Gevurah, sometimes called Din, is the sefirah that lies opposite to Hessed in the Tree of Life. Gevurah means power, strength, rigor, or bravery, and Din means judgment. All of these understandings of Gevurah/Din are important concepts for anyone who wishes to lead a good life.
The sefirah of Gevurah/Din is where we find measures, limits, and restraints. It is this sefirah that regulates the manifestation of our ethics, and the insistence of maintaining boundaries to preserve our personal and emotional space. According to the Kabbalah, we understand that for the world to be created, the Ayin Sof had to go through a process of tsimtsum (see my previous post on the concept of Ayin Sof), meaning that God had to limit Godself. God used the energy of Gevurah to bring about the limits needed to create our world. Dr. Moshe Idel, in his book Kabbalah, New Perspectives, relates the teaching of Rabbi Barzilai from Gerona, who wrote that the sefirah of Gevurah is “the beginning of the awesome forms, apprehended in the prophetic visions. From them the seat of Glory, and ophanim, seraphim, holy creatures and servant angels are created.” Not only God needed to contract a bit for the world to be created, using the energy of Gevurah to start the creative process, but also to continue creating God still uses this energy.
In translating this concept to our lives, to be able to create and be productive, we must have good boundaries, defined as discipline, focus, and restraint.
It is from the sefirah of Gevurah that elements needed for self-preservation arise. To function in our world, we need good judgment, which means the imposition of limits, and the establishment of good boundaries. Limits are important. The gift of the energy of Gevurah is the ability to discern when to say no to the things that do not propel us forward, and to stop people from invading our mental, emotional, and physical space without permission.
Gevurah is self-containment and restricting power. While these are needed for many things, they sometimes lead us to an excess of stern judgment. The world, as well as human beings, cannot stand while incurring only critical, unrelenting scrutiny. When judgment is the only energy that we experience, we fall prey to the untenable position of holding ourselves to unachievable standards. For this reason, we have to limit our limits, balance the self-scrutiny, so we are not destroyed by the internal voices that bring us down, the voices that only point out our negative features and what we have done wrong. And we must refrain from judging others with an excess of the same energy, otherwise we will only create strife and negativity. In early kabbalah there was a tendency to equate the sefirah of Gevurah with the aspect of God’s severity, which in turn was equated with the principle of evil. Gevurah, the divine attribute of discipline and judgment, which both gives us the choice between good and evil and passes judgment on the choices we make, can result in severity if left unchecked. And if our actions are only judged with severity, they will lead to paralysis. We read in the Zohar: “The restraint of the flow of life, a quality intrinsic to the activity of judgment, frequently entails destructive consequences for the world.” Too much Gevurah can be a dangerous thing, for ourselves, and for the world.
Rabbi Avraham Abulafia (thirteenth century, Spain) understood two terms that are very present this time of year, yr’ah (awe or reverence) and pahad (fear), as emanating from the sefirah of Gevurah. Awe and reverence are important tools to do the kind of self-reflection needed for the process of teshuvah, where we first recognize our mistakes, ask for forgiveness, and when confronted with the same issue, we choose to act in a different manner.
Using the tools of awe and reverence are a productive way to gain insight into our actions and help us map our steps to lead a good life in the year to come. And we must beware from the energy of fear, which will not help us in the process of teshuvah.
When motivated solely by fear, we become slaves to self-recrimination, seeing only a bleak future. Rabbi Avraham Abulafia suggested that we engage in the process of tikkun hanefesh in order to limit the energy of fear and boost the energies of reverence and awe. Tikkun Hanefesh is a meditative practice centered on combining the letters of the Name of God in different ways. There are a few diagrams for this meditation, but we can keep it simple; set your timer for 5 minutes daily, see in your mind’s eye the Hebrew letters yud, hey, vav, hey, and let them dance and combine in different ways. With that practice Rabbi Abulafia believed that we are able to highlight the aspects of awe and reverence in the sefirah of Gevurah, and keep at bay excessive fear.
May we be able to have a productive relationship with the sefirah of Gevurah, during this period of reflection before the Days of Awe, and in every day of our lives.