[Avodah] superstition

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Eli Turkel wrote:
> Even more the Ramah says not to cut the nails in order but
> gives a different order (in darcei Moshe brings that
> cutting nails in the natural order causes poverty, memory
> loss and burying one chidren.
> Though some objected to these things MB says one should
> follow it lechatchila.
> To me it sounds like a superstition. Nothing is mentioned
> in the Gemara about this.

Obviously, having been codified by authoritative poskim, they are not forbidden as being superstitions. But for many years I wondered *why*. I've come up with a couple of possibilities.

One possibility is that someone, at some point in time, received some sort of Revelation - either through real nevuah or some lesser sort of ruach hakodesh - about these medical realities. Just because it doesn't appear in the gemara does not prove it to be a recent innovation; it's quite possibly very ancient (maybe even from Sinai) without being written down until more recently.

Another possibility is that these things were commonly accepted medical facts, learned through state-of-the-art research and statistics, at some point in history. They don't make much sense to us, but I'm not aware of any double-blind controlled studies which might disprove it. Perhaps I'm a bit tongue-in-cheek here (or maybe not) but it sounds pretty similar to the whole business about mixing fish and meat.

Akiva Miller

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