In Genesis, notwithstanding the Lord telling her in an oracle that the older of the twins in her womb would serve the younger, Rebecca is not about to sit around passively and wait for the Lord to fulfill the oracle. She plots and implements the deception of her old blind husband and the shafting of her first born: she does all the work (25.23, 27.6 13). Oracles get fulfilled because they are read as warrants to take action to bring about what they prophesy.
Suppose, though, your good fortune does buy you happiness: you have no complaints. Yet you must complain. Your continued happiness hinges on your fulfilling the complaint requirement. Happiness uncomplained about provokes the gods, and surely the evil eye of your neighbors. Thus the Yiddish “no evil eye” (kein erin harah), upon hearing good news. Good news is dangerous stuff; it is a tax on your remaining supply of good luck. Best to protect against the harmful consequences of good luck and ward oil the demons by knocking on some nearby wood. Beware, too, the envy of your neighbors. it is one of mankind’s most predictable traits to find as much cause for complaint in another’s good fortune as in one’s own misfortune. The former being experienced as a special case of the latter. In a world in which one’s standing is gauged relative to others and the competition is fierce, your good fortune costs your neighbors. They will, unless you go out of your way to make their envy less painful to them, plot to make your happiness painful to you. As the Bemba proverb says: “To find one beehive in the woods is good luck, to find two is very good luck, to find three is witchcraft.” If your luck is too good to be true, it might cost you your life.
Proverbial wisdom is prudent rather than heroic: discretion tends to trump valor. You do not count chickens before they hatch, you do not go looking for tights or get stuck in a web of deceits. (A carefully planned single deceit is fine, but webs are hard to manage.) The wise are constantly wary of the ubiquitous wicked, with their lies and snares, who always seem vastly to outnumber the righteous, among whom you are unsure whether to include yourself, for it sometimes takes tire to fight fire. Ecclesiastes is even more cynical: “All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous over much: neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?” (7.15—16). Be good and wise in modest doses or you are either dead meat or have just wasted your time.
Prospero: A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost,
And, as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers. . . .