Tag: i feel like breathing would be enough of a ‘something that a dead person does not do’ thing

animatedamerican:

semitics:

I’m a Jew, so if I am not complaining at all times. I will die

So there’s an old Jewish superstition (not universally held among Jews; we’ve got astonishing diversity of superstition) about how it’s a bad omen to sew or mend an article of clothing while somebody else is wearing it.  Why?  Because it invokes the image of sewing a shroud, which is done while it’s on the corpse.

If you really do need to have someone mend a garment while you’re wearing it, then (so goes the superstition) in order to counter the bad omen, you should whistle or sing or chew something or talk, continuously, while the sewing is being done.  Because those are things a dead person can’t do.  So doing them breaks the ill-omened image of being a corpse, passive and unresponding while someone sews your shroud.

And I bring this up because sometimes I honestly feel like complaining at all times is our way of reassuring each other, and ourselves, that we aren’t dead.