Vayelech
R. Moshe Cordovero on Parashat Vayelech, read on Shabbat Shuvah · Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — with one of this week's three questions for the two of you.
This is Shabbat Shuvah — the Shabbat of Return, the holiest Shabbat of the year. The whole calendar is calibrated to this moment: the asking, the looking inward, the turning back. Cordovero's whole project in Tomer Devorah rests on a single quiet conviction. Teshuvah is not becoming something you are not. It is returning to what you already are. The image of God in you was never destroyed; it was only veiled. When you act with mercy, you are not adopting some foreign virtue. You are returning to your truest self — the one beneath the layers of the past year, beneath the habits, beneath the disappointments. The work of these ten days is the work of getting back to who you have been all along.
What is one quality in you — gentle, real, true to who you are — that has been somewhat veiled this past year? What veiled it?
The full week — the passage itself with its source, the other two questions, and the closing verse of hope — lives in the app. Together Tomorrow on the App Store.