Leslie Wexner’s Inner Demon

…As defined by Encyclopedia Britannica, a dybbuk is a Jewish folklore term for “a disembodied human spirit that, because of former sins, wanders restlessly until it finds a haven in the body of a living person.” Unlike spirits that have yet to move on but possess positive qualities, such as the maggid or ibbur, the dybbuk is almost always considered to be malicious, which leads it to be translated in English as “demon”. This was also the case in this New York magazine profile on Wexner.

The author of that article, Julie Baumgold, describes Leslie Wexner’s dybbuk as “the demon that always wakes up in the morning with Wexner and tweaks and pulls at him.” Wexner could have easily chosen to frame the entity as a righteous spirit (maggid) or as his righteous ancestors (ibbur) guiding his life and business decisions, especially for the purpose of an interview that would be read widely throughout the country. Instead, Wexner chose this particular term, which says a lot for a man who has since used his billions to shape both mainstream Jewish identity and leadership in both the US and Israel for decades.

As the article continues, it states that Wexner has been with the dybbuk since he was a boy and that his father had recognized it and referred to it as the “churning”. Per Wexner, the dybbuk causes him to feel “molten” and constantly pricked by “spiritual pins and needles”. It apparently left him at some point as a young man, only to return in 1977 when he was 40, half-frozen during an ill-fated trip up a mountain near his vacation home in Vail, Colorado. This specific trip is when Wexner says he both rejoined with his childhood dybbuk and decided to “change his life.”

He told New York magazine that his dybbuk makes him “wander from house to house”, “wanting more and more” and “swallowing companies larger than his own.” In other words, it compels him to accumulate more money and more power with no end in sight. Wexner later describes the dybbuk as an integral “part of his genius.”

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