Published in the Tri Valley Herald on July 14, 2006
There’s an old Jewish adage: “Everything a person hears or sees should serve as a lesson in life”.
The 2006 World Cup, the most widely-viewed sporting event of the year, has come to a close. As is the case with every phenomenon in God's world, this game serves as a model and metaphor for our mission in life. Let us, for a moment, analyze the game through this moral prism.
The objective of the game is to move a ball into a ‘goal’ or ‘gate’. This would be fairly easy to achieve were it not for the fact that facing the player is an opposing team which will do everything in its power to prevent him from scoring a ‘goal’. But then again, if there were no opposing team, the full extent of the player’s skill and power would never be actualized. For such is the nature of the human being: our most potent potentials are awakened only by challenge and adversity.
The earth is a sphere – a ball. The objective of life is to place this ball into the goal. Each of us is given our personal ball, our personal world: our character traits, families, material possessions, and circle of influence. Our mission and objective is to elevate and refine our world, ‘our ball’, kicking it into the goal. By utilizing our talents constructively, by using our material wealth to help and assist others, by being a positive influence on our friends and families, we infuse and imbue ‘our ball’, our lot in life, with a sense of purpose. In so doing we elevate ‘our ball’ and we move the world, as a whole, toward the goal of its creation.
At our every step, however, we are challenged by a formidable opposing team - composed of our own negative traits and habits and a host of external foes - who obstruct our advance toward the goal and seek to move the ball in the opposite direction. But it is the perpetual presence of this opposition that provokes our deepest potentials and maximizes our achievements. Instead of getting bogged down by adversity we can transform our ‘opponent’ into a catalyst and springboard for constructive growth.
The other important lesson, from our World Cup metaphor, is never to underestimate the power of the feet. To advance the ball towards its goal, we must make use of the full array of our faculties, from "head" to "foot": Our minds, our capacity for feeling, our talents and our physical energy. But our most important faculty is the "feet," which represents our capacity for action and instinctive obedience. The foot does not think. The foot does not feel. It acts. Void of complexities, the foot obeys.
Although “the foot” constitutes the "lowest" and least sophisticated of our faculties, it is this unequivocal commitment to action that has the greatest impact upon our world and is the most powerful force for the world’s advancement and ultimate realization. We might not always feel like doing the right thing, we might even intellectually rationalize this feeling, and yet it is many times “our feet”, our innate and reflexive sense of right and wrong, that propels us forward.
Each of us has the best coach and personal trainer – God Himself. With his help we will, no doubt win the game and bring home the trophy!
