The Crowded Temple

How exactly does raising the right kind of people help to solve the problem of too many people? The Talmud relates that during the pilgrimage festivals, the Jerusalem Temple was so crowded that people barely had room to stand. However, during the period of the service that called for worshippers to prostrate themselves upon their knees on the floor, there was mysteriously sufficient room. This is, indeed, a mysterious account since everyone knows that people on their knees require more floor space than people standing erect. During the part of the service when people were on their knees, conditions should have been more, not less, crowded than when the people were standing. The traditional explanation is that standing erect is a metaphor for a condition of arrogant self-absorbtion. Prostration is a metaphor for humility and awareness of others. Finally, the Temple itself is depicted in the Torah as an almost mathematical model of the world. It is not hard to grasp the truth of this message: If a population consists of humble people constantly aware of one another, it never feels crowded. However, is a population finds itself surrounded by even a few arrogant and self-centered individuals, conditions feel overcrowded. Overpopulation is not a question of numbers or objectively measurable figures such as people per square mile. Instead, it is a question of whether people feel oppressed by the overwhelming presence of others. This has more to do with standards of civility and behavior than with actual population numbers. Most of us would feel less pressured and more comfortable on the crowded streets of Hong Kong or Tokyo than we would on a lonely urban alley in New York City. What we really have is not a population problem, but a perception of a population problem -- a problem that results not simply from too many people, but from too many people arrogantly and thoughtlessly impressing their presence upon others. Rather than reducing the number of people, we need to reduce the incidence of selfish behavior that oppresses others and to increase the amount of creative behavior that meets others' needs.

--pages 19-20.

This is a powerfully different way of thinking about overpopulation. Importantly, it might be an argument that would penetrate the thinking of the crowded planet hand wringers in a way those everybody-on-earth-could-live-in-Texas-and-have-plenty-of-room arguments don't.

Full disclosure concerning my own cynicism: the first time I read the part about the crowded temple, I assumed that many of the people who were present for the standing part of the service had just slipped out before the humility-inducing kneeling part began. I had to re-read the passage to realize that's not what was happening!