The Hidden Wisdom of Mazah Ball Soup
One of the most ingenious advertising slogans ever created was from Hebrew National Kosher Hot Dogs: “We answer to a higher authority”. When it comes Secretary of State’s John Kerry’s efforts to broker a successful peace deal, I think he could benefit with a bit of matzah ball soup wisdom.
The problem is one of translation and of greater perception of reality. Pirqei Avot is commonly referred to as “Ethics of our Fathers” but translates literally as “Chapters of Our Fathers”. We need to get beyond shallow rooted geo-political expedient strategies. From the standpoint of the Kabbalah, these Chapters refer to higher spiritual levels teaching us how to illuminate the deepest spiritual roots of these ethics.
So when I read an article about ‘Kerry threatening to cut PA aid if no peace deal signed’, I think about offering him a bowl of Matzah Ball soup and teaching him about the spiritual roots of matzah. There is an allure about mazah balls. According to Kabbalah, matzah represents the lack of taste of bestowal, as compared to tangeable taste of egoistic fullfillment. One learns to nullify the ego in return for a higher spiritual fulfillment.
This is the kind of crossing over one’s egoism, that needs to be addressed beginning at the children’s grassroots level throughout the region. As I have mentioned in previous articles, peace can longer be brokered as if it was tightly woven geo-textile keeping destructive weed-like forces dormant, waiting for the first cracks in the fabric to appear. Gardening is such a wondrous ritual for weeding out hate and sowing the seeds of peace. It can make even the most bitter of life’s lessons tasty. For this reason, it is a natural method for overcoming egoism and acquiring good habits of bestowal. Bestowal is important in all religions. The act of having Jewish, Muslim, and Christian children rooting out weeds together is a powerful prayer for drawing the corrective Light onto our souls. First, it ionizes remaining inner weeds and stony hearts within the soul, and then it illuminates them back up to the source.
Weed out Hate pedagogies can be taught at schools, within families, and in urban park settings. Once hatred is rooted out and stony hearts picked out at the grassroots level, spirits are free to rise into the geo-nexus layer of peace, so perfect it could have only been created through Intelligent Design.