Have you ever heard someone refer to a couple as magical and wonder what that means? According to the Zohar, a magical couple is one in which both partners see themselves as two halves of the same soul and dedicate their lives to a united purpose. And thankfully for us, the Zohar provides a means to obtain such a beautiful relationship.

Unfortunately, many marriages do not understand that there is a deeper meaning, and goal, to their relationship. It is important for a couple to keep mitzvot together and to share the same values and ideals, but these actions don’t necessarily mean that the couple has a “magical” status. In order to achieve such a status, partners need to have made three connections to one another. They are a physical connection, an intellectual connection, and a spiritual connection.

When a couple has a physical connection, they are attracted to each other’s physical characteristics. This connection is followed by the intellectual one in which a couple enjoys having conversations with one another and expresses their opinions. Next is the highest level, a spiritual connection, in which a couple feels united and dedicates their lives to a mutual goal of doing good in the world.

The level of connection that a couple has is correlated to the types of arguments they have throughout their relationship. For example, a couple who only has a physical connection will argue about each other’s looks. A couple who has an intellectual connection will fight about the tone that a partner had during a discussion. For a couple who has a spiritual connection, their conflicts become centered around overcoming challenges and giving productive feedback to their partner. And it is this that creates a magical couple—realizing that you and your partner are a single unit, falling in love with your partner as equally as you love yourself, and therefore, always striving to better one another for the good.

However, many times, friction and conflict in a relationship can be created by the evil eye and witchcraft. Thus, in addition to working on having a united spiritual goal as the foundation of your relationship, you can also increase your chance of having a magical status through many tools that protect you from witchcraft and the evil eye.

An example of such a tool is as follows: the Zohar writes that when a man enters a cemetery for a funeral, he endangers himself because the Angel of Death dances within a cemetery. Women are more protected from the Angel of Death because they already drain all of their spiritual negativity during their monthly cycle. Men, however, do not have a way to drain the negativity that exists in their spiritual systems. Therefore, a man needs to be careful to protect himself from the spirits of death. Furthermore, when a couple goes to a cemetery together to comfort a widow, the widow will look at the couple and think about how it is unfair that their spouse was taken while this couple in front of them gets to live with each other. The widow’s thought introduces an evil eye onto the healthy couple. As a result, this evil eye ignites a conversation in the Heavens to determine if the healthy couple really deserves to live. According to the Zohar, the evil eye begins its influence when the couple makes eye contact with the widow in the cemetery. Therefore, people need to lower their eyes when in this situation in order to avoid eye contact. Incidentally, this is the reason why it became a custom to prepare black sunglasses at a funeral—for people to avoid the eyes of the widow. In addition, when visiting a hospital, one should beware of the evil eye; the sick patients in the hospital may be jealous of the healthy visitors, and any jealousy that is not for its own sake creates an evil eye.

My late grandfather, HaChacham Chagani, lived in Moshav Pardes Katz in Bnei Brak and was famous for removing the evil eye and spells through the methods of the Libyan chachamim. Therefore, many people also turn to me and ask for help in removing evil eye and spells of witchcraft. In most cases, people do not suffer from witchcraft but from the evil eye.

Interestingly, one way to determine if your home is cursed through witchcraft is through the presence of ants in the house. Ants will not enter a bewitched house or touch a bewitched person. Therefore, I ask people who come to me with concerns about witchcraft if they have ants in their house. If so, there is nothing to worry about. It may be that the evil eye is still in the house, but that can be fixed more easily than witchcraft.

Another way to protect from witchcraft and evil eye is through zechuyot, the good merits that a person acquires as a result of righteous actions. Therefore, it is important to prevent the evil eye and witchcraft through kindness and charity. For example, one can distribute food to the poor and help people in need. Additionally, one can protect from the evil eye by saying “May all our evil enemies perish” after immersing the Havdalah candle in wine at the end of Shabbat. One final tool that protects from the evil eye is names that you can wear to repel spells and the evil eye.