By V Riczker

Edited by Amy Li and Alloe Mak

Spirit wraps around my neck like a noose. Twin weights, beckoning from two camps. They pull me in opposite directions. Fate or faith. Canaries in the coalmine of my collarbone, doomed to never be believed in enough. The necklaces that I wear on my neck mean something to me, and yet, they don’t belong together.

It was only recently that I started to wear jewellery again. Like everything in my life, I never kept up with my promise of wearing a necklace every day. Each lost chain became another broken oath, laid to unrest in every dark corner I could find. But recently, I’ve been on my longest streak yet.

These charms are different from the ones I used to wear. For one, the chains don’t match. Neither do their sizes. Neither does the weight they carry. Around my neck, I wear both a small Magen David and a flower charm I’ve dubbed “lucky”. God lives in one, and hope in the other. Superstition and religion are forces I rely on for peace, but they constantly battle to fill up the empty space on the forefront of my body.

My prized possessions repel each other like magnetic forces. My Magen David, encrusted with gems in each corner, glitters in the sunlight. My small lucky charm—once a plate, excavated from a landfill—is too fragile to expose to water. My twin flames juxtapose each other; too similar in force, too different in meaning.

I take off my “lucky necklace” when I go to sleep. Why am I able to part with it? Maybe it’s less of a commitment than a religion I was born into. After all, the Magen David has never left my neck since I put it on. My religion follows me everywhere, but maybe I sleep better without the idea of luck hanging over me. And yet, I wake up each morning and clasp it back on, even the days I don’t believe enough to.

Is there a way to describe the torment I feel, playing for both teams? Judaism is famously big on God; superstition is pretty atheist to me. Superstition often finds itself an outsider in Abrahamic religion. What is there to believe in other than a God? Luck feels unholy in religion’s company. These forces do not mesh well together, and yet they perch together around my neck like unwilling allies stuck in a Saw trap. Why do I draw comfort from these competing forces? Why did I trap them together like this?

I think I need more than one, honestly. I don’t really fit in either place, so how could just one force protect me? I can’t commit to superstition or religion. I’d call myself a “cultural Jew,” but I want so deeply to be more than that. I want to know the language, to read the texts. I can’t bring myself to believe, but I want to so badly. And then there’s my issue with memory. Each time I tell myself something is going to be my lucky charm, I forget to commit. I am a fraud in the way I believe—never enough. My foot is in the door between superstition and religion. I pray to the heavens, but I bring my lucky pencils anyway. I feel almost guilty, grouping together my relationship with God and a dice roll.

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to escape the torture of belief. I am constantly searching for something more powerful than I to tell me where to go, but nothing fits just right. Is it that I don’t believe one is enough, or that I don’t believe enough at all? I am drawn to spirituality by the promise of aid, of some unwavering cosmic force, but I refuse to commit enough to reap those rewards. I am stuck in a never-ending faithful purgatory.  

My throat closes up when I think about faith. I don’t think what’s choking me is the weights on my neck; rather, the idea of choosing one thing to believe in forever. What if I one day wake up wiser and realise I made the wrong decision? I’d rather remain indecisive than find myself trapped in a faith I can’t believe in anymore. I will stay with double-barrelled belief for the rest of my days, or at least until I know better. 

As I consider the traitorous implications of my wish-washy ways, I find peace in knowing I’ll never believe enough to find hope in either side. I’ve come to realise that God can’t save me from this pain—but neither can a dice roll. Superstition and religion are two sides of the same coin. Heads or tails? It won’t help me decide, but it will at least prolong the process. 

In Judaism, thirteen is considered to be a lucky number. A boy becomes a man at thirteen. We have thirteen months in our leap year calendar. God taught Moses the thirteen attributes—compassion, grace, truth, so on and so forth—to save His children from sin. What the world sees as cursed, Jews see as blessed. Thirteen is also my lucky number. That usually gets a chuckle, or at least a question of “why?”. Maybe it’s thirteen’s implications with bad luck, and my need to subvert that. Maybe it’s the number’s meaning in my heritage. Or maybe, it’s a little bit of both. What’s the hurt in some extra metaphysical protection? I don’t think it matters what force I pray to—just the extra chance of there being something on the other side.