Partzuf The 7 Colors of the Rainbow

THE COLORS OF THE RAINBOW

The number 7 is central to the covenant that God made with Noach after the Flood. The word “covenant” (יתִרְּב), in its various forms, is found 7 times in the verses describing God making His covenant with Noach and all of mankind. In this covenant, known as the covenant of Noach, God assured Noach that He would never again destroy the world by water.

The visible sign chosen by God to make mankind aware of the covenant was the rainbow.

In Chasidut it is explained that the Flood actually had a purifying effect on the earth and its atmosphere (just as the waters of a ritual bath purify one who immerses in them). Before the Flood, the air was unrefined to the extent that a rainbow could not appear in it. The Floodwaters served to refine the air, allowing for the natural phenomenon of the rainbow to appear.

How many colors are there in the rainbow? According to the Zohar, there are three: white, red, and yellow-green! According to modern science, beginning with Newton, there are seven: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. The Zohar is not actually in contradiction with our empirical experience. The discrepancy is because the Zohar is relating how our inner consciousness—the Divine soul—experiences the rainbow. This is not the same experience as what our physical soul has. Science, based on empirical observation, tries to make sense of our physical senses and experiences, which document seven colors in the rainbow. One way to recognize how different the Zohar’s description is from our empirical experience is by noting that when we see a rainbow, there is no white in it at all. And yet, the Zohar writes that this is one of the three colors in the rainbow.

Incidentally, the scientific perspective on color is very complex, but there too, the phenomenon of “white” is not simple to define. Our physical sensation of white is considered as either the result of the color-wheel (with all of its six or seven colors, or more) revolving at a high enough speed so as to make the individual colors imperceptible to the human eye, or the effect of an object reflecting, at once, all of the colors present in the spectrum of the ray of light hitting it.

For all their differences, the Zohar and our physical experience complement and complete one another, because together they speak of 10 colors, which naturally corresponds to the most basic Torah model of 10 sefirot. Additionally, the sefirot intrinsically divide into 3 and 7: the 3 intellectual powers of the soul referred to as the sefirot of wisdom, understanding, and knowledge (הָינִּה בָמְכָח תַעַּד) and the 7 emotive and habitual power of the soul referred to as loving-kindness, might, beauty, victory, acknowledgment, foundation, and kingdom (תֶרֶאְפִּה תָרּבוְּד גֶסֶח תּכוְלד מֹסוְד יֹח הוַצֶנ).

Let us first focus on the Zohar’s perspective and the three “colors” of the rainbow observed by the Divine soul, which we said correspond to the three supernal sefirot, of which it is said, “The concealed are for Havayah our God.” In other words, they refer to faculties that are described as concealed and therefore have the ability to perceive that which is likewise concealed. Another important point is that the Zohar mentions the colors red and yellow-green, which are also perceived by our physical senses. Obviously, the Zohar’s colors must refer to something that is not readily perceptible to our physical senses. Let us first draw the model of the correspondence of the Zohar’s three colors with the intellectual sefirot:

• wisdom-chochmah הָמְכָח – white
• understanding-binah הָינִּב – red
• knowledge-da’at תַעַד – yellow-green

Now let us turn to explain this first part of our partzuf. The Zohar’s white color of the rainbow refers to the revelation of, or the way we might conceptualize what it would be like to see, the sefirah of wisdom. Wisdom is considered the inner soul of the sefirah of loving-kindness, which lies directly under it on the right axis of the Tree of Life of the sefirot. The color associated with loving-kindness is blue and its archetypal soul is Abraham. Correspondingly, Divine wisdom is referred to as the revelation of “the God of Abraham.” Divine wisdom refers to the wisdom of the Torah, of which it is said, “He [i.e., the Almighty] and His wisdom are one.”

When the Zohar refers to red it is actually conceptualizing our intellect’s faculty of understanding, i.e., the sefirah of understanding. If one were to see the sefirah of understanding in one’s mind one would describe it as red. Understanding is considered the inner soul of the sefirah of might, which lies just under it on the left-axis of the Tree of Life, and which corresponds to the physical color red. Again, where the archetypal soul corresponding to might is Isaac, understanding is referred to as the revelation of “the God of Isaac.”

The same is true of the Zohar’s yellow-green of the rainbow which is the conceptual color of the sefirah of knowledge—the inner soul of the sefirah of beauty, which lies just under it on the middle axis of the Tree of Life and whose associated color is yellow. As Jacob is the archetypal soul associated with beauty, knowledge is referred to as the revelation of “the God of Jacob.”

In the Torah, the word that the Zohar uses for “yellow-green” (קֹרוָי) means either yellow, the color of the sefirah of beauty, or green, the color of the sefirah of foundation. In Kabbalah, many times the sefirah of beauty includes the sefirah of foundation, personified by the figure of Joseph, Jacob’s son.

THE SEVEN-COLORED RAINBOW

As mentioned, in the verses that establish the covenant between God and Noach (and all generations to come) with the rainbow as the sign of this covenant, the word “covenant” (יתִרְּב) repeats 7 times. These seven appearances of the word “covenant” clearly allude to the seven Newtonian colors of the rainbow, and to the seven Laws of Bnei Noach, which, as we shall now see, correspond to the seven emotive/behavioral powers of the soul. The color correspondence is as follows:

• loving-kindness-chessed דֶסֶח – blue
• might-gevurah הָרּבוְּג – red
• beauty-tiferet תֶרֶאְפִּת – yellow
• victory-netzach חַצֶנ – violet
• acknowledgment-hod דֹהו – orange
• foundation-yesod דֹסוְי – green
• kingdom-malchut תּכוְלַמ – indigo

Modern physics has revealed that every color is essentially the experience of light particles (photons) traveling at a particular frequency. The physical order of the seven colors as they appear in the rainbow, from higher to lower frequency (from right to left), is: violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. In the next partzuf, we will see how the 7 lower sefirot correspond to the 7 Noachide laws and how the order of the colors in the rainbow reflects this order.

Notes

1. Genesis chapter 9 verses 8 through 17.
2. Ibid. 8:21. See Sotah 11a.
3. Genesis 9:13-16.
4. Mamarei Admur Hazaken – Bereishit, pp. 57-60. The sages list the rainbow among the ten things that were created prior to the rest of creation (Avot 5:6). This is learnt from the verse: “My bow I placed in the clouds...” (Genesis 9:13), indicating that it indeed did exist before the covenant with Noach (see Zohar 1:71b), but it could not be seen as a natural phenomenon until after the flood.
5. 1:98b.
6. See our seminar on Light and Color.
7. Deuteronomy 29:28.
8. Exodus 3:6, and elsewhere.
9. Rabbi Moses Cordovero, Pardes Rimonim 4:10. It should be noted that “His wisdom” refers to the origin of wisdom in the wisdom of the super-conscious crown, a faculty that is referred to in the Zohar as the “concealed brain” (אהָימִתְא סָחֹמו). Thus, the ultimate origin of the rainbow’s color white according to the Zohar is in the sefirah of crown.
10. In Chasidut the relationship between red and understanding appears with regard to the verse, “your eyes will become red like wine” (Genesis 49:12). The simple meaning is that the pupil of Judah’s eye should be as colorful as the color red, which is the liveliness exhibited by a person drinking wine. Figuratively, this verse depicts the inner understanding symbolized by the color red and perceived by one engaging in meditation, which is symbolized by the drinking of wine.
11. Exodus 3:6.
12. For “the body [the sefirah of beauty] and the procreative organ [the sefirah of foundation] are considered one” (Zohar 3:223b), unlike the relation of the right arm (loving-kindness) to the right leg (victory) and the left arm (might) to the left leg (acknowledgment), for the leg is not a direct extension of the arm.
13. Jacob and Joseph are also considered one as in the verse: “These are the offspring of Jacob; Joseph...” (Genesis 37:2).
14. Often, indigo is not distinguished from violet (victory), and then kingdom is seen to correspond to brown, the color of the earth, created by mixing all the physical colors together, just as the sefirah of kingdom receives from all of the sefirot above it and as such possesses no individual color of its own.

Contemplating the entire partzuf as one is a key to unlocking the Torah’s hidden dimensions.