Protection against the Evil-eye
When the things we want to do are obstructed by irrational causes, we can feel the influence of an external intrusion, of an eager desire to prevent our progress, even if it is minimal.
We feel we are observed from our physical features, to our psychological or social skills. Our material goods, our way of expressing our joy, even our children can become victims of this external gaze which does not like them, and wants to see their progress slowed by the ambient energy of this surrounding malice.
This phenomenon created by the gaze has been analyzed by the Sages of the Mishna.
Rabban Yochanan said to his disciples: “Go out and go and inquire of the evil path from which the man must turn. ”
⁃ Rabbi Eliezer replied, “to have a malicious eye. ”
⁃ Rabbi Yehoshua: “to be a bad companion. ”
⁃ Rabbi Yossi: “to make a bad neighbor. Rabbi Shimon: “to borrow and not to repay, because to borrow from man is to borrow from G.d, as it is written: ” The iniquitous borrows and does not pay, but the right is rewarding and gives with generosity ” “(Ps. 37,21).
⁃ Rabbi Elazar son of Arach says: “to have a bad heart. ”
“I prefer the opinion of Elazar the son of Arach,” replied the master, “for yours are contained in his. ”
The wrong path, which leads through all these stages, or can be defined in these few ideas, is the one that leads to social fracture and enmity.
The best way to name the Evil -Eye, the bad neighborhood, the lust, is “Evil Heart”, to put it back in its purely emotional origin.
Evil-heart is a heart that sees only the outside, and that forgets or even denies its own inner nature.
Evil heart believes in the skin color, the garment more than the body, the appearance more than the character, the power more than the human qualities, the unpermanent more than the permanent, and ends up becoming ‘evil eye because he does not see well, and insists on showing his error of glance.
The path from which one must turn is the one that begins in the forgetfulness of the heart.
Racism is language, reasoning, philosophy, forgetting the heart.
To borrow not to return, is the true conscious cause behind this forgetfulness. One wants to dispossess the other of the goods that life has given him. By doing this, we look away from the heart to the outside, or become hungry becomes its daily reality.
For nothing in the external reality can satiate the heart.
This phenomenon of vampirization of hearts and human relationships is real for those who are victims.
The Sages of the Mishna teach us the importance of seeking the designation of what we live. According to them, they must go back to the source and rename things so that they correspond to the place from which they emanate.
Victims of racism know that the excuses to justify their oppression come from a Evil heart.
The evil eye that accompanies the bad heart sees all the assets of the other as a threat, and hastens to devalue them.
Everything becomes a proof of inferiority.
Evil-heart is able to measure your skull, your nostrils, the color of your eyes, your skin, and make calculations to prove your inferiority in order to satisfy its insecurity.
Bad-heart sees the good of others bad.
He wants to go to their homes and dispossess them, in their own countries, of their own resources, without repaying them, without even thanking them, but by making a constant propaganda of infantilization, and justification of violence and looting.
To protect oneself from this evil eye means to be aware of where and how it strikes.
Racism is a contagious disease of the heart.
To be aware that it exists, and to draw the right moral consequences of this realization, is what can protect us from it.
If racism exists in us, the evil eye exists in us.
If the evil-eye exists in us, we can not be protected.
Knowing this, we can understand why in the Torah when Jacob feared the evil eye of his brother Esau, he sent all his prayers for the heart of his brother to be transformed.
Esau says to Jacob: take, I have a lot.
Jacob replies: Thank you, I have everything.
Esau says to him: come, let’s run to the top of the mountain
Jacob answers him: As for me, I’m going with the speed of women and their children
Read this passage, learn from it, it concerns us all in our commitment to a more inclusive look, a look that blesses and flourishes our fellow men, and protects them from insensitive and inhuman judgments.