If you come over, you’ll see that almost every wall of my house is some shade of blue. To me, blue is the perfect color – at once calming and serene, but also energizing and inspiring.
Judaism views the color blue with a similar mix of contradictory meanings. Like techelet, an ancient dye that appears on tzitzit, blue is connected to themes of divinity, spirituality and equilibrium. At the same time, the Zohar warns that “all colors in visions are a good omen except for the color blue. It is the low color, and much ardent prayer must be exercised to avoid it” (Zohar Chadash 68:4). How can blue be both divine and dangerous?
Blue reminds us of elements in nature: ocean, sky, water in its purest form. Throughout the Torah, water too, contains contradictions – it symbolizes Torah itself, but it can also connote chaos, as in the times of Noach when flood waters overwhelmed the earth and destroyed all but vestiges of humanity.
Perhaps these contradictions contain a message. Every quality we have, every element of ourselves and psyches, has the power to both create and destroy. Qualities are not only good or bad – the key lies in how we use them, how well we learn to manage the destructive edges of the traits we possess.
May we all learn to find the beautiful, inspirational blue within us.
