Bereft of other options, Shaul seeks out a ba’alat `ov to consult with her. She protests first that she cannot help him, as Shaul has removed all of that from the land. When Shaul reassures her that nothing will happen to her, she raises up Shemeul. When she sees Shmuel, she screams in fear, realizes that it is Shaul before her, but he again reassures her. He asks her what she saw, and she says "Elohim raiti olim min haarets, A great man (in the ArtScroll version, but obviously elohim has other overtones as well) I saw, rising from the earth."

Shmuel now asks Shaul why he has disturbed him, and Shaul answers that he has had no success getting an answer from God. Shmuel concurs, saying that God has indeed turned off the communication to Shaul and is in the process of removing the kingship from Shaul, giving it to someone else, and that the next day, the Jews were going to lose the battle to Plishtim. Furthermore, Shaul and his sons were going to die.

Understandably upset by the news, Shaul falls on the ground in fear. Having fasted that whole day, he also has no strength in him. His aides, and the woman, try to get him to eat something, but he does not want to. They press him further, and he finally concedes. The woman prepares a calf she had in the house, and Shaul and his servants eat, and they leave.

LOCKED OUT

The precipitating event of this week’s happenings was Shaul’s inability to find out what God wanted. Had Shmuel still been alive, Shaul might have sent a messenger to him and gotten an answer (even if the answer was the same as he eventually did get from Shmuel). Instead, bereft of his navi, Shaul tries other avenues, at first legitimate ones. He tries dreams (whether his own or others’), which I assume means trying to work oneself into a trancelike state, or trying to go to sleep focused on a certain issue and hoping to awaken with a dream that gives insight into the issue. That fails. He also tries to consult with the Urim ve-Tumim, the breastplate of the Kohen Gadol, which was supposed to light up with God’s answer. There, too, at least according to Ramban, there was an element of prophecy involved, since only the kohen could see which stones lit up, and interpret the message that was supposed to extend from there.

When that doesn’t work, Shaul is faced with a dilemma. He feels the deep need for advice from God—an example among many of the role that continuing messages from God were expected to play for the nation, at least in its youth—but had no way of getting one in the ways that had been codified as acceptable. The religious challenge for Shaul right here was to cope with having lost communication with God, and either bearing that loss, or working in permissible ways (teshuvah, for example) to get it back. Shaul, whose downward spiral will continue unabated up until the very end, decides to go to a witch (the famous Witch of En-Dor), expecting her to be able to raise up Shmuel and get him the contact he craves.

A PERSON IS NOT JUST ONE THING

Along the way, the navi mentions to us that Shaul had rid the land of the various types of witches that had been there. In the narrative flow, we need to know this to understand both why the woman demurs at first, and why she gets particularly upset when she finds out that it is Shaul who has come to consult with her. At the same time, though, the information reminds us that the books of Tanakh rarely if ever mean to give the kind of complete portrait of a person that we would expect in a biography.

Shaul’s having worked to rid the land of witchcraft is a huge credit in his favor, since it advances the cause of teaching the people to rely on Hashem as opposed to magic greatly. Had Shaul resisted the urge to go to this woman, we would never have known of this aspect of his reign, and would have seen him as almost completely a failure in his role as king. While ultimately he fails at achieving the level of obedience to God that is necessary for a king, we should note those places where he made worthy efforts to promote the reliance on Hashem alone.

As for the incident here, the commentators’ debate what actually happened, depending on their view of witchcraft generally. Most commentators accept the text in its simplest sense, that witchcraft worked and was prohibited. In this view, the woman at En-Dor really could contact the dead and communicate with them. For them, when the Torah prohibits this activity, it is telling us to rely on God as opposed to other means of divining the future, and Shaul is violating this prohibition. When the ba’alat `ov gets frightened, the Midrash suggests that it is because Shmuel appeared to her differently from how other spirits appeared (upright as opposed to upside down), again taking this whole incident as having happened as written in the text.

Others assume that witchcraft never worked (following Rambam’s view of that issue) and therefore interpret the whole incident as a ruse on the part of the ba’alat `ov herself. An astute woman, these commentators assume that she figured out that Shaul was the man in disguise, and simply told him what he presumably expected to hear.

WE BATTLE OUR WEAKNESSES

Whichever we go with this, the whole experience is a highly negative one for Shaul. Especially since this sin was one he had paid particular attention to, his yielding to it at the end of his life is a mark of his fall. I remember reading about a 19^th century British man (I’ve forgotten who) who had set a life task of convincing prostitutes to give up their profession, and was, I believe, somewhat successful. His diaries later showed, however, that while he was sincere in his belief in the evils of prostitution, he also was tempted by the women with whom he worked and at least sometimes yielded to that temptation, a weakness he constantly berated himself for and regretted fully.

The Ba`al Shem Tov was supposed to have said that the flaws we note in others are invariably those we have ourselves. While he took that to great lengths—I believe he once saw a man violate Shabbat and assumed that he, too, must have neglected Shabbat in some way, since otherwise he would not have seen it—it seems to me reasonable to assert that the flaws in others that particularly irritate us are those to which we bear some relationship (although not always that we are prone to it).

In the case of Shaul, it would seem that the question of relying on God solely was a continuing challenge. Indeed, it was on these issues that his hold on the monarchy foundered. First, he neglected to wait seven days for Shmuel because the people were fleeing, and he felt that he had to offer a sacrifice. Then he could not fulfill God’s command to completely wipe out the group of Amalek he was sent to fight. Now, faced with a lack of communication from God, he is unable to resist the urge to find that communication, even by means he himself knows to be wrong and evil.

Kol ha pogem be-mumo pogem, the Talmud says in a statement that later became famous. In context, it meant that a person who accuses someone else of lineage flaws has those same ones, but it became broadened to include character flaws as well. Here, we find out that Shaul’s wiping out of witchcraft was to some extent a personal struggle with proper and improper ways of discovering the Divine Will, and that, at the last moments of his life, the lack of communication was too great a challenge for him to bear.

FROM ONE FAILURE TO ANOTHER

Shmuel is uncompromising with Shaul, either a function of God’s having come to the end of the line in this relationship (Shaul’s going to die the next day and God has cut him off from communication) or because, once having reached the next world, Shmuel no longer has any interest in the gentle mannerisms we adopt in this world. In that world, truth is truth and there is no point in other expressions, so Shmuel gives it to Shaul straight on.

Shaul, understandably, is shaken up by the vision, but, sadly, once again fails to rise to the occasion. We have seen numerous times that the future is never fully and completely set; even a prophecy that someone will die can, on occasion, be averted. While that may not be true for a vision from a dead person (assuming it is real), there were still many options left open to Shaul that he either did not think of, or chose not to take.

First and foremost, there is always teshuvah. Would anything have changed, either for Shaul, his sons, or the Jewish people, had Shaul gone back to the camp, woken the entire people, and spent the night praying to God? They would have been exhausted for the battle, it is true, but one of the central lessons they were supposed to have been learning was that God brings victory, not rest. Having obtained such a negative prediction, Shaul could at least have thrown himself and his people at their Creator’s mercy.

Worse, Shaul allows himself to be convinced to eat. Following what seems to have been the general Jewish custom, Shaul was fasting the day before the war, ideally a sign of teshuvah and prayer to God for salvation. When he collapses from the content of the vision, his advisers and the witch insist that he eat. If we recall that Shaul has always had a problem holding to his own view in the face of others’ opposition, such as when the Jews wanted to take some of the sheep from Amalek, or when the people were fleeing from him at Gilgal, this giving in to their point of view seems another example of how Shaul is losing a battle with each of his major demons at the end of his life. Lest we think that the servants were right, and that Shaul should have eaten, I believe that the reference to an egel marbek, a fattened calf, is meant to show that Shaul was not only eating a little something to restore his dangerously sapped strength, but that he allowed himself to be lured into a meat meal, an inappropriately festive occasion on the eve of his death.