Evil Eye: Magical Amulets

Sometimes I like to peruse Jewish fundamentalist websites. I enjoy reading their apologetics. Chabad.org is my favorite. They seem to be very hard-line regarding many of Orthodox Judaism's rules and regulations.

This brand of Judaism has many kinds of ideas which incorporate magical thinking. It seems that the Jewish equivalent to a curse or a hex is the Evil Eye.

According to: http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/166909/jewish/Do-You-Believe-in-the-Evil-Eye.htm

The Evil Eye is the name given to harmful negative energy which is created by people looking at you with envy or ill-feeling.

What the heck is "negative energy?" This sounds very New-Age-ish. How can we capture this energy in order to test its effects? How could there be evil power in just a glance, a look? How can my thoughts and ideas resonate into actual power and action to harm someone? That's just absurd, crazy.

Aron Moss from Chabad describes the Kabbalah tradition of wearing an amulet -- a red string:

. . . the red string is an old tradition. A thread is wrapped seven times around the tomb of Rachel in Israel, and then cut into little cords. It is then said to give protection from the "Evil Eye" for one who wears it on his or her wrist.

Unbelievable. Someone wraps a thread around a grave and that particular string (cut in cords) is supposed to protect all humanity from their own invention, the evil eye.

So, they create a problem: the Evil Eye

And they have the built in solution: wear a red string to ward off the evil energy.

But Aron Moss minimizes the effect of the red string against this negative energy:

If you are concerned that some sinister power has designs on you, there are other solutions. The most powerful protection against evil forces is the force of goodness. Whether a red string helps or not I do not know . . .

Of course, he offers his own equally loony solution to this fictitious problem of the evil eye: ignore it. He writes:

. . . the Talmud says that the Evil Eye can only affect you if you worry about it, whereas it leaves you alone if you ignore it. So a more effective (and cheaper) way to avoid the Evil Eye is to forget about it.

That is just nuts. If something is actually real, it remains in reality whether or not we ignore it or obsess over it.

If my sister has a nasty cold with symptoms such as coughing and sneezing, I can choose to ignore these symptoms and visit with her. But I will most likely catch her cold despite the fact that I chose to ignore her symptoms.

How could adults actually believe this stuff? Why would people think that they could create a negative energy (whatever that may be) with a glance or a feeling? On top of that, they think that wearing a red string will protect them from this effect.

These crazy magical amulets are abundant in Judaism; mezuzzahs, prayer shawls, tefillin, little hands of God. How can people actually think, in this day and age, that objects and incantations (prayers) have magical powers?

Life is irrational, unfair, unexplainable. How comforting to think that there are simple little things we can do to ward off evil. But this is the refuge of children. And bad things still happen.