more common in Bavel—historically known as a center for occult practices—than in Eretz Yisrael.

Even today, some Jews whose families originate from regions like Persia or surrounding areas continue to preserve certain folk beliefs. For example, a student recently shared that his grandmother, who came from Persia, would call out a warning before pouring water on the floor, so as not to disturb the shedim believed to be present. This serves as a contemporary reminder of how such traditions persisted in certain cultures, particularly in places long associated with these ideas.

It is reasonable to assume that during the time of Hazal, some sages accepted aspects of these beliefs, while others did not. In Eretz Yisrael, such notions appear to have held less influence among the learned, while the general populace may have been more susceptible to the surrounding folk culture. In Bavel, however, these beliefs were more widespread, even among some scholars, as they were seen as part of the accepted understanding of the world—much like the once-universal belief in spontaneous generation.

Regarding the question of washing one’s hands in the morning due to a lingering negative force: it is true that the Shulchan Aruch, following the Tur, cites this idea, which is rooted in the Bavli’s discussion in Berakhot. Rashi interprets the passage as referring to a ruach ra‘ah that rests specifically on the hands upon awakening, requiring three pourings of water to remove it. The Zohar also mentions such a concept, which further influenced halakhic codification.

However, Rabbenu Hananel—drawing from even earlier traditions—interprets the same Talmudic statement differently. According to him, the negative force pertains to the eyes rather than the hands, and thus the washing refers to the eyelids. This alternative reading aligns with the continuation of the gemara, which discusses remedies for harm affecting the eyes, making the context appear more coherent.

This raises the point that the interpretation underlying the Shulchan Aruch is but one understanding, while others exist that shift the focus entirely. Moreover, many Geonim and Rishonim—including the Rambam—omit this idea altogether from their halakhic summaries. They discuss washing for prayer or before bread, but not washing hands three times in the morning due to a spiritual force. This omission invites the question of why.

Two plausible explanations arise. One is that some authorities simply viewed the idea as rooted in superstition and therefore not halakhically substantive. Another possibility is that, even if they acknowledged the concept, they regarded it as a middat hasidut—an act of piety rather than a formal obligation. Notably, the Ramak, one of the greatest kabbalists, explicitly describes morning washing for these reasons as a middat hasidut in his commentary Or Yaqar.

As a wise man once remarked, the Talmud Bavli indeed contains the Oral Torah—but not everything found within the Bavli is, in and of itself, Oral Torah.

It has now been clarified that halakhah does not require a Jew to believe in literal, independent demonic beings in the folkloric sense. The Talmud Bavli certainly speaks in the language of shedim, mazikim, and ruah ra‘ah, but great authorities such as Rav Saadya Gaon and the Rambam understood much of this as either metaphor, local culture, or non-binding aggadah. At the same time, the inner Torah does not leave these words empty. It takes the same vocabulary and gives it a very precise, non-mythological meaning.

The point of departure is the Tzelem Elokim—the Divine Image. To be created in the image of Elokim means that a human being has been entrusted with a god-like creative power: every thought, word, and deed shapes spiritual realities. When that power is misused, the result is what Kabbalah calls kelipot—husks, parasitic forces of concealment that feed on misdirected divine energy.  

In this light, “devils and demons” are not rival gods; they are the autonomous forms taken by our own distortions. They are “negative spiritual entities we ourselves forge through transgression, the manifestations of our own inner distortions.”   When Hazal speak of shedim and mazikim, the inner dimensions of the Torah is describing the way repeated patterns of sin, fear, arrogance, lust, hatred, and despair coagulate into real spiritual structures that then influence us in turn. They are our “children,” built out of our misused creative power.

From here the door opens to gilgul.

According to the chain of Kabbalah from the Arizal, no spiritual spark is ever lost. “Every soul, or fragment of a soul, must ultimately return to its divine source. Gilgul is the vehicle for this return, the long and winding journey of tikkun (rectification).”   A transgression is not just a mark on a heavenly ledger; it is a concrete distortion in the soul, a blockage in the flow of shefa through the five levels of Nefesh–Ruach–Neshamah–Chayah–Yechidah.   That “cosmic gunk” must be dealt with. Teshuvah can clear it at its root. But what is not rectified has to find a context where it can be worked through.

Here is the radical, sobering teaching that hovers behind this whole framework: “Every single gentile soul is a gilgul, a spiritual incarnation, of a prior transgression that originated from within a Jewish soul.”   This is not a statement of superiority or contempt; it is the opposite. It means the Jewish soul stands at the root of a vast, interdependent system. We are the trunk; the nations are the branches. “The nations are tethered to us, literally, as branches are to a root.”  

When we perform mitzvot, the root is clear and the branches receive pure shefa. When we transgress, we twist the root, and that distortion becomes a soul that must be born into the world carrying that specific imprint.

So for example: a Jew commits a violent act out of rage. That act creates a sheid of violence and a deep fracture in the Ruach of that soul.   If it is not fully healed through teshuvah, that distortion incarnates as a non-Jewish soul whose life will be bound up with the struggle over violence: perhaps born into a war culture, or with a fiery temperament. That person is not a “demon” in any derogatory sense. He is a living opportunity for tikkun of that very energy. The “spider-web” connection between root and branch means that when the original Jewish soul finally does teshuvah, the flow of light changes: “It is as if a spiritual surgeon has cleared a blocked artery…this healed flow reaches the connected gentile soul…empowering its own inherent capacity for good, weakening the hold of the kelipah.”  

In this sense, the nations truly are partners in creation with Israel. Their very existence, their struggles and choices, are the arena in which our missed responsibilities are being rectified, often at great cost and with immense dignity on their side. A righteous gentile who overcomes the very trait that brought his soul into being “not only rectifies itself but, in doing so, completes the rectification for the root Jewish transgression that brought it into being.”   That is why Hasidei Umot HaOlam have a portion in the World to Come: their righteousness heals a fracture that started with us.

This is what it means that the nations are governed by mazal while Israel is “above mazal.” The nations move within patterns, archetypal configurations of energy—the very patterns that crystallized out of Jewish actions. The Jewish people, when we are aligned with Torah, are meant to stand at the place where those patterns are generated and re-written. Our teshuvah is not self-help; it is cosmic engineering.

Seen this way, many hard pesukim fall into place. Again and again in Tanakh, HaShem says that when we abandon His ways, He “raises up” nations against us. Here the language is brutally honest: “The spiritual state of the Jewish people directly shapes the spiritual and physical reality of the nations.”   A generation sunk in sinat hinam will find itself facing external hatred and conflict; a generation of hesed and tzedakah will see nations more open to compassion and justice.   The nations become a macro-mirror of our heart. That is frightening, but it is also a profound sign of HaShem’s unity: nothing is random, nothing is outside His one system.

What, then, of “demons,” “angels,” and “evil spirits”?

Given everything we have said, it should be clear that the cryptic language of Hazal is not childish magic. The Zohar and Arizal speak in code, because in their time, to state such things plainly would have either endangered them or led people into crude misunderstandings. They therefore wrapped teachings in images of malakhim, shedim, mazikim. Those who reduced this to literal monster-theology—and other religions that built entire horror-folklore systems on top of it—missed the point entirely. In this system, a “malakh” is a force-vector of divine energy created by mitzvot; a “sheid” is the form taken by misused energy; a “mazik” is a damaging impulse or thought-form riding on that energy.  

Kabbalah goes further: the kelipot are explicitly called “parasitic forces of concealment…that feed on misdirected divine energy.”   That word “parasitic” is not poetic; it is exact. These husks cling to the life-force of the soul and of the world as a parasite clings to a host. Before the sin in Gan Eden, there is no sickness, no death in the human sense. That enters once the Tzelem is fractured, once the flow of shefa is forced through clogged and contaminated channels. Illness, in this vision, is part of the post-Edenic reality of mixture: physical pathogens and spiritual “parasites” together express the deeper truth that something in the flow has been diverted into the Other Side.

So when a person in this world is struck by illness—whether a simple cold or flu, or something more severe such as diabetes, cancer, or a virulent disease—these, too, stand in inner relationship to a spiritual imbalance “above,” meaning within the soul of the person below who is not yet fully reflecting Tzelem Elokim. The body becomes the screen on which these distortions are projected. Such sicknesses can be understood, on the plane of sod, as particular configurations of those same “evil spiritual forces”: not conscious beings, not entities with free will, but non-conscious formations of misdirected energy and blockage. They are among the ways HaShem interacts with us, measure for measure, inviting us to repair the connection between below and above. To live as Tzelem Elokim requires avodah—the ongoing work of aligning thought, word, and deed with the six directions, the six middot of the Sefirot, as the human being stands at the center and chooses how to conduct the flow.

To say that does not mean we blame the sick, or deny biology. The same HaShem who runs gilgul and shefa also runs immunology and microbiology. Rather, it means that behind the surface layer of viruses and bacteria there are patterns of distortion and concealment that have been allowed to persist because human beings, collectively, have fed certain kelipot for a very long time. When a generation is obsessed with fear, rage, consumption, or cruelty, the kelipot that embody those traits are thick and strong; they exert pressure both on consciousness and, ultimately, on the body of the world.

What, then, of those who say, “But I have seen demons”?

Within this framework, two things can be true at once. First, human consciousness is itself a powerful projector. Created in the image of Elokim, the imagination can clothe invisible patterns in vivid form. A person who is filled with fear and steeped in demon-lore will likely experience their own inner distortions as terrifying external figures. They “see” what they have already decided exists. That does not make their experience trivial. It means they are encountering, in symbolic form, the very mazikin that their mind has been feeding.

Second, there are times—especially in unstable mental or spiritual states—when the border between the inner screen and the outer world becomes thin. People may then move through a reality where their own projections, the ambient energies of a place, and the deeper spiritual patterns all blur together. Kabbalah will call this an encounter with “spirits.” Psychology will call it hallucination or psychosis. In either language, the task is the same: to return to Shema Yisrael.

“Shema Yisrael, HaShem Elokeinu, HaShem Echad” (Devarim 6:4) is not just a creed. It is a spiritual weapon. The whole system of shedim, mazikin, kelipot, gilgul, and nations only exists within that aleph of Echad. There is no second power, no independent evil. When a Jew begins to attribute real, independent power to “demons,” to mazal, to any force at all—when one starts to live in fear of them—one has already slipped, in a subtle way, toward avodah zarah. That is the real danger, not the creatures themselves.

Here, too, the language of the stars and heavens must be understood correctly. When our sages speak of the “hosts of heaven,” or when later writings speak of the Sefirot in imagery of stars, constellations, sun and moon, this is not a claim that the physical stars are the Sefirot or possess autonomous power. These are metaphors, cryptic garments used to point toward realities that are above nature and beyond the physical cosmos. There may be correspondences between upper patterns and lower configurations, but the lower lights in the sky are not the Sefirot themselves; they are symbols. To mistake the symbol for the reality is the essence of idolatry.

And the same is true of Hebrew letters and “divine names.” We speak of the Torah as the blueprint of creation, and of the Hebrew letters as the building blocks of reality. All of this is true—yet only as metaphor pointing beyond itself. The letters as we see and write them are themselves created things, vessels within creation, not the pre-creation divine speech itself. The true dibbur Eloki that brings worlds into being precedes and transcends any written form; it is the simple, undivided will and wisdom of HaShem. The letters, then, are tethers—interfaces that allow the finite mind to relate to what is essentially beyond all form. Through them, reality can be influenced and re-shaped, but it is never the ink-strokes or sounds that “do” anything. All power remains only with HaShem.

From this perspective, all twenty-two letters are in truth one letter, and that “one letter” is HaShem Himself, Echad. We perceive a differentiated alphabet because our minds require images, distinctions, and diagrams in order to be taught. In the same way that each Jew is described as a “letter” in the Sefer Torah, and the people of Israel together form a scroll, so too the letters are metaphors for soul and for the facets of the Divine that can be revealed in creation. But the danger is clear: if we begin to attribute independent power to the letters, to the permutations, to “names,” we risk turning even these holy tools into a subtle form of idolatry.

Yes, there are traditions of shemot, segulot, practices that work with divine names and letter-combinations. Whether, when, and how such things should be done is itself a vast and delicate discussion. But even there, the inner point is that one is turning to HaShem alone, not to the letters as intermediaries. The Torah is not an intermediary between us and HaShem; the Torah is HaShem’s revealed will and wisdom, and the root of our own soul as Tzelem Elokim is of that same oneness. The letters are the only “images” we are given to describe what may not be imaged; they are the permitted diagrams in a world where we are forbidden to carve pictures of what is above and below. They help our animal mind begin to grasp what cannot be grasped, but they are not the thing itself.

The danger is that a person encounters these texts only on the intellectual or scholarly level, without engaging in the work of mussar and refinement that makes one into a living Tzelem Elokim. Such a person can easily fall into giving actual power to stars, constellations, horoscopes, and astrological signs, embracing the very forms of avodah zarah that the Torah explicitly forbids. We see this among the nations of the world in the cult of astrology and in the obsession with “what the stars say.” And in truth, all of these practices are forbidden not only by halakhah but already on the level of the written Torah itself. The transmission of Kabbalah, Torah she-be‘al Peh, was always careful to speak of these matters in guarded, allegorical terms, because there is an obligation to conceal sod from those who are not yet ready. Only in the time close to redemption are these secrets allowed to be clarified more openly, and even then only in order to free people from bondage to the symbols and return them to the One who stands beyond all images.

The inner reading therefore does two things at once. It takes the language of Hazal and Kabbalah with full seriousness—there really are spiritual consequences, there really are parasitic forces, there really is gilgul, there really is a web binding our actions to the fate of the nations. At the same time, it absolutely refuses to grant any of these things independent standing. They are all functions of the one Divine, all inside HaShem’s unity, all subordinate to the Tzelem Elokim and the power of teshuvah.

From here, the discussion naturally turns to how this changes the way we read history, relate to non-Jews, pray Shema, and engage in our own inner work of tikkun ha-middot and teshuvah, and how much responsibility we truly bear for the “demons” and “angels” walking around in the world right now.