💡 Think:
Who expresses greater wisdom in what they do: A child or an astrophysicist?
In the summer of 1905, Rabbi Sholom Ber of Lubavitch unpacked this question. While exploring the descent and concealment of an infinite G-d in this finite world, he lays out the varying ways in which wisdom can be expressed.
Wisdom can be seen as the act of touching the sublime with mind, a journey of transcendence from the dross physicality of this world reaching out to the infinite.
Thus a craftsman or artist, can create works of great beauty and wisdom. Encoded within the work of art is a keen perception and skill of the artist. Yet no matter what is made or drawn, the end result will remain a new permutation of the physical. Even an inventor, someone note just building a better clock, but rather a new paradigm for telling time, ultimately is finding new and innovative ways to address the physical.
At the other end stands the theosophical contemplation of the Creator - the act of a human mind trying to contemplate G-d. When a person plumbs the depths of the Divine, then the human mind has the power to grasp at ideas beyond the limitations of this physical world and reach a transcendent state.
Between the two, the manipulation of the physical or the contemplation of the divine, stands someone like an astrophysicist. Someone who strips away the layers of physical reality and explores the underlying tensions that animate it.
But, it can be understood, no matter how profoundly wise the scientist is, there are limits to his or her innovations. They remain tied to this world. For any thoughts on physical things, must draw the mind into physicality itself.
Higher than the greatest inventor or scientist stands the wisdom of a toddler. A child, possessing a healthy level of receptive learning, but lacking the expressive mode of speech, must learn to talk. That child must analyze the world at large and touch an essential part of existence: Learning to speak is an expression of the inner thoughts of the soul itself. As opposed to other forms of wisdom which express ideas or core principles initially learned from others, building off of decades, centuries or millennia of research, a child’s acquisition of speech is a profoundly creative moment.
Thus on a scale from the mundane to the divine, the applied wisdom of the child far surpasses that of the scientist.
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