If I Didn’t Care by The Ink Spots
The story goes something like this. Two respected rabbis go to New York City for a rabbinical conference. Upon landing at the same time, they organize to meet each other at the airport and take a taxi into the city together. Once in the taxi, they start talking and quickly begin to outdo each other with modesty that verges on obsequiousness. The first rabbi says, ‘It’s true, I’ve studied the Talmud extensively, and could practically cite it by heart, but I know almost nothing compared to you.’
‘Know almost nothing?’ The second rabbi responds. ‘You’ve got to be joking. I’m absolutely no match for you! Sure. I know quite a bit, especially when it comes to the Gemara, but compared to your knowledge? Zilch.’
‘No, no, no.’ Says the first. ‘Compared to you and your knowledge, I’m less than nothing.’
‘Less than nothing? No way! I’m less than nothing.’
This goes on a little longer, until the taxi driver, bemused, turns around and says: ‘I’ve been sitting in traffic listening to this for over half an hour. If you two grand figures of your religion are nothing, then what does that make me? Probably less than less than nothing.’
The two rabbis look at the driver, then at each other, and by coincidence state in unison: ‘Who does this guy think he is?’
According to the Torah, humans were constructed in God’s image, meaning there’s a divine soul in all of us. Of course, with this sense of consciousness, awareness, the power to plan and create, humans can naturally become quite conceited. Translating roughly from the Talmud: God created humans last to remind us that even the mosquito was created before us. In other words, we’re creatures who have an inherent need to be humbled. Those who are righteous (not self-righteous) know this very well.
Another reason man was created last was God’s desire for the world to not only be taken care of, but appreciated and marveled at, since birds, tigers, and mosquitoes aren’t able to reflect the same way we can, at least not in the same spiritual, ritualistic manner. It says in the Torah that God made man from the dust of the land. Interestingly, the Hebrew words for land and desire are almost the same, meaning the desire that occupies our minds constitutes the elements we’re made up of, and the only thing allowing us to control this desire is our consciousness, our reflective sense of self, our divine interiority. Again, God created us in his image, with the power to make decisions and judgments, to create and destroy. Without this inherent aspect, we’re nothing but animals.
This all reminds me a bit of Mise en abyme, the formal concept of putting a story within a story, an image within an image, a movie within a movie. The phrase literally translates to ‘placed into abyss,’ and holds the idea that the characters an artist creates have a free-flowing conscience of their own. God may have created man, and man is an extension of God. That’s all good and well. It doesn’t mean that man can’t deviate from the creator’s path and begin a destructive one of his own. We’ve been created, the decision of how to live is now ours.
If we hold any of this as true, humans must be seen as creatures of comparison, unique animals with a natural duality. We’re made up of both the spiritual and physical realms, physical body (desire), Godly soul (consciousness). We’re filled with a sense of good and bad, right and wrong, truth and lies, self-deception and self-realization, and if used properly, this allows us to contrast and compare, to hold two conflicting truths at once, to be able to simultaneously experience the physical while envisioning the spiritual. To be human is to be conflicted, to balance opposing realities and learn how to live with them.
What I admire in certain readings of the Talmud is that the only blind devotion that matters is to studying, to the attempted grasp of wisdom and knowledge (a great duality), to better understand the world, and to have a strong sense of the other, the external forces that exist outside ourselves but can only be properly understood within ourselves. Empathizing is self-actualization and vice versa. Judaism, or religion in general, can be viewed as a way of becoming connected to our surroundings, staying connected to our surroundings, to have as strong a sense of the other as one has of themselves.
So anyway, the rabbis in the taxi, that pissing game of who can piss less. They both want each other to know, to really know, that all their knowledge comes from a place of humble curiosity and not of ego. They themselves are nothing special, they can’t take credit for their God-given desire to learn, their attempt to understand. And in some perverse way, their well-intentioned inclination to put themselves and their experiences down is to say: I’m more holy than thou—for holiness has nothing to do with accomplishments, with prior knowledge and experience. Holiness is merely the inclination to keep on going, to keep on learning.