Abdimos the Gardite once approached Rabbi Meir with one of the largest possible questions. "Tell me," he said, "how was the earth created?"
Rabbi Meir did not open a book or begin a lecture. He said, "Go find Abba Yosef the builder."
Abdimos went looking for him and found Abba Yosef sitting on a beam high above the ground, squaring a roof. Abdimos called up to him.
"Come down," Abdimos said, "I have a question from Rabbi Meir."
Abba Yosef answered without climbing down. "I am a worker. My time is not mine. Ask from below."
So Abdimos called up his question, and Abba Yosef called his answer down, each voice echoing between beam and ground.
"How was the earth created?"
"God took a snowball from beneath His Throne of Glory," Abba Yosef called back, "and flung it into the void, and where it landed, the earth congealed. The world is a snowball that melted into soil."
The image is strange and beautiful. Snow is white, cold, unformed — a single thing from which all the textures of the world (rock, water, plant, animal) differentiated as it thawed. And the snow came from beneath the Throne — from the coolness of the divine presence itself. Creation is not violence, in this telling. It is melting. God dropped a piece of His own nearness, and it became a world.
Rabbi Meir, by sending his questioner to a builder instead of to a scholar, was also teaching a lesson. The deepest cosmology is sometimes known best by the craftsman with dirt under his fingernails. Sit below his scaffold and listen.
(From The Exempla of the Rabbis, Moses Gaster, 1924, no. 265, based on Midrash Tehillim 93.)