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Futurism made easy

By Ed Goldman

In India,” I’m being told, “if a group of people is talking about you and you suddenly show up, it means you will have a long life.” The speaker, who’s Indian, is a wait-staff captain at The Sutter Club, a 135-year-old private organization which, through a series of egregious oversights in its vetting process, made me a member a decade ago. 

As far as omens go, I like this one—though, of course, it’s not without its fallacies. 

For example, the wait staff already knew from the reservations list that I’d be lunching there that day and that I try to always sit at the same table at which they were congregated. Ergo, mysterious forces may not have been at work.

Then, too, I could see how that interpretation could be easily (and negatively) flipped to indicate that if people are talking about you and you fail to appear, it means something else. Remember the Sean Connery/Catherine Zeta Jones film “Entrapment”? In this cat-and-mouse thriller, Connery and Zeta-Jones set a time for an appointment, to which Connery adds the caveat, “I’m never late. If I’m late it’s because I’m dead.” (Is this also why Connery still hasn’t consented to my interview requests? ‘Eh? ‘Eh?)

Omens, portents, auguries, forecasts, signs and prophecies are all pretty much the same thing. Unless the “seer” of them is a true psychic, and not just after a few drinks (yours), they’re also utter bunkum. (For fans of the original version of the CBS-TV series “Hawaii Five-O,” “Bunkum” is not what Jack Lord told his underling James MacArthur at the climax of each episode. What he aid was, “Book ’em, Danno.” If he’d said “Bunk ’em,” it would’ve meant he and Danno ran an Airbnb. But I digress.)

Throughout history, people have believed in omens when what they might really have been seeing were symptoms. My mom used to say that when I was a little boy, if I was about to come down with a cold or flu a very faint white line would form around my mouth. She believed herself to be a part-time “white witch”—whereas my dad had a great-aunt Rachel who was a fulltime practitioner. 

The odd thing about all of this, besides that white line around my mouth (invisible since I first grew a beard at 18), is that my dad, Robert, was named for Rachel. In Judaism, children are rarely named to honor living relatives or even given the exact name of deceased ones, but rather by using the first letter of a loved one’s name. This is why my daughter’s middle name is Rachel—because of the “R” for Robert. When my mom found out I’d suggested Rachel to honor my late dad, she burst into tears and told me about my dad being named for another Rachel. My mom found this supernatural—just as, while growing up, my brothers and I found her meatloaf.

Anyway, in my tribe, there’s an entire sect devoted to the Kabballah (pronounced Kah-BAH-lah). According to the website Reform Judaism, “Kabbalistic thought is often considered Jewish mysticism. Its practitioners tend to view the Creator and the Creation as a continuum, rather than as discrete entities, and they desire intimacy with God. This desire is especially intense because of the powerful mystical sense of kinship that Kabbalists believe exists between God and humanity.”