While I was in California last week, I learned a new phrase, May Gray. It seems while according to the song, “It never rains in Southern California”, every morning in May is gray.

But this is the week to talk about and learn about tiferet. Tiferet gets translated as beauty or glory or splendor. And by late afternoon, that is what would happen, the sun would break through and the world, or at least my corner of it, would be filled with splendor.

Splendor comes from the Latin and has to do with light breaking forth. It gives us “enlightenment” and “insight.”

In Judaism there is a concept of hiddur hamitzvah, beautification of the commandment. That is why there is so much Jewish ritual art. In every time and place, Jews have sought to enhance the mitzvoth, to make them more beautiful. Now the trick here is that what is beautiful to me may not be to you and visa versa, and that is OK. Just fine.

What if, however, you can’t see? Or you can’t see colors? Can the world still be beautiful? I think so. And I am reminded of a Louis Armstrong song,

I see trees of green,
red roses too.
I see them bloom,
for me and you.
And I think to myself,
what a wonderful world.

I see skies of blue,
And clouds of white.
The bright blessed day,
The dark sacred night.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.

The colors of the rainbow,
So pretty in the sky.
Are also on the faces,
Of people going by,
I see friends shaking hands.
Saying, “How do you do?”
They’re really saying,
“I love you”.

I hear babies cry,
I watch them grow,
They’ll learn much more,
Than I’ll ever know.
And I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.

Yes, I think to myself,
What a wonderful world.

That’s splendor. That is letting the light shine forth. That is that perfect balance between chesed and gevurah we were talking about last week. And it is beautiful, indeed.

When an individual is privileged to have that flash of insight or enlightenment, in Buddhism, that term is satori. Other words might be awakening, comprehension or understanding. It is the ability of “seeing into one’s own nature, or essence.” I think that is what splendor or tiferet really is. And it is fleeting. Just an instant. And then just as quickly it can be gone. Because that balance is so, so difficult to achieve.

Here is a Buddhist poem to describe satori

A thunderclap under the clear blue sky
All beings on earth open their eyes;
Everything under heaven bows together;
Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.
Wuman

Satori or tiferet isn’t experienced very often. But when it is, the colors are brighter (even on a grey day), the pieces fit together, the world seems whole. It is hard to describe. But you know it, if you are lucky enough to experience it. Some say that it is the whole purpose of Buddhism.

Yet, Tiferet is a little bit more than that. Tiferet becomes known as compassion (in other places the Hebrew might be chanun) because it blends and harmonizes the free outpouring love of chesed with the discipline of gevurah. We talked about this last week. But, tiferet introduces another way to balance, a third dimension – the dimension of truth, which is neither love or discipline and therefore can integrate the two.

At first I was surprised by this. How can truth and beauty be the same word in Hebrew? My husband figured it out. It is like the poem “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by Keats.

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,–that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”

According to Simon Jacobson, whose work on the omer we have been studying, “This quality gives tiferet its name, which means beauty: it blends the differing colors of love and discipline, and this harmony makes it beautiful. For tiferet to be complete it needs the inclusion of the following seven facets: love of compassion, discipline of compassion, compassion of compassion, endurance of compassion, humility of compassion, bonding of compassion and sovereignty of compassion.”

We are now back to the colors of the kaleidoscope and putting the pieces together. When we put those pieces together, we find beauty, we find truth, we find peace. And that is tiferet.

So what is beauty? Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What is beautiful to you?