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Beauty Can Be Beautiful

Wednesday, 27 February, 2008 - 5:16 pm

Posted by Rabbi Mendy Herson

Vanity table, vanity bench, makeup vanity…

 I just Googled these items and found that they are a normative part of home furnishings.

Interesting. The dictionary defines vanity as shallow, excessive attention to beauty. So, we now have ostentation and self-admiration enshrined in the home with standardized accoutrements.

 It’s an equation that comes straight from your local home-furnishings outlet. Beauty-related furniture=Vanity.

 Living in a Hollywood culture, I can understand this attachment of the ‘vanity’ label. We instinctively associate the pursuit of beauty with the pursuit of movie-star glamour. So we denigrate it as vanity.

 But is that what beauty is? Could there conceivably be a place for beauty in a refined, holy life? Of course there is.

 It’s all in the attitude. The operative question is: Why do we want beauty?

 Is beauty an end in itself or is it a helpful aid to a meaningful end?

 Proverbs tells us that “Grace is false and beauty is vain”, but “respect for the Divine… should be praised”.

 Beauty is false and vain when it is detached from a meaningful context, but if beauty helps us in the quest for meaning, that’s great.

 Does one want to turn heads on the street (with a beautiful image) or impress friends (with a beautiful home)? That’s beauty with no substantive purpose.

 Or does ‘looking good’ help the speaker’s meaningful message to be heard, and one’s beautiful Shabbat table help create a serene and dignified ambience? That is beauty which supports a real purpose.

 Both want beauty; but they’re worlds apart.

 The Talmud teaches “Which is the right path for a person to choose? That which is beautiful to himself and beautiful to others”.

 Beauty brings pleasant feelings to the mind. I should be doing good things; and good things should create a pleasant feeling within me. If my positive actions are done with proper regard to those around me, then others should also feel pleasant vibes.

 So my conduct should be beautiful. Now if I can give it a physically beautiful setting, that setting will be beauty with a purpose. How beautiful.

Comments on: Beauty Can Be Beautiful
2/27/2008

Mendy wrote...

Kicking it up a notch - connecting the Torah thought to the Torah portion


This week's Torah portion - called Vayakhel - addresses the particulars of building the Tabernacle in the Desert. This special place for humans to commune with the Divine was portable while the Jews were travelling in the desert but was eventually fixed as the Beit Hamikdash - Holy Temple - which stood in Jerusalem for 830 years (the Western Wall is a remaining wall of that Holy structure).
The Tabernacle was a place which brought an other-worldly consciousness into a worldly experience. The Tabernacle represents a very holy place within each of us, too; it's a place deep within the soul, where we are unscathed by the world's harshness and are authentically 'whole'.
Thus every detail of this special building represents an important detail of the quintessential human experience.
In verse 38:8, the Torah talks of a copper basin which the Kohanim, the priests, would use for washing their hands prior to beginning the service. We're told that it was made from mirrors, the copper sheets which the women would use as mirrors to beautify themselves.
Moses found this incongruous, to say the least. The service was meant to raise a person above the self-centeredness of the human experience, to find soul and disengage from bodily self-gratification. How could we launch this Service with [a Basin made of] mirrors - tools of self-absorption and vanity?
To this, G-d gave a profound answer. Those mirrors were in fact cosmic tools of Holiness. Those mirrors were used by the Jewish women in Egypt, during those terrible years of slavery, for a very special purpose.
They would beautify themselves in order to bring a semblance of normalcy to the home ambience, and to maintain the rhythm of family life. Their husbands would return from slave labor totally broken and exhausted; but the women would try their best, aided by their cosmetic tools, to maintain a vestige of beauty and attraction in that very special place: The Home.
What better way to begin a Divine Service, to cleanse the hands of the Kohanim, than with those special mirrors?