By Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal
SAN DIEGO — When my daughter, Margalit, was young she had very simple tastes when it came to souvenirs: she liked rocks. When we walked into gift shops, she invariably gravitated to displays of brightly colored stones, geodes, and crystals. The more ornate, complex, or unusual the rock, the more she liked it.
I understood why Margalit loved rocks so much. They are at the same time simple and commonplace, and astonishingly varied and beautiful. Take a geode, for example. On the outside, geodes can be quite plain and even ugly but cut them in half, and a rainbow of colors and an amazing variety of crystal formations are found within.
Even the plainest and simplest rock, when cut and polished, becomes a magnificent work of art. And of course, we are all aware of the incredible splendor of diamonds, rubies, and other gem stones.
On a deeper level, rocks and crystals also serve as reminders of the awesome and creative power of God. Rocks and gemstones are formed by all of the power, pressure, and heat through which our world came to being. They are remnants of the awesome physical forces which formed the physical features of the earth, and which continue to lay seething beneath its surface today. In this way, the beauty and variety of rocks found on the earth bear witness to the continuing and ever-renewing forces of God’s Creation.
A few weeks ago I was talking to someone who collects crystals. They got into collecting crystals for the same reason that my daughter loved all rocks: they are extraordinarily beautiful. However, that’s not always why this person continues to collect them. She believes that crystals possess and radiate power and that when you wear them, they bring all kinds of forces to bear upon your body and psyche.
This is not an uncommon belief. One guide I found on the internet tells us, for example, that, “Amethyst can be used to help overcome obsessive behavior caused by drugs, alcohol, and food. It also helps self-esteem. Beryl…is good for the treatment of the heart and spine. It is also good for providing intellectual and spirituality insight of one’s self. The Ruby is said to be able to protect the wearer against unhappiness. It can be used for the treatment of the fever, too.”
I must confess that I find this view of rocks, crystals, and gemstones on one hand amusing, and on the other hand deeply disturbing. It seems that some people have transformed that which is witness to God’s power into instruments of human power. That is, they believe that inanimate objects which are the result of Ma’aseh Breisheet, the Creation of the Universe, are actually independent agents, with intrinsic power of their own which can influence Creation. These beliefs have no basis in scientific fact, they have not been subjected to controlled clinical studies, and are what my grandparents would have called bubbe meises.
I call them something else: a modern manifestation of magic. Although what stage magicians do is called magic, they actually perform illusions. What is an illusion? An illusion is a trick. It is a way of confounding and confusing you by showing a transformation that both you and the illusionist know is not objectively true.
Creating an illusion is different from magic. What is magic? The attempt to influence God or the rhythms of nature through certain rituals, acts, or incantations. It is the belief that by sticking pins into an effigy of a person, harm can be caused to that person. It is the belief that by combining certain types of chemicals in a certain way, lead can be turned into gold. It is the belief that by waving or wearing a certain type of rock formation near your body, cancer can be cured.
The Torah was well aware of the existence of magical rites and saw them as a defiance and denial of God. Magic claims that nature, and therefore God, can be controlled by human beings. Religions assert that human beings can communicate with God, and request God’s intervention and help, but can in no way force God’s hand. We may be able to influence the natural order, but we can never control it.
One of the ways the Torah teaches us about the limits of human power is through the stories of the Ten Plagues. The Egyptian Pharaoh claimed that he was a god, and that there was no other power in the universe mightier than he. The purpose of the Plagues, or as the Torah calls them “signs and wonders,” is more to convince Pharaoh and the Egyptians of the greatness of God, rather than to punish them.
The first three signs are staged to lure the Egyptians into a state of false confidence. When Aaron’s rod turned into a snake, Pharaoh’s magicians duplicated the feat. When God, through Moses and Aaron, turned the Nile to blood, so did Pharaoh’s magicians. When Aaron brought frogs upon the land, his magicians did the same.
It is only with the third plague that Pharaoh’s magicians found themselves impotent: “The Lord said to Moses, “Say to Aaron: Hold out your rod and strike the dust of the earth, and it shall turn to lice throughout the land of Egypt. And they did so. Aaron held out his arm with the rod and struck the dust of the earth, and vermin came upon man and beast; all the dust of the earth turned to lice throughout the land of Egypt. The magicians did the like with their spells to produce lice, but they could not.” (Ex. 8:12-14)
Try as they might they could not duplicate God’s wonder. The same was true for the fourth through tenth Plagues. But Pharaoh, in his own egocentricity and belief that he could control not only the Israelites, but the Egyptians and nature itself, was steadfast in his stubbornness. He hardened his heart and refused to let the Israelites go.
It is only after the tenth and the most terrible of the Plagues that Pharaoh realized his own limitations, bowed his head before the One who spoke and the World came to be, and allowed the Israelites to go free.
Human beings cannot control nature. Only God can. Our obligation and challenge as God’s Children is to learn our limits and the limits of creation. We must use the gift of human knowledge to work within the natural order to better take care of our world and to improve it, rather than to believe that inanimate objects or a magic formula has the power to change our lives.
*
Rabbi Rosenthal is spiritual leader of Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego