Jewish Life Digital Edition January 2014 | Página 14

FEATURE

THE EVIL EYE REMOVER
WORLDLY
PROBLEMS DESERVE
AN OTHERWORLDLY
RESPONSE – FOR
$101 BY RUCHAMA
NOTHING WAS WORKING OUT THAT YEAR. MY
husband had just switched careers at the
height of the recession, and we were flat
broke. Though my first novel had been published and well received, everything I wrote
since then had turned to dust.
One of my children had come down with a
rare illness – manageable, curable, yes, but it
was serious enough that it felt like a plague,
took out our kishkes tending to her. On top
of it, everything in the house was breaking.
Pipes were bursting right and left, and even
the toilet clogged every third time it was
flushed. When you can’t even count on your
toilet flushing, the world seems black.
I got a call from a friend who said, “This is
all about the evil eye.” I imagined her sipping her bancha tea in her apartment as she
said this.
Evil eye? Of course I had heard of it. My
mother, from Casablanca, Morocco, was on
the superstitious side. Her mother, my
Grandma Estrella, was even more superstitious. They believed in hidden forces that
would take away a new car, job promotions,
their good looks and talents, or maybe prevent happy things from coming their way. A
random compliment, someone showing off
her new baby – all this reflexively brought
on mutterings of “Keyn’e hore” (no evil eye),
followed by cries of, “A-willee, a-willee!” I
turned up my nose at all this – this voodoo.
“I don’t believe in superstitions. It’s not
Jewish,” I said to my friend.
“It’s not a superstition,” she replied. “Ayin-hore – the evil eye – is real. The Talmud
mentions it a lot.”

10 JEWISH LIFE

ISSUE 69

THEY BELIEVED IN HIDDEN FORCES THAT WOULD
TAKE AWAY A NEW CAR, JOB PROMOTIONS, THEIR
GOOD LOOKS AND TALENTS, OR MAYBE PREVENT
HAPPY THINGS FROM COMING THEIR WAY.
“Yeah,” I thought, “but the Talmud also
says it only affects you to the degree you
buy into it.” At least that’s what I’d heard
from my rabbi. “Come on,” I said. “Something must be going on with you.”

Actually, she’d been having tsoris and her
own publishing woes. She admitted she’d recently made contact with an evil eye expert
in Jerusalem. “She had mine removed,” my
friend blurted. Like a gallbladder. Like mas-

PHOTOGRAPHS: ILAN OSSENDRYVER; BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM

KING FEUERMAN