Prime Principles: Pirke Abot 4:1 (Part IV): "Who is Honored?"
Honor can never come from the outside....
The final question that Ben Zoma addresses is the question of honor: "Who is honored? One who honors creations."
The Mishnah asks not who should receive honor but who is honored, meaning, who truly bears kavod—the Hebrew word that denotes not simply respect or recognition but weight, substance, presence. The word kavod comes from kaved which literally means heavy. In Torah thought, kavod is the existential gravitas of being. It is the significance of one's real presence in the world, the degree to which one participates fully in life as a meaningful expression of the Creator.
The Mishnah responds: "Who is honored? One who honors beriyot." Beriyot are not only people. The term refers to all creatures, all created entities. People who can observe another living thing or any part of the created world and recognize in it the inherent weight of being, the value of its existence, is someone who can hold kavod. Not because others bestow it upon them, but because such people have aligned themselves with the fundamental truth of existence—the Divine energy that sustains it all.
To support this, Ben Zoma cites a powerful pasuk: מְכַבְּדַ֥י אֲכַבֵּ֖ד וּבֹזַ֥י יֵקָֽלּוּ - Mekhabdai akhabed, ubozai yekalu (I Samuel 2:30). God says: "Those who honor Me, I will honor; and those who belittle Me shall be made light of." The word yikalu is an appropriate response to the use of kavod in that verse. It is saying that those people who do not give weight to God, yikalu—will literally be made light of. It is for this reason that the word for curse in Hebrew is kelala—essentially, to curse is to make someone’s gravitas light and irrelevant.
This describes a natural reciprocity. When a person acknowledges the weight of the Divine by honoring His creations, they themselves come into contact with the power of the Divine. They bear it— it flows through them. Those who do not, lose the strength and magnitude of their being.
What does it mean to honor the Divine? In this case it isn’t belief. Kavod is existential. It is known through experience. It is what one feels standing before overwhelming beauty, staggering truth, or genuine life. Its power is not in proof, but presence. Attempts to prove God by statistics or cosmological probabilities misunderstand the point. They treat God as a conclusion to an equation rather than as the One in whom the equation itself exists.
God is known in the same way that one knows that one exists. It is not proven by argument. It is revealed in the presence of one's own being. מִבְּשָׂרִ֗י אֶֽחֱזֶ֥ה אֱלֹֽוהַּ - Mi-besari ehezeh Eloah (From my flesh I perceive God) (Job 19:26), says the verse. Because in the very fact of one's own conscious presence in the world, one recognizes that being is real—and because it is real, it must have a Source.
When I honor existence, I stand before it. Sometimes, I bow. Not out of subservience, but out of awe. This is kavod.
Kavod is not something one can chase. One who runs after it, the Mishnah says, causes it to flee. Because to chase kavod is to externalize it. It becomes no longer the weight of my own being, but the attention I receive from others. It becomes artificial.
And we are all susceptible. The genetic self, the biological self, upon which we have been reflecting, is inherently insecure. It seeks status, recognition, distinction—not as kavod, but as a means of survival. The more disconnected we are from our own inner sense of being, the more desperate we become for external validation. Kavod, then, becomes a costume.
That is why the Mishnah is careful: not mekhabed anashim, one who honors people, but mekhabed beriyot, one who honors creations. This reminds us that kavod a condition of vision. When I see the world as meaningful, I become meaningful. When I see life as valuable, I become valuable.
To cultivate kavod is to stand in wonder at the sheer fact of being—our own and others'. It is to approach the world as an ongoing act of divine self-expression, one in which we are participants, not spectators.
One who is mekhabed beriyot honors the Source of being that connects every created thing. That person bears the true weight of presence which can never compare with mere social esteem. The unshakeable dignity of being uniquely alive, present and aware in the world is the only kavod worth having.