Ayin Hara
The “evil eye,” ayin harah, is the harmful negative energy that is created when one looks at something with envy or ill feeling.
The idea of an ayin hara is found in many places in the Talmud and Jewish law. For example, we are told not to gaze at a fellow's field of standing grain, lest we damage it with an evil eye, and the custom is not to call two brothers (or father and son) up to the Torah consecutively because of the ayin hara that may come from drawing too much attention to a single family. The evil eye is also the reason why we don’t “count” people.
We deep dive into the history of this notion, whether superstition, cross cultural phenomenon or psychological projection.