The Ten Sefirot, Explained Simply

Notice the order. First: God is One and no thought can grasp Him. Only then: there are ten sefirot, and they are tools He uses "to run the worlds."

So if God is One, why does He seem to act in different ways? Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (the Ramak, who lived in Tzfat in the 1500s) gives an example in his book Pardes Rimonim. Picture sunlight coming through a window and passing through ten panes of glass, each pane a different color.

On the floor you see red light, white light and green light. But there is only one sun, and its light never changed. The colors are in the glass. In the same way, God does not change. The sefirot are the "glass" that His light passes through on the way to us.

Where does the word come from? It first appears in Sefer Yetzirah ("The Book of Creation"), one of the oldest books of Jewish mystical thought.

"Of nothingness" (בְּלִימָה, which can be read as bli mah, "without anything") means they are not physical things. You cannot see or touch a sefirah. The word sefirah itself is connected to three Hebrew words: mispar (number), sippur (telling) and sapir (sapphire, something that shines).

Greatness (gedulah) is another name for chesed. Then come gevurah, tiferet, netzach and hod by name. The kabbalists read "everything in heaven and earth" as yesod, and "the kingdom" as malchut. That gives seven. Above them are three more that have to do with the mind.

Patach Eliyahu describes the sefirot as חַד אֲרִיךְ וְחַד קְצַר וְחַד בֵּינוֹנִי, "one long, one short, and one in between." Long means giving without limit. Short means holding back. In between is the balance.

Rashi finds this pattern in the first verse of the Torah. The verse uses the name Elokim, which stands for strict judgment. Later the Torah adds the name Hashem, which stands for compassion. Rashi explains that at first God thought to create the world with strict judgment alone. He saw that the world could not last that way, so He put compassion first and joined the two together (Rashi, Bereishit 1:1).

The Gemara shows the other side. When God created the world, it kept spreading out, wider and wider, until God stopped it.

So the world needs both. A world with no limits has no shape. A world with only limits cannot survive. The same is true for people. Try it:

Iyov says, וּמִבְּשָׂרִי אֶחֱזֶה אֱלוֹהַּ, "from my own flesh I see God" (Iyov 19:26). The kabbalists take this as a method. If you want to understand something about how God acts, start by looking closely at a human being.

That is why Patach Eliyahu places the sefirot on the body: chesed is the right arm, gevurah is the left arm, tiferet is the torso, and so on. Daat is the exception: Patach Eliyahu does not list it. (Switch the tree's labels to "Body" to see each one.) This is only a comparison. God has no body. See the limits below.

Rabbi Akiva Tatz, a doctor who became a well-known teacher of Jewish thought, builds his book Worldmask on this idea. The physical world is a mask. It hides God. But it also shows something about Him, the way a mask shows the shape of the face behind it. He points to the Hebrew word for nature, teva. Its root means "to drown," because nature can drown a person's sense of anything spiritual. But it is also the root of matbe'a, a coin stamped with an image. The world is the stamp of a higher reality.

The Hebrew word for world, olam, hints at the same thing. It is related to the word he'elem, hiding.

The Tanya, by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi (the first Lubavitcher Rebbe), says this clearly:

The mind comes first. The top of the tree is how you think. Rashi defines the three words when the Torah describes Betzalel, who built the Mishkan (Shemot 31:3). Chochmah is what you take in. Binah (he calls it tevunah) is what you figure out on your own from what you learned. Daat, Rashi says, is ruach hakodesh: a kind of knowing that comes from being close to God.

Rabbi Kaplan, in his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, describes the difference like this: chochmah is thought before it has words, and binah is thought in words. First you see the whole idea at once. Then you spell it out.

Rabbi Tatz, in his book Living Inspired, shows that life follows the same pattern. Something new starts with a burst of excitement that you did not earn. Then the excitement fades, and the real work begins. The flash is a gift. What you build from it is yours.

The mind gives birth to feelings. The Tanya calls chochmah and binah the "father and mother" of the feelings. What you think about deeply is what you end up caring about. This is why learning Torah matters for your character and not only for your knowledge.

Feelings have to become action. The bottom of the tree is where something inside you gets out into the world: you push forward (netzach), you step back and listen (hod), you connect with another person (yesod), and finally something real happens (malchut).

The Ramak wrote a short book, Tomer Devorah ("The Palm Tree of Devorah"), that goes through the sefirot one by one and asks a single question about each: how does a person act like this? It opens with these words:

This is the practical point of the whole subject. The sefirot are not only a chart to memorize. They are a list of the ways God acts, and a person is supposed to act the same way.

You sing the same idea every Friday night in Lecha Dodi: סוֹף מַעֲשֶׂה בְּמַחֲשָׁבָה תְּחִלָּה, "last in action, first in thought." Shabbat was created last, and it was the point from the start.

The Torah tells us to count seven full weeks from Pesach to Shavuot (Vayikra 23:15). The kabbalists teach that each of the seven lower sefirot contains all seven inside it. Your kindness has some discipline in it. Your discipline has some kindness in it. That makes 7 × 7 = 49 combinations, one for each day.

Each week has one main trait, and each day looks at one part of it. Many siddurim print the day's pair right after the count, with a short tefillah asking to fix that trait. Tap any day: