Jeremy Rosen
Magic, Superstition and the Jews

Jeremy Rosen - Magic, Superstition and the Jews

• Hello everybody. This is a very controversial subject we’re going to deal with today and it needs some definition and some clarification. And as always, I like to see how an idea has developed over the centuries from the early biblical period until our time today. What we call luck is very, very difficult to define. Is it the same as good fortune? Does it mean that something supernatural has intervened in a particular series of events in order to achieve a specific result so that if for example, a witch doctor were to give you a magic potion and as a result of this magic potion, you got better, is that a matter of luck, is it a matter of science? Today, as has happened at serious various times in the history of mankind, we have gone through a period of clashes between what is called scientific on the one hand and what is called magical or even superstitious on the other. And it’s a very strange phenomenon that here we are in the 21st century with scientific advances beyond our wildest imagination, with all kinds of amazing phenomena that we have been able to analyse, break down, turn into formulas that can then cure people, form what look like miracles.

And yet, at the same, time our belief in superstitious, non-rational, non-scientific, magical issues have grown instead of receded. You might have thought that over the past century notions of magic and luck would’ve disappeared in the face of science, and yet they haven’t. Part of it is because science isn’t always as accurate and as definite as we like to think it is, and things that were apparently very clear and obvious at the time of Newton are no longer the same at the time of Einstein. And what was clear to Einstein is not absolutely clear to us at this particular moment in terms of the latest developments scientifically. So why is it that as rationalism rises at the same time non-rationalism rises almost in reaction to the rationalism? And yet we humans are remarkable phenomena and we have both a rational and a non-rational element to us. And even though behaviourists like to give formulary and explanations of how human beings respond, and how they act, and claim they can predict everything. And yet humans have this capacity to defy predictions and to defy expectations.

Let me start with the Bible because the Bible sets out initially to challenge all previous ideas as to what happens on earth. The pagan world beforehand believed that what happens on earth was the result of heavenly influences. These heavenly influences were the stars, the spheres, the sun and the moon, because they saw very clearly that the moon has an influence on the physical world in terms of tides, that the sun is able to produce or encourage the growth of plants, of fruit, of food. And because they saw these things, they believed that these were the powers that organised the world. And if you could appease these powers, they would do the right things. They would bring you rain at the right moment, sun in good measure. And this was the pagan world that thought there were forces beyond us over which we have no control. And therefore, our reaction has to be to appease them. And the way we appease them is by sacrificing to them, by giving them, by offering up whatever we can in order to get them to be on our side and whatever we can included not just animals but humans. Both other humans, we think of the Inca and others in South America who sacrifice large numbers of them to appease the gods. We think of the Greeks killing their children to appease the gods.

And we think of some of the tribes that were around Israel when it was initially formed, who rather like the Spartans left children to die on the mountaintops to make sure that only the strong survived. They made their children pass through fire and only those who were able to survive were going to be the ones who would lead on. Along comes initially monotheism and monotheism says, guys, you don’t have to be frightened at all these forces that are going on around us on the outside, you don’t. You have to realise that there is a system, a source, and this source is the one GOD who is above the sun, and above the moon, and above anything physical on earth. And so long as you are on good terms with this God, which you can achieve by managing to obey what God wants morally, ethically, then you are all right. And that in effect is the promise of the Torah that if you listen in the Shamar to the words of God, the rains will come at the right time, and you’ll eat, and you’ll be satisfied, but beware if you don’t.

Theoretically, this should have been the end of paganism, but it wasn’t. And just as religion has survived to this very day, so has paganism in one form or another. What is interesting is that in a sense the Torah is slightly ambiguous. And the reason that it is ambiguous is that the challenge to monotheism is that good people suffer, bad people survive and thrive. And if the world is based on rewarding you for good deeds and punishing you for bad deeds, then how are you going to explain this? Of course, as we know, one of the answers given at that a certain stage was, well, it’s not in this world, it’s in another world, but the Torah doesn’t talk about another world and therefore, one of the answers that might be given is that this is a national promise rather than an individual promise. That nations thrive or fall on the basis of their ethical behaviour and things go well.

And in addition to that, we’ve also discovered that in this pagan world, kings when they came to power were always associated with the gods. They were ruling by divine authority or by whichever God was their adopted God, and they would give a declaration on behalf of that God in which they would say that we as kings, we guarantee that if you are good, good things will happen. And if you are bad, bad things are going to happen. But from that moment when monotheism appears, human beings have been ambivalent about all this. And so it’s very interesting that if you look at what the Torah says and says very clearly that you should not go after magic or hocus pocus or anything that you possibly might be misled by. At the same time, it does seem to give some sort of validity. So if you think for example of Pharaoh and his magicians, and the fact that they were able to replicate some of the magic that Moses was able to do, the serpent turning into a stick and then back again. And rivers turning into blood, and plagues coming from locusts and other animals.

So they do seem to have some sort of power. The question of course is, is this power just trickery, just like David Copperfield walking through the wall of China. Or like any mind-reader or like any person who is good at cards, are these really what we call magic. Or are what they called in ancient times in Hebrew. Able to grab hold of your eye and fool it. Take it away for a minute so you don’t realise what’s going on? So if you look at what the Bible says about these magicians that did exist in Egypt and did appear to have magical powers. The Torah insists, so whether it’s in Exodus, whether it’s in Leviticus, whether throughout the five books of Moses, such things as don’t follow magicians, don’t follow ghost source spirits, don’t listen to those people who are soothsayers or enchanters or sorcerers or divinations. All the sorts of things that Madam Blavatsky was doing and people still to this day are doing. On the streets of New York, you will find mind readers, palmists, fortune tellers.

And astrology is the most followed religion in the United States of America today. So the Bible, the Torah, is absolutely certain that these things have no power. And not only in the five books of Moses, but I’m sure you all know of the story of Samuel when, sorry of Saul, when Samuel died and his religious leader wasn’t there and he didn’t know what he was going to do. And he turned to the two oracles that the Torah talks about. The oracle of the Urim and the Thummim. The Urim and the Thummim were these stones that lit up on the high priest’s breastplate. And when you wanted to know what to do, you would go to the priest and the priest would consult the Urim and the Thummim in the same way that in Greece, they would go to the Oracle at Delphi and ask what they thought, in the same way that the Romans used to look at the innards of birds, the auspices, and see if it was auspicious or not. So there were these seemingly magical oracles.

There was the case of trying to find the truth of whether somebody was telling a lie or not and getting them to drink some sort of magic water, a trial by ordeal also something that was part of the world and has been until a few hundred years ago within the structure of the Torah. So the Torah seems to speak in if you like forked tongue, but I don’t mean that. I think we have to understand that just as with things like sacrifices, there are procedures that were calculated at that time to achieve certain ends. The most obvious is to take an oath. Nowadays, we take an oath all the time and we swear by God’s name in any other name and we don’t pay any attention to it. And people stand up in a court and swear to tell the truth. And we know they’re not going to tell the truth. These forms, they’re not magic necessary, but they are ways of trying to find out, of getting people to confess, and then you have the information. In a sense, they become tools. But the question is why does the Torah go on allowing these tools? And the simple answer would be that at certain stages you have to deal with the reality of what the ordinary person actually thinks and feels.

So the truth of the matter is that there is a word in the Torah called Mazal. Mazal is used only once in the Bible and it’s used to describe the stars of the heaven. It’s not used to say that the stars of the heaven in themselves have any influence, but as we refer to the sun, and the moon, and the stars, there is something called Mazal, but it doesn’t mean what we think it means today. It’s not until Babylon where you have the development of new ideas, of angels, of extra spirits, even the word shade spirit, which runs right through the Talmud, is not used in that same way in the Bible. It is adjusted at a later stage to explain anything we can’t understand. And that was what happened with Mazal. Mazal gave way to astrology. Astrology is this incredibly sophisticated way of attributing to the stars, to the moon, and to the sun, certain influences they have over us. And there’s an argument as to whether this goes by year, by month, by day, or by hour. So that all people in this world born at a particular month, at a particular day, at a particular hour will have the same characteristics and qualities as each other, and different to others. Now, this was the norm.

This was the norm throughout the Greek and the Roman period. It was the norm that was adopted right through to this very day. And so when you look for example at certain books on astrology, they will not only give you the time of the day and the hour, they’ll talk about colours, they’ll talk about numbers. In Judaism, they’ll talk about tribes, and all of these are supposed to have inbuilt qualities and influences of the spheres upon how we live. When we come to the Talmud, there is a debate and the Talmud is split between those rabbis who say there is such a thing as Mazal and those who say no, there’s no such thing as Mazal. In the Talmud, different rabbis arguing with each other. The Talmud is full of magic, full of spirits. Anything that couldn’t be understood like gravity would be applied to spirits. If your clothes wore out, there were spirits. If your food went off, it was thanks to spirits. If you didn’t get a good night’s sleep, it was thanks to spirits. And you had to know how to deal with spirits, either by giving a formula which puts the spirit off or by some sign that stops the spirit having influence upon you or by taking certain precautions. A very interesting example is that in the Talmud it says that there is a spirit and evil spirit over the water.

And if you drink the water when the evil spirit is around, it is going to poison you. But if you find a way of preventing the spirit working, for example, pouring out a little bit of water first, then the spirit of the bad water won’t be able to get to you. And you won’t be surprised here that to this very day there is a custom in some Hasidic circles of always pouring out a bit of water first before you fill-up the cup to make the blessing. These different magic spells are so strange and weird that they seem impossible. For example, if you want to know the evil spirits who are around you place sand around your bed when you go to sleep and when you wake up you’ll see little marks in the sand that is proof that evil spirits were there. But if you want to see them in real life, what you have to do is you have to get the placenta, of a black cat, and you have to boil it down, and you have to mix it with various herbs, and place it upon your eyes, and then you’ll be able to see them. Now this within a Torah which says, don’t pay any attention to sorcerers, to witches, to magic or anything like that.

Now, the rationalists were able to deal with that. Maimonides writing 1,000 years ago, said listen, all reference to anything magical that happened in the Torah, were not literal and not expected to be taken literally. And even things like angels and fighting angels are symbolic or are the result of dreams. You shouldn’t pay attention to any of these things in the world we live in now because they were valuable once upon a time, but they’re not necessary anymore. Now, Maimonides was irrational and many people disagreed with that. In fact, the great Gaon Vilna, who existed in the 18th century, commented on Maimonides and says Maimonides was wrong. All these things are things that are still potentially influential. And therefore, we have to be very careful about we what we do. And therefore, we have to spend our time as much as we can doing good deeds, studying Torah all day long in order to make sure that these bad influences can get to us. Unfortunately, the Holocaust showed more than anything else that no matter what you do, there is nothing that you can do to stop a certain convergence of events over which you have no control, that can be catastrophic.

So we are in a situation in which we can look at the world in which we exist from different points of view. We can look at it from the point of view which says, look, everything that happens on earth happens for a reason. And the reason is the convergence of certain factors. If for example, you don’t look after your body, you will get ill. If you drive dangerously, you will cause an accident. And you may even curse yourself. If somebody who is given the responsibility of examining engines on jet planes misses something in the process, it could lead to a catastrophic disaster. And so when people talk about I’ve had good luck or bad luck, the question is what do they mean by good luck and bad luck? Because there’s no question that sometimes you can try a hundred times to make a bank survive. The famous Japanese banker of Nomura went bankrupt eight times before he was able to get a successful company going. So many people have gone through disasters or have gone through failures before, only perseverance got them to survive. If they would’ve taken a view, oh, it’s only luck, then that is passive. It means you don’t do anything to try to make yourself successful financially. And the chances are that you probably won’t.

But then you might say, well, what about the luck of lucky genes? Some people have lucky genes. They inherit vast sums of money and they don’t have to do any work, and they can rely on previous generations, and that is luck. Well, you could call it that but you could call it, it is the fact of somebody making love to another person and producing a child who was either more intelligent or had certain other qualities that other children do not have. Would you call that luck? We tend to call it luck, but in fact, we know why it happens. We can give an explanation for it. And for that reason I have to say that I do not believe in what we call luck. I do believe that there are things that happen that we can explain and there are also things that happen that we might not be able to explain ‘cause we don’t have the information. And yet I have a close friend, a surgeon who is one of the best surgeons in Manhattan who tells me that very often surgeons use some form of superstition before they perform certain experiments and certain surgeries.

I also know how many people still to this day take their favourite little bunny or penguin or whatever it is to an exam in the hope that having their little token there that’s going to help them. And then if we come closer to home, I come to all those people who go to great rabbis who tell 'em if they do what they tell 'em to do and make this particular psalm and say it whenever they should say it, or this particular combination of texts, that they will be cured, they will do well in business. And one notices how often people will always focus on those occasions when the prediction comes true and ignore the predictions that don’t come true. This is the idea I suppose you call it, of bias confirmation. And given that there’s always a 50-50 chance, if I say you’re going to get better and you do or you don’t, then people will remember the 60% when you do and when they don’t. Does that prove that it was because of the Rebbe or was it just that what the Rebbe did was to give you some sort of feeling of somebody’s taking care of us, it makes me feel better. And that opens up to another important idea.

The idea of the placebo. The placebo is a process in which something which has some within it medical benefit, is paired-off with something which has absolutely no benefit. Some pupils take one and some the other. And then there are groups that make sure this is a fair combination. And we see that sometimes the placebo produces good results. In the same way, faith healers very often give people the sense that somebody’s looking after you, somebody will help. And in a situation like that, it seems to work. And people who feel they’re helped and work hard are very often able to overcome situations which other people just give up on or feel so negative, feel they’ve got nothing they can do. So that humans are amazingly susceptible, particularly when you come to things like Kabbalah, mysticism, which are supposed to guarantee a good outcome. And yet, in many cases, are based on very similar acts and traditions that were popular in magic throughout the mediaeval period until this very day.

Even issues like whether pigeons are able to remove any physical problem when you place them on the heart of somebody who’s suffering from some liver fault. And very often, sometimes they work and sometimes they may be beneficial in certain ways, but that doesn’t mean to say that they replace the medical side. On the other hand, in the medical side, we also know how often things go wrong, and how often people are dishonest, and how often people who want to make money say terrible things because they want to sell a particular drug, and they want to make money out of that. So in that sense, we are faced with this tremendous insecurity and uncertainty about the nature of life. And you can argue therefore, that each person chooses the poison, so to speak, that they want to take and the result that they want to take. And as a result of that, sometimes it will work, sometimes it won’t work, and yet people are amazingly susceptible. That’s how things work in the world in which we are.

And so for example, I’m often faced with people who say, look, I’ve been cursed. I genuinely have been cursed and I want you to remove the curse. Or somebody who will say something like somebody has an evil eye. And I’ve told you bad things are going to happen because it’s an evil eye or a curse of some kind. I try my best to tell people that they shouldn’t worry about something totally not logical. But people will say to me, that’s because you’re rationalist. We’re not a rationalist. We do believe in the evil eye, we do believe in spirits, we do believe in strange things that happen. And that if we go to the graves of men who have died long ago, that this will help us either find a wife or find a business. Or that people, if they put a little piece of paper in the wall, will guarantee that something good is going to happen. And sometimes people will tell you they did and they’ll tell you the most amazing stories of how things have happened. And very often, things do happen that are quite amazing.

And some human beings have incredible gifts and very often they distort these gifts, but have gifts in order to persuade people to follow them. And look how many people are followed, all these crazy evangelical, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish leaders who believe that they can do almost anything, sadly, including being corrupt at the same time and fiddling even though they claim to be holy men. And so I have to say I’m very suspicious of holy men. I don’t trust holy men. I trust human beings as human beings that I come into contact with and I find them impressive people, but I do not assume they have divine qualities that they claim to have that comes from heaven. So the challenge in life indeed is what are we going to do? I don’t believe for one minute that a Kabbalistic curse on somebody is necessarily going to get them to perform some sort of catastrophic dream or event or disaster. Indeed, I go back to the Talmud and I say that when it comes to interpreting dreams, it all depends on who interprets them. And particularly, if they get a lot of money, then they believe in it. And by and large the Talmud says that the interpretation of dreams is simply a matter of who’s doing it, not what exists objectively.

That these dreams and all these traditions are essentially important part of a tradition. As they say, there is no god in a foxhole. That is to say in the old days when there was a catastrophe, things were happening, you were terrified, the war was going on. The bullets were fighting on all kinds, go zooming around, and the bombs were going to go off. And we go through periods of disaster. That’s the time when one always says, oh, please God, let there not be. And I understand this, it’s necessary to be the case. And yet I’ve always said that I personally don’t find this helpful. There’s a curse, give it to me, I’ll take it from you. You have some evil eye. By all means send me your evil eyes. You’ve been told terrible things will happen, terrible things will happen, I’ll take them from you. It doesn’t mean to say it protects me from life, God, things are going to happen to me, when I’m ill, when I’m sick, when I don’t look where I’m going, when I meet the wrong person or something happens that it shouldn’t, of course, terrible things are going to happen. But I don’t assume it’s going to happen because of some hocus pocus.

I come to the conclusion that there is an amazing world in which we live. There’s so much good, there’s so much bad, there’s so much what we think is bad luck but is explicable and so many things that sometimes are not explicable. But I strongly believe that what we should be doing is trying to be good, caring human beings and being as good and as helpful as we can. And when bad things happen, we have to be supportive. And when bad things happen, we need the personal strength to help overcome. And eventually, of course, we know we’re not. We know we’re all going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it. And therefore, the function of our lives is to be as positive, as constructive, and as hurtful as we can. Some of us are going to be suicidal, some of us are going to be desperate, some of us are going to fail, and some of us are going to survive. There is no magic cure. There is no perfect solution. God is there to support us, to give us strength, but not necessarily to intervene every single moment we make a mistake and we expect God to intervene and stop us from stepping in front of a bus.

And so, on that note, I turn myself over to discussion as to how we can move from here.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: And the first question I have is the question of simply what happened to the wonderful music I was playing when I started this particular piece of music.

A: It was Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto, one of my favourite pieces.

Q: Madeleine asks, how does monotheism and the sacrifices in the first temple in Jerusalem coexist in biblical times?

A: Well, it is my opinion and it actually is the opinion of Maimonides. Again, the rationalists like it, the non-rationalists don’t. But Maimonides says very clearly, look, at that time everybody was sacrificing. It was rather like a child wants to give its favourite balloon to its mommy and its daddy. So if you want to appease God, you do something by sacrificing which shows that you care. And that’s what people do. Of course, at the same time as they were doing it with animals, they were doing it also with human beings and killing human beings. I personally find the idea of killing animals for food, something unbearable. And particularly the methods that we use and the number of animals we kill. I find it personally offensive. But on the other hand, this was the norm thousands of years ago. And in a sense we’ve moved from there so that we’ve stopped offering sacrifices and instead we appease God, if you like, by praying, and by giving of ourselves to God. But even that is now changing because now we tend to meditate and maybe a new religion soon will be a new form of artificial, some sort of ChatGPT is going to come along. Sometimes we might think it’ll be extraterrestrial. Who knows? We are constantly changing and evolving, bear in mind, that human beings have been developing for millions of the years.

And when we look at maybe a thousand years, it’s a speck, it’s nothing. So sacrifices at that time was what people did, both in the first temple and in the second temple until it was stopped. And I think it’s a jolly good idea that it was stopped and we’ve moved on to something more spiritual, and academic, and different. Even though there are many people within the religious Jewish world still hope there’s going to be a time when the sacrifices will come back. Even though there are some sources in the Talmud which say maybe when the Messiah comes back, we won’t want sacrifices, and maybe things will change, and maybe we’ll be in a different, and we don’t know what’s going to happen.

But nevertheless, this, I see, a personal process at a time as a means to an end. And what the Torah is primarily concerned with is being a good person. Which is why the Bible says God doesn’t want your sacrifices if you’re going to be corrupt, equal people. We don’t want 'em. God rejects taking sacrifices if they’re not good human beings as well. Try letting science, maths provide your answers, laws of probability, luck. Sorry, I now have to depart. See you some other time. So I’d love to know what you’re talking about. So some other times.

Q: Andrea, how do you feel about Jewish statues trying to fool the evil eye, red string amulets, black weddings, wearing rockgrind colour and so forth and so on.

A: You find this in every religion. Little bits of rites of string around on our wrists. Are just as much part of the Hindu tradition as any other. These are part of, shall we say, magic forms of protecting us from bad influence or bad luck. So I think these are a joke. If it makes somebody feel better, good luck to them. I’m certainly not going to spend my time, any energy trying to dissuade them because somebody who’s already absolutely certain this is going to work, what I say is not going to influence them. I just try to praise to pressurise people, to persuade them not to be susceptible to them and thinking that this is necessarily going to work.

Don’t listen to magicians, just the Word of God. But there have been several cases, says Lauren, of people who claim to have heard the Word of God, which was instructing them to kill prostitutes or whatever it is, what God told them to fight against abortion and other unpleasant consequences. I have to say that I don’t believe for one minute that we believe in what we called prophecy. Prophecy happened at a particular time, at a moment in history when the idea of God speaking to human beings directly was considered quite normal. In Judaism, we’re told very clearly from the time of the Bible that we don’t listen to divine words. We’ve been given, if you like, a Constitution. And the Constitution tells us to follow the Constitution and not to follow what people say God has told them to do if it flies in the way of the tradition of the Torah. The fact is that unfortunately, many people have come to claim nowadays in our own times, that certain rabbis speak with divine inspiration. I’m afraid, I do not expect, I don’t respect and I don’t value the idea that they are inspired by God to do something that goes against what the Torah tells us to do.

So this is an example of precisely what I’m talking about, that people take this power, they happen in particularly in Christianity. It to some extent happens under Islam. It happens within Judaism that people have leaders that claim to have extra super, super, super sonic supernatural forces, which I find disturbing. Again, I’m judged by how I act, how I live, how I do. And if I want to know what to do, I go back to the Torah to tell us what to do. And I don’t relying on someone with special gifts to tell me that I’m wrong. A surgeon once told me that I should be fine now, touch wood. Well, of course, as you know, where touch wood comes from, it comes from the superstition in Christianity that touching wood is the wood of the cross. And if you touch the wood of the cross, this will protect you. Well, frankly, if you think it’s going to help you, good luck. Mickey asks, where does the life of olam ha-ba come from? Well, it’s interesting because the, no mention of life after death actually specifically in the Torah, it does appear later on in the Talmud, and it comes after the Babylonian exile. I think that the question of where the idea comes from is an attempt to try to explain why it is that bad things happen to good people. And therefore, the idea that somehow or other they will be paid back in a world to come at some later stage. Now, we have no idea whether that’s going to happen or not. And the Talmud tells a story of a certain rabbi Meir who went up to heaven and he discovered that in heaven, all the people that were at the bottom in this life are at the top in the next world.

And all the top in the next world were those who were at the bottom in the world we are today. To which how do we know? Do we really believe he went to heaven and came back? Of course not. And therefore the Talmud says in regard to the world to come, we just don’t know. Nobody knows, nobody’s been there, nobody has seen it. The olam ha-ba, the world to come is something which we have no idea of. It would be very nice if it exists and if we get there, it will be lovely. I have no idea what it’s going to be. And again, Maimonides says very specifically, we’ve no idea what the world to come is about. It is an accepted idea that meets the question of if we’ve suffered now, maybe things will be better in the future. I on the other hand think that we have to make the most of our lives now. What will happen in another world is for us to deal with when, and if, and how we get there.

Thank you Clara for your comments.

Sue says this freedom I have as psychologist, insists on Reuter Bendell, of having red little offerings from rabbis that offer cures around the wrist every day that she visits and we let her go about her business. Well, all I can say is, frankly, I would not have any confidence in any psychologist who offers to anybody else little red string as a solution to their problems. That doesn’t mean to say they might not be superstitious. And I know a lot of psychologists who are very strange and weird, but frankly, if I knew a psychologist relied on the red string, I’d run away as fast as I possibly could.

Q: So Shelly asked, why do we ask for God to intervene?

A: Well, this is an interesting issue. When I ask for God to intervene, am I asking God to intervene? Am I expecting God to help me win a football match? Am I expecting to get a good tip of the stock market? The answer is I don’t. I don’t expect God to be Superman. What I am asking when I pray is I just hope that wonderful things are going to happen. I want things to happen. I hope things are going to happen. I hope my children are going to succeed. I hope they’re going to be healthy, but I’ve no guarantee they’re not. And if it doesn’t work out, I have to do my best to help. But I not pray treating God as a fruit machine in Las Vegas. I don’t believe if I put a coin in and I do the right thing, I’m going to get an answer. That’s not how I understand the world works.

Q: Does God produce miracles or is that also superstitious?

A: Well, it depends. I think and as again Maimonides says miracles are the least important, the least important ways of engaging with God. They might have worked at a time when people believed in them, but we shouldn’t look for miracles. And you look at the Torah again, how often there are miracles and then almost immediately they fall back to doing what they shouldn’t be doing, no matter how many miracles come. So I think miracles are, if you like, indications may be to some people, look there’s something unusual going on here. There’s something beyond what you normally understand at this moment, but it’s not a guarantee that things are going to work out. So I certainly don’t believe in miracles, but I do believe that remarkable things happen. We don’t always know why those things happen and I’m amazed at what how often happens and can happen.

Diane asks, a 25-minute commute on an express daily to high school at which I taught, trucks on the way, slaughterhouses pass very regularly. Yes. I don’t know what you mean. I wish I knew what you mean. So if you want to send me an email to explain, I would like to know. You might be referring to the question of the Holocaust and why horrible things happen but they happen because humans are evil and do things.

Q: Mezuzah are talismans to ward off luck?

A: Well, some people think it is. I don’t think it is for one minute. I think what a mezuzah is simply saying, this is a way of identifying like when they were in Egypt and they put on their doorposts, in order to identify that they were getting out of Egypt. The purpose of mezuzah is to show that this is a house which is committed to a particular way of life which expects us to be good people. I do not believe that mezuzahs are magic talismans and I certainly don’t have the custom of my family of kissing mezuzahs. I notice them, I see them. But that doesn’t mean to say I believe they are protective, but then throughout the Muslim world, door being paint around the entrance to a building is supposed to ward off evil spirits. So I think it is again, superstitious.

Q: George. Hi , George. How does one account for rabbis such as Ralph Messer, who give guidance, foretell events that will happen?

A: Well listen, I happen to know personally of many examples where the Rebbe made predictions that didn’t happen. I also know of others where predictions did happen. Now the Rebbe is, in my view, was an absolutely great leader. And what he often did was give people encouragement and support. And this is one of the things that Hasidic Rebbes do. They make people feel better and it helps. And so without doubt going to the Rebbe often has helped people get better, feel good, but just as often they’ve been and it hasn’t happened. So this comes back to the whole question of what the role of a Rebbe is. And the role of the Rebbe in my view is not to perform magic, it is to give emotional support as best as possible. Help people cope with terrible things that may or may not happen. But to think that they have magical powers, I do not buy.

Myrna. Thank you. I’m sorry I have to leave.

Woody Allen once said, we should happily believe in God if only he could put a large amount into a Swiss bank account in his name. Very amusing, very amusing. And who knows, it may happen, but I don’t think that’s the function of God anymore. It’s the function of God to respond to the World Cup football match when people either bow down, kiss the earth or sign up to God. That’s not his business.

Q: Michael, the irony that human animals are created with the need to believe in mysticism or to believe father figures or to believe in politicians and to believe in all these things. Was this all part of the grand design?

A: Well, it is part of the design, the evolution of humans to look for help, to look for support and to look for love. And so, just because, shall we say, I love the idea of my father being a support to me and giving me a feeling of love. It doesn’t mean to say that therefore my father carries out magic. And in the same way, the idea that people are superstitious doesn’t mean therefore that there isn’t some value in emotional support. I just don’t believe for one minute that this automatically makes things better. And so, particularly, when people want to say God is a lot of nonsense or mysticism a lot of nonsense, I strongly disagree because mysticism can also be just a matter of feeling there is more to life than what appears immediately. That it can give oneself a certain sense of well-being, a certain sense of support. And therefore, I regard myself in a certain way as a mystic. And I love mysticism, but I don’t expect from mysticism magic. That’s the crucial difference. And so in the same way, love may lead me to be misled or let down or suffer from and love hurts, doesn’t mean to say I might not still want to love.

What about the revolutionary Rebbe? Well, I’ve mentioned that. Sharing your wisdom.

Q: So what is God?

A: Well, for me, God is a dimension that adds to the physical. That it is a force and an energy that one can tap into that one finds supportive and enables us to think beyond the immediate physical world that surrounds us everywhere. Where we think this is the only thing that counts. And there’s a lot more that is not rational, that does count, but that doesn’t have anything to do with magic. Surely everything has to do with personal beliefs. And yes, I think personal beliefs mean that we find what works for us. I would like to persuade people that being a good person and being rational is a help. It’s not the only solution, but it’s where one should put one’s emphasis.

Q: What when people consulted Lubavitch Rebbe to get advice?

A: Well, again, as I say, not only the Rebbe of Lubavitch but plenty of other Rebbes. There are plenty of Rebbes in the world today that people consult and they pay money to give them good answers, and good resolutions, and good solutions. And I know many people who swear it’s helped. But I know just as many people who swear it hasn’t. So you take your pick. It would be interesting to know, activated by fake religion as wokeness, which is also no less devotion. Oh, that’s an excellent point. I mean several people have pointed out that we are in an era of where woke is a kind of a religion. You’ve got to believe whatever you think, and you can’t have any other point of view, and this is the only way to go. That’s a form of religion, it’s a form of primitive belief. It’s not examining another point of view.

I’d be interested to know, also, activated by faith religions to do work. Yes. Well, that’s what we’ve mentioned and I think that’s everything. In which case, Julian, if you want to follow up with an email, please do so. I look forward to carrying on from there. So thank you very much and have a good day.