Can I Read My Horoscope? - Transcript for Episode 117

Rav Avi: Hi, and welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, Executive Vice President at Hadar, and I'm an Aquarius. And I'm here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, who is a Sagittarius. Good morning.

Rav Eitan: Good morning. I'm quite struck by the Zodiacal introduction there, Avi.

Rav Avi: What, you don't always introduce yourself as a Sagittarius?

Rav Eitan: I am a proud Sagittarius, but I keep it a little more on the down low.

Rav Avi: We are going to explore a question today that talks about horoscopes. I'll start with the question, and then we'll dig in. The questioner writes, Can I read my horoscope? Does it matter whether I'm reading it, quote, just for fun, or if I'm really trying to predict the future? Are horoscopes more forbidden for me than they were for medieval rabbis, who probably considered astrology a legitimate science? I might amend the end of that question actually to ask, like, there certainly are people today, even Jewish people, who do think that horoscopes are a legitimate science. So maybe you would ask, is it more forbidden if you think that it's legitimate or more forbidden if you don't think that it's legitimate? But it's a really interesting question. I think I probably was raised thinking that horoscopes had nothing to do with Judaism and then as I became a person who learned more and more text, when I would come across the concepts of signs and mazal and constellations in Jewish texts, I was always surprised. It's really unclear to me how they interact. So I'm super curious what you have to say about this.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, it's interesting also culturally where these things get situated. When you asked me about horoscopes, I associate them with the comics page, not the Science Tuesday section. So even when newspapers or other outlets print them, where they go is already a choice of how they're being cast. As we always like to do, let's start as early as we can. I mean, this one goes back to the Bible for sure, right? The Torah has an aversion to sorcery and divination. You've got an explicit ban on being a me'onen, lo te'onenu, don't engage in some kind of divination. It seems to be some form of predicting the future. It is one of the things cast as an abomination and described as one of the things that the seven nations of the land of Canaan did that caused them to forfeit their right to live there, right?

Rav Avi: And the ban is on trying to predict the future or the ban is on using these sorcery tools to try to predict?

Rav Eitan: So that's exactly the question, right? When the Torah contrasts me'onenim with their opposite, these diviners, the opposite are prophets, right? Israel has prophets or elsewhere, when Bilaam comes and kind of praises the people, when he's hired by the king of Moab to curse Israel, he says, Ki lo nachash b'Ya'akov, Jacob doesn't have diviners. They just hear from God what's going to happen. The Israelite channel to knowing the future is basically a prophet. So there is a possible reading here that there's nothing wrong with figuring out the future, maaybe it's just doing it from a foreign source or in some idolatrous context, but it does also open the possibility when the Torah says, for instance, tamim tihye im Hashem Elokecha, just be simple with your God. Maybe there's a deeper dispositional thing of, no, don't try to predict the future. Just kind of go with your morals, your values, your understanding of what the Torah wants from you. Anything beyond that is trying to game the system in a spiritually unproductive and inappropriate way.

Rav Avi: So on the one hand, this could sound actually to our modern ears a little bit archaic, right? Like it's saying, hey, just trusting God, where I'm saying like, you should get a mammogram. And you're like, I trust God. I'm living into God. So I guess my question is, how do we know the difference between sorcery and science, maybe? And is that a distinction that you think the Torah is making here in these prohibitions?

Rav Eitan: Yeah. So I think for this, we've got to move one step forward to rabbinic literature and see what they say. Because I think the Torah kind of has that ambiguity. It's not our question here, but this will come up as you already took us to the medical realm. The question of our medical intervention, somehow lack of faith in God, or are they just using the tools that God has given us to help heal? So when we hear about kind of astrology, right, and the things that produce horoscopes, right, in our day, we find some interesting tension in rabbinic literature.

So Rabbi Akiva comes along in one passage, and he says, hey, you want to know what a me'onen is? This horrible diviner?

Rav Avi: I do. I do want to know.

Rav Eitan: It's someone who tries to calculate which hours and days are good times as opposed to bad times, and what kind of activities I should do when in order to seek success and fortune. So I mean, to quote a practice, which actually is still done until today, there's a common Jewish tradition that like, Tuesday's a good day to do a business deal.

Because after all, in the creation story, Tuesday's the only day when ki tov, God saw it was good, appears twice.

Rav Avi: Right, it's a good day to get married too, right?

Rav Eitan: Exactly. So, you know, but people will like try to close a house on a Tuesday. Not clear what Rabbi Akiva would think of that, but that whole genre of thing, kind of timing your actions because they will be more auspicious at a certain time. He says, absolutely not. And a companion teaching actually quotes this verse, be simple and pure with the Lord your God, and just says straight up, this is in the Talmud in Pesachim, you cannot consult astrologers.

Rav Avi: Do you have a sense of why that timing thing? Because it strikes me actually very in keeping with Judaism to say like different times of the week are categorically different. We usually talk about Shabbos and not Tuesday. I'm sort of surprised that that would be a problem, actually.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, saying that different times are different from one another is not the same as I'm going to now arrange my schedule to avoid doing something because I'm going to kind of tap into some karma that is present or flowing in this moment that's not in another moment. But you're right, one of the interesting things is, well, if you go to another passage in the Talmud, this one is in Tractate Shabbat, there's a whole long sugya, a whole long Talmudic passage, you referenced this already about mazal.

Rav Avi: Luck?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, luck, maybe a constellation or some kind of heavenly body. And basically the debate is, yesh mazal l'Yisrael or ein mazal l'Yisrael, which doesn't mean are Jews lucky or not. It means are Jews kind of subject to the astrological forces or not?

Rav Avi: Yeah, so the question means, should I read my horoscope or not?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, or is that a legitimate or productive way from a Jewish perspective, right, to look at the world? So this is the most outlandish thing I think you'll find that is hard to square with these other statements of Rebbe Akiva, like don't try to game the times. You get this great series of statements of kind of little secret pieces of wisdom that were hidden in sages' notebooks. And they're like, it's like they find their diary, right? And they're rifling through Rebbe Yeshua ben Levi's notebook, prominent sage. And he says that, well, I can tell you a lot of what you need to know about anyone based on the day of the week when they were born. If you were born on a Sunday, you're either totally good or totally bad. Born on a Monday, you've got a short temper. On Tuesday, you'll be rich and promiscuous, Wednesday wise, etc., etc. And yeah, you have this whole notion that, well, what do you mean? Like it does matter when you were born. I mean, this is on some level the ultimate horoscope, right? What day were you born? I'll tell you what your destiny is. And then Rebbe Hanina, another sage, disputes this and says, no, no, no, it doesn't go by the day. It goes by the hour of the day and whatever planet was dominant at that hour of the day.

Rav Avi: Yeah, so that's pretty straight up horoscopes.

Rav Eitan: Pretty straight up horoscopes.

Rav Avi: You know, sometimes I'm struck by, oh, the wisdom of today is also ancient wisdom. It's like the pop culture of today was also ancient pop culture, right? Where I'm like, oh, like horoscopes are in Seventeen Magazine. It's like, that was true also for the rabbis.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, though I think this is the interesting thing. We'll explore this. I'm not sure for Rebbe Hanina it's pop culture, because one of the things-

Rav Avi: Meaning it might be science?

Rav Eitan: I think so. Let's put it this way. When Rebbe Hanina and Rebbe Yoshua ben Levi are arguing, one of them is not saying, hey, this horoscope is right. And the other is saying, horoscopes are nonsense. He's saying this horoscope is right. And the other one's saying, no, that's not right.

This horoscope is right. They seem to both agree that the astrological forces matter. And Rebbe Hanina goes out of his way to say, and then there's a special constellation or order of the planets or force up above that affects Israel in particular. And sort of the fate of the Jewish people collectively is determined by that.

That gives Rebbe Yochanan his opening to jump in and to say, ein mazal l'Yisrael. Now, you can read that sort of softer or harder. The soft reading is, no, no, no, there's not one specific thing that determines Jewish destiny. There's sort of general astrological stuff that affects humanity.

That's true, but-

Rav Avi: Meaning like the horoscopes don't apply to the people of Israel? Like you wouldn't say, and Israel is fated to always fight with people because they were created in the year of whatever.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, something like that. But the harder reading would be, Jews don't do horoscopes. Jews are in a relationship with God, maybe mediated through prophets, through Torah, and we don't do that, and he cites a verse from Jeremiah, which basically says, God says, don't learn from the ways of the nations. Don't be afraid of the signs of heaven, because the nations are afraid of them. And Rebbe Yochanan seems to be reading that as something like, this is more maybe like, there's this pop culture thing that everyone else does, where they're afraid of what is in the skies. Stay away from that, that's not for you. And what I find then the most moving follow-up tradition to this is, remember the story in the Torah where Avraham is so worried that he's not going to have a kid and God takes him outside and says, look at the stars. There's so many of them, and that's how many kids you're going to have. So Rav picks up on this.

And when it says, he took him outside and clearly playing on the star imagery here, fills in what was happening there. Actually, Avraham said to God, hey, I checked my horoscope and it says. No kids.

Rav Avi: No kids.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. Right. I checked actually with my astrologers and they said no kids. And God says, I am taking you out of that frame. That's not how this project is going to work. If I say you're going to have a kid, planets be damned.

Rav Avi: Yeah. It's really interesting.When I think about like, why are people so drawn to horoscopes, right? What are we trying to do? There's one element that I hear playing out in your description of the rabbinic takes, which is like, we want to understand each other, right? Like, well, if I could just say like, well, he is the way he is because he was born on Wednesday or because he was born at 8pm. Like, I just want to understand other people and horoscopes help me do that. I feel that also now, right? In the modern context, one of the reasons people reach for horoscopes is to say like, she's a Libra. That's how Libras behave. She's a, you know, she's a Sagittarius, whatever it is.

Another is because we want to understand why things that are happening in our lives are happening the way they're happening. And this gives us an excuse, you know, like, oh, it's been a bad week because, you know, the moon is in Taurus. I'm sure to the people who know these things, I sound ridiculous. But there's some explanation. There are some answers we're looking for. So I'm curious, the rabbis who are saying yes or no on this, do you hear a particular thing that they're reaching for or trying to say about, like, Judaism doesn't do horoscopes mean Judaism does believe in free will or something?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think this will become much more important when we get to the medieval record. But I think it's plausible to say there's some mix of free will and freedom of the divine, right to act to break into history. It's not unrelated to the question of how do you think about miracles? Or is there a predetermined course of history? All the reasons you might bristle at too much of a predetermined regime, personally, theologically, historically, I think those are all in the mix here. But I will say as a coda to that Rav telling of Avraham and God says, don't worry about, you know, the planets. The end of that is God basically says, don't worry, I'll rearrange the planets so that you'll have a kid, which itself actually concedes, right, that this astrological range does matter. It just means God is in charge of them. But they can be rearranged. And it's so striking what you said about trying to make sense of people as part of what's going on.

This is the last piece of Talmudic evidence I think is helpful for this. Rav Nachman Bar Yitzchak, very famous sage, people who have studied Talmud know his name. So we have a story about his mother and how non-Jewish astrologers told his mother, your son is going to be a thief. Okay, about Rav Nachman Bar Yitzchak seems like when she's pregnant with him. So she then maniacally spends all of Rav Nachman Bar Yitzchak, who back then was just Nachman, covering his head, so that the fear of heaven would be upon him, basically trying to do sort of counter essence, you know, education. And, and she does that and sort of she succeeds, but then one day, his head covering flies off while he's sitting under a date palm tree. And he's overcome by the urge to steal. And he goes up the tree, which is not his tree, and takes a bunch of dates and steals them and eats them.

Now that's the end of the story. So we could ask, like, what's the point here? But I think that is a sort of narrative coda, where in a way that Talmud is encapsulating in that one story. It's kind of conflicted take on this.

On the one hand, it clearly believes in education or the ways in which you can actually struggle against your essence, your parents or teachers can shape you. But then it's also saying, but some people seem to have certain kinds of inclinations that are not nurture their nature. And you're maybe living in denial if you think those can be completely ignored. And I wonder, is that part of what you're suggesting the horoscope helps us understand someone? So this, I think if you were to ask the Talmud, like yes, does the Jewish worldview have a place for this? You would get a complicated answer. It doesn't feel simple.

Rav Avi: So I would say if our listeners have many different inclinations about this, that seems to track actually with our stages. They also seem to have many different inclinations.

Rav Eitan: I think that's right, which as usual leaves it to the medievals and the moderns to kind of either clean up the mess or more to the point, like pick or favor a course. And so here, it's really interesting. There's overall basically three medieval approaches.

And we can think about how they might translate to kind of attitudes today. And then one practical piece to add to this also, the Rambam, Maimonides. I think anyone who knows him can guess where he comes out on this as the quintessential rationalist scientist, et cetera. He puts all his eggs basically in the basket of that Rabbi Akiva source that says you can't go to astrologers and that's totally unacceptable.

And basically he thinks if you consult an astrologer, we'll get to whether reading a horoscope counts as this. But if you go to an astrologer and say, please tell me based on the stars, what my future is going to be. You are a Me'onen. You are that biblical diviner. You have violated a biblical law. But here's the real kicker. Maimonides says further, even if you obey the law and never consult an astrologer, but you think astrology is true, you're a fool. That is to say, he's not just saying

Rav Avi: Even if you're resisting going?

Rav Eitan: Yeah. Even if you never go, but you like for Maimonides, it is a religious crime to consult an astrologer. And it's a severe intellectual shortcoming to give it any purchase. And he says the command in the Torah, Tamim Tiyeh Im Hashem Elokecha, be simple with the Lord your God, is kind of a call for how he would put it. Do not give any credence to pseudoscience.

Rav Avi: Do you have a sense of why he says that? What does he think is at stake in it?

Rav Eitan: Well, I think he genuinely just believes it is false, like has no scientific weight, does not actually explain the world. And therefore, anything that you kind of give credence to that takes you away from a deeper understanding of how God's world actually works, sort of a combination of waste of time and sacrifice.

Rav Avi: So it's not that he's particularly scared of it. He just thinks it's stupid.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. Or maybe he's scared of it.

Rav Avi: It would be like you could read it. And if you did, you'd be an idiot because God controls the world, not the planets. So don't even go there.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. And you might be scared of it the way you might be scared of fake news or AI generated dissembling where you know it's not true, but that doesn't mean it's not damaging in some way. So that's the Rambam. The Ralbag, Rav Levi Ben Gershon, he resists this because he thinks it's a science. He basically compares it to like weather and agricultural forecasts. If I, I'm going to speak a little anachronistically, right? But if you look at the weather forecast for Wednesday and say, oh, two days out, it looks like it's going to rain. I'm going to plan that activity indoors. No one's going to say you're a diviner who is violating the biblical law, even though you are using predictions about how the world works to actually get at a plan, that whole thing of Rebbe Akiva, what days are good? What days are bad? Well, you're doing that.

So, says Ralbag, what's the difference between something like that? Or, you know, what's a good time to plant crops, right? And based on almanacs and things like that to determine that. So Ralbag makes the following distinction. He says, if you kind of forget that God is behind it and you think Tuesday somehow makes it a better day to do something or Wednesday decided to be rainy and therefore I need to avoid those forces. Well, that's a kind of idolatry.

And so, says Ralbag, if you consult astrologers, because you actually believe like we all know when the sun is out, unobstructed by clouds, the world is different. Certain activities make more or less sense to do that. Why can't that be true of Jupiter as well? When Jupiter is high in the sky, right? There is a planet right or a star, right? But they would have thought of a sort of one of the planets that we routinely plan around, right? The sun and the moon for that matter. What's different about doing that with Jupiter? Sure.

You got to keep your religious orientation straight of recognizing God's the creator of all the world and the planets.

Rav Avi: So as long as you know God made Jupiter, you're fine?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, you don't have to be a sun worshiper to put on sunscreen based on the UV forecast. And the Ralbag basically in his world of science assumed astrology kind of functions the same way.

Rav Avi: So it feels like he's saying astrology when it is more like what we would call astronomy is okay. And when it's more like superstition is when it becomes a problem.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. And particularly when you assign the times or the stars or the planets themselves as having some kind of agency, that's idolatry. But if you recognize, no, God created the planets. We're told in the fourth day of creation, God created those heavenly bodies. And they should be signs. There's actually a way of reading that verse that it means you're supposed to consult them.

Rav Avi: Well, it is very striking to me. Actually, I find it to be a very compelling text to say, God took Abraham outside and pointed at the stars. Like God is the one directing our gaze up to the stars. That's not an anti-God thing to do, that's God's direction.

Rav Eitan: And look, the root debate between Rambam and Ralbag may be just how seriously do they take that quote unquote science or science, but it creates a very different approach. The Ramban's a third approach and he's super interesting. He kind of leans into the ambiguity in the Talmudic passage. And he says, look, Rabbi Hanina clearly thought yesh mazal l'Yisrael. He thought somehow the heavenly bodies have an impact on Jewish history and destiny. It can't be that Rabbi Hanina was a me'onen, that he was somehow a sorcerer or a diviner. Maybe Rabbi Yochanan disagreed with him, but that can't be the space where we're playing it out. So he says, look, astrology is not a form of idolatry. What is potentially at stake is, tamim tihye im Hashem Elokecha, being pure and simple with God, maybe a kind of positive mitzvah, an aspiration, a direction. Try to free yourself as much as possible from a deterministic mindset. And Rabbi Hanina and Rabbi Yochanan will fall out on different ends of that spectrum, but they all should be sort of pushing in the direction of don't go and consult astrologers. Like astrology might be true, but don't spend your time doing that. Like I think of this with, you know, the stuff in the newspaper is true, let's say for the most part. That's a separate question from whether I want to begin my day reading it. So Ramban says, astrology might be true or a science that has a lot of worth.

The question though of how we integrate it into our attitude on the world. Am I constantly putting myself in a position of asking, what's my fate going to be? How am I destined to be? Or am I getting up each day saying, what does God want from me? How can I act?

Rav Avi: Yeah, it's interesting. It almost makes me feel like you could say, you'll tell me if this feels right in answer to this question, like, am I allowed to read my horoscope? That you would almost say like, well, will it interfere with your Judaism? Because if it will, then you're not allowed, right? If I say like, hey, my friends are all going to a psychic, she's going to read our cards, like, am I allowed to go? The answer might be like, well, if it's not going to interfere with your religious life, and you're still going to wake up in the morning and like, thank God for your soul and not say like, oh, well, I'm only alive because the tarot card said, then it's fine. If it is going to interfere with your religion, then no, that's where it would stop being fine?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, that might be a way of paraphrasing the Ramban. Will it sort of pull you away from a relationship with God and the understanding that God has the primary role in running the world and pull you away from a sense of agency?

Rav Avi: It's a surprising answer, I would say, meaning like, it does feel like you might just have a simplistic like, yeah, horoscopes, forbidden. That's avodah zarah, meaning that's foreign worship, like avodat kochavim is this phrase of like, you know, star worship. It feels like it would have been intuitive to be told: No, divination based on the planets and the stars is not allowed. And that's not the message that I'm hearing across all these texts and all this time.

Rav Eitan: Right, so the Rambam tries to articulate that. But this later position of the Ramban, not much later, a little later, where he says, look, this might be real, this might be true, but try to orient yourself away from it, that's the one that gets more traction over time. So there's two, I think, important codas to this. First, one interesting spur, which might be relevant to horoscopes, I alluded to this earlier, there might be a difference between going out and seeking an astrologer, or going to a tarot card reader, etc. I mean, tarot card reader, I'm not sure whether they would have thought was science in the same way as the planet. So we got to be careful, not all things are, are the same. But that's not quite the same as someone else printed a horoscope in a paper, you didn't ask anything about it, and you're now reading it. And in fact, in the Erech Lechem, by Mahari Castro, who is a Sephardi commentator on the Shulchan Aruch, he makes exactly that distinction. He says, if someone tells you your horoscope, as it were, or some astrological advice, without you asking anything, yeah, that's fine.

The main thing that let's say the Ramban's position should be drawing you to is, that's not what you should be seeking out. So you're reading the paper, there's a horoscope, you read it according to this, it might be like, that's whatever, but you shouldn't necessarily be booking an appointment, right with an astrologer. So that's one spur on the specific questioners point. I think the other piece to bring us back to what you asked at the beginning, like, does it make it better or worse, if I take this more or less seriously as a science? So putting my cards, not my tarot cards on the table.

I personally can't take astrology seriously as a field with any sort of scientific reliability. Like I cannot imagine making any important decisions in my life based on that, in any way that would be parallel to how I would interact with medicine and that kind of scientific knowledge. To me, intuitively, if you are really in that place, the Rambam's warning becomes much more serious. That is to say, if you really believe, well, this doesn't actually tell you anything. This is not a field on which you would base serious decisions. If in principle, in the sense of if you take it seriously, but this is the question of what's the mode in which you're doing it. I love reading a fortune in a fortune cookie. But why?

Rav Avi: I am about to be really lucky!

Rav Eitan: Right. So why do I love reading something in a fortune cookie? I would say it's for two reasons. One, it's fun. It's amusing and it's just a form of entertainment. And I think there are people who read horoscopes in a similar way. And sure, that's not what the Ramban's talking about. That's not an issue. The other way is sometimes a fortune or I think a horoscope can get you to think about traits or opportunities or decisions that are in front of you that you wanted to focus on anyway and they stir it up like it's not that you think, oh, by reading the fortune, this will now happen to me.

But by saying, you know, when you have an important decision, kindness is always the primary choice or something like that. You may actually have a decision coming up and it may help you realize, oh, that's probably right. Not because the fortune told you, but it's almost like the fortune reminded you. I imagine that for some folks who read horoscopes, I don't read horoscopes, but I have read horoscopes. And there are sometimes where it lands with me that way.

Rav Avi: They're like, oh, they're masterfully written to apply to any situation.

Rav Eitan: This is not because I am a Sagittarius, but it might be I read something under Sagittarius and say, oh, you know what, I needed to hear that today. Or that was helpful. I don't think that's running afoul of the Rambam either, but I think the Ramban's guiding message here is important and strong advice, which is, in other words, try to actually cultivate a personality and a religious approach where you're mostly focused just on being a simple person in the world with a set of obligations, a set of aspirations and asking yourself the question, what can I do to advance that today? And less time stressing out about outsmarting the system or how things are out of my hands. Right.

Rav Avi: So I guess I want to just conclude by asking you, what if we translated mazal here as fate? Is this actually just a pushback on fate to say, well, maybe you're in charge. To some extent, you're in charge, to some extent, God's in charge. Fate is something you shouldn't put too much like stake in or spend too much time worrying about. I'm fated to do this or I'm fated to do that. Does that feel like maybe the right read?

Rav Eitan: I think that's one definitely plausible read. And we go back also, I think, to the prophetic tradition. We have to remember, even if the prophets did sometimes tell the future, they were equally and more focused on exhorting people how to behave, including if you change your ways, there may be a different future than the one that otherwise will come about.

Rav Avi: Maybe I'll end with, I'll bring a text. You didn't actually bring the text, but the one text that I teach most that asks this question about mazal, where Rabbi Akiva says, ein mazal l'Yisrael, there is no fate, horoscope, whatever this word means for Israel. And then the story that he tells us about his daughter, he says, yep, an astrologer told him your daughter will die on the day of her wedding. And then the story talks about how Rabbi Akiva's daughter, in the middle of her wedding, a poor person comes to the door and nobody hears him and nobody's paying any attention. And the bride on her wedding day, I always like to imagine her like at the sweetheart table in the middle of the party, goes and feeds her portion to the poor person at the she feeds her steak dinner directly to the Ani. And then that night, there's a snake that was sent to kill her. And there's this sort of crazy story that she puts her hairpin directly into the snake in the wall, and it saves her life. And this is the story that Rabbi Akiva brings as proof. And what's interesting about it is that it's not that fate didn't exist, right? The snake is in the story. It's that her kindness, her mitzvah of feeding the poor person and of paying attention to the world and hearing, even on her wedding day, even when she's the bride, overcomes fate. I think the message in that story is actually like, it's not that there isn't fate, it's that you can overpower it and you can overpower it with mitzvot. And in particular, you can overpower it with kindness and feeding the hungry.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, it's a beautiful and powerful story.

Rav Avi: Thanks.

-------------------

-------------------