Why Did God Create Beauty and Ugliness? A Jewish Perspective on Aesthetics and Purpose

Yonatan asks: Why did God create beauty and ugliness in the world? After all, He does not create anything without purpose. Why are these opposites necessary?

* * *

Hello Yonatan,

You’ve asked a beautiful question (in both senses of the word), and there are many answers to it, since both beauty and ugliness carry meaning.

Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the beholder. If we had grown up in a world where people had no noses or ears sticking out, we might think that a nose and ears are ugly and strange on a human face. Beauty has no absolute laws, because even a snake, which most people find repulsive, is in fact smooth and visually clean. The deeper question behind yours is not simply why beauty and ugliness exist, but why the Creator gave human beings an aesthetic sense — a sensitivity to see certain things in the world as beautiful and others as ugly.

There are several answers, but the main one is simply for our benefit. We enjoy beauty, and the world can be breathtakingly beautiful when we pause to notice the beautiful people, beautiful food, a beautiful sky, a beautiful sea, beautiful eyes. If you stop and look around, you will notice that there is far more beauty and harmony in the world than ugliness. Even looking at your own hand, the way the bones, joints, and muscles coordinate in perfect precision, is a marvelous and beautiful design.

God wanted us to live in a beautiful world so that, by contemplating creation, we could take joy in His wondrous works and give thanks to Him. The first purpose of beauty is to allow us to enjoy creation, to be inspired by it, and through it to recognize God’s kindness and goodness.

Beauty also has a moral purpose in shaping our character traits. A man or woman who was created beautiful faces the challenge of overcoming arrogance and vanity. A woman who is beautiful can (and should) use her beauty within the sanctity of marriage, but outside of it, her beauty becomes a test of her commitment to modesty and to God’s will.

Why was ugliness created?

As we learn from the book of Genesis, ugliness is a result of human deeds and spiritual decline. Since the sin of Adam, the world fell from its original level, and into it entered both ugliness and death, which were not present before. We might say that ugliness is a direct reflection of human wrongdoing. When people behave with cruelty and evil, the world mirrors it back with natural disasters, animal cruelty, disease, and similar things. God created the world as a mirror to human behavior. When redemption comes, the sages teach that ugliness and deformity will disappear, just as the evil inclination and destructive actions will vanish.

Kabbalah adds another dimension: sometimes a person who is born ugly or with a defect is a soul who, in a previous life, was beautiful and became arrogant about their looks. One must be extremely careful never to mock or blame such a person, God forbid, since the very same fate could one day befall the one who mocks. As the Sages teach in Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers 2:5): “Do not judge your fellow until you have reached his place.”

At the same time, ugliness can exist not as punishment, but as a source of growth. Interestingly, many people who grew up feeling unattractive later became very successful in life. This is perhaps because they could not rely on physical appearance for success, and so developed deeper strengths of personality, talent, or perseverance.

Ultimately, we must remember that the body is only a shell in this world. The body ages and fades, but the soul is our true self, and its beauty shines through our deeds. A person who lived a life of kindness and goodness will have a radiant soul, even if their face was considered unattractive in this world. This is why our tradition calls this world “Olam HaSheker” — “the world of illusion”, because outer beauty here is temporary and deceptive, while inner beauty, born of the soul and good deeds, is eternal.