My grandmother had a system for compliments. If you told her the kugel was delicious, she would smile, say thank you, and then turn her head slightly and go pooh, pooh, pooh — three quick little spits at the air, like she was putting out a small fire only she could see. I was maybe seven the first time I noticed. I asked her what she was doing. She said, “Keeping the evil eye away from my kugel.” I said, “Bubbe, it’s a kugel.” She said, “That’s exactly what they want you to think.”
So let me tell you about the evil eye in Judaism, because it followed me around my whole childhood, and it turns out it has been following our people around for about three thousand years.
So What Is the Evil Eye, Really?
The evil eye in Judaism — in Hebrew, ayin hara, which literally means “the bad eye” — is the idea that envy itself can do damage. Not a curse from a witch. Not a hex from an enemy. Something quieter and, if you ask me, much more believable: the notion that when someone looks at your good fortune with too much wanting in their heart, that wanting can leak out and harm the thing they’re staring at.
That’s the whole concept. Somebody admires your new baby a little too hungrily, your roof springs a leak. Somebody can’t stop talking about how much money you made this year, and suddenly the IRS would like a word. My uncle Morris believed this with his entire body. He once refused to tell anyone he’d gotten a raise for an entire year. He drove the same dented Buick out of pure superstition.
Why My Bubbe Spit Three Times
The spitting — pooh, pooh, pooh — is one of the oldest folk defenses against the evil eye, and Jews are far from the only ones who do it. But we made it ours. Three is the number. Always three. I asked my grandmother once why three and not two, and she looked at me the way you look at a boy who has asked why the sky isn’t green.
“Two is an accident,” she said. “Three is on purpose.”
The smell of her kitchen is tied to this for me forever — chicken fat and onions and a little burnt sugar — and somewhere in that warm cloud, a tiny grandmother spitting at the ceiling to protect a noodle pudding. I have spent decades writing down moments like this, and you can find a wheelbarrow of them in my collection of Jewish stories, most of them free, all of them true-ish.
Kein Ayin Hara: The Two Words That Run in My Family
If you grew up in a Jewish house, you have heard somebody say kein ayin hara — often mashed together into “kinehora,” said fast, almost as one word. It means “no evil eye,” and you tack it onto any sentence where you’ve just admitted something is going well.
“The kids are healthy, kinehora.”
“Business is good, kinehora, knock wood.”
It’s a verbal seatbelt. You say something nice about your life, and then you immediately strap in, because who knows who’s listening. My mother could not say the word “healthy” without it. To this day, if I tell someone I’m feeling fine, a little voice in the back of my skull whispers kinehora before I can stop it. You don’t shake off three thousand years in one generation.
The Red String, the Hamsa, and the Whole Gift Shop
Walk through any Jewish neighborhood gift shop and you’ll see the merchandise of fear, beautifully made. The red string you tie around your wrist. The hamsa, that little open hand with an eye in the palm, hanging by the front door to stare down anything jealous that tries to come in. Blue beads. Tiny charms. My aunt had a hamsa in every room and a red string on every grandchild, and she still worried, because worrying was her cardio.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you in the gift shop: none of these objects are commanded anywhere in the Torah. They’re folk practice — the warm, slightly anxious traditions that grew up around the law like ivy around a fence. And I love them for exactly that reason. They’re how ordinary people, my people, turned a big scary idea into something you could hold in your hand and hang on a wall.
What the Kabbalists Actually Say About It
Now, the mystics took the evil eye more seriously than a red bracelet. In Kabbalah, the eye isn’t just a body part — it’s where the soul leans out to look at the world, and what you send out through your eyes carries weight. A generous eye, an ayin tova, pours blessing onto whatever it sees. A grudging eye does the opposite. The fix the sages prescribe isn’t a charm at all. It’s becoming the kind of person who looks at someone else’s good fortune and feels glad, not gnawed.
That’s harder than tying a string, believe me. But it’s the real teaching, and it’s the kind of thing I keep circling back to in the Kabbalah Kronicles — big mystical ideas dragged down to the kitchen table where they actually have to live. The Kabbalists understood something simple: the evil eye is really a teaching about envy, dressed up in spookier clothes.
Is the Evil Eye Real? My Honest Answer
People ask me this directly, and I’ll give you the same answer I give them. Do I think your jealous neighbor’s stare can crack your foundation? No. I’m seventy years old and I’ve never once seen a casserole ruined by a dirty look.
But do I think envy is real, and corrosive, and capable of poisoning a friendship, a family, a whole life? Absolutely. The evil eye in Judaism survived three thousand years not because it’s literally true, but because it’s pointing at something that is. Our ancestors didn’t have the word “envy” sitting in a psychology textbook. They had a grandmother spitting at a kugel — and honestly, that’s a more memorable lesson.
And notice what the tradition asks you to do about it. It never tells you to hide your good fortune in a hole, or to stop being happy, or to drive a dented Buick like my uncle Morris. It tells you to add two little words — kein ayin hara — and keep living. It’s gratitude wearing a disguise. You say something is good, you acknowledge that good things are fragile and not entirely yours to keep, and then you go right on enjoying the kugel. That’s not superstition. That’s wisdom that learned to keep its head down.
A Blessing, Quietly
If you made it this far, may your kugel be golden, your business steady, and your relatives only mildly nosy — kinehora. If you want more of this kind of thing, the warm and the funny and the occasionally wise, wander into my funny stories, or if you’re feeling generous toward a writer, take a look at King of Shabbos or anything else in the shop. Buy a book, support a grandfather, keep the evil eye off my royalties.
And the next time someone compliments your cooking — you know what to do. Three times. On purpose.