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Ooh, 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 tells us to spook 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 on loop, a memory you just couldn't shake?
When Tamir Habaka was just a wee lad, he had a lifetime of them. Snap's Shana Shile 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, I'm being 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 started sweating like this cold sweat. I started 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 request. It's like I'm being pushed, it's 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 you are, 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 your body feel in that moment? Like, I've been here before.
Like it's familiar, it's safe. It's something that I did before. And then 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 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, your name is Dunia, you're my mother. That would be it for me. I think she was more worried because a five-year-old
And he starts talking, listing names out of nowhere.
Your name is Dur, your name is Naeem. 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're talking, talking, talking, and then like it's over. The battery's 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 having these fevers. I went to 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 you don't hear every day. But I'm going to be honest here. It's even crazier for me. Tamir is 23 now. He lives in the northern Israel village of Yanuk and belongs to an ethnic minority called Druze. Being a Druze is not an easy thing. We're going to start from that. Tamir isn't religious. I never touched the holy book. 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 the second that you close your eyes you're gonna 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 and 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 Drew's 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 Tabmir when he was five years old was ready. I think she was 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 Wafa, I probably would cry or I would, I don't know. Well, 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 Wafa. Wafa 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 Wafa's family started showing up at Tamir'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 Wafa's family. He says his family, his wife. What he means is Wafa's wife. Yeah, she came. I remember she was wearing a black dress because her husband died. So in 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, Wafa'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?
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 Wafa? 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 Wafa's relatives, like Wafa's wife, who was more than 20 years older than Tamir. I used to sit on 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.
The whole family was desperate. They wanted more time with Wafa. Tamir obliged. He spent a lot of time with Wafa's family. One day, when he was seven years old, he went with Wafa's brothers to see a house Wafa had been building before he died.
It was 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.
Tamir had found a stash of ammunition. And here he was, seven years old, holding live grenades.
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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 brown 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, Wafa, 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
But Tamir was not so cool about it. In fact, he was freaked out. Mostly because he had no control over when Wafa popped into his life. I used to dream a lot of seeing my wife 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
you know, wetting my bed. Every time that it happened to me, I woke up like, you know, with a wet bed, like I couldn't control my body at all. As he got a little older, he wanted more control over Wafa, that Wafa that showed up without asking in his body, mind and dreams. He tried summoning Wafa. 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 going to happen. Like maybe at a certain point, I'm going to have a mental breakdown. And I don't know, maybe he's going to take control over everything, you know?
After high school, he started distancing himself from Wafa. Wafa was a big meat eater, so Tamir became a vegetarian. And I didn't eat meat at all. Wafa was fit and muscular. Well, I'm sort of a Seth Rogen kind of a guy. The last straw came at a family barbecue, Wafa'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, Wafa really liked meat, so there's something wrong here. You know? And I said, like, I'm not Wafa, 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 Wafa was wearing when he died. And we opened the whole thing. She gave it to me. I touched it. And I felt really awkward. She started crying and crying.
I felt that, you know, like she needs someone now. 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...
It was obvious there was a tension in the air, but again, I wouldn't blame her. She was 20 or something when all of this happened, and she was really connected to me or Bafa. She met him a lot. I felt that slowly and gradually they were changing me to Bafa. 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 Wafa'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 escaping the hands. It's almost being caught by the hands. But it's escaping them with feathers flying everywhere. It's like escaping, you know, being suppressed.
He went back to Israel a year later. I came back, yeah, I came back with a beard and with tattoos everywhere. 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 Wafa, Tamir and Lillian got an invitation to Wafa'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. Lillian was also surprised.
Imagine, celebrating a wedding with a woman who thinks your fiancé is her husband. The love of her life. Tamir had a decision to make. To go back, with the risk of getting involved with the family again,
I really thought about that, like, do I want that again?
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, like, bound him to not to do anything, you know? 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 Lilian walk in a little late and no one's talking to them. Tamir feels awkward and cracks a joke. As a joke, like, 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? Yeah.
And everyone was crying, even the man, like my nephew, 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 like, Wafa would want you to know that he's sorry he's not there.
And I told that to my daughter too. If I 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 when you finished school. 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. And then like the picture time after everyone ate,
There was this one picture where all of the sons and their wives, they took me and my wife from the past life and they put us next to each other. I remember my fiancee was like furious. You're going to die. Why did you take that picture? There's nothing I can do. It wasn't my fault. You can't say no. It would be rude.
Can I be honest? Yeah. I know that maybe this is my last time here with everyone, you know? I'm going to stop going. I'm going to 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 The Snap. And shout out to Dr. Raja Saeed Faraj, the author of Reincarnation in 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.
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