The Midrash of the Mateh

This is the ongoing saga of the Mateh,the staff taken from the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and passed down, generation to generation.

The shock of war was something the Mateh could never shake. Again the people had to fight; the horror and the brutality filled the Mateh with dismay. Was there ever a time when such terror would end?

This people who was to become "Ohr LaGoyim," 'a light unto the nations,' was shedding only darkness now. For every action, the Mateh knew, there was a 'Karma debt'. What would be the consequences of these actions? Would this people become numb to the brutalization of war and slaughter? Would others learn from the evil that is butchery?

The Mateh, which, as we have seen, was not locked in by time and space, flowed through the centuries.

It saw examples throughout the generations of how the world would, in some ways refuse to outgrow the insanity of war. Thirty centuries after the horror of this Jewish Jihad, others would be continuing the malevolent legacy of these ancient ways.

The difficulty of being in the position of "Light to the Nations" was that lessons learned from the ways of their ancestors are both good and evil.

When the Israelites continued the practices of the peoples around them, they became part of the infection that is violence within the world. Yes, the Mateh noted, this evil, this particular evil would pass from the path of the two-leggeds who were to be called Jews. But it did not pass from the world. There would be those who read the words but did not learn the lessons of Torah. There would be Jihad through the centuries. As the Mateh looked around at the bloodshed and death, it knew that victims become perpetrators and perpetrators become victims in the cycle of violence.

And it took a moment in prayer for a time when everyone could sit under a vine and fig tree with none to make them afraid.