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talmud study
"R' Elazar said: The Holy One, blessed is He, said the entire world was created only for the sake of [the person who fears God and keeps his commandments]. R' Abba bar Kahana says [the person] is equal in importance to the entire world. R' Shimon ben Azzai, or some say R' Shimon ben Zoma, the entire world was created only to serve as an accompaniment for this person."
The footnotes expand on this: R' Elazar says the purpose of creation was to get one person who fears God and keeps his commandments, and once that state is reached everything else is superfluous. R' Abba says other people do serve a purpose, but their combined value is less than the value of the one God-fearing person. R' Shimon says the rest of creation provides for the social and material needs of that one person, so it has value, though it's still a lesser value. And the Maharal argues that the rest of humanity is there to serve this person; the one who fears God is special, rising above trivialities and focusing on what matters, and he's an example for others.
(Aside: the word used for "fear" is "yirah" or its cognates -- good ol' yud-reish-alef of which I wrote a few days ago.)
I have a problem with these statements. We are also told that we -- every single one of us -- is created b'tzeit Elo[k]im, in God's image. Somewhere in Pirke Avot, in a wonderful passage that I can't quote or cite from memory, it says that every person should remind himself that for his sake the world exists. Yet, here we have the rabbis of the talmud elevating certain people above the rest, not on the basis of something that can really be demonstrated, like scholarship, but based on an internal matter. It seems incongruous.
Now sure, I'm being colored by my post-Enlightenment modernistic ideas about human worth and so on. And also by the way that passages such as these have been interpreted by those who choose not to work (living off of society) so that they can study all their lives. (To them I say: remember the other half of "without Torah there is no bread; without bread there is no Torah".) But it still seems a challenging, risky argument to try to put forth.
Perhaps it's meant to teach humility -- "while I do my best, surely I am not the sort of person they're talking about, so I should do my best to support my betters and learn from them". And if everyone acts that way, I suppose it can work. But everyone doesn't act that way, and a lot of friction and little good can come of contests to show who's more God-fearing. After all, isn't that, fundamentally, what every single religious war is about?
So I'm still challenged to fit this statement into its proper context, and into a context in which it makes sense.
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And if you become that perfect saint, then the rest of the world was created for you. No matter how observant you are, there's probably some way for you to improve yourself, Godfearingnesswise. So what more incentive do you need to improve? Get cracking! (he said, looking nervously at his Chumash and thinking about how little of this week's parsha he's read...) There's your individual human worth.
Re people who live off society so they can study full-time: Pirke Avot says "according to the effort is the reward", not "according to the clock-hours is the reward".
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