Are we all just animals?

 Human animals. That is how one of my teachers insisted on referring to human beings.  "We are the same as all the animals," she said, "except that we can speak."

 

It didn't sit well with me.  Although I was a young kid, I knew that Hashem had created us as unique creatures, and there was much more to us than just being human animals.  You have probably heard the story about a kid who asks her mother how we got here.  She tells her that in the beginning there was nothing and then Hashem created everything, including human beings, whom He created from the earth and blew life into his nostrils.  She then asks her father, who tells her we evolved from monkeys.  She goes back to her mother confused and asks her about what Dad said.  “Oh,” says the mother, “he's talking about his side of the family.”

 

As I grew up, I noticed a marked difference in the Torah’s description of all of creation and that of the human.  Hashem created the mineral world to exist constantly.  He created vegetation with a built in nature to grow.  He created animals as "living souls," meaning that their body and soul were created as one.

 

Humans, however, were uniquely created as a lump of earth with no life, and then He "blew a living soul into his nostrils."  The human body and soul are distinct, the only being created this way.  This is because the human soul is eternal, whereas the body is physical and mortal.  Humans have the unique ability to fuse the physical and spiritual, to bring the eternal into the finite.    

 

It does seem strange though that of all creation, specifically humans, the "chosen among the creations," were created as lifeless bodies.  In the hierarchy of creation there is inanimate, vegetable, animal, and above all human.  Yet while all other creatures were created as living beings, the human was originally created inanimate, a non-living piece of earth.  Seems like a paradox.

 

There is a deep mystical concept here.  The purpose of the human is to elevate all of creation.  Imagine you want to lift a building, let's say.  (I know it is done.)  You use a giant lever.  If you put the lever in the middle of the building, you will only lift the top part. In order to lift the entire building, the lever needs to be at the bottom, underneath the building.  In order for our souls to be able to fulfill our mission, to elevate every aspect of the universe, including the inanimate, to holiness, it was necessary for it to descend all the way into the inanimate.

 

This is the power that Hashem gave us in Bereishit, at the beginning of time.  We can bring meaning to the animal world, to the vegetable world, and even to stones, by using them to better the world.  Living purposefully according to the Torah gives us this ability, and it is this kind of mission-driven life that transforms the world to a place of goodness and light.