Do Jewish And Muslim Leaders Engage In Metaphysical Battles?
JERUSALEM — What motivated the smashing on April 23 of the main gate to Damascus’s historic Jewish cemetery and the digging of a pit disturbing the tomb of renowned mystic Rabbi Hayyim ben Joesph Vital?
The desecration can be understood as part of the history of Jewish and Muslim leaders battling on the metaphysical astral plain in parallel to the normative Israeli-Arab military conflict.
In the year 1570, the Vital, who was born in what is today israel, became the leading disciple of the visionary Rabbi Isaac Luria. They were at the center of the kabbalistic circle that flourished in the 16th century in the Galilee town, including mystic luminaries like rabbis Josef Karo, Moshe Cordovero and Moshe Alshich. In the year following his mentor’s death, Vital recorded Luria’s oral teachings in “Etz Chaim” (“The Tree of Life”), considered the primary text of Lurianic Kabbala. Luria, also known by the honorific title Arizal, put almost nothing in writing.
Leaving the city of Safed in 1577, the rabbi went to Egypt but soon returned to the Galilee, moving to the village of Ein Zeitim, later to Jerusalem, then back to Safed. In 1594, Vital settled in Damascus. There he wrote “Sha'ar haGilgulim” (“The Gate of Reincarnations”) based on Luria’s teachings about souls being reborn.
Buried in Damascus, Vital’s grave remained a site of reverence for Jews across the region. The sage rested in peace there for more than three centuries until 1965 when a consortium of French construction companies began building Damascus International Airport. It is located 30 kilomters (19 miles) southeast of the Syrian capital in the governate of Rif-Dimashq, a major site of fighting in the Syrian Civil War that broke out in 2011.
In the ensuing years, the airport was repeatedly expanded and modernized to meet the increasing demands of travelers. Among the improvements was the construction a highway. That motorway sliced through the centuries-old Jewish cemetery near the Jewish Quarter in the southeastern quadrant of Damascus’s Old City. Despite protests, Vital’s grave was relocated.
Some would consider the fiery crash on August 20, 1975 of Československé Státní Aerolinie’s flight 540 from Prague to Tehran via Damascus divine retribution for disturbing the sage’s remains. Out of the 128 passengers and crew on board, two survived the ČSA jet’s ill-fated approach to Damascus International Airport.
A second mysterious and disastrous accident involving the airport occurred on a foggy night on January 21, 1994. Speeding in his Mercedes sports car, Bassel al-Assad – the 32-year-old eldest son of Syrian president Hafez al-Assad – lost control and smashed into a barrier. Not wearing a seatbelt, he was instantly killed. Sitting beside him, was the brigadier general and spymaster Hafez Makhlouf, later hospitalized with injuries. The chauffeur in the back seat was unhurt.
Fast forward 31 years to April 24 of this year, the day before Vital’s yahrzeit (the anniversary of his death according to the Hebrew calendar), with Syria reduced to a shambles by the civil war that erupted on March 2011 and resulted in the toppling this past December of the Ba'athist regime ruled by Bassel’s younger brother Bashar al-Assad.
Who then desecrated Vital’s tomb? Was it someone looking for his bones?
Jewish leaders around the world were quick to express their outrage. The Alliance of Rabbis in Islamic States, an umbrella group representing rabbis from Jewish communities across Muslim-majority nations, condemned the vandalism.
“We are deeply shocked and saddened by the desecration of the tomb of Rabbi Chaim Vital this Thursday in Damascus,” the organization said in a statement. “Jews have lived in Syria for thousands of years and are an integral part of its history. We urgently call on the Syrian government to immediately secure Jewish holy sites, synagogues, and cemeteries and ensure their safety, security, and well-being.”
“This act of desecration is not just an offense against Jewish heritage,” the group added, “but an affront to the broader principle of protecting religious and cultural diversity in the Middle East.”
In a post on X, the organization tagged Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Calls for the Syrian government to act have so far gone unanswered. Others, meanwhile, understood the grave desecration as part of a divine plan.
Writing on the haredi website VINnews, Rabbi Yair Hoffman warned that “divine retribution awaits.”
“This desecration occurring just before Rav Vital’s yahrzeit cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence,” the rabbi said. “We must recognize this as a deliberate act perpetrated by those who harbor ill will toward our holy sages and, by extension, toward the Jewish people. They did this just before his Yahrzeit! History has repeatedly shown, those who raise their hands against our kedoshim invariably face divine retribution. The neshama of this great tzaddik will surely bring about heavenly judgment upon those responsible, as we have already begun to witness.
“Few realize the profound spiritual role Rav Chaim Vital zt”l continues to play in the affairs of the region. The great mekubal serves as a spiritual guardian watching over Israel from his resting place in Damascus, where he was sent by the Arizal to overcome powerful forces of tumah (spiritual impurity). The Arizal himself revealed that Rav Vital possessed the neshama of Chizkiyahu HaMelech (King Hezekiah). His presence in Damascus was no accident but rather a Divine mission. Recently, Rabbi Daniel Glatstein pointed out that when Syrian authorities previously attempted to move his kever to construct a highway, despite the valiant efforts of the local rabbi, Rav Nissim Indivo HaKohen, to prevent this desecration, they proceeded nonetheless.
“The consequences of disturbing the tzaddik’s rest were swift and profound. In 1994, Bassel al-Assad, who was being groomed to succeed his father as Syria’s ruler, met his fate on that very highway built over Rav Chaim Vital’s original burial place. Traveling at high speed through fog toward the airport, his life ended instantly in a crash. This shocking turn of events propelled his brother Bashar—then a medical student in London with no political aspirations — to return to Syria and eventually assume leadership. As we know, Bashar al-Assad became a ruthless dictator responsible for the deaths of countless innocent people. Yet his downfall, too, came with stunning swiftness—a clear manifestation of the tzaddik’s continued influence in Syrian affairs. Those who disturb the peace of our holy sages invite profound consequences upon themselves and their nations.”
In addition to Vital’s tomb in Damascus, scores of apocryphal stories circulate in the Orthodox Jewish world about rabbis whose graves are imbued with supernatural powers.
Equally gripping is the apocryphal story of Rabbi Yaakov Abuhazeira, the grandfather of the miracle worker the Baba Sali who died in 1880. Known as the Abir Yaakov, the saintly rabbi fell ill in Egypt while en route from Morocco to the Holy Land. He asked to be buried where he was dying, in the village of Damityo three kilometers (1.8 miles) south of the Nile delta city of Damanhur, rather than be interred in Alexandria’s Jewish cemetery.
Some Jews connect Abuhazeira’s merit with the Allies’ victory against Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in 1942 during World War II’s pivotal Battle of El Alamein. As he lay dying, Abuhazeira was said to have had a vision of Spitfires and Messerschmitt Bf 109s – airplanes had not yet been invented – engaged in aerial dogfights above the Egyptian Desert. In his merit, according to believers, the Axis armies were turned back at the gates of Israel.
Equally bizarre to this researcher is the decades-old claim promulgated by occultists of the “Magical Battle of Britain.” On October 8, 1939 – the day Nazi Germany annexed western Poland – British ceremonial magician Dion Fortune began issuing a weekly newsletter to members of her magical order, The Fraternity of the Inner Light. Fortune – who went on to popularize the “Dawning of the Age of Aquarius” – and organized meetings of witches for nighttime arcane rituals in New Forest south of London to carry out “Operation Cone of Power.”
Meant to stave off the Nazi invasion of Britain, this included directing magical energy in the direction of Hitler’s army across the English Channel with the command of “you cannot cross the sea, you cannot cross the sea, you cannot come, you cannot come.”
Christine Hartley, an acolyte of the Fraternity of the Inner Light and one of Fortune’s cadre of psychics mobilized to defend His Majesty’s realm, spoke “a lot about her experiences fighting the Nazis on the spectral plane on a one-to-one basis, going ‘into the crystal’ and seeking out those foes threatening Britain on magical levels.” While Hartley claimed to “cope with German magicians,” she experienced “real trouble” with a man who “lay behind Hitler on the inner planes” — Palestinian Arab leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni.
Here she concurred with Britain’s Winston Churchill who called the Grand Mufti the “deadliest enemy of the British Empire.”
Hartley said al-Husayni’s mindset “was so alien to anything she had yet encountered and so inimical to things Western – especially British – that she sometimes feared for more than her life.” She perceived the Mufti’s concept of as-Sudma al-Kubra (which translates into “the big shock”) of the lands of Islam and the Western democracies was existential.
But what if the Mossad or Orthodox Jewish vigilantes were responsible for disturbing Vital’s grave, hoping to squirrel away the bones while post-revolution Syria remains in a state of chaos? Perhaps they were also hoping to recover the remains of Israeli spy Eli Cohen, who was hanged in Damascus’s Marjeh Square on May 18, 1965? Or even bring back to Jerusalem the bones of Israel Air Force navigator Lieut. Col. Ron Arad, who went missing in action in Lebanon on October 16, 1986?
The long arm of the Mossad provides fodder for Middle Eastern fantasists, even as truth is sometimes more unbelievable than fiction.
Gil Zohar was born in Toronto and moved to Jerusalem in 1982. He is a journalist writing for The Jerusalem Post, Segula magazine and other publications. He’s also a professional tour guide who likes to weave together the Holy Land’s multiple narratives.