This past week we heard a lot of commentary about Simone Biles, the amazing gymnast that withdrew from Olympic competition, due to mental health issues.Binah, the third sefirah of the Tree of Life, can be understood as intuition-understanding. Classic Kabbalah teaches that in Binah we develop the ideas that were yet unformed in Hohmah. According to Rabbi Moses de Leon (Spain, c. 1240-1305), the sefirah of Binah can be understood as “the beginning of emanation.” What does that mean? While it is difficult to clearly define God’s energies of Keter and Hohmah, the energy of Binah is a bit easier to grasp. According to de Leon, understanding Binah is like seeing the light of the sun reflected in a dish of clear water; every so often we are able to see the rapid movement of this light, yet we cannot have a good visual grasp of the reflection of that light. Binah is the place where the potentials that exist in Keter and Hohmah begin to take shape, or the beginning of an idea. That is what is understood by “the beginning of emanation”—the place where our ideas begin to crystallize, where that which we will accomplish in the future starts bringing up its potential.
Binah is also understood as discernment, the ability to figure out what needs to go and what needs to stay. In his book On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, Dr. Gershom Scholem (German-born Israeli scholar, 1895–1982) explained that Binah is the sefirah where the undifferentiated Divine wisdom becomes distinct and is separated out. Binah is the full expression of ceaseless creative power. Binah is considered the mother of the lower sefirot, with Hohmah being the father. Following this metaphor, Binah is receptive to the seed of Hohmah and is “incessantly transformed into an element that gives birth, as the stream of eternally flowing divine life enters into it.” According to the Zohar, Binah, the upper mother, brings forth and gives active expression to the inner world of the Eternal. Later kabbalistic schools understand Binah as a representation of consciousness.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different outcome. Yet for us to be able to achieve our full potential, we have to do many times the same thing, expecting to have a very different outcome. Simone Biles undoubtedly spent an enormous amount of time developing and honing her gift in order to realize her potential. In that, she is an expression of Binah, as she creatively brought forth her natural abilities. She also expressed her Binah consciousness as she recognized that a change had happened, and that she was not going to play the insanely dangerous game of pretending everything was okay when it was obviously not.
Simone Biles is teaching us the true meaning of the sefirah of Binah: the intuition and understanding that we have many choices of roads to travel, and that there are no prescribed ways in which we must move forward.
She is telling us that we can leave insanity behind, and forge ahead with creativity, honoring and giving full expression to the ideas that were floating in our unconscious. We make peace with our past and honor the feelings of the present, having the intuition and understanding that we can, and indeed, we must, choose the path of life.