A Black Cat Crossed My Path
Yesterday a black cat crossed my path. Actually it’s something that happens to me once every couple of months. Nu, what do you say, should I expect bad luck? Is a black cat crossing your path something to worry about?
Searching for Jewish Beliefs? Click Here for my main article on Jewish Beliefs.
When I was answering shaylos (queries in Jewish Law) for Ohr Somayach’s Ask the Rabbi way back when, I received a shayla from somebody whose mother, if I remember correctly, had a bit of a accident with the car, and busted the side mirror. Soon after that a whole series of unfortunately events started occurring. Asked the sho’el, her son, is it because my mother broke the mirror that all of a sudden we’re having all this bad luck? And what do we do?
Now, I had what to write, but I wanted first to bounce it off an older sage, and engage him with an attack of questions that I imagined that the asker could ask, in order to develop and crystallize my line of thought. What came out, and what I wrote, is that even if we say that chochma bagoyim ta’amin, and that they have a certain grasp on spiritual metaphysics, bottom line, the framework of mazalos works differently for Klal Yisroel than it does for the Umos, and all of these accepted traditions have no place in Jewish belief. And therefore he can completely disregard the issue of the mirror.
Just that if he sees that his family is the recipient of unfortunate circumstances like he says, this is a message from Shamayim that more is required from him that what he is currently doing in “Sur MeRa VeAsay Tov”, and that he should make a cheshbon hanefesh and do Tshuvah. I write in brief, this is not the place to delineate exactly what I told him.
There was a time when I would chazer, review, the above adage when our charcoal feline friend happened to traverse a perpendicular route to yours truly’s, I would say to myself “the maarechet of mazalos works differently for the Yidden, ain mazal leYisroel…” but even that I’ve stopped doing already.
Leave A Response