Chesed She'be'Tiferet: Curb Your Gevurah

Tonight we begin the week of Tiferet, which means beauty, and is the synthesized balance of chesed and gevurah. Stereotypically, chesed is a more feminine and gevurah a more masculine characteristic. This approach taps into Kabbalah, which is why major Jewish English language publishers have shied away from it.

The book Sefiros, by Rabbis Haber and Sedley, cites a piece of a speech by Elizabeth Cady Stanton in its introduction to the week of Tiferet. In their text they attribute the quote to "a poet" and in the footnote they provide just her name. The words they cite are from a speech (entitled The Destructive Male) that Stanton delivered in 1868 at the Women's Suffrage Convention in Washington, D.C. What follows is the entire final paragraph of that speech with the words cited in Sefiros in bold print.

"With violence and disturbance in the natural world, we see a constant effort to maintain an equilibrium of forces. Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony, and beauty may reign supreme. There is a striking analogy between matter and mind, and the present disorganization of society warns us that in the dethronement of woman we have let loose the elements of violence and ruin that she only has the power to curb. If the civilization of the age calls for an extension of the suffrage, surely a government of the most virtuous educated men and women would better represent the whole and protect the interests of all than could the representation of either sex alone."