As we mentioned yesterday, many people believe beauty is achieved by culling anything which is not beautiful. The Jewish approach is more complex than this. Tifferet, beauty, represents a balance. Beauty depends on Composition. Combined in the right formula, anything can be beautiful. A great example is the Ketoret incense we offer in the Holy Temple. Some of its components had a pleasing aroma, others a foul one. But the correct composition of the Ketoret achieved an even more pleasant smell.
This teaches us something important about Man, and by proxy about the world. A person is made up of good and evil, in the right measure, a person may be righteous, but if s/he is poorly composed s/he is wicked.
God created the world with evil in it, does that make the world unbeautiful? Is the final geulah a culling of all that is evil and ugly in the world? Or is it a recomposition to a beautiful balance where we may recognize what seemed initially ugly or evil to be an essential component of some greater beauty?
We say death will be swallowed up forever, but is death a proxy for 'evil', or for 'ugliness'?
ps. Today is the two year annivesary of my Father in Law's passing, may R' Meir Benayahu ben R' Yitzhak Nissim be remembered as a blessing to the world and all those in it.
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