With Halloween approaching this weekend, this week’s Daily Kavanot will share some meaningful tales of ghosts and spirits from Jewish tradition.
The Babylonian Talmud (Berakhot 18B) shares the tale of a pious man who, ridiculed by his family for giving away a full dinar during a drought, slept in a cemetery to escape their mocking jests. There, he overheard two ghosts discussing the weather. One informed the other that hail would fall, striking any crops planted during the first rainy season. So, the pious man planted his crops during the second rainy season and ate well while everyone else suffered.
The next year on the very same day, the man returned to sleep in the cemetery and overheard two ghosts discussing how all crops planted during the second rainy season would suffer from blight. So, the pious man planted his crops during the first rainy season, while everyone else, fearful of hail, planted in the second season and suffered.
The next year on the very same day, the man returned to sleep in the cemetery and overheard two ghosts talking. When one asked the other what the season held in store, the other replied, “Be quiet. Our words have already been heard among the living.”
This story illustrates how we often learn the wrong lessons from events. Unlike the pious man, who seeks out privileged information (from the spirits) to guide his decisions, the “common sense” wisdom applied by his contemporaries to guide their planting leads to misery, when their crops are first destroyed by hail, then by blight. The journey of the pious man begs us to ask: When do we rely too heavily upon unreliable “common sense” wisdom that might be biased or misinformed in order to guide our choices as individuals and as a society?
—Rabbi Josh Knobel