 I moved to Toronto about 22 years ago. You can tell from my accent from New York. And I was originally here working as the chaplain at the University of Toronto. And I was spending my spare time helping the Julius with Jews for Judaism. And I spent quite a few years downtown at the University. And during one of those early years, I received a phone call from someone, not far from here actually, that was in a tremendous amount of distress. And told me that their place of living was haunted by evil spirits. And that these evil spirits were causing a tremendous amount of problems. And this person seemed extremely upset and agitated by what she was describing. And asked me to help. And said, you have to come to my place. And you have to basically cast out these demons, these evil spirits. And I have a little bit of background in psychology. I majored in psychology. I have been doing counseling for many, many years. My suspicion was that this place was not really inhabited by evil demons. My intuition told me that this person needed some help. That was my instincts. This person needed to speak to someone that could be helpful. Some kind of a counselor or a therapist. And I tried very desperately to make a referral. I tried for over an hour to convince this person that they don't need to speak with me. That I probably can't be of much help. And that the problem is probably not with the house. The problem is really probably more internal. And I was getting nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. And it was extremely frustrating. Because the person was reaching out for help. Very desperate. And I believed in the wrong direction. And I was trying to offer what I thought was the most appropriate kind of advice. And literally I was hitting a brick wall. And after another half hour or so of back and forth, this person pulled out what turned out to be a trump card. And told me that if you don't come and help me, Rabbi Scobac, I'm going to the Catholic priest across the street. And I said, you win. Okay. So I drove up from downtown. And I stopped off at my house. I think back then I was still living in an apartment. And I told my wife, I have to go to basically do a ghost busting. And my wife is much wiser than me in these issues. And she said, no you're not. She said, I don't want you to go unless you take along with you two other rabbis. And I said to myself, how in the world am I going to find two other rabbis to go with me on short notice? Thank God I have quite a few good friends in the city. And I thought of two candidates off the top of my head. They were unnamed at this point. But I called them and they were willing to come with me. So we got together and we had to have a quick pow-wow. What are we going to do? Because I will tell you that we didn't go to the same rabbinical schools. But none of us were there on the day when this topic was covered in rabbinical school. So we basically had to add lib. We had to add lib. And I think that given the circumstances I think we came up with a pretty reasonable plan. We stopped off at one of the Jewish bookstores on the way to her place. We purchased a mezuzah. We also picked up a pushka, a tzdagabak, a charity. We took along a prayer book. And what we basically did was to have in this house essentially a form of hanukatabayit, a dedication of the house. Where we came into a house that had no mezuzot, no mezuzas on the doors. So we explained the importance of a mezuzah in a Jewish home. We put a very beautiful mezuzah on the front door. We explained the importance of having a charity box, a pushka, a place to give charity, to give in our lives how important it is. I'll be speaking about some of this next week. We gave her that. We recited Psalm 30, which is the Psalm for the dedication of the sanctuary, the temple, but also each one of our homes is supposed to be a temple. We said a few other Psalms, and we basically spoke about what it means to have peace in our homes, how you can have peace in the home. And incredibly, I'm thrilled to tell you, it worked that I would run into this person occasionally and thank God things seem to be fine. Things seem to be okay. About 10 years later, I run into the person again and basically the message is, they're back. And now I went right to my wife. And we spoke about it. And she had what I thought was a very insightful idea. She thought it would be important to give this person specifically some sense of empowerment. And so we came up with a two-part plan. The first thing we did was to ask permission if we could take her to a mikvah. The tradition is normally people that are not married don't go to a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath for purification, but we were told we could do this. And so we took her to a mikvah just to give her a sense of spiritual cleansing. And then my wife felt that the more important piece would be the teacher about the Jewish tradition of natility or dying in the morning, of washing your hands in the morning. That there's an idea that when we go to sleep at night, where the Talmud says one sixtieth of death. It's a form of death because we're not really fully alive. We're sort of in a sleep state, which is a quasi-state of death. I'll be speaking about this during my dream session. And the Jewish law says that when we wake up in the morning, there's a sort of a residue of spiritual impurity that basically adheres to our hands. So there's a tradition we have of washing our hands with water three times over each hand as a way of, again, purifying ourselves in the morning and also in the same way that the high priest and the priest would wash their hands before the temple service. It's a way of dedicating ourselves to our daily service of God. And my wife felt that this simple but easy and accessible Jewish practice would give this person a sense of empowerment that I've taken control over my life spiritually. And thank God that seemed to have done the trick. I haven't heard any further complaints. Now, I don't know if this was spoken about by this person, but a number of months later, I received another phone call from someone in Richmond Hill. Shortly before Rosh Hashanah, a day or two before Rosh Hashanah, I got my scope back. You have to come to my house. We have a horrible problem with evil spirits here. And I think I might have looked up to God and said, Why me? But I said, OK. And I said, I think I have a sense of what I want to do. Again, you have to appreciate that this is purely ad-libbing. And I took a chauffeur with me. And I came into the house, a beautiful big house. And we spoke for a few minutes. And I took out the chauffeur and I blew it as loudly and hard as I could. And I said, I hope that does the trick. And I haven't heard back from this person since then. So I hope that that worked. Now, I want to share with you one more story because these stories will be bracketing, I think, some of the complexity of the Jewish approach to some of these issues we'll be discussing tonight. A number of years ago, I was giving a series of lectures in the United States in Ohio. And after I finished my lectures, someone drove me back to the airport and returned to Toronto. And on the way to the airport, this person was very spiritual and was giving me many blessings, maybe five minutes worth of very beautiful blessings. It was very nice to hear these blessings. And then the blessing stopped short. And the fellow says to me, you know, Rabbi Scobac, I think you should get your mezuzahs checked. Now, I was taken aback by this because you are supposed to check your mezuzahs regularly. And we had not checked our mezuzahs in a long time. We actually went over the time that they should have been checked. And it so happened that we had arranged for the very next day for someone to come to our home, take all the mezuzahs down in the morning, check them and bring them back at night. Someone here, at least one person in town, does that. And so here, after years of not checking them and the very next day, I'm about to have them checked, this fellow out of the blue says, I think you should have your mezuzahs checked. And I was sort of struck by this. And then he says to me very casually, I think you have a problem at the front door. Noted. And then he says, on the second floor of your house, and then I really shout out because how does he know I have a house? How does he know it has a second floor? He says on the second floor of your house, there is a bathroom. And that's not such a hard thing to guess. He says, but across from the bathroom, there are two rooms. He got that one right. He says, you've got a problem with those two rooms as well. I'm just taking it all in. I'm playing my cards close to my vest. I'm not really giving much feedback, but I'm getting freaked out. And of course, the next day, when the mezuzah man comes and I hand them over, I am very anxious the whole day to find out what's going to be when he comes back at night. The mezuzahs come back at night, and as we say in Aramaic, the kach hava, and so it was, the front door, and those two rooms had problems with the mezuzahs. Now, I was very shaken up by this. I immediately called the people back in the United States who had brought me out, and I said, does this fellow do this? And they said, yes, he does this quite routinely. Something was going on here. Now, I'll tell you that I have a bit of a personal history when it comes to what might seem to be strange things in the Jewish world or superstition, maybe going back to an early age. I didn't grow up in a very observant Jewish home, but we went to synagogue occasionally. And one of the things that I heard as a child that obviously for children, this is very, very spooky, was that on the holidays when the priests of the synagogue go to the front of the synagogue and say the Birhat Kalanim, the priestly benediction, so we were told that you shouldn't look at the priests because if you do, you'll go blind. Now, my friends and I found this amusing and spooky. And so what we would do every holiday was we would talk among ourselves, we'd sit behind a family, and we'd talk among ourselves and we'd say, I think we're going to try and look. And then one of us, after talking about the fact that we're going to look, would just start screaming that we can't see and we're blind. The truth is that in the times of the temple when the Shrinah, when the holy presence, God's holy presence was present in the temple, so we're told that God's divine presence did rest on the fingers of the Kalanim. But after the destruction of the first temple, we know that the Shrinah departed. We don't really have this issue in a spiritual way nowadays. And the mission of Brua, the Chavitzchayin, explains that the reason that we're not supposed to look at the priests of the Kalanim is so that we'll be able to concentrate on their blessings. The whole purpose of not looking at them is so they'll be able to focus our attention on the blessings that they're transmitting to us from God. But people go so overboard with this idea of not looking at the priests that what many people do is actually turn their backs and face away from the priests. Many people actually recite the paragraphs in the Sidur while the actual blessing is being relayed by the Kalanim. So we're turning our backs on the blessing and while the blessings are being given, we interrupt the blessings with our own recitation of these paragraphs. And so we unwittingly sabotage the entire experience. There's a tremendous amount of superstition that floats around the Jewish world. The truth is that when it comes to these matters and I don't want to make light of them, I believe that the old Zen statement holds true. The Zen masters would say, He who says doesn't know and he who knows doesn't say. I can tell you that I know a little bit about this topic tonight. And so I'll feel comfortable sharing a little tiny bit, but then we'll have to crawl it even. All of you know that in recent times there's been an explosion of interest in matters of the occult and this is greatly reflected in popular culture. I'm just going to share with you a very short digest of what all of us have been seeing over the past number of decades. We all or many of us in the room grew up with movies like Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Damien's, Ghostbusters 1, Ghostbusters 2. I'm not sure how many there were ultimately. I think there was Ghostbusters 3, The Blair Witch Project and today numerous other films including The Current Obsession with Zombies. Music as you all know has been extremely influenced by Satanism, the occult, witchcraft, heavy metal music especially very much impacted by these issues. Performers such as Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, kids flashing a devil sign at concerts. There's a whole pervasiveness of occultism and the devil in much of heavy metal music. In much of heavy metal and other forms of rock music. Books and magazines. This has been widespread. Harry Potter obviously at the top of the heap. These are books that swept the world and there are over 3,000 not books, over 3,000 publishing companies that deal with books on the occult and they sell over a billion dollars a year well over a billion dollars of books and magazines sold each year dealing with these issues. A number of years ago I did a bit of an experiment. I went down to the world's largest bookstore. I'm not sure if it really is the world's largest bookstore but it's called the world's largest bookstore. I think it's on Edward Street and I did a survey of all of the sections in that store dealing with the occult and I found to my surprise that the number of books dealing with the occult at the world's largest bookstore far exceeded all the books on Judaism, Christianity and Islam combined. They had entire sections. This is a number of years ago it might have gotten better but a number of sections dealing with crystals, shamanism, channeling, divination, tarot, yiching, astrology, black magic, new age, witchcraft, angels, Gnosticism and numerous other topics entire sections of the store dealing with all of these issues. We know this is back when I was growing up and it still takes place today that games are heavily into issues of the occult from Ouija boards to Dungeons and Dragons where spells are cast and witchcraft is used in fantasy role-playing games today on the internet these games are extremely popular and very, very life-like in many cases. Learning institutions, adult learning institutions such as the Learning Annex which is all over North America offer dozens of courses on occult topics such as how to experience your past and future lives out-of-body experiences astral projection how to read auras and channeling and numerous other topics are regularly taught in adult education courses throughout North America. Every newspaper as long as newspapers are still around I'm not sure how long that's going to last but every newspaper in many magazines have horoscopes that are consulted by millions of people there are dozens of 1-800 or 1-900 ads and lines infomercials on television promoting various types of psychic advice and numerous mediums such as Sylvia Brown John Edward James Von Prague and numerous other people regularly appear on television and elsewhere helping people to contact their dearly departed. About 30% of police forces allegedly use psychic detectives today in the world and as you all know we even have kosher fortune cookies. What's going on? We live in a world where there's been increasing secularization of our society which has left a tremendous spiritual vacuum and with a tremendous rush in our world to pursue material success we know that people ultimately find that to be very empty and people discover that the emperor has no clothes that's not the source of salvation to have more things to possess more things and so many people go beyond the material world to try to seek ultimate answers to the big questions in life. This is already prophesied in the Jewish Bible in the book of Amos Amos chapter 8 verse 11 God says behold I'm going to send a famine to the land but not a hunger for bread or a thirst for water but a thirst for spirituality a thirst to hear the words of God. We're going to be living in a time the Bible says where there's going to be tremendous thirst for things spiritual. We all know the world is a very scary place to live in these days. We live in very uncertain times. Life is extremely precarious. People in the prime of their lives succumb to very scary and deadly diseases. Our environment is often in peril. The economy is unstable and global terrorism is growing. Just a week after the bombings in Boston they arrested today two people in Canada in a plot to blow up a train to going from Canada to the United States. They expect at least three more arrests in this case but we always seem to be waiting for the next shoe to drop. Occult and superstitious practices are a way of gaining some degree of control over our lives and that I believe is the major attraction. We have Segoulas. We have somehow not sure if there's a good English translation if it's Segoula, a lucky charm or a fortuitous practice but we have in the Jewish world Segoulas for people who want to get married. Many people will run after the wedding ceremony takes place and pick up the pieces of glass that are left over from a broken glass. Any kind of thing that we can take hold of that might give us a little bit of control over a life that seems to be so out of control people grasp for. Today people spend $25 sometimes to buy a little red string to put around their wrists to ward off the evil eye. I heard an amazing story. By the way, you don't need to spend $25. You'll probably get it for much cheaper. I imagine a few cents is what it should cost. One of the most popular rabbis in New York today is Rabbi Reisman. This is a lecture that attracts, I was told, a thousand people in New York but his lectures are telecast all over the world. They're shown here in Toronto as well and he told an amazing story. One of his congregants was a descendant of the Noam Eli Melech one of the great great Hasidic masters. And the Noam Eli Melech Rabbi Eli Melech and the Ligentsk wrote a book that is called the Noam Eli Melech and this family had an original version, a very, very original version of the book. And to them it was a prize possession and their family would take it whenever a special occasion was going on. So if there was a wedding they would bring this book to the wedding. If there was a brisk they would take it to the brisk and in the family was a member of his congregation that was an attorney that worked on very, very big cases and he was involved in a case that was going on for over three years and there was a tremendous amount of money that could have been his if he won the case. I think he was looking at three or four million dollars as a payoff if he won this case. So on the day when the case was going to be decided this attorney went to his father and said, Taty, I need the Noam Eli Melech and he puts it in his attaché case and he brings it to the courtroom I think this was on a Friday morning Friday night the fellow shows up in the synagogue where my rising can see from the look on his face it didn't turn out well. He went over to the attorney just to talk about how things were going and the attorney said when I went to my father after I lost the case I complained to my father I said, Taty, it's not working it doesn't work So his father said you don't think it works? Did you ever read the Noam Eli Melech? Did you ever read the book? He said at the very back of the book at the back of the Noam Eli Melech he gives a blessing the author gives a blessing to all of his descendants and one of the blessings was that none of them would ever become wealthy he says the book is working the book is working what's unfortunate what's terribly unfortunate is that the very same media today the very same media that promotes a fascination with the occult and the bizarre tends to disparage traditional religion and caricaturizes traditional religion as trite as out of touch, as irrelevant and the role models in popular culture that are so impactful on everyone in the world today rarely embrace traditional values but serve as a pulpit for the occult and for the new age and they gear to a society that is so fixed on seeking quick and simple solutions to very complex issues in life the truth is that virtually all new age practices have been anticipated in the bible and there is some truth to the claim that the new age is really nothing more than recycled old paganism now how do we understand these occult practices such as witchcraft sorcery, astrology there's a whole list of powers in the occult how do we understand them as Jews basically there is a famous and long standing dispute between Maimonides the Rambam and virtually everyone else in the Jewish world of Jewish philosophy the Rambam's position was that all of these occult practices should not be used or engaged in because the Rambam says they're not alone he says they're idiotic they're fake, they're deception and he says essentially that the Torah commands us not to be fools not to be idiots and he says to get involved with these kind of occult practices is basically putting ourselves into a world of lunacy of idiocy what he would consider an entire time that's the position of Maimonides however as I just mentioned he is unique in this approach virtually everyone else follows along the lines of Naach-Maimonides the Rambam who says that actually the Bible takes these practices quite seriously as a matter of fact when the Bible speaks about idolatry the Bible refers to idolatry as Elohim Akherim other gods it wouldn't use the word Elohim God for something that was idiotic and stupid and had no power whatsoever and so Naach-Maimonides takes the view that all of these practices actually are potent they can work but the Bible tells us to not go there to stay away basically what our sages teach us is that the world was created with both positive and negative spiritual forces the truth is that the world of nature itself we try to understand how God runs the world God runs the world to a great extent through nature we live in a world where there are natural forces what happens often in the occult is an attempt to manipulate to take control to outwit to predict to co-opt the natural forces in the world and there are two levels of these natural forces they were the laws of nature in which we operate on a physical level but then there are the spiritual forces that basically mediate between the almighty and the physical world what the Kabbalists speak about are a level of worlds the example that's most easily given is that it would be very difficult for the physical world we're living in to connect directly to the upper spiritual worlds it would be like taking your vacuum cleaner and plugging it into a nuclear generator it's not going to work so what happens is we have the step down generators that allow the ultimate power of the nuclear generator to become more accessible down where we live in the same way with the the Kabbalist teach us is that from the upper supernal spiritual worlds there are different spiritual levels where all these spiritual forces finally are able to come down into our world the spiritual world right above us is for example the world where the astrological powers are mediated so what happens for example when the person taps into the powers of astrology they're not really reading into the future they're not predicting the future they're able to see the present meaning they're able to see on that level of the spiritual world what's going on now and they're able to see how that is going to play out when it comes down into our physical world Nachmanides tells us and many of the Kabbalists teach us that what the occult powers do is to try to take control of the natural forces of the world to try to manipulate the spiritual forces of the world and there's one more layer the bible teaches us that there has to be a balance of power in the spiritual world because if there was only one kind of spiritual force in the world it would have a negative impact on our freedom of choice so for example if there are positive spiritual forces in the world for example we had in the times of the bible the power of prophecy we had in the temple the urim vittumim these amazing powers to be able to know things spiritually we had miracles in the time of the bible so when you have all of these positive spiritual forces we had those spiritual forces that would basically make it very difficult for a person to go anywhere else other than in that direction so what our sages teach us is that the world was created with a spiritual economy if there are spiritual forces that are positive there has to be a balance of negative spiritual forces and so therefore there are the forces what we would call the dark side what the Kabbalists refer to as the sitra akara the other side what sorcery does is to try to manipulate these forces the bible says even though these forces are real don't go there that's the position of Judaism we're not supposed to use these forces and there have basically been three understandings of how these forces are able to impact us one approach again which seems to be the approach one of these is that these forces don't have any real power but they can have psychosomatic effects on you if you are scared by them meaning if you somehow let yourself open to these forces and you let yourself believe that there is some power there by mananese would say there is no power you subject yourself to possible psychosomatic repercussions in most people say there is real power but it can't affect you the bible promises us that we don't have to be affected by these spiritual forces abraham for example was told that according to the astrological signs in the world he would never have children according to the flow of natural astrology abraham was told he would not have no children the bible says god took him beyond the stars and the message of the bible is that we don't have to be we don't have the sense that we are being controlled by forces beyond our control the bible says that if we don't really give ourselves over to these forces they can't really affect us and that ultimately we can override all of these forces through our prayers through our good deeds it's a very famous story in the talmud where the astrologer said akiva's daughter was going to die on a certain date they were able to tell by astrological predictions that akiva's daughter was going to die on a certain date it was the day of her wedding so happened that right before the wedding a poor person came to the door she helped this poor person gave the person something and then she was adjusting her cap apparently it was held on by some kind of a pin while she was adjusting her cap she took out the pin she put it into the wall in order to keep it for a few moments took it out, put it back into her hair got married later that day they saw on the other side of the wall the pin had gone through a scorpion so it could be that maybe if she didn't do this act of kindness maybe this thing would have happened to her but we never under the control of these forces but the ultimate message of the bible is that if we don't pay too much attention to these forces they can't really affect us negatively and finally another point of view which says that there may or may not be power in these forces but the effects of these forces can be punishments if we believe in them and take them seriously I want to emphasize that even though most sources do not accept the approach of mnemonies and do insist that there are real occult spiritual forces in the world it's important to emphasize that today very few of these people really exist virtually all occult practitioners today are fakers meaning that there was once true astrology but the astrological horoscopes in any newspaper today are not true astrology they don't have any real power and there have been by the way many scientific experiments to prove this one of the best ones where they took dozens and dozens of people and gave them all the same exact astrological prediction that was based upon a chillent of different astrological charts all put together every single person read them and said wow that is so accurate that is me the truth is that if any of the people today making psychic predictions really had power to know the future they wouldn't be charging you $25 to take a reading they'd be going to the horse track or playing the stock market and making millions of dollars if any of the people today claiming to be healers really had the power to heal they would go into a hospital and clean it out Browcho Marx once said to a famous psychic who was telling people about their dead relatives everyone was gushing Marx asked the person can I ask a question the psychic said sure you can ask me any question Marx said any question the psychic said sure you can ask me any question Browcho Marx said what's the capital of North Dakota Bismarck in case you want to know but basically the people today that are practicing the occult are generally speaking charlatans the bible tells us in the 13th chapter of Deuteronomy that there will be false prophets in the world that will be able to do incredible miracles but that God is giving these people the ability to do miracles in order to test us so if there is the ability for these people to do incredible things with their powers it's basically there in order to test us to see if we will keep our focus on God and not on these people and their magic tricks the great Gona Vilna was once giving a Torah lecture and in the middle of his lecture a huge clap of thunder was heard by all the students a frighteningly loud clap just like we heard last week I think in the middle of our lecture and the students stopped after hearing this thunder clap and they said the blessing that you're supposed to say when you hear thunder they looked at a very disappointed face from the Vilna Gona their teacher looked very unhappy and they said Rebbe did we say the wrong blessing and he said no you didn't say the wrong blessing but if you had really been paying attention to the lecture you wouldn't have noticed the thunder so the question is often these incredible powers if they do exist are there basically to test us and to see if we'll be distracted by them I told another story last week that I'm going to retell this week but it has a different application and again if you were here last week please indulge me I mentioned last week that it was told by another Rebbe but I heard it in this version of the first who I named after so the story was told of a person who desired to have a very special horse and he was very wealthy and he spent a tremendous amount of money to purchase the most expensive horse in all of Europe and he wanted to take care of this horse and protect it properly so he built a very very elaborate beautiful stable for the horse he put on a very very defensive and fancy lock onto the front door of the stable and then he hired a security guard to watch the stable 24 hours a day 7 days a week he thinks he's going to go to sleep feeling confident that his horse is safe he can't sleep he's nervous he's afraid maybe the guard's going to fall asleep so he gets dressed quickly he runs downstairs at midnight and he sees oh thank god the guard is still awake so he asked the fellow he says you know it's very late at night so the fellow says you know what I do is I ponder very very complicated questions I think of a question that's very difficult to figure out and I try to figure it out and it helps me stay awake so the fellow says what are you thinking about he says you know I'm wondering when a person takes a nail and hammers it into the wall what happens to all the wood that was there where the nail is now the nail is there so the owner of the horse looks at him a little strange but says okay if it's keeping you awake keep thinking so he goes back to his house he tries to fall asleep he's rolling in bed he's tossing and turning he can't fall asleep because he's nervous this guy's going to definitely fall asleep so he runs back down to the barn it's now three o'clock in the morning he sees the fellow is still awake he says wow you're still awake what are you thinking about now he says now oh boy this is really hard he said I was wondering when they make bagels so there's a hole in the middle of the bagel what happens to all that dough where the hole is now where did the dough go so the owner looks at him again rolls his eyes and says okay keep thinking he tries to go back to sleep he can't he's still very nervous he's tossing and turning several hours he runs down he thinks this guy's surely going to be asleep he sees thank God he's still awake he says it's amazing you've been awake all night long what are you thinking about now he says now boy do I have a big question now he says you know you bought the most expensive horse in the world and you put it into this incredible barn that you built and you put on an amazing lock and then you hired me to guard the horse so I was wondering where's the horse so the Hidushia rim said that if you waste so much energy and you spend so much time focusing on useless things then your Yatsuhara, your evil inclination has a very wide gap to come in and steal your right mind that's one of the dangers with focusing our minds where they shouldn't be focusing the Katsugareba used to say that I avoid evil not so much because it's wrong he said I avoid it because there's no time I don't have time to waste on it you know people get very caught up with the issue of the evil eye and people go to extreme lengths to make sure we spit when we see a baby right and you know we have all kinds of practices that make sure nothing is going to happen with the evil eye I think there are more and less healthy ways to think about the Ayanharad, the evil eye I think often we get distracted by the assumption that we can find some kind of mechanical cure like again putting a red string on our hand obviously the evil eye doesn't work like magic if you talk about your new house there's not going to be some magical force that sends termites if someone says your baby is adorable something magical is not going to happen to the child Rabbi Destler one of the great thinkers of our time explained that the change from the evil eye will not come to your home or to your baby but the change will come to the listener or to the observer certain statements or behaviors call attention to what you have and they can make other people jealous when other people are jealous of what you have they may begin to pray for something negative to happen to you prayer is a real spiritual force or when people are jealous of what you have they may try to call attention maybe in the upper worlds to what you have and bring more scrutiny upon you than you're able to withstand many times we get things in life and maybe it was a gift on some level and maybe if the eye of true judgment was placed upon us we wouldn't fully deserve the things that we have God is often very kind to us so it could be that the evil eye so to speak will bring a scrutiny upon us that we may not be able to handle do we really deserve all the things that we have or will the person who we've provoked with jealousy try to subconsciously sabotage us the Torah tells us that we're supposed to have sensitivity even for the feelings of inanimate things it's an amazing part of Judaism we're supposed to develop ourselves to even have sensitivity to the feelings of things that are inanimate for example you all know the custom of covering Friday night when we're saying Kiddush because normally every Jewish meal begins with bread Friday night we're skipping over the bread, we're beginning with wine maybe the bread's going to get upset so in order the bread shouldn't get upset we cover the bread obviously the bread is not neurotic the problem is us the problem is are we going to become insensitive it's really to affect us it's a Jewish custom that when you go into a cemetery you take your tzitzit and you tuck them in because it's considered to be mocking the dead to flaunt the fact that you can perform mitzvot this person's no longer alive they cannot do any mitzvot does the person really see your tzitzit it's not so much for their benefit it's for your benefit we don't want to become the kind of person that is insensitive even to the feelings of the inanimate Judaism tries to instill in us if we're going to be sensitive even to the feelings of that which is inanimate obviously the true goal of Judaism is we should become sensitive to the feelings of other people do we cause other people any discomfort or any jealousy by displaying or calling attention to what we have so the best remedy for this is not running out and buying a red wristband the best remedy is learning to live more simply and learning to live more modestly not necessarily or unnecessarily calling attention to what we have you know the world we live in as I pointed out is a very scary place and it's often tempting to try to get some kind of amulet or lucky charm or some kind of a practice to do to gain some control over your finances, over your health over other situations in life you know in the Bible there was an incredible story where the Jewish people had in the desert done something else to upset God and God sent snakes to bite the Jewish people and to make them sick the story from Numbers chapter 21 the people had spoken ill of God and Moses the God sent against them burning serpents and they bit the people and many people died so what did God tell Moses God told Moses to make a snake out of copper and place it on a stick whoever was bitten and will look at this snake will live Moses then made a snake of copper put it on a stick and if the person was bitten by a snake he would look at the copper snake and would live now if anything sounds like an occult practice that sounds like an occult practice but here it was given directly by God as a commandment what happened ultimately and Talmud tells us in Tractate Psachim 56a that King Chizkiah who has a Kaia did two things there was a book of remedies for any physical ailment in the world there was a book that contained the cure for those ailments we had the cure for everything and Chizkiah who hid that book and he destroyed the copper snake that was used by Moses has a Kaia destroyed the copper snake that was used by Moses why did he do that so the Talmud asks Tractate Rosh Hashanah 29a do you think for example that the Jews were able to prevail over the Amalekites simply because Moses raised his hands what the Bible says when the Amalekites attacked the Jewish people Moses was up there with his hands in the air when his hands are up the Jews prevailed in the battle when his hands weren't able to stay up the Jews lost the battle and there were people that were holding his hands up to make sure he'd be able to keep the hands up so the Talmud asked do you think that the Jews were able to win over the Amalekites simply because Moses raised his hands no when he raised his hands and thus caused them to raise their eyes to their father in heaven then they prevailed so too the Talmud says it wasn't the copper snake it wasn't anyone the copper snake didn't cure anyone but when they looked up towards the copper snake they were ultimately looking up to their father in heaven and then they were able to be cured why did Kiskyahu destroy this copper snake because it had become an idol any time we take our attention off of God and we put it anywhere else we put it into a soothsayer we put it into an astrologer we put it into any other force in the world other than God that's idolatry and so Kiskyahu destroyed this copper snake because it had become an idol people began to ascribe powers to this copper snake all by itself and so too with the book of remedies people began to think who was healing them it was this remedy it was that remedy it's one of the reasons why the Talmud says the best doctors will go to hell the best doctors will go to hell why? it's interesting that we pray every day we call it the Shimonah Esra the 18 benedictions it's really 19 hour days but originally we had 18 blessings the word tov in Hebrew is the numerical value of 17 so the rabbis say tov shebarofem legehenim doctors who feel that they are really the cures they're the ones that are curing people they don't say that 18th blessing they only recite 17 blessings they think they are the healer people like this are basically headed to spiritual destruction and also it's referring to the best of doctors a doctor that's a lousy doctor that doesn't cure many people may not get this kind of swelled head but a person who's a good doctor a great doctor they could easily come to the view that look what I did sir you did nothing you're just a tool of God and so the Talmud says that the best of doctors are often headed towards Gehenim spiritual destruction you know a couple came once to the Baal Shem Tov they were married for many many many years did not have children and they heard the Baal Shem Tov was able to perform wonders and they said Rebbe can you please pray for us that we should have children and he sat with a couple for a little while and he said you know I'm willing to pray for you you're going to have to give me he asked for a tremendous amount of money they looked at him like he was crazy he said we don't have anything like that he said I'm not going to pray for you unless you give me that much money so they ran all over the place they tried to beg they scrapped they asked people please help us they couldn't raise what the Baal Shem Tov was asking for and they spent days and days and days bitterly trying to raise this money they came back to him and they said Rebbe keep your blessing we don't need it we're going to pray ourselves of course the Baal Shem Tov said to himself yes because that's ultimately what had to happen the worst thing would be for them to think that some great rabbi was able to help them the fact is that they are supposed to relate directly to God and self the Torah teaches us that we're supposed to keep our eye on the Baal God wants us to use our brains when we were told not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil it seems very strange why would God tell us not to eat from a tree which contains knowledge why hold that back from us a tree of knowledge of good and evil that might be a good thing to have why does God say not to eat from that tree and one of the reasons might be that if you think you can get something as precious as knowledge by simply eating fruit from a tree then you will become dead that's why the Torah says if you eat from that tree you'll be dead because that becomes a life of spiritual death if you think that you can get something that's ultimately value simply by eating fruit from a tree you're in very bad shape the Torah asks us to keep our eye on the Baal one of the most important commandments in the Torah and it was the focus of a wonderful book written years ago by one of the leading Kabbalists in the land of Israel in Hebrew the book was called you should be wholesome you should have a wholesome and pure relationship with God it's based upon the verse in the Bible 1813 which basically says don't try to outsmart God don't try to figure everything out don't try to ferret out the future don't try to co-opt all the spiritual forces in the world just be a person that goes through life simply relating to God following God's commandments listening to what God says putting your trust directly in God don't try to figure everything out and beat the system so this book was written it's in English it's called Faith and Fali because it deals with what became a very serious problem especially in Israel with all the fake Kabbalists that would go around extorting money or ripping people off with miracle cures or miracle solutions writing amulets pronouncing special formulas for people to recite and the book is urging people not to go there rather than putting all your faith in a Kabbalist put your faith directly in God the reality is that God is in control of the world and to prosper we need to follow God's instructions and not the lure of magical powers