Converting, 9th of Av, and Bad Luck in general

I can’t help but wonder if it was a terrible idea to convert on the 8th of Av. It didn’t occur to me, this, until just now, that in less than an hour it is the ninth of Av, and we converted this morning. Certainly, it wouldn’t have been possible to do a conversion, not only because of Shabbat, but even had it not been, it still wouldn’t have happened on the 9th. Perhaps I’m just being superstitious here. Being superstitious is really something that a scientist shouldn’t be, but I’ve never felt the need to be un-superstitious. There’s no reason to invite calamity to fall on you if you can help it. I’m not saying that I go out of my way to prevent a black cat from crossing my path, but I simply acknowledge that at times, certain things seem to have a very ominous presence to them.

black cat

My wife is baking a cake right now. The cake will have started baking on the 8th, but will not be completed until the 9th. This strikes me as peculiar. If you are superstitious, is the cake only half cursed, since it was partially completed on the 8th, or is it fully cursed, having been completed on the 9th? I suppose the superstitious answer is to complete the cake on the 8th at all costs. I’ll wait for some responses from my large following of zero readers before providing my answer to this.

Also, what exactly constitutes a bad omen? A black cat crossing your path, already mentioned. Breaking a mirror. Why breaking a mirror? It seems that early belief was that since the mirror contains your reflection, it basically contains a part of your soul or essence. So once you have gazed into a mirror, breaking it will cause you some level of bad luck. And what of spilled salt? This one is harder to explain. The basic answer seems to be that Judas spilled salt at the last supper, and as such, it is now considered bad luck to do so. This one, without any further explanation, seems to be easily dismissive, as any bad luck which may have befell Judas, are explained as having been caused by his own actions and not some form of bad luck.

Spilled salt

I use to not believe in luck or fate, but lately, it seems to be ever present around me. I cannot happen but wonder if certain things do in fact happen for a reason. Small coincidences in my life, easily dismissable separately, start to add up to form a larger picture when you put them all together. For now, all I can do is continue to observe and write down the things happening around me that I find unusual and out of place. These things seem to be occurring with greater frequency as of late. Simple example. My wife and I are looking for a house right now. We randomly selected a christian realtor. The experience was less than professional and we are finally almost rid of this realtor who caused us an unusual amount of trouble. Now, I suddenly remember a realtor appearing at my door late last winter. He was going door to door, which I found unusual, but dismissed it as not impossible, since the housing market was in such bad shape. However, he even more unusually mentioned during our conversation that he was also Jewish (it was during channukah and we had our menora going). At the time, I thought perhaps he was just making it up, trying to make a connection with me and was acting a little peculiar. In retrospect, it’s likely that he might have been Jewish, but was simply overly uncomfortable having to go door-to-door in an apartment complex.

Either way, I was suddenly reminded of this during our realtor tribulations and it made me wonder what the odds were that a Jewish realtor would have knocked on my door and stuck in my memory for that long. My memory is terrible. I mention ‘the odds’ because when you mention ‘the odds’ it seems really scientific. Like there are complex calculations going on somewhere to explain the likelihood of an event.  The odds here are almost part of an Interview 2.0 problem. How many realtors are there in the Indianapolis area, and of these, how many are Jewish, and of those, how many are likely to knock on your door and ask if you’d like to buy a home?

Roughly 82,000 people live in my city. Of those, let us estimate that since there are 934 listed real estate agencies. With an average of 6 per group, lets say 6000 realtors, roughly. Of those, we’ll use a high estimate of 0.04% being jews, taking us down to 281 realtors total. Feels high, but we’ll go with it. Of these, I can’t imagine more than 10% going door-to-door. The reason for this is a combination of factors, but the highest factors I believe are initiative and money. It takes time and money to do the door-to-door thing in realty as you MUST give every door you knock on SOMETHING. These people need a way to remember you, and preferably contact you. Pens, fridge magnets, etc. These things cost money. Now, we are down to 28 realtors. I think we could whittle this down, but let’s just go ahead and use this, which already leaves us at (using a very simple calculation) less than a 1% chance that this would have occured. This falls in line with the fact that less than 0.04% of the Indiana population is Jewish (quick math common sense check). In fact, given this, the total number of realtors is almost irrelevant, as given the jewish population percentage, the numbers will be similar given any number N of realtors. As a sidenote, I decided against converted this into the 1 in a million, type version, as thinking about it, I really don’t think it is clear what that really means. I get that it is a small chance, but let’s say you have a 1/400 chance for something to occur. How likely is that event really? A topic for another discussion perhaps.

oddly odd odds

Sorry for this going so long for no reason. Thanks for continuing to not read this. Good Shabbos!

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