Beauty and Balance
By Dovid Tsap

From the book 'Beauty, Art & Colour in Jewish Mysticism', by Dovid Tsap. To purchase the book click HERE

Beauty is the product of blending and contrasting varying qualities with rigorous control and precision.[1] This principle applies to any sphere of self expression. We will focus here on music, painting, and emotions:

·         Music consists of diverse sounds: high and low, melancholy and joyful, percussion and string. Talented musicians can blend this variety of sounds into harmonious and seamless streams of music. Compositions that manage to harmonize opposite qualities tend to be all the more graceful, exciting, and magical.

·         Painting consists of diverse colours and shades. Talented artists can combine various colours in the right proportions and use the technique of contrast to complement and enhance composition. Underlying the artwork is a sense of accuracy, unity, symmetry, and balance.

·         Emotions can also be diverse. We all possess a variety of emotional traits, many of which are opposite in nature, e.g., kindness and sternness, dominance and surrender, humour and seriousness. Emotional beauty results from blending various emotions together in the proportions appropriate for the circumstance or the individual with whom one is interacting.

To illustrate: a kind, warm teacher is often taken advantage of by students, and struggles to maintain decorum in the classroom. However, the rigorous and harsh teacher is disliked and fails to develop a rapport with students. The talented teacher carefully balances these approaches. He bonds with the students, while keeping them under control.[2]

The domineering marriage partner overshadows and suppresses his or her spouse’s personality. The submissive spouse then risks losing the expression of his or her own personality and interests in favour of the spouse’s. A delicate emotional balance is necessary to forge a healthy marital relationship, one where each one can express their identities and needs while caringly supplying to those of the other.

In the realm of divine service accurate balance of emotion is imperative.

A tension exists between light-heartedness and seriousness. A casual or flippant approach to spiritual failings desensitises one from their damaging effects, thereby perpetuating the misconduct. On the other hand, an overly serious and self-blaming approach is prone to lead to depression.[3] This also engenders sin, for the depressed person often resorts to indulgence and lust in a desperate bid to alleviate his low spirits.[4]

The secret is balance: serious remorse upon realising the damage done, but optimism and even humour to mitigate the contrition and maintain the degree of joy necessary to extricate oneself from sin.

Another tension exists between humility and self-esteem. This is commonly experienced by those who strive to attach themselves to G–d. An excessive sense of insignificance impairs one’s strength, preventing one’s potential from being actualised. The person feels downcast and incapable of contending with his aggressive animalistic instincts, resulting in repeated succumbing to temptation, as in the case of self-blaming.[5]

Excessive awareness of one’s virtues and talents, on the other hand, can result in complacency or arrogance and condescension. Again, the solution is balance. It is essential to be confident and aware of our abilities, for this ensures that we will use them in divine service. Nevertheless, one ought to simultaneously feel inadequacy, both because he is unworthy of the great privilege of serving G–d, and because he could be achieving much more.[6]

In this vein Rabbi Zusha of Anipoli taught[7] that one should always carry two reminders in his pockets. One should read, “Every person is obligated to say, ‘The entire world was created for me’”[8] and the other, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.”[9]