Thoughts of this story from the Talmud

[The Mikado]

Background: there is, of course, a Biblical injunction that touching something that touched a corpse makes one ritually unclean.  This does not apply to the ground, and, by extension, something like a clay oven built directly out of the ground can touch a corpse and still be fine as far as ritual purity goes.  (Whether or not you want a corpse on your oven is a different question)  However, what about a clay oven that's been transported and is sitting on the ground but no longer part of the Earth itself?

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So Rabbi Eliezer defends his Oven of Serpents and Rabbi Yehuda condemns him for it.  Rabbi Eliezer performs several miracles and even gets the Lord Himself to endorse his position, but Rabbi Yehuda reminds God that He doesn't have the ability to go back on the Torah now, reminds Him of Deuteronomy 30:12 "It is not in heaven" and points out that His own Scriptures had said "After the majority one must incline."  (Exodus 23:2)  The Rabbis effectively outvote Rabbi Eliezer by pointing out that he's in a minority of two on this issue: him and God.

[FEMA Camp Administrator]

Hmmm... Interesting. God is in fact made inferior to His word. I suppose this is meant to have some sort of lesson in it. The infallibility of the Torah, I assume (or, maybe the other way around, demonstrating that some rely on it too much? Not familiar with the Talmud and such).

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I've heard this story before. I didn't know what the exact issue at hand was.

This is interesting to me because one of the things that Christianity does differently to Judaism is (obviously) the Incarnation, the idea that God in some sense reduces Himself to human status to accomplish the salvation of humanity (this also exalts human status, of course, so I'm really not treating it with full justice in this sentence. Oh well). Yet here we see a Jewish story in which God, while not Incarnate, is being treated, as the OP said, on a roughly equivalent level with the human rabbim, such that He can be held to be in the minority and thus wrong about a point of the Law that He laid out.

Obviously the Christian perspective isn't particularly relevant to this Talmudic story, but the story does demonstrate that the treatment of, for lack of a better word for this concept, 'majesty' is very, very different in at least some strands of actual Jewish thought than in the stereotype of Jewish thought with which a lot of Christians live.

[The Mikado]

I've heard this story before. I didn't know what the exact issue at hand was.

I love the idea that Rabbi Eliezer is so insistent on defending his oven that had a corpse touching/in it.  I'd want to ditch that not out of ritual cleanliness reasons, but out of...cleanliness reasons.

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The Talmud was written in an era when there was a massive backlash against priestly Judaism of the animal sacrifice at the Temple variety (mainly because neither Temple nor priests still existed) and there was a real need to refocus the religion on something else, and the Halakhic 613 Laws of Moses was the answer.  The Torah wears the same priestly garments that the Temple Priests once did and the Law itself is treated in this super-reverent fashion.  The implication in this story is that the Law is so important that God Himself can't override it or insist that his interpretation is superior (due to the requirement that in manners of disagreement, the majority consensus carried the day).  Note, however, that the passage describes the walls of the building as staying slumped, not falling over but not returning to fully upright.  The walls are recognizing that Rabbi Eliezer has a point, even if his argument didn't win.