Yom Kippur 2023 at Congregation Agudas Achim
Chesed and Gevurah: Living in the Balance
Rabbi Talya Weisbard Shalem
We as Jews have a funny relationship with God. Most other religions see God as someone to pray to, a perfect being. In Jewish tradition, not only is God someone to pray to, but someone who prays, who is themselves working on self-improvement.
What prayers does God say? According to the Talmudic tractate Brachot, which is all about blessings and prayers:
May it be my will that my mercy overcome my anger, and that my mercy prevail over my attributes, so that I may treat my children in accord with the trait of mercy and in their regard go beyond the strict measure of the law.
Let’s unpack this prayer a bit. What does it mean for mercy to prevail over anger?
We can imagine we are in court. The defendant has broken the law, but for very good reasons, like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, who stole a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. We, the judge, have complete freedom to rule, either to follow the strictures of the law and send him to jail, or to let him go free, because we feel compassion for him.
God, in our imagination, faces this situation every day and hopes to err on the side of mercy more often.
What does it mean for us when we retell this story? Where do we situate ourselves in the story? I imagine many people here, grappling with the liturgy of the high holidays, see themselves as the defendant and God as the judge, and hope to be judged compassionately.
However, is this a story about God or a story about ourselves? Perhaps this is how we should all aspirationally behave, putting ourselves in the judge’s shoes, in how we judge and behave toward others, erring on the side of compassion whenever possible.
Let’s spend some time really trying to understand these traits.
Both of these traits, chesed (mercy) and gevurah (judgement) are major themes of Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism. In Kabbalah, God is considered to have multiple facets, called sefirot. You may have seen images before of these sefirot, called the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. (show image), or spent time during the omer period between Passover and Shavuot exploring your own relationship to several of these attributes.
Each aspect is a different trait of God, as well as an attribute that we as humans might strive for.
Chesed is overflowing love, kindness, warmth, generosity, mercy, and loving-kindness. Art Green, in his book on the Zohar, describes it as “love beyond measure and without limit, boundless compassion.”[1]
Gevurah is boundaries, limits, strict justice, and self-restraint.
Tiferet is the idealized balance between them.
When do chesed and gevurah come into conflict?
In addition to the courtroom / Les Miserables scenario I mentioned earlier, I believe this conflict comes up for each one of us in our lives, as we work to determine the balance between being all-giving and setting limits.
It comes up for parents all the time with young children – needing to set limits while wanting to give them the world. Even when a parent has to restrain themself from stepping in to rescue their child as they stumble and learn to walk, learn to live on their own, and experience struggles in the world, that requires contemplating each time anew the correct balance between chesed and gevurah.
Here’s how this struggle plays out in my life, and I imagine in many of your lives as well.
I love my work. I love being a rabbi, and even more so, being the rabbi here in this community right now. I want to give my all to this sacred calling. I want to be there for each and every one of you at all times. I want all our publicity to be accurate, attractive, and informative, with no typos ever. I want to spend many hours crafting my teachings every week. I want to be inspiring and cheerful at all times. This is the pull of chesed for me, wanting to be all giving all loving all the time.
And yet, this is impossible. This is an impossible standard that I try to hold myself to.
If I truly gave 110% to the community all the time, I would burn out. I would not be there for my child when he needs me, or my partner, or myself.
I need to have some boundaries, some gevurah in my life. I used to look down on gevurah, and think it was negative to set limits. But I am learning to see setting limits as a form of showing chesed to myself.
This was all driven home to me, of course, in the past month, as I struggled to decide when to be where – when to set aside my responsibilities here to fly to DC to visit my dad in his last days and weeks on earth, when to prioritize my pre-existing responsibilities here and hope to find another chance to connect with him later.
Looking at all of you, and thinking about the struggles of those I know a bit more closely, I think we all struggle to find the right balance for ourselves between chesed and gevurah.
The invention of cell phones, and email, and the pandemic era encouragement to work from home, has made this challenge much harder than it ever was in the past. For each of us, it can be hard, and harder than ever before, to fully disconnect from work (and even from volunteer responsibilities). It is easy to see ourselves as indispensable for whatever project we are working in. But we need to do so in order to be able to be present and fully show up for ourselves and those around us – parents, children, partners, and friends in the ways we want to and should.
Rabbi Sari Laufer, in an essay entitled “Saying a Sacred No” asks us to
Take a moment to think back to the last time you were fully present. Where were you? Who was with you? What were you doing? And….perhaps most importantly….what were you NOT doing? To what–and to whom–did you say no in order to be in that particular moment? In what ways did your no open up a yes?
We are slowly–or at warp-speed–emerging from Coronatimes. As the world opens back up, so do the obligations and the opportunities. Will we continue to be busy, or will we be there?? The answer, I think, lies in our ability to say a sacred no. Saying no is important–it is sacred. It is coming from real human experience. It can be radical and it can be protective. It can also be productive.
My truth this year is that it is important to set more boundaries, in order to be able to be more present in my own life, for myself, my son, my mother, and my partner. As I ponder my own healthy choices, I want to model drawing these types of boundaries for the community. How can we each support each other to make healthy choices, for we truly do need each other to face the onslaught of demands on our time.
I encourage everyone to spend some time today looking at your own life balance over the past year, and considering how you feel about it. Would you like to work to re-jigger the balance in your own life for the coming year? What would it take to do that? How can I and everyone here help you to do so?
[1] p. 43 Green
