The dybbuk rite is built on a distinctive premise: the possessing spirit is not a demon but a human soul in trouble. In the kabbalistic understanding developed at Safed, the soul of a serious sinner may be denied entry even to purgatory, and, harried between worlds, seeks refuge in a living body, usually one made vulnerable by some lapse of its own. Exorcism therefore proceeds as a judicial and pastoral process as much as a battle. The exorcist, a kabbalist reputed to command the practical tradition, first compels the spirit to speak, and the interrogation is essential: the dybbuk must give its name, its history and the sin that condemned it to wander, testimony the assembled witnesses hear from the possessed person's mouth.
There follow the instruments of pressure, adjurations in the divine names, decrees of excommunication against the spirit, psalms with protective power, clouds of incense, and the shofar blasts whose sound is held to shake the spirit loose. But the classical accounts insist equally on the offer: the exorcist undertakes to pray for the spirit's repose, to arrange study or kaddish on its behalf, the tikkun that repairs its condition, so that departure becomes release rather than mere eviction. The spirit is directed to leave through the toe, harming no one, and the vacated person is guarded afterward with amulets and blessings. The whole drama presumes the permeability of the worlds of the living and dead that Lurianic kabbalah, with its doctrine of transmigration, made systematic.