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Marc Daniels

A Kabbalah Community Peace Garden for Palestine and Israel.

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Back to the Garden http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aOGnVKWbwc

Oh how I remember the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the flower children generation. People took a lot of drugs and smoked a lot of weed in a feeble attempt to get back to the garden. The concept of weed is okay, but not to smoke it, but rather symbolically weed out hate for a more long lasting spiritual high. In an attempt to get in touch with my own spiritual garden, I began researching the cultural, educational, and ecological roots of gardening, and contrasted these aspects against my own Jewish spiritual roots. After ten years of research and analysis, I published my conclusions in a highly charged spiritual gardening manifesto, “Der Himmelsgarten”.

After all of this analysis, I discovered that the German pedagogues were on the right track, when they invented kindergarten. Gardening was thought to be an excellent method for conditioning the spirit as well as the mind and body.  Various gardening rituals were compared to how one gardens his or her own spirit. In the concluding chapters I portrayed a not so mythical globally televised Weed Out Hate event, broadcast from the White House gardens. I even publicized it on a Times Square billboard.

PR Newswire
PR Newswire

This became the inspiration for the Weed Out Hate Initiative.  In the course of the past three years, I have distributed more than 50,000 packs of Sunflower Peace Seeds teaching kids to pull weeds in the garden as a symbolic gesture for rooting out bullying inclinations and worse.

After becoming a blog writer for The Times of Israel, I began paying closer attention as to the intense nature of hatred in the Middle East.  I felt compelled to write this blog article relate relating spiritual gardening insights to such complex topics as the spiritual mission of Israel and the symbiotic nature of the Jewish – Palestinian relationship using the same kind of spiritual gardening rhetoric. According to Merriam-Webster, a Wandering Jew is “…any of several plants (genera Zebrina and Tradescantia) of the spiderwort family; especially   :  either of two trailing or creeping plants (Z. pendula and T. fluminensis) cultivated for their showy and often white-striped foliage”. What is interesting about this plant is that when the shoots are cut of from the vine, they easily take root in another location.   Their second definition is “a Jew of medieval legend condemned by Christ to wander the earth till Christ’s second coming” This term condemned is an interesting choice of words.

If I was to illuminate this rhetoric in kabbalah, I would define a wandering Jew, as a group of Jewish souls, in exile, rooting their ‘spiritual gardening’ shoots amongst the Nations of the World.  It appears that the Jews were chosen for a special purpose with respect to the rest of the Nations of the World. Like Johnny Appleseed, their purpose was to sow seeds embedded with the following spiritual DNA for future peace:

Legend has it that 2,000 years before the Creator created man He created the greater spiritual universe and mapped it out into 22 geo-spiritual quadrants. Each quadrant was root-fed with a unique combination of heavenly wisdom and heavenly heart. In my book I discuss how these depictions were sensed by the biblical Patriarchs and later chronicled as the 22 Hebrew letters which were later combined into words, verses and books within the Bible. The horizontal aspects of the letters relate to the degree of heavenly godliness one feels in the heart and the vertical components signify the heavenly wisdom to attain a specific level towards attainment. Biblical words like grasses, rose, flower bud, water, land, roots tree, etc. contain embedded spiritual instructions to cleanse the heart and garden the spirit. This helps explain why people can feel spirituality while gardening. They are harmonizing with the original root feeding of the spiritual letters, which will help them stream their way back to the Garden.

Using this kind of kabbalah code, the term Jews or Yehudi is related to the term of reuniting and Israel stands for straight to The Jewish soul is spiritually engineered for connecting other souls and bringing them back to the Land of Israel, where detached desires come unifying spiritual intention. In order to become fit for this task, the Jewish souls would need to cross over their egoism (not receiving contentment for His name), to altruistic (receiving for His Name). This is the spiritual definition of the term Hebrew is.  The most geo-politically term called Zionism also has a spiritual root.

Once a soul has crossed over into spirituality, this soul would be pure enough to receive torah, spiritually speaking, the Light that reforms, for irradiating and illuminating stony hearts in the soul into spiritual energy, for drawing the rest of the souls back to the garden. It is interesting to note that the further one ascends in spirituality, all those divisive religiously charged terms take on a new meaning that inspires people to unite.

When it comes to defining our Jewish roots they belong to everyone. The spiritual Wandering Jew shoots that were down streamed onto the Nations of World, now can function for up streaming intentions to reconnect back to the Garden. Just as we were created with direct spiritual roots that stream sustenance into our souls, the forces that detach us from this perception are so-called inner seeds of hate, which can germinate upon the right conditions. and clog the spiritual roots. On the surface, we are very susceptible hate and fear mongering.  Given the right inspiration, we bring out our latent heavenly intention to connect.

Image Courtesy of U.S. Embassy Berlin
Image Courtesy of U.S. Embassy Berlin

The children can easily imagine the possibilities of blooming spirits once hatred is removed. As a spiritual gardening wandering Jew, I have spread this message to schools and community gardening groups in Springfield, IL, Chicago, Washington D.C., New York City, Atlanta, Des Moines and Las Vegas. Last April, the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Berlin, used the concept with eighty local German students or relating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ethics of social inclusion. Jews and Non-Jews alike are very much souls-in-training and we all develop at our own pace. An egoistic soul is definitely a threat to  conditioned altruistic soul. One culture’s weed is another’s cultured plant.  In the garden bed , we insert edging dividers protect the roots of turf grass from impacting those of the garden bedding plants.

Terrorist organizations like Hamas perceive Jews, Israel, and all the other infidels, as being limitations to their development. They spread propaganda that Western culture is a cancer limiting their elevated spiritual lifestyle and future redemption.

The righteous Palestinians and others in the Nations of the World see things much differently, They may not understand the full dimension of the role of Jews, but most of them understand that they have one to be fulfilled; if not now then sometime in he not so distant future. Utilizing the German cultural model, is once way to ensure universal access to Waldorf Schools, community gardens, and kindergartens can help children root feed our connecting souls by weeding out hate. The two contrasting visuals of the extraction of an ugly weed and the blooming of a beautiful sunflower are powerful devices. This intention, reinforced over the course of a season and throughout our life times is a natural and organic means to make this habit our second nature.

Our Jewish spiritual roots that are being nurtured belong to everyone. It is in our common interest to strengthen them and to fortify them, by teaching our children in Gaza, in Ramallah, or in Jerusalem how to weed out hate and sow the seeds of peace.   Perhaps there are opportunities for Israeli – Palestinian community gardens.

We need to spring up community gardens with the same vigilance that our enemies create terrorist cells. The choice is simply, to either continue to fall victim of the hate cycle, or to plant the first seed of peace, and weed out hate.

To answer the question, why hate exists, you might as well pose the question, why the Creator created weeds in the garden. Only when we take action to put ourselves back into spiritual balance by weeding out hate,  this is the first step in giving peace a chance. The answer lies in the recognition of the detaching forces that enervate sustenance from fruit bearing plants, or root out weeds, pick out stones, irrigate the deepest roots, enrich the soil, and protect the plants. Weeding out hatred, is a spiritual cry that triggers an ocean of  ‘eye for an eye’ cathartic tears back.

Whether lured by the heavenly sensations of spiritual gardening or compelled by external terrorist attacks, it is clear that every one has a role to play and that part of this role is inner change and spiritual evolution.  By learning to appreciate the justification for hate, we begin to understand just how to flow with the spiritual streams rather than against them.  We learn to root feed and systemically protect the Tree of Israel together, as one soul, one heart, against all threats. This helps us develop a spiritual resistance for tasting and appreciating that once seductive, unattainable forbidden fruit connection with the Creator.

A Model for the Middle East; An opportunity for the Nations of the World. After spreading our Wandering Jew shoots throughout the world for over two thousand years, the time has for streaming eight billion golden stardust souls back to the Garden.

About the Author
As the eldest grandson of Ross Daniels, the inventor of a horticultural irrigation tool for deep watering and feeding at the deepest roots, Marc spent the first half of his career learning about global gardening and gardener's trends. Ten years ago, he began thinking about how to take his grandfather's vision to the next level, for inspiring humanity to weed out hate and sow the seeds of peace through spiritual gardening.