"Duality" from Snap Judgment

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Oh, spooksters.

We've got an extra for you this week.

Something we thought you'd dig from our sister show, Snap Judgment.

If you are not subscribed, Snap Judgment is on podcast platforms everywhere.

And this Snap, it delves into spooked adjacent territory.

We hope you dig it.

Amazing stories with a beat.

Snap Judgment.

Snappers, have you ever had a memory that just got stuck in your head?

Maybe you unloop, a memory you just couldn't shake?

Wow.

When Tamir Habakku was just a wee lad, he had a lifetime of him.

Snap's Shana Shele brings us Tamir's story from the northern Israeli village of Yanu.

I was at a wedding with my parents.

I was sort of dragged to the wedding because I didn't like to attend family events.

I was a small kid.

I wanted to stay home, watch TV,

you know, play on the computer.

Tamir was five years old in a strange village two hours away from his house.

I was dragged by my mother to sit next to her and then I told her I want to go to the bathroom.

I walked past, you know, other kids.

I was the fat kid of the group.

We got into this argument.

They made fun of my hair and, you know, how I look.

And then I got into a fight with them.

I got a punch in the head

at that point like I

am being like controlled from that moment on

I'm feeling dizzy I'm feeling nauseous and I have a terrible headache I was supposed to go back to the table where my mother and father were sitting but I took the opposite direction and I went out of the wedding.

I thought it's sweating, like this cold sweat.

I thought it feeling like I was going to be sick.

As a kid, I was afraid of my mother and father.

He tries forcing himself back to the wedding, but his body isn't listening.

My body is not responding to my requests.

It's like I'm being pushed like

a magnet pulling a metal to it.

So now I'm walking on my own without even knowing where I'm going.

I was afraid because I didn't know where I was going, but I...

I had this feeling like I've been here before.

It's like playing a video game and playing it again, where you know where

are you, where you're supposed to go.

I'm stopping traffic at a certain point, crossing the streets and going into alleys, and I'm walking in a calm, familiar environment.

I'm touching the walls next to me.

I'm going around corners and you know, grabbing poles or, you know.

and how does how does your body feel in that moment like

like I I've I've been here before

like it's familiar it's safe it's something that I did before and then I I reached this house and I managed to open the gate from the inside so you just go you open the gate and just walk in like yeah I even knew how to open it the lock is was from the inside like I knew how to do that

I'm knocking on the door.

A lady opened the door, an old lady.

At first, she didn't even see me.

She was looking like around.

I'm grabbing her by the dress and I'm talking to her.

Like,

hello, my your name is Dunya, you're my mother.

That would be to me.

I think she was more worried because a five-year-old is on his own and he's knocking on doors, you know.

She didn't say anything, she invited me in.

Wow.

And so then you walk in.

I went down the stairs inside the house itself.

I knew how to go down and I sat on one of the couches.

I remember my feet are not touching the ground.

And he starts talking, listing names out of nowhere.

Your name is Dur, your name is Naim.

I know you.

I don't know how, I don't know where, but I know you.

I've been here before.

They wanted to hear more, but everything stopped.

And then I felt like there's no room inside my body.

Like

my head has two people inside it, you know?

I remember everything spinning.

Afterwards, it's like someone unplugging you.

You know, like you talking, talking, talking, and then like it's over.

The battery is over.

And then I felt like sort of a crack.

And everything just went black.

Five-year-old Tamir fainted.

I blacked out.

His parents, frantic at the wedding, put out a call for a missing child, figured out where he was, and picked him up from the house.

And then, like, I woke up in my parents' car, and we were on the way home.

And from that moment on, I started being like

having these fevers.

I went to like sort of a

physical breakdown.

I was sick for almost a month.

Tamir got so sick that his parents took him to the hospital.

He stayed there for two weeks.

Doctors couldn't figure out what was wrong.

They thought it might be anxiety or something worse.

For a five-year-old to have these kind of, you know, mental breakdowns, it's

weird.

Yeah.

Because they didn't know like what was the cause of

this breakdown.

They feared that I have other problems, you know, like a tumor or something.

Tamir didn't have a tumor.

Doctors couldn't find a cause of his illness.

It was his friends and family who diagnosed him.

They said an old soul had been reborn in his body.

I know it's weird.

It's something that I don't hear every day.

But I'm going to be honest here.

It's even crazier for me.

Tamir's 23 now.

He lives in the northern Israel village of Yanuch and belongs to an ethnic minority called Druze.

Being a Druze is not an easy thing.

We're gonna start from that.

Tamir isn't religious.

I never touched the holy book.

Like maybe it's blank inside.

I don't know.

The Druze faith is shrouded in secrecy, and to even touch the holy book, you have to sacrifice modern comforts like TV.

Tamir isn't ready for that.

He knows that the Druze believe in God and that a main belief is reincarnation.

What I understood is that when people die, they are born again.

Like at the second that you close your eyes,

you're going to open them as a baby.

After that, you're going to live again, and you're going to live again, and you're going to live again, you're going to live again, you know?

It's not going to stop.

But I see it as a rational

explanation of where does the soul go?

Like, it doesn't go anywhere.

And it goes to a different body.

According to Druze faith, everyone, everywhere, is reincarnated.

But not everyone remembers their past lives.

But the thing is, the people who remember, they died in a tragic way.

Which is why the woman who opened the door to Tamir when he was five years old was ready.

I think she was waiting for...

waiting for her son to reincarnate I think

her son Wafa had died when he was on reserve duty Wafa died he was killed in the army, so he's going to talk eventually.

So they waited for a small kid at that age to come.

And you say they weren't shocked?

Like when you opened the door and you said, you're my mother, even if she was expecting you, wouldn't she be shocked?

If I were the mother of Waffa, I probably would cry or I would, I don't know.

Well, she...

She was very excited.

She had tears in her eyes.

But I think the people that were inside the house expected that like they wanted that

and there were a lot of people who missed waffa

waffa left behind sisters brothers a child and a 23 year old pregnant widow Hanadi they wanted wafa back from then on a parade of people from waffa's family started showing up at tamnir's doorstep wafa's sister was the first to visit When she came, she sort of forced words out of me, And I was like sweating like crazy and had fevers.

And after that, they came again.

Third visit, my wife came with them.

So this weird thing happens when Tamir starts talking about Waffa's family.

He says his family, his wife.

What he means is Waffa's wife.

Yeah, she came.

I remember she was wearing a black dress.

Because her husband died.

So it's been five years she's wearing all black.

She was in her 20s and she was blonde and I was very shy and nervous.

I was shy to answer some of the things that they were asking me.

Do you remember her?

She's your wife, and you know.

During that first visit, Waffa's wife brought a bag of photos with her.

You know, me holding my baby, and my wife next to me, and my friends next to me.

Like, one of the pictures was in a park, in a national park, on Independence Day.

I remember, like,

where was it, or when was it?

Yeah.

So, I've noticed when when you're talking right now, you interchange the meaning of me, like when you say my friends.

And I'm wondering if that's confusing for you, because as a listener, it's confusing for me.

When you say my, it's like

Waffa or Tamir?

Well,

I always need to explain or to, you know, to clarify that I'm talking about me or I'm talking about my past life or I'm talking about, you know.

Yeah.

and is that confusing for you like when you're trying to tell people about your experience and you say my or me do you know which one you're talking about like do you know if you're talking about Tamir or Waffa well

I

how can I say it when I talk like I feel like we're the same guy

but you know in a different story

which was hard, especially as a kid, trying to figure out relationships with Waffa's relatives, like Waffa's wife, who was more than 20 years older than Tamir.

I used to sit in her lap and hug her, and you know, I was four or five years old.

She always hugged me like I felt warm, like my mother, like she cares about me.

I saw that she was desperate.

The whole family was desperate.

They wanted more time with Waffa.

Tamir obliged.

He spent a lot of time with Waffa's family.

One day, when he was seven years old, he went with Waffa's brothers to see a house Waffa had been building before he died.

It's a really dangerous place for a kid to walk in because you could fall or you could break something.

So I remember I walked two floors down.

There was this huge red door.

I remember opening it.

It was really heavy.

Tamir lost control of his body, like at the wedding.

Well, it more feels like someone giving you signs or even like whispering in your ear.

Like

a grown-up taking your head and walking you around.

I'm grabbing one of the handles on the drawer and I'm taking it out.

I took the whole drawer out.

Underneath the drawer, I'm grabbing this metal things, this round metal thing, and I'm taking them out.

It's live grenades.

Tamir had found a stash of ammunition, and here he was, seven years old, holding live grenades.

Seven-year-old boy, live grenades, what could go wrong?

With Snap Judgment, the duality episode continues.

Stay tuned.

Support for Spooked comes from Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport.

OAK offers non-stop flights to to your favorite destinations across the U.S.

and Mexico with new non-stop flights to Los Cabos and Zacatecas.

OAK makes travel easy with Park OAK's convenient parking options.

Reserve a spot in the daily lot or economy lot and save on your next trip.

Learn more at iflyoak.com, the best way to San Francisco Bay.

JPMorgan Payments helps you drive efficiency with automated payments and intelligent algorithms across 200 countries and territories.

That's automation-driven finance.

That's JPMorgan Payments.

JP Morgan, Internal Data 2024, Copyright 2025, JP Morgan Chase Company, All Rights Reserve, JP Morgan Chase Bank, and a member, FDIC.

Deposits held in non-U.S.

branches are not FDIC insured.

Non-deposit products are not FDIC insured.

This is not a legal commitment for credit or services.

Availability varies.

Eligibility determined by J.P.

Morgan Chase.

Visit JPMorgan.com/slash payments disclosure for details.

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Can your dog food say that?

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Now, when last we left, seven-year-old Tamir had his hands on some live ammunition.

Snap Judgment.

Underneath the drawer, I'm grabbing this metal things, this round metal thing, and I'm taking them out.

It's live grenades.

Tamir had found a stash of ammunition, which in any other circumstances would feel dangerous.

I held them before, so I wasn't scared at all.

I've been here, I've done that.

So I could...

I'm touching it again.

I'm here.

So it's okay.

It's safe.

Tamir explained to the brothers that he, Waffa, stole the grenades from the army.

I can't get in trouble for saying that because he's dead, you know?

You can't judge me now.

And that he had been planning to remove the grenades.

I told them that I didn't get a chance to because I was killed.

Now they're looking at me, they're really shocked.

and

I went back upstairs.

It was one of my priorities when I wanted to get back.

I think that's why I did that when I first walked in.

I wanted to take them away from there or even to throw them away or something.

Tamir knows this all sounds unbelievable to people outside the Druze community.

The weird thing is that People here in the Druze community see it as a normal thing.

Like everyone's cool about it and it's normal, yeah.

But Tamir was not so cool about it.

In fact, he was freaked out.

Mostly because he had no control over when Waffa popped into his life.

I used to dream a lot of seeing my wife in like in her wedding dress

standing in the middle of the ocean and I one try to catch her and I fall inside the water and I suffocate.

Like at the end of every dream, you feel like they're stuffing two people inside you and there's no room.

So like you can't breathe.

Like the air is going and leaving your body and then you wake up sweating and you know, I had a big problem with

wetting my bed.

Every time that it happened to me, I woke up like, you know, with a wet bed.

It's like I couldn't control my body at all.

As he got a little older, he wanted more control over Waffa.

That Waffa that showed up without asking in his body, mind, and dreams.

He tried summoning Waffa.

Like, I tried hypnosis and Ouija boards and, you know, a lot of spiritual guides and people and,

you know, ways to communicate with spirits and everything else, but I'm afraid for what's gonna happen.

Like, maybe at a certain point, I'm gonna have a mental breakdown, and I don't know, maybe he's gonna take control over everything, you know?

After high school, he started distancing himself from Waffa.

Waffa was a big meat eater, so Tamir became a vegetarian.

And I didn't eat meat at all.

Waffa was fit and muscular.

Well,

I'm sort of a Seth Rogen kind of a guy.

The last straw came at a family barbecue.

Waffa's family barbecue.

I told them, like, I'm a vegetarian now.

I hate meat.

They saw it as a weird thing, and they were like...

Like they looked at me in a weird way, like, how?

Like, Waffa really liked meat, so this is, there's something wrong here you know and i said like i'm not waffa i'm tamir

that's when wafa's widow hanadi walked out of the room a few moments later she returned to the barbecue holding the uniform waffle was wearing when he died

and uh

we opened the whole thing she she gave it to me i touched her

and i felt really awkward She started crying and I felt that, you know, like she needs she needs she needs someone now.

Like Like, I wanted to sit and talk as Tamir.

I wanted them to, you know,

to talk about normal things, life and everything else.

But no, they kept like going back, going back.

She just wanted her husband back, you know?

She wanted someone to help her.

She wanted someone to...

Be there.

It was obvious that there was a tension in the air, but again, I wouldn't blame her.

Like, she was 20 or something when all of this happened.

And she was really connected to me or Buffalo, you know, and she missed him a lot.

I was like, I felt that slowly and gradually they were changing me to Waffa.

I waited for them to ask me to act like him or to even grow my mustache like him, you know.

Like they wanted Wafa again, not just spiritually, but you know, from the outside.

Tamir didn't want to be at Waffa's barbecue comforting his sobbing wife.

So he stood up and left.

At least I want to be treated as Tamir, you know, I want to have this chance of living, give me a chance to live as Tamir,

not as, you know, Wafa, Wafa had his chance.

He wanted to go as far away as he could, to leave Wafa's family, to leave the tiny Druze community, to leave Israel.

He flew into Zurich and enrolled in a study program.

He left Wafa behind in the village.

He's on the bench now.

I'm on the court.

One of the first things he did in Switzerland was get a tattoo.

It's a stone, it's like a jewel, evil hands coming out of it on top, and an owl like escaping the hands.

It's almost being catched by the hands, but it's escaping them with feathers flying everywhere.

So it's like escaping, you know,

being suppressed.

He went back to Israel a year later.

Like, I came back, I, I,

And he fell in love with Lillian.

I was playing the guitar.

And as soon as she walked in, I stopped playing.

I didn't know how.

When he started dating Lillian, Waffle wasn't coming around much.

I didn't deal with it that much, you know.

I have a life, you know.

Tamir was living his life.

He proposed to Lillian, she said yes, and then after a long break from Waffa, Tamir and Lillian got an invitation to Waffa's daughter's wedding.

My younger daughter's wedding, she's the same age as me now.

I was surprised that they invited me because I haven't talked to them in a while, but.

Lillian was also surprised.

Imagine.

Celebrating a wedding with a woman who thinks your fiancé is her husband, the love of her life.

And my fiancé said that it would be awkward if she was at the party.

Tamir had a decision to make.

To go back with the risk of getting involved with the family again, or to stay away and disappoint all of Waffa's relatives.

I really thought about that, like, do I want that again?

Tamir didn't want to get sucked back in, and Lillian really didn't want him hanging around Waffa's wife.

But Tamir knew he was different now.

He told Lillian he had things under control.

So now I can control it.

Like, I'm the one who could control everything.

Like, Wafa could just be there.

I could bound him

not to do anything, you know, to just to put like handcuffs on his hands and just put him in a corner.

Like, he can't do anything.

And I'm the one, I'm the boss, you know?

So they got into the car and drove the two hours to Wafa's village for his daughter's wedding.

Did it for the bride, so she wouldn't feel bad.

He and Lillian walk in a little late and no one's talking to them.

Tamir feels awkward and cracks a joke.

As a joke, like, do you start the wedding without me, you know?

And then the family swarms him.

Everyone gathered.

It was crazy.

Like the father came, you know?

And

everyone was crying, even the men, like...

My nephew who the fur who was the first one to come to my house.

He was there and I haven't seen him in like 10 years.

Yeah, he was crying like he was shaking.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he sees Hanadi, Wafa's wife, and he has something to get off his chest.

I told her that

Wafa would want you to know that he's sorry he's not there, you know?

And I told that to my daughter, too.

Like, I...

Waffa said that he's sorry he can't be at your wedding and he's sorry he wasn't there when you grew up and you know when you finished school and

they put Tamir at the head of the table with the groom and his father

i sat at the table where the head of the family sits you know and

then like the you know picture time after

after everyone ate there was this one picture where like all of the sons and their wives and they took me and my wife from other from the past life and we like they put us next to each other.

I remember like my fiancé was...

was

she was like furious

and i like you're going to die you know

like why did you take the pic that picture and i'm like i there's nothing i can do it wasn't my fault like it was you know you can't say no it would be rude

can i can i be honest yeah

like i know

that

Maybe this is my last time here with everyone, you know?

I'm gonna stop going.

I'm gonna stop meeting everyone.

So

this is the last thing,

and it was for a good cause, it wasn't like to, you know,

I did it like to make them feel better

because I always remind them of him, you know, for them not to forget.

Thank you, Tamir, for sharing your story with Snap.

And shout out to Dr.

Raja Saeed Faraj, the author of Reincarnation and the Druze Community.

The original sound design for that story was by Renzo Gorio.

It was produced by Shana Shealy.

Now it's about that time.

It is, but it doesn't have to be because we've got more snap just waiting for you right now.

Subscribe to the amazing storytelling podcast, snapjudgment.org.

And this is not the news.

No way is this the news.

In fact, you could build the most magnificent sandcastle ever made at high tide, confident that it wouldn't be destroyed in low tide.

Only to realize that you really don't know what the terms low tide and high tide actually mean and you would still

not be as far away from the news as this is.

This is

PRX.

Support for Spooked comes from Oakland San Francisco Bay Airport.

OAK offers non-stop flights to your favorite destinations across the U.S.

and Mexico with new non-stop flights to Los Cabos and Zacatecas.

OAK makes travel easy with Park OAK's convenient parking options.

Reserve a spot in the daily lot or economy lot and save on your next trip.

Learn more at iflyoak.com, the best way to San Francisco Bay.

JP Morgan Payments helps you drive efficiency with automated payments and intelligent algorithms across 200 countries and territories.

That's automation-driven finance.

That's JPMorgan Payments.

JP Morgan Internal Data 2024, Copyright 2025, J.P.

Morgan Chase Company, All Rights Reserved, JP Morgan Chase Bank, and a member, FDIC.

Deposits held in non-U.S.

branches are not FDIC insured.

Non-deposit products are not FDIC insured.

This is not a legal commitment for credit or services.

Availability varies.

Eligibility determined by JPMorgan Chase.

Visit jpmorgan.com/slash payments disclosure for details.

Oh, watch your step.

Wow, your attic is so dark.

Dark.

I know, right?

It's the perfect place to stream horror movies.

What movie is that?

I haven't pressed play yet.

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Even your really, really creepy attic turned home theater.

Jimmy, what have I told you about scaring our guests?

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Limited availability coverage may require extenders at additional charge.

My dog Max loves chewing on my favorite pair of shoes almost as much as he loves his Blue Buffalo Life Protection Formula dry dog food.

Seriously, he never leaves a crumb.

And I love it too, because it's made with high-quality protein, antioxidant-packed fruits, and nutrient-rich veggies.

Blue Buffalo foods are made with the superior ingredients your dog needs to thrive.

Can your your dog food say that?

Visit feedbluefood.com to learn more.

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