So this is Netanyahu's reward?
So this is Netanyahu's reward?

Well that didn’t take long.

Days after President Trump reversed US policy in Israel’s favor as regards Judea and Samaria (the “West Bank”), mazel tov, yes, on that occasion, but then Israel’s attorney general came down like a ton of bricks on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, proving once again that no good deed goes unpunished. 

A time to rejoice? Yes. But then immediately a time to despair. 

Netanyahu has been indicted for no good reason, according to two of America’s leading attorneys, Mark Levin and Alan Dershowitz. 
A time for gratitude? So you would think. Netanyahu survived Obama, and through force of personality, got President Trump in tow to become Israel’s best friend ever. 

Netanyahu has been indicted for no good reason, according to two of America’s leading attorneys, Mark Levin and Alan Dershowitz. 

So Instead, a time to strike him down through “spurious” legalities. Here’s Levin: “No, do NOT step down, Prime Minister Netanyahu.  I’ve carefully reviewed these charges and they’re outrageous.  This is an assault on freedom of the press and the investigation was corrupt. And your media is ever worse than ours.”

We know it’s political what’s being done. But is it also something supernatural when good news can’t last…and bad news follows as if on cue?

Back when I grew up, you never congratulated a pregnancy, and if the newborn was beautiful (as it always was) you called it ugly, and my mother would go “poo, poo, poo,” to ward off the evil eye. That was custom, and it has been customary since the beginning of time, even as we are warned, through Solomon and others, to pay no heed to omens.

It is even a sin to believe in such things. 

A momentary reflection to note that I wish the Torah would slow down a bit for me. I can’t keep up. The weeks and the weekly portions move by too fast. The pace tells me I’m growing older. I’m still on Deuteronomy. I love it too much to leave. I can’t leave. I owe it to Moses to stick with him. I can’t leave him in the desert worried what’s to become of us, after all he’s done. I wonder what he’s thinking now. He can’t be too happy. 

Back to superstition, recently, Rashi spoke of the evil eye, in reference to a passage related to envy. That source I cannot find at the moment. But when Jacob sent his sons to buy corn in Egypt, he warned them against entering together, lest they attract harmful attention at being so handsome and formidable. 

Is it superstition? The rabbis, even in the Talmud, will warn you that it is. But they will also warn you about open-faced pride, and the harm it can do.

A wicked look can be a curse – some believe. Do I? Afraid so. The superstition takes different forms. For instance, I fear the backlash after mentioning something good that happens.   

“So we can’t say anything?” asks my wife.

Well imagine the glow at Netanyahu’s household when the good news broke about Judea and Samaria, that the territory is legitimately Israel’s…and then the despair.

The win was swiftly taken from him…from him and all on the Right; in other words, patriots who believe in a strong Israel; sovereign, border to border. 

Netanyahu never got the time to sit back and enjoy what he and Trump achieved together. Rotten luck? Was the ayin hara awakened?

Netanyahu has been a good prime minister, and better yet, a lucky prime minister, as per Napoleon’s comment that for leadership, lucky is better than good. 

Yes I know that historians now debunk Napoleon as the author of that remark, but it still sounds like something he would say, and gladly about Netanyahu. 

World class prosperity under his leadership, yes, that Netanyahu.

Luck – is that also superstition? That some were born with it, and some without it, to the point where “luck is everything,” as I wrote in this book, I was challenged by a professor, who rejoined that “brains are everything,” to which I asked him, and being born with a good mind – is that not lucky?

There is nothing that says Netanyahu’s luck has run out. He will prevail. Because he is a realist, and because he is an optimist.

Optimists tend not to be superstitious. Nothing like that can harm them, they who pay no mind to portents. They give the lowerworld no powers. So they can’t be touched.

They can’t be bothered by such nonsense. 

Netanyahu appears to be that sort of man, unflappable, and it is that virtue which will see him and the nation through this period of discord and discontent.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah,” for which contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com