Kabbalistic Insightsby Thiago Moshe
Michael Berg's teaching
on the new pathway opened by Teshuvah
This page is a synthesis of Michael Berg's lecture on Nitzavim-Vayeilech. Teshuvah begins when we recognize what must change, but it ends somewhere else: in a new connection with the power of our soul and all the Light we can still reveal.
Michael Berg teaches that correcting the past is the doorway to Teshuvah, not its destination. The destination is to recognize who we are again, feel the divine spark of the soul, and open a pathway that did not exist before.
Reviewing actions and correcting failures matters, but it is only the first step. Michael Berg teaches that the ultimate purpose of Teshuvah is complete reconnection, a new relationship with the Light of the Creator and with our own soul.
The verse cited in the lecture speaks of a pathway created through the ocean and turbulent waters. The image reveals Elul's gift: even after our failures, we do not have to return by the old road. A new passage can appear exactly where there seemed to be no ground.
Rabi Naftali of Ropshitz teaches that, in the upper worlds, a negative action is announced as the beginning of a new path of connection. Failure breaks the former bond, but it also requires us to find a closer and truer way back.
We may have done ten, twenty, or eighty percent of the work. The consciousness of this Shabbat is that, when we honestly do our part, the Light of the Creator embraces us and carries the process into complete reconnection.
Sefat Emet takes the teaching further. Reconnection is not only with something outside us. It is with the divine force within us. The test of this Shabbat is simple and demanding: do I recognize my power and who I came here to be more clearly?
Michael Berg shifts the focus from what we did wrong to everything we could have done and did not. Perhaps we helped five people when our soul had the power to reach one hundred. That distance is not meant to crush us. It reveals the true measure of our potential.
Rabi Yosef Weinstock's teaching is direct: the Light of the soul that we do not reveal does not remain neutral. It is handed to the force of the snake, the symbol of destructive darkness. The work of the Zohar is to help the individual and the collective separate Light from darkness and leave inner exile.
Michael Berg compares this process to someone who recovers only one hundred dollars because they never realized one hundred thousand had been stolen. On this Shabbat, the more honestly we recognize the scale of our unrealized potential, the more Light we can receive back for the new year.
If I recognized the full power of my soul today, who would receive my Light tomorrow?
Original lecture: Michael Berg, “Nitzavim-Vayeilech: Creating A New Pathway to Our Soul”, Kabbalah Centre, recorded September 28, 2024. This page is a synthesis in the author's own voice by Thiago Moshe, not a transcript. The Hebrew and Aramaic passages are unreadable in the provided transcript and were not reproduced, in order to preserve fidelity. The two Hebrew words shown on this page, teshuvah and neshamah, are standard forms set by the editor to name the movement of the teaching, and are not quotations from the text read in the lecture.
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