One sefirah for now

The teaching

As the Hasidic and Musar tradition teaches it.

The ten within a person

The teachers of Hasidism bring the Tree down into every person. The soul, says the Tanya of Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, has ten powers that answer to the ten sefirot. Three are powers of the mind, wisdom, understanding and knowledge, from whose initials his school takes its name, Chabad; seven are powers of the heart, love, awe, compassion and the rest, which grow out of what the mind has understood.

So the sefirot are not only a map of the heavens. They are the shape of a human life, and each of them can be strong or weak, healthy or turned aside, in anyone. To work with one sefirah is to work with one power of one's own soul.

Be like your maker

Moses Cordovero's Palm Tree of Deborah opens with the rule that a person should become like the Creator, in image and in likeness, by acting as the sefirot act. The book then goes through them one by one: to be like the crown is humility and patience with those who wrong us; to be like lovingkindness is to do good to all; to be like strength is to master one's own urges and keep anger for its rightful place; and to be like the kingdom is lowliness. The qualities above are learned by doing them below.

Counting the forty-nine days

Between Passover and Shavuot the days are counted aloud, forty-nine of them, and the kabbalists give each day a sefirah. Each of the seven weeks belongs to one of the seven lower sefirot, from Chesed to Malkhut, and each day within the week to one of them again, so that the first day is lovingkindness within lovingkindness, the second is strength within lovingkindness, and the forty-ninth is kingdom within kingdom.

Many who count use the day's pair as a question about their own character: today, is my love held in strength, or my strength softened by love? The count is the tradition's own school for attending to one quality at a time.

The ten as questions: the crown to strength

Keter asks what a person truly wills beneath all their wanting, the will before the plan, and whether they are humble enough to hear it.

Chokhmah asks for the first seeing: the flash of insight, the new thought, the whole glimpsed at once before it is worked out.

Binah asks for the working out: patience with detail, the thinking through that gives an insight its form, and the willingness to turn back, which is return.

Chesed asks for giving: love, generosity and welcome, the tent open on every side. Its shadow is giving that does not know when to stop.

Gevurah asks for limit: the honest no, discipline, awe and the courage to judge. Its shadow is harshness.

The ten as questions: beauty to the kingdom

Tiferet asks for truth and compassion together: the balance in which love and limit each receive their due, with the heart at the centre.

Netzach asks for endurance: to keep going through the long middle of a task, and to win by not giving up.

Hod asks for acknowledgement: to admit, to yield where yielding is right, to give thanks, and to let the glory belong to something larger than oneself.

Yesod asks for faithfulness and connection: to keep one's word, to bind oneself truly to others, and to pass on what one has received.

Malkhut asks that all the rest come down into speech and deed, into the actual day, with the humility of the moon, which shines by a light it receives.

The quality on the other side

No quality is worked on alone. Chesed is balanced by Gevurah and Gevurah by Chesed, with Tiferet holding both; Netzach is balanced by Hod, with Yesod between them; Chokhmah is balanced by Binah. The crown and the kingdom answer each other, for the Sefer Yetzirah says that the end of the sefirot is fixed in their beginning and their beginning in their end, like a flame bound to a coal.

So a person who needs more Gevurah is not asked to give up love, and one who needs more Chesed is not asked to throw away limits. The quality for now comes in beside its partner, never in its place.

Beside the chart

The Hermetic Qabalah sets a planet beside the sefirot: Saturn by Binah, Jupiter by Chesed, Mars by Geburah, the Sun by Tiphareth, Venus by Netzach, Mercury by Hod and the Moon by Yesod, with the zodiac by Chokmah, the first stirring of the heavens by Kether and the elements by Malkuth. The table belongs to that stream. Read beside a birth chart, it points to where a quality may already live: the planet of the sefirah, and the house of the chart in which that planet stands.

A week with one quality

The Musar teacher Mendel Lefin gave the work its plainest form. In his Accounting of the Soul a person takes one quality at a time and gives it a full week of attention, marking each evening in a small table where it was kept and where it slipped, then moves on to the next and in time comes round again. Lefin took the table from Benjamin Franklin's plan of thirteen virtues and filled it with the qualities of Jewish teaching.

The same method serves one sefirah. One sentence names the situation; one quality is chosen for it; its partner is named to keep it in balance; and each evening a line or two records where the quality showed and where it was missing. At the end of the week the page is read through once, and the quality is kept or set down.

Every sefirah is needed

The higher sefirot are not better people, and the lower are not lesser ones. Malkhut, the last, is the gate through which every other quality enters the world, and without it nothing above is done. A quality is chosen because a moment asks for it, and set down when the moment has passed. In Jewish tradition the deeper study of the sefirot is done with a teacher; the attention to one's own character asked here is open to anyone.