Hello I am Gail Ginsburg and this is Installment 5 of Kabbalah for today, a practical introduction to traditional Jewish mysticism design to help you along your personal spiritual journey.
We continue our exploration of the traditional image of the tree of life or chart of the Sephiroth, with the Sephirot known as Chesed. Chesed is a Hebrew word meaning compassion or loving-kindness, one of the attributes of God.
By the way I will be posting on my website, www.neshama.org, links to several nice tree of life charts so you can get a better visual idea of what I am talking about. So what does the Sephiroth of Chesed compassion signify and how can it be useful to each of us?
Compassion is to me active sympathy. Well sympathy is feeling along with another. Compassion has the additional component of wanting to do something to actually help, to make a difference, to ease the suffering wherever this is found. And now in these contacts there are three different personal orientations that I would like to present to you to help understand the idea of compassion or Chesed.
First of all is selfishness, overvaluing the self. We all know what this is about. Putting once own interest first, thinking that the other party really does not matter. This is the orientation of infants which unfortunately many individuals carry with them in to their adult lives.
The next orientation is selflessness, over valuing the other which I think can be as much of a problem as selfishness. This is the attitude of the martyr, of one who is lacking a sense of their own good or of their own wellbeing. According to our Jewish tradition, this is not what God wants for us. The Torah tells us first, to love the Lord our God with our heart, our soul, our mind, our strength with all our lives. The center of each of our lives is to be in awareness of the holy power of the ultimate reality. We are also taught to love our neighbors as ourselves. Note that we are not to love only ourselves, the orientation of selfishness. And, we are not taught to love the neighbor to the exclusion of ourselves, the orientation of selflessness.
The third personal orientation is self awareness, which is one of the goals of all spiritual practice, which includes Kabbalah. Self-awareness allows one to see the deep interrelatedness of all that is, to see the presence of God in and through and beyond everything and also to see once own immense value, to see how precious you truly are. Self awareness is a type of balance which is achieved when one tampers compassion with strength and healthy boundaries which not coincidentally relate to the next Sephiroth, Gevurah, which I will discuss in Installment 6. As a meditation on Chesed, I suggest first, beginning of course with the 3-6-3 breathing exercise then breath in and out to the word Chesed, as you do so, begin to visualize that which traps you either in selfishness or selflessness, and see those things melting away leaving you pure and open, and true.
God’s blessings and joy be with you always.
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