A Talmudic parable:
One Friday, a fox tricked a wolf into entering a Jewish courtyard, looking for a bit of the aromatic Shabbos food.
Chased away, he then went to a well, where the fox showed him the moon's reflection in the water. There was a two-bucket pulley system, so the fox went down in one and called up "come down, I’ve found cheese!” The wolf clambered into the empty bucket, and lowered himself into the well. The weight of his descent lifted the fox’s bucket up. The wolf was left stranded at the bottom.
Sounds like Roadrunner and Wile.E.Coyote. But this is Talmudic, so we should look for some its profundity.
Two primary questions:
1. The wolf is the hapless bad guy. Cartoons aside, why just discard him? Why not rehab?
2. The fox is the cunning good guy. Can a guy be ‘good’ if he uses Machiavellian tactics?
G-d didn’t give us a perfect world; He gave us a world to perfect. We need to pierce its shallow façade to find its meaning.
Reality is like an orange. On the surface, there is an inedible peel - our world of shallowness and suffering – which yields no genuine beauty. Our job is to find the fruit – the goodness and meaning – behind the peel.
All week, we wrestle with the ‘peel’ because that it’s our functional reality. On Shabbos, and during transcendent ‘Shabbos moments’ of the week, we connect with the ‘fruit’, life’s deeper meaning.
In a perfect – Messianic – reality, we’d be able to elevate the ‘peel’ in its entirety. But, for now, that’s beyond our ken. Once the ‘peel’ has served its purpose, we need to jettison the shallow and focus on the ‘fruit’.
The wolf represents the peel. Shabbos food was beyond his reach, because Shabbos is all about the ‘fruit’; self-centeredness has no place at the table. The wolf’peel represents attitudes and behaviors (not people!) that need to be rejected; they end up at the bottom of a well.
So that addresses one element of the parable.
But why the cunning? Can there be holiness in deceptiveness?
1. ‘Deceptive’, means that appearance differs from reality. Well, what if an act appears selfish, when it’s actually other-centered? To an onlooker, most of our daily activities will appear self-serving. But what if you are actually focused on achieving your Divine destiny and making a positive mark on the world (through your business)? That’s deceptively Holy.
2. Our Patriarch Jacob spent much of his life protecting his family, and his life’s mission, from unscrupulous people (Esau and Laban). He needed to stay focused on his values, at the same time that he was outwitting them. In a perfect world, that wouldn’t be necessary; but we don’t yet live in a perfect world.
As the Psalm (18) says: “With the pure You (G-d) act purely, and with the crooked You act crookedly.”
The bottom line message for me and you: We need to cunningly plan our engagement with the world, by piercing it surface banality and finding its beauty. It takes lowering ourselves into the pit of life, but eventually we can ascend and leave the trivialities behind.
Go Road Runner!
ב"ה
Mendy wrote...
The idea of the fox represents our wise interactions with the material world. The wolf represents our shallower interactions with the world.
The shallower side (wolf) felt that it also could partake of the beauty of spirituality, since that too has a self-serving benefit. The fox wanted it to perceive its own distance from transcendence (no Shabbos food).
The wolf went down into the well symbolizes how we need to lower ourselves into the world if we want to refine it. The he found the moon's light. The moon, with its reflection of the sun's rays, is a Torah metaphor for the world's receptiveness - and reflection - of Divine light.
Te fox told the wolf that it was actually cheese. Cheese is made through separating the curdled part from the milk, which symbolizes the distilling of meaning from the material. The wolf wanted to benefit from that very idea, just on his shallow terms.
Once the fox ascended, which symbolizes our accessing the meaning of physical engagement, then the shallow part - the wolf - has no more productive use. It's place is at the bottom of the well.