Prior to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, there were reports that the curse had been recited against him. There have been unsubstantiated media reports of the curse being recited against archaeologists and authors. Early in the 20th century, Haredi Jews in Jerusalem were accused by the media of having recited the curse against the linguist Eliezer Ben Yehuda. As the saying goes in Israel “you have not made it in Israeli politics until you’ve been cursed by the Pulsa DiNura. Some adherents of Kabbalah developed the idea of invoking a curse against a sinner, which they termed pulsa deNura.Īccusations of the use of this curse by religious Jews against Jewish figures who have committed major transgressions has been made often over the past 50 years and quoted mostly in Israeli media. The phrase appears in a small number of other locations in the Talmud and Zohar, but not in the context of a mystical curse. There it is described as a heavenly punishment against a person who does not fulfill their religious obligations. The seeming mistake of Metatron established him as being liable to receive a sentence of sixty pulse deNura: אפקוהו למיטטרון ומחיוהו שיתין פולסי דנורא, “They took out Metatron and lashed him with sixty pulses of fire.”Ī pulsa denura is also mentioned once in the Zohar (section 3:263c, “Raya Mehemna”), one of the classic works of Kabbalah. An account is given of Elisha’s encounter with the angel Metatron and the subsequent erroneous course of action taken by Metatron.
This page contains an Aggadic section concerning the heresies of Elisha ben Abuyah. The origin of this phrase seems to come from the Babylonian Talmud, in tractate Hagigah 15a. The text itself was once considered to be part of “orthodox” Judaism under the influence of Hellenism, but this text, along with some other works, are considered to be unorthodox or heretical in modern Judaism. It is thought to be a sourcebook for Jewish magic, calling upon angels rather than God to perform supernatural feats.
This is an unorthodox text while traditional Jewish laws of purity are part of the cosmogony, there are “praxeis which demand we eat cakes made from blood and flour”. Note that this is a different book than the Sefer Raziel HaMalakh, which was given to Adam by the same angel, but they stem from the same tradition, and large parts of Sefer HaRazim were incorporated into the Sefer Raziel under its original title. Sefer HaRazim (Hebrew: ספר הרזים, “Book of Secrets”) is a Jewish magical text supposedly given to Noah by the angel Raziel, and passed down throughout Biblical history to Solomon, for whom it was a great source of his wisdom, and purported magical powers.
#Pulsa dinura manuals#
The source for this modern ritual is not to be found in Kabbalah, but among the Hebrew magical manuals of antiquity, such as Sefer HaRazim (“Book of Secrets”) and The Sword of Moses. Rather, it offers the solution to pray that the bad in the person die and he become a righteous person.
However, the Torah prohibits praying that something bad should happen to another person. Pulsa deNura, Pulsa diNura or Pulsa Denoura (Aramaic: פולסי דנורא “The Lashes of Fire”) is a purportedly Kabbalistic ceremony in which the destroying angels are invoked to block heavenly forgiveness of the subject’s sins, causing all the curses named in the Bible to befall him resulting in his death. Kabbalah always had its practical, magical tools in addition to its spiritual goals.