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Crazy Superstitions

Shemini 5767 Sermon, April 13, 2007

Rabbi Ben Sharff

It is so wonderful to see all of you here this evening.  Thank you for braving the cold Tucson weather to join us at this Shabbas evening service.  Also, thank you for coming out on this Friday the 13^th.  I know it is a superstitious time for some of us, but knock-on-wood, we will all be safe throughout the rest of the day.

Speaking of which have you ever thought about why Friday the 13^th is such a superstitious day, or why we even say the phrase knock-on-wood?

Friday the 13^th has a fascinating history to it.  It all begins with the First Crusade in 1096 C.E.  The First Crusade was launched by Pope Urban II with two goals.  The first goal was to free Eastern Christians from the rule of the Muslims.  The second was to liberate Palestine and in particular Jerusalem from her Arabic rulers.  The notion of a Holy War between Muslims and Christians had been building over time.  In earlier times, when Palestine was under Persian and early Islamic rule, Christian pilgrims were generally treated well.  Yet by 1010, with the rise of Sultan Hakim of Egypt, the Muslims began to persecute the Christians in Palestine including burning many of their buildings.

Pope Urban II, though not the first to decry these atrocities, was the first to successfully rally peoples throughout Europe to go to the Middle East to aid their religious brethren.  It was Pope Urban II who famously uttered, “God wills it.”

Yet strangely wherever they went, these Crusaders felt the need to attack, plunder, rape, and pillage any number of Jewish communities who unfortunately crossed their paths, but that is a sad sermon for another night.

But one unanticipated result of the First Crusade was the arise of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon .  Or as they are more commonly known as, the Knights Templar.  Following the First Crusade, these Knights helped to ensure the safe passage of pilgrims to and from the Holy Land .  Officially recognized in 1129, they grew rapidly both in number and also in power.  They adopted the red cross as their symbol, and eventually they also became in essence, the international bankers for all of Christendom. 

But as happens, their power began to decrease with the failures of later crusades.  Also King Philip IV of France found himself deeply in debt to the Knights Templar.  So rather than pay off his debts, King Philip simply had the members of the Knights Templar arrested and tortured on October 13, 1307, Friday the 13^th.  Later Pope Clement, under pressure from King Philip, had the order disbanded, and the Knights Templar disappeared into myth and legend.

Ever since October 13, 1307, Friday the 13^th has been associated with bad luck.  Of course, this may in fact not be an entirely true statement.  It might just simply be an association we find in books like the DaVinci Code.  The truth may just be that origins of the association of Friday and thirteen have been lost to myth and legend as well.  What is known is that many cultures view the number 13 as unlucky.  There is even a word for the fear of the number 13, triskaidekaphobia. 

But we as Jews really have nothing to fear from the number thirteen, unless you have an upcoming Bar or Bat Mitzvah, and haven’t started preparing your Torah portion.  But it does beg the question of why are we so consumed with superstitions?

I mention this not only because it is Friday the 13^th, but also because it is the beginning of baseball season.  And some of the most superstitious people on the planet happen to be baseball players.  They only eat certain foods before games.  One might wear the same pair of socks through a hitting strike.  And Halavai, God forbid you mention to a pitcher that he is in the middle of throwing a no-hitter.

So even though we live in the 21^st century, with all of its technological marvels, we are still surrounded by superstitions.  But lest we think we are immune as Jews, we too have our superstitions as well.

Jewish superstition dates back to the Middle Ages though its origins are even earlier than that.  It was affected by both early Kabbalistic and magical traditions, but also by Christian culture as well.  So what do I mean by Jewish superstitions?  keynahora, most Jewish superstition was centered around the evil-eye.  Though the rabbis generally tried to prohibit this, there was a widespread belief that certain individuals have the ability to cause harm by directing their gaze at others.  That these people can cause bad luck, illness, and even death. 

As a result, we must safeguard against such individuals.  To protect against the evil eye, we break the glass at weddings.  We use blue paint on our doorposts, and we tie a red ribbon in the vicinity of a newborn child. 

I learned about this first hand before Emily was born.  We were told not to buy anything or fill our house with any baby related items lest we encourage something untimely to happen.  Of course one of the problems is that it can take up to two months to order baby furniture.  And you have to have a car seat, otherwise they won’t let you leave the hospital.  So what is a new parent to do?  How is one to reconcile our specific needs versus the old traditinal superstitions.  Needless to say, we bought the furniture.  We had it delivered when it was ready.  And it looks really nice by the way.  Though I am becoming a big fan of circular cribs, but that is another story.  We even had the car seats installed a month ahead of time.  But I can’t help but feel like somehow we were tempting the fates. 

But that doesn’t make any sense.  Superstitions are irrational.  We are a rational people, aren’t we?  So why are they so pervasive?  Why do they continue to capture our imaginations generation after generation.

To find the answer we have to go back in our history and look to the Torah.  This week we will be reading Parashat Shemini.  In it, we find a curious event that has troubled rabbis for generations, and that is the incident of Nadav and Avihu.  In this portion, “Aarons sons Nadav and Avihu each took his fire pan, put fire in it, and laid incense on it; and they offered before the Eternal aish zara alien fire, which had not been enjoined upon them.  And fire came forth from the Eternal and consumed them; thus they died at the instance of the Eternal.”

What troubles us is the issue of what did Nadav and Avihu do that was so wrong that it warranted a death sentence.  Many explanations have come forth.  One of the more interesting ones is that just a few verses later we find the command from God, “Drink no wine or other intoxicant, you or your sons, when you enter the Tent of Meeting, that you may not die.”  The rabbis make a kehser between this verse and Nadav and Avihu inferring that the reason they died is that they were drunk when they offered of the alien fire.

Another possibility is that Nadav and Avihu were innovators.  This comes from the phrase “which had not been enjoined upon them,” meaning they were trying something new.  They were trying something different, which ran counter to their role as priests for all of Israel .  As is stated in Plaut, “the priestly ideal is one of conformity, not of innovation.”  And as some of us might know, any sudden innovation is often times not necessarily well received.

But another possibility is that they died because they simply did not do the sacrifices properly as they were commanded.  The sacrificial system of the Israelites, though archaic in our own minds, is actually is a system of complex rituals that needs to be done in a very specific manner.  It is a responsibility to be taken seriously, because sacrifices are a means for influencing God.  God forbid, it not be done according to God’s will.

In this we can find some the origins of superstition.  Superstition is based in the belief that our actions can somehow control or at least affect the greater world.  Sacrifice in for our ancestors was the proper way according to their tradition.  Magic, idol worship, and improper sacrifices were not.  Whenever the Israelites followed what God asked of them, they succeeded in life. When they did not, like with Nadav and Avihu, the results were often disastrous.  For us as modernists, we think this theology to be too simple.  We are far more advanced than the Israelites of old.

Yet as evolved as we like to think of ourselves, we cannot escape this notion that we can influence the greater world around us.  Why else do we through salt over our shoulder, avoid crossing the path of a black cat, not walk under a ladder, try not to break a mirror, and knock-on-wood (which is actually a Christian tradition)?

The reason for this is that we are not as rational as we would like to believe.  Superstitions appear to be effective, so why not use them?  This is usually not a big deal, until they influence our ability to do things that can actually impact ourselves.

For example, tying a red ribbon around your wrist is all fine and good.  But tying one around your wrist, expecting God to protect you and then not wearing a seat belt while driving?  Yet people do this all too often.  They use the irrational and the superstitious to guide their lives, and ignore the more rational sensible solutions.  For example, some will avoid going to a doctor, lest the doctor give them bad news.  But if the doctor finds something in a timely manner, often times modern medicine can do something about it.  But if they wait too long, bad news can become disastrous. 

Sacrifices were one of the earliest forms of communication with God, but it was not the only one.  Nor was it the only one God wished us to rely upon.  Sacrifices in some ways are very technical and demand little of us as individuals and as a community.  Instead, as we learn from the prophets, God what God wanted us to emphasize was proper action, looking after ourselves, our families, and our communities.  We were to look after the poor, the widow, the orphan, the stranger in our midst.  We were to engage in acts that would lead to the elevation of society and not to its detriment.  In a word, God wanted and continues to want us to influence the world through positive action.

We ask ourselves, do our superstitions help us in this endeavor, or do they merely hinder us?  Do we use our worries to bring about positive change?  Or do our worries merely consume us like Nadav and Avihu?  Are there ways to use the energy we put into our superstitions, to bring about real change that we know to be actual and effective?  For in the end, there is actually very little we can control in the world, but our own selves and more importantly our own actions.  May our actions continue to be for what is good and for what is righteous.

Shabbat Shalom