Mystical Lies

Rabbi Moshe Ben-Chaim

Reader: I was curious to ask you about the Hamsa symbol. I used to see some Jews using it. But isn’t it considered a pagan symbol? Isn’t it just like the superstition that there exists objects or forces other than God falsely claiming to provide protection?

Luciana 

Rabbi: One lives in reality and follows rationality when accepting observable and detectible forces, and when accepting Torah’s principles of a Creator who created the world and manages it. But other than through God and demonstrable natural law, how can one intelligently suggest there are “other” forces? By what means other than one’s senses and Torah authority does one validate that any entity or force exists, other than God and nature? There are no other means. 

Believing in an unverified entity or force is superstitious, and indicates that the believer rejects our God-given senses to act as our validation of what is, and what is not. If accepting any belief is God’s will,  He would not have proved His existence at Revelation at Sinai with all those miracles. 

God granted man senses as God demands man to accept only what his senses detect, and reject what is not observable. And superstitions are not observable. They are believed only because man is incapacitatedly insecure and grabs onto anything with the promise of hope. But what man should do is grab on to his reason and secure his life with the natural means God created, and by praying to God. But to think that manufactured amulets can override God’s system of Reward and Punishment, one forfeits his soul. To think one can sin, but by wearing a red bendel or a Hamsa he won’t be punished, is heretical and is out of reality.