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Torat HaTzeva

Rising in Kislev: Re-emergence of Hidden Light Returning Through Women in a Generation of Teshuva

CIRCLES OF LIGHT: Feminine Teshuva, Torat HaTzeva, and the Hidden Healing of Kislev

By Rachel Leah Weiman



“Kol ohr nigleh lefi ha’kli — all light is revealed according to its vessel.”
— Zohar

“Ha’ohr ha’pashut mispashet b’chol ha’tzdadim — the simple light spreads in every direction.”
— Ramak, Pardes Rimonim

This article explores the expansive convergence of feminine teshuva, Torat HaTzeva (the Torah of color), and the subtle, embodied healing pathways rising in the generation of Kislev. Rooted in classical Kabbalah, Chassidut, somatic wisdom, contemporary color theory, and the experiential depth of women’s workshops, it proposes that today’s creative Torah circles represent a collective return to the earliest layers of the soul — the layers formed in the womb, before language, where inner light was undivided and process was still sweet.

Drawing from Rav Kook’s teaching on חטאת הארץ הכמוסה — the hidden cosmic wound from Bereishit — and from the geometry of Samech, the article shows how breath, movement, color, Torah, and circle form a unified vessel for restoring the sweetness of process, awakening compassion toward the self, healing generational imprints, and cultivating a lived geulah-consciousness, gathering the scattered “stones” of the soul and nation.

Through this lens, feminine teshuva — embodied, relational, rooted in softness and breath — is emerging through the surprising medium of Torat HaTzeva, the Torah of color and light. In these circle-based art practices, participants touch what Rav Kook calls the hidden cosmic wound, restoring the sweetness of becoming and reopening ancient pathways of healing, wholeness, and return.

The Circle as Daily Practice: Living Inside the Light

When the workshop ends, the real work begins.
Circle becomes stance.
Breath becomes prayer.
Color becomes perception.
Softness becomes strength.

Living with geulah-consciousness means:
allowing process to be sweet,
trusting gestation,
honoring the pace of becoming,
creating yichud-spaces in relationships,
gathering rather than judging,
seeing fruit inside the tree,
recognizing that every person, even the difficult ones, are “stones in my field” waiting to be gathered.

This is how feminine teshuva transforms the world.
Not through force.
Not through ideology.
But through remembrance.

She does not conquer darkness. She gestates light.
She does not scatter. She gathers.
She does not rush. She reveals.

And as circles close, as breaths deepen, as colors soften into one another — a new architecture of geulah begins to emerge. Quiet. Certain. Like Kislev. Like hidden light. Like a circle that closes itself from within.

When Teshuva Appears

Teshuva is not an effort, not self-criticism, not fixing oneself.

Teshuva is a light.
When it appears, the original desire for good — the soul’s innate nature — strengthens.

A tzinnor, a spiritual channel, opens.
And through that channel, joy begins to flow “מנחל עדנים”— from a “stream of Eden.”

This is Rav Kook’s language for:
                  •                effortless joy
                  •                innate delight
                  •                the soul drinking from its Source

When a person’s practical mind and emotional faculties absorb these new inner sensations, a new form of mussar appears —
not guilt-based mussar,
but mussar ha-tahor ha-elyon
— a pure, elevated life-force that beautifies and succeeds life.

It refines the person naturally, from the inside.

There are moments in history when something subtle begins to move beneath the surface. Not loudly, not dramatically, not with the force of a storm — but with the quiet persistence of dawn. A soft tremor rises inside the collective soul, a whisper of something ancient returning. In our generation, this movement is unmistakable. Something is happening among women — in homes, in studios, in late-night Zoom circles where faces glow softly from the light of a single lamp. Women are gathering not to perform, not to debate, not to impress — but to remember. To soften. To return.

In these circles, a new-old kind of teshuva is emerging: feminine, embodied, intuitive, tender, and deeply rooted in the earliest layers of the self. A teshuva that returns us not to ideology but to sensation. Not to dogma but to breath. Not to abstraction but to color. Not to the linear but to the circular — to the womb-like consciousness of Kislev and the letter ס, Samech, whose shape holds the secret of Divine support: “Somech Hashem l’chol ha’noflim.” Hashem supports all who fall.

This is where Torat HaTzeva begins: in the place before language, before separation, where light was still whole.

They come with colored pencils, brushes, breath, silence. They come with longing and fatigue, with unspoken prayers, with the weight of this moment in Jewish history pressing against their ribs. And something happens in these spaces — something gentle, something radical — as if the deepest layers of the soul, the pre-verbal layers formed in the womb, finally have permission to breathe again.

This is where Torat HaTzeva begins: in the place before separation, before narrative, where light was whole — Ohr Pashut — and the world still remembered its original circle.

There are teachings that feel ancient the moment you hear them—not because they are old, but because they describe something the soul recognizes before the mind does. They name something the soul already knows. For me, that moment arrived with two short passages from Rav Kook’s Orot HaTeshuva (14:6–7). These teachings, written a century ago, feel of remarkable contemporary relevance, especially for the women of our generation. That is the point of departure for this article which Rav Kook articulates a spiritual anthropology of remarkable contemporary relevance.

Today, the teachings of Arizal and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai—once guarded secrets known only to mystics—are emerging through women’s breath, women’s hands, women’s paintbrushes, women’s movement, women’s tears, women’s laughter, women’s circles, women’s mikvaot. Not in theory—in the body.

The mochin (intellect) are descending into the heart. The heart is descending into the body. And the body is rising into light. This is not metaphor. This is geulah-consciousness.

The feminine, after millennia of being diminished, is rising—not as rebellion, but as return. As Rav Kook says, teshuva is not effort. Teshuva is light. And when the feminine rises, she brings that light into the world through color, circle, breath, and presence.

Torat HaTzeva was born here— in the vortex of Tzfat 5786— in a circle of neshamot who clearly had known each other before.

Women whose souls were together in previous gilgulim.
Women who sat at Har Sinai.
Women who followed Miriam’s drum.
Women who kept the nation alive in Mitzrayim.
Women who danced with Devorah.
Women who died al kiddush Hashem with Chana and her seven sons.
Women who carried the teachings of the Baal Shem Tov.
Women who whispered Tehillim in exile.
Women who went through the Shoa
Women who held their children in bomb shelters.
Women who survived.
Women who returned.

And around us—though unseen—we feel the circle of tzaddikim who have walked these streets before us: Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Rabbi Elazar, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Yonatan ben Uziel, Rabbi Yehuda bar Ilai, the Ramak, Rav Shlomo Alkabetz, Rav Yosef Caro, the holy women of Tzfat whose names were never recorded but whose tefillot still vibrate in these stones.

They surround us with the circle of Samech—
light, protection, equanimity
—holding us as these teachings emerge in our generation.

Because this work is not ours alone.
It is generational.
It is ancestral.
It is a movement of souls gathering from the four corners, creating a frequency the world desperately needs.
A frequency of wholeness.
A frequency of return.
A frequency of hidden light rising from the darkness.

This is Kislev.
This is the circle.
This is the womb.
This is the Samech.
This is the rebirth Rav Kook foresaw.
This is Torat HaTzeva.

And when that light appears, something begins to shift in the deepest layers of the human being. Sadness transforms. Bitterness softens. The soul reconnects to its original sweetness. Rav Kook describes it as “a pure and exalted moral force” emerging—mussar not as discipline, but as inner radiance, guiding a person toward wholeness.

But the part that ignited Torat HaTzeva was his next line:

All the sadness in the world, he says,
comes from a hidden fracture in creation—
the “concealed sin of the earth”—
and Mashiach’s essence is to return creation
to joy.

A fracture so ancient it lives in the very ground we walk on.
A sorrow so subtle we feel it but cannot name it.
A world whose earliest wound was a loss of sweetness—
the tree no longer tasting like its fruit.

And suddenly, everything I was seeing in women’s circles, in painting sessions, in breathwork, in color work, in Kislev gatherings—the tears, the trembling, the softening—came into focus.

This is not psychological.
This is not therapeutic.
This is cosmic teshuva.

A return to sweetness.
A return to process.
A return to womb-consciousness.
A return to the circle.
A return to the hidden light.

This is why Torat HaTzeva was not developed—it was born.
It rose from the exact place Rav Kook describes:
the place where sadness is simply the soul tasting misalignment,
and where teshuva appears as a gentle, luminous force
that restores color, restores breath, restores inner softness.

And Torat HaTzeva emerged specifically in Kislev because:
circles became wombs,
black became integration rather than fear,
color revealed relationship,
breath revealed inner knowing,
and women found themselves crying not from pain,
but from the shock of remembering their own light.

Rav Kook says the world is sad because of a primordial misalignment—
a sweetness lost.
A circle broken.
A process disconnected from purpose.
A tree that forgot how to taste like its fruit.

Torat HaTzeva is the opposite movement:
a return to sweetness.
a return to becoming.
a return to the circle.
a return to the hidden, prenatal light of the soul.

It is, in its essence, a Kislev process—a rising in the dark,
a coming-into-light from inside the circle of Divine holding,
a tuning of the soul back to the frequency of joy
that Rav Kook calls “a stream of Eden.”

This article is the story of that return.
It is the map of a journey that began in Rav Kook’s words
and unfolded through breath, paint, Torah, and women’s quiet tears.
It is the story of how Torat HaTzeva was born—
not from theory, but from light.

Rav Kook Illuminates the Inner Root

November 2025…,at the same time that I was teaching Kislev: Rising in the Dark, Tzfat is still trembling and we are finally returning our nervous system to shigra, routine. The hostages are home and we are shining in their light. Beginning to see the light in the tunnel, as they all so eloquently describe it. And  I am sitting in my women’s Beit Midrash, Ohr Pashut—directed by my beloved teacher Rabbanit Devorah Benyamin—learning these same passages again, this time from Rav Osher, in a room full of women whose eyes glistened with a kind of knowing that has no words. It became clear that something was ripening. Not an idea. Not a technique.
A birth. —a morning that began with yoga, somatic healing movement, and paired practices of supporting and “healing each other”—the next shiur in the schedule was a class on Orot HaTeshuva. It was within this Rav Kook learning, taught to a circle of women immersed in pnimiut haTorah, that a deeper layer of meaning began to reveal itself about something that had already started months earlier.

It was there, sitting among women immersed in inner Torah—a room of women whose faces bore the unmistakable mixture of vulnerability and spiritual readiness that characterizes this moment in Jewish history—that Rav Kook’s teachings revealed themselves not merely as philosophical propositions but as experiential descriptions of a collective emergence taking place in real time.

Suddenly, what had begun intuitively now revealed its conceptual root. Kislev—with its letter Samech, the circle of holding and hidden gestation—became a revealing atmosphere, shedding light on the tikkunim, relational healings, and generational reconnections already taking place.

Rav Kook writes that sadness arises when the soul “tastes their bitterness” of misalignment—to’emet et merirutam (טועמת את מרירותם)—when our actions, traits, or thoughts fall out of resonance with who we truly are. Sadness enters the soul not as weakness and not as failure, but as the soul’s own sensitivity to misalignment. “The soul tastes their bitterness,” he says. It recoils. It trembles. It grieves.

But then he says something extraordinary: Teshuva, he insists, is not struggle but light. When the or ha’teshuva (אור התשובה) appears, “a channel of delight and joy opens,” and the soul drinks from “a stream of Eden.”

Teshuva is not struggle.
Teshuva is not self-critique.
Teshuva is light.

And as I listened, I realized that this wasn’t only Rav Kook’s language for the individual—it was the language of our nation, of our land, of our women, of our generation. Because Torah is not static. It travels. It incarnates. It takes on new vessels.

And here, in the hills of Tzfat, it is taking a new form—through breath, through color, through women returning to their bodies, through circles of neshamot remembering each other across lifetimes.

Cheit Ha’Aretz: The Hidden Wound of Creation

But Rav Kook also speaks of something larger. Rav Kook teaches that much of the sadness in the human heart comes from a wound far older than any individual story. He calls it:  Cheit Ha’Aretz HaKemusah (חטאת הארץ הכמוסה)—the “hidden sin of the earth.”. Hashem commanded the earth: “Eitz oseh pri” — a tree that makes fruit, meaning: the tree itself should taste like its fruit.

He says the sadness of the entire world comes from a primordial misalignment, a cosmic fracture he calls It is the moment in Creation when “the earth did not do so” (ve-lo as’tah ha’aretz ken, ולא עשתה הארץ כן) (Bereishit Rabbah 5:9)
, failing to manifest Divine intention in its fullness. This is not moral failure but cosmic dissonance, the first fracture in the relationship between essence and expression, purpose and process, tree and fruit—when the tree no longer tasted like the fruit, when essence and expression fell out of harmony.

Humanity, formed from earth — afar min ha’adamah — inherited this rupture as impatience, rushing, sadness, and the ache for transformation without the journey.  Rav Kook calls this פגם התהליך — the wound of process itself.

A gap opened between essence and expression. Between potential and manifestation. Between purpose (ma) and process (ech). The sweetness of becoming disappeared. Humanity — shaped from earth, afar min ha’adamah — inherited this cosmic misalignment as:
impatience, rushing, avoidance of journey, longing for outcomes without gestation, sadness without clear cause, confusion around timing, difficulty savoring process.

This is the fracture Rav Kook says Mashiach returns to heal.

These passages—written a century ago—carry remarkable contemporary relevance for what has been unfolding in our time and became the conceptual seed for how we now understand Torat HaTzeva. There are passages in Torah that do not simply teach—they name the inner landscape of an entire generation. For me, the seed of this rising, this return, this entire unfolding we now call Torat HaTzeva, was planted during Covid, in a small Zoom box, when I joined a class in the Shiviti School for Jewish Women based in Yerushalayim and learned Orot HaTeshuva with Rav Kook’s voice echoing across the screen, where his words became a luminous thread for me during a period of global contraction.

That thread continued to guide me through my Aliyah, resettling in Tzfat …   t was a strange season in history—silence in the streets, fear in the air, the world contracting. Yet in that contraction, the words of Rav Kook entered like oxygen. They became the spiritual thread that carried me through my Aliyah, through rebuilding a life in Tzfat, through two years of war, and through thirteen months of being bombarded with Hezbollah missiles. Each blast shook the windows; Rav Kook steadied the soul.

The Atmosphere of Tzfat: Where Women Are Rising

The spiritual atmosphere in Tzfat today is extraordinary. In study halls devoted to pnimiut haTorah, Chassidut, Kabbalah, psychology, somatic and contemplative practice, yoga, and embodied healing—schools of inner Torah for women such as Almaya, Ohr Pashut, where I learn how to be a Jewish woman living on the Land—women gather not just to learn, but to transform. These spaces have become living ecosystems of feminine spiritual emergence.

These are women whose inner lives are shaped by the teachings of the Zohar, the Arizal, Rav Kook, Rabbi Nachman, Rav Ashlag, the Chassidic masters, and the great kabbalists of Tzfat. Their emunah is alive and vibrant—expressed through motherhood, community, loss, rebuilding, tefila, silence, dance, grief, and creativity. Many are mothers and wives of chayalim, carrying both the weight and the light of this generation. Their emunah is not theoretical; it is lived through the guf—the body—in breath, movement, parenting, uncertainty, and the quiet courage of spiritual work done in the body. They have endured two years of war, motherhood during crisis, loss and rebuilding, and the emotional landscapes of our times. Yet they rise with a depth that feels both ancient and startlingly present.

The women who gather here are a phenomenon in themselves. They are grounded and courageous, deeply rooted in Eretz Yisrael, living faith not as a concept but as a somatic reality. They hold pain, prayer, uncertainty, and resilience in the same breath. They have found their voices—women whose emunah is steady, whose bitachon is embodied, whose inner worlds carry both the fragility of this time and a fierce spiritual clarity that feels ancient.

They are role models of Jewish femininity in its fullest form: soft yet unshakeable, rooted yet visionary, tender yet brave, willing to look directly at sorrow while still choosing light.

They embody a form of Jewish femininity that is steady, rooted, honest, brave, deeply tender, and profoundly strong. They move with a grounded connection to Eretz Yisrael as a living, breathing reality. Their voices are authentic; their presence is prayerful. They hold complexity with grace and continue to choose light even while standing inside darkness. They illuminate their homes, families, communities, and study halls with a quiet, radiant emunah.

According to Rav Kook, tzaddikim (צדיקים)—“the foundation stones of the world”—and Mashiach in particular, return in teshuva not for personal misdeeds but upon the essence of this cosmic wound, restoring the original lost sweetness between orot (אורות, lights) and kelim (כלים, vessels), turning inherited fractures and ancestral sorrow back toward simcha / joy.

This is precisely the labor these women are doing—quietly, steadily, through learning, prayer, creativity, and presence.

In their presence, Rav Kook’s teachings feel suddenly alive. These women embody his description of those who take the sadness of the world, the inherited fractures, the wounds of history, and return in teshuva on their essence—transforming sorrow back into joy.

Through war, through loss, through months of uncertainty, through the intense spiritual labor of being mothers, grandmothers, teachers, healers, neighbors, and friends—they continue to rise, to return, to learn, to pray, and to create new light. Rav Kook’s words about the generational work of teshuva feel not theoretical but visibly alive.

It is within this atmosphere—of women who live Torah through body and breath, who hold one another with kindness, who move through darkness with faith felt in the bones—that Torat HaTzeva began to arise. The land itself seems to nourish it; the mountains of the Galil seem to echo it; the Beit Midrash floorboards feel saturated with the prayers, tears, and longings of these women.

Although the deeper metaphysical language of these passages became clear only later, the birth of Torat HaTzeva began much earlier. Its first contours took shape in Av 5786 through embodied practice, color-process work, women’s circles, breath-based meditation, and intuitive Torah-integration. From the beginning, it was received not as a new teaching but as a recognition—personally and collectively—as if something long dormant in the feminine memory had suddenly remembered its name. It emerged among women who live Torah through body and breath, who hold one another with compassion, and who weave spiritual depth into daily life. From its earliest appearance, it felt less like an innovation and more like a return, as though something long buried had simply been waiting to surface.

The Emergence of Torat HaTzeva (July 2025)

As the Torat HaTzeva curriculum developed through seminars and workshops in Elul, Cheshvan, and Kislev, the seasonal and symbolic resonance of Kislev became increasingly apparent. The month’s letter, Samech—with its geometry of circle, containment, and hidden gestation—mirrored with striking precision the healing already unfolding within these circles. In this way, Kislev functioned as a revealing atmosphere of tikkunim and healing of core relationships, both present and past, illuminating and amplifying dimensions of the work that had been there from the beginning.

It began as an innovative painting class interwoven with meditation, breath, color theory, movement, creative expression, and raw spiritual seeking during a time when northern Israel was still processing trauma.

Only later did the language surface to describe what the soul had already been living. In retrospect, as in many spiritual births, the experiential knowing preceded the linguistic articulation; conceptual clarity arrived only after the soul had already lived it—offering names, structure, and illumination to what had been unfolding all along.

In the months following its emergence, it became increasingly clear that the influx of healing, softness, mother-root repair, and collective awakening now happening in these circles is profoundly connected to the energy of Kislev. The Samech-consciousness of Kislev—its geometry of holding, its womb-like protection, its rising light within darkness—mirrors precisely what is unfolding among the women in Tzfat.

Torat HaTzeva sits within a sweeping historical arc reaching back centuries
Torat HaTzeva does not stand outside this story; it continues it. It gathers the threads of these eras—mystical, artistic, psychological, embodied—and weaves them into a single, living tapestry now rising through the bodies and voices of Jewish women in Eretz Yisrael.  I moved to Tzfat during Covid Sept 2021,  where these streams were converging in Tzfat. The teachings of the Ari, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and Chassidut began re-emerging through women’s bodies—through breath, color, voice, dance, painting, embodiment, tears, movement, and the spiritual intelligence of the feminine.

Parallel Universes of Revelation: Tzfat, Kandinsky, Bauhaus, Color Theory

There is a striking synchronicity between mystical Safed and the modern art movements of the early 20th century — as though different worlds were receiving the same revelation through different languages.

1500s Tzfat:

What is emerging now among women in Tzfat is not isolated, sudden, or accidental. Rather, it is the newest expression of a lineage that winds through the Arizal’s circle in the 1500s; the Ramak and the early Tzfat masters who articulated foundational teachings on orot and kelim—lights and vessels—alongside geometric models of circles, yichudim, and the dynamics of the cosmic feminine and the return of Shechinah, laying the groundwork for an early multidimensional psychology of the soul.

Early 1900s Europe:
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the rise of Chassidut further developed these ideas, bringing the pnimiut / inward light of Kabbalah into affective, relational, emotional, and embodied dimensions of Jewish life.

The arc continues through the seismic awakening of our time. Simultaneously, in the early 20th century, the color revolutions of the Bauhaus artists emerged—currents that now meet, refract, and reunite in our day.

Meanwhile, in Russia and Germany, Wassily Kandinsky (1911)  was articulating color as a spiritual vibration and circle as the vessel of inner resonance. At the Bauhaus, artists searched for the laws of perception — contrast, harmony, relational meaning. 

And then came Josef Albers(1923), whose seminal work The Interaction of Color demonstrated with near-mystical precision that:
color has no independent identity; perception is contextual; harmony arises only in relationship; contrast reveals essence;
truth is dynamic, never fixed; and light appears only according to its vessel.

Different languages, different worlds of thought — yet all circling the same truth, refracting the same primordial light. One revelation appearing through many lenses. developed theories of color relativity, contextual perception, and the interdependence of form and light—ideas that, though secular in origin, mirror the metaphysical structures mapped by the Zohar and expanded by Lurianic Kabbalah. These principles of relational perception resonate strikingly with the axiom kol ohr nigleh lefi ha’kli (כׇּל־אוֹר נִגְלֶה לְפִי הַכְּלִי)—all light is

Albers, Kandinsky, and the Bauhaus uncover the spiritual physics of color, form, inner necessity, emanation, relativity, and harmony—without knowing that they were describing structures the Zohar mapped centuries earlier.
revealed according to its vessel.

1980s New York City:

Decades later, in the 1980s, those Bauhaus sensibilities were alive in Cooper Union in New York City. Under Professor Irwin Rubin — himself a student of Albers — the study of color was not technical but spiritual. Color was not treated as material but as phenomenon: relational, subtle, alive. One hue transformed entirely by the presence of another. Truth shifting with context. The world rearranging itself through perception.

Another stream enters the story in the 1980s: the American Baal Teshuva movement. Many who returned in that era—shaped by the spiritual searching of the 1970s and the post-Holocaust generational ache—experienced themselves as what Sarah Yocheved Rigler later described as “gilgulim from the Shoah,” souls returning to complete interrupted spiritual work.

A young art student (me) sits in Professor Irwin Rubin’s color studio, learning that color has no identity outside relationship; that every hue is transformed by its environment; that perception is relational. She does not yet know that she is learning Pnimiut Torah in a different language. She is absorbing principles of color interaction that would later, upon encountering the Arizal and Rav Kook, reemerge as a pre-verbal preparation for the teachings of color, vessel, and light central to Torat HaTzeva.

Looking back now, it is impossible not to see how that early training in relational color — color revealed through vessel — prepared the ground for Torat HaTzeva, the Torah of color that would arrive much later through teshuva, Torah study, and a life in Tzfat. It is the same revelation, simply refracted through different vessels at different times.

2025 Tzfat

In 2025, this emergence crystallized further with the founding of Shaar L’Neshama: The School for Inner Torah and Meditation for Women (www.ShaarLneshama.com), a dedicated framework integrating pnimiut with somatic, artistic, and meditative practice. Here, the embodied transmission of pnimiut—once the province of mystics—found expression through women learning, teaching, composing, creating, painting, and giving birth to Torah in the profound literal and metaphorical sense. The Torat HaTzeva classes are facilitated and directed by the author, as a dedicated framework for integrating these streams—Torah, color, somatic awareness, and meditative practice—into a coherent path of inner avodah for women. In this sense, Torat HaTzeva is not an isolated project but part of a broader ecosystem of women’s pnimiut learning and practice emerging in the north of Israel.

This generational emergence is distinctly feminine—not in the sociological sense alone, but in the mystical one. After centuries in which women’s spiritual authority was constrained, there is now a visible rise of the feminine as body, as vessel, as presence. Teachings once held in the mochin (intellect) are descending into the lev (heart) and from the heart into the guf (body), where they take on new form through voice, dance, painting, childbirth, mikvah immersion, and embodied Torah learning.

In Tzfat, circles of women—many of whom palpably feel that they have learned together in previous lifetimes—are gathering with an intensity that evokes the early circles of the Ari. Their work is held, consciously or unconsciously, within the spiritual geography of the city: the circle of tzaddikim whose resting places surround Tzfat like a cosmic Samech—Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, Rabbi Elazar, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Yonatan ben Uziel, Rabbi Yehuda bar Ilai, Rabbi Yosef Karo, Rav Shlomo Alkabetz, the Ramak, students of the Baal Shem Tov, the Tannaim, the Imahoth, Bilhah and Zilpah, Chana and her seven sons, and countless unnamed women whose prayers saturate the stones.

Ohr HaGanuz emerging in Kislev

Color is not merely pigment or aesthetic. It is perception, relationship, revelation. It speaks the mother tongue of the soul — a language older than words. In Kabbalah, color appears at the tender edge where Ohr Ein Sof, Infinite Light, prepares to enter form.

Before that moment, the Ramak teaches, all light is ohr pashut — simple, undivided, circling in every direction. Everything is circle. Everything is womb.

Torat HaTzeva brings the practitioner back to this primordial place not theoretically but somatically. Through breath, movement, gentle technique, the drawing of circles, the touching of color before naming it, the body remembers what the mind has forgotten.

This is feminine teshuva — the return to the original softness of the soul.

After a lifetime of Torah, teshuva, exile, art, motherhood, war, and return, that same student begins to see that all these streams—Ari, Albers, Arizal, Kandinsky, Rav Kook, Bauhaus, Zohar—are converging. Not abstractly. Not philosophically. In the bodies of women.

In this environment, Torat HaTzeva did not originate as a conceptual framework but was born as an experiential one—out of breath, paint, movement, grief, neon flashes of clarity, and the rising feminine consciousness of a generation living through war and return

What arose in 5786 is not a new doctrine but a continuation of a much older unfolding: the descent of mystical teachings from mochin (mind) into lev (heart) and from heart into guf (body), where Torah is now being expressed through painting, voice, dance, childbirth, embodied prayer, and women’s circles that feel unmistakably like the gathering of souls who have been learning together for lifetimes.

This phenomenon reflects a larger generational pattern: a rising of the feminine not as ideology but as teshuva—a return of Torah from the mochin (mind) to the lev (heart) and from the heart into the guf (body). The intellectual becomes relational; the mystical becomes somatic; the conceptual becomes incarnate.

In Tzfat, circles of women—many of whom unmistakably sense they have learned together in previous lifetimes—are gathering with a familiarity that evokes the spiritual intimacy of the Ari’s circle. Their work is held within the ancient geography of the city, surrounded by the spiritual presence of tzaddikim whose resting places form a protective Samech around Tzfat In Tzfat, these circles are held—consciously or unconsciously—within the spiritual geography of the city: the encompassing Samech of tzaddikim who surround it like a cosmic ring. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and Rabbi Elazar, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Yonatan ben Uziel, Rabbi Yehuda bar Ilai, Rabbi Yosef Karo, Rav Shlomo Alkabetz, the Ramak, the students of the Baal Shem Tov, the Tannaim, Bilhah and Zilpah, Chana and her seven sons, and countless unnamed women whose prayers saturate the stones, the Imahoth and the nashim tzidkaniyot whose names are lost to history but whose merits saturate the stones.

In this environment—Tzfat 5786—Torat HaTzeva did not emerge as an intellectual construct but as a birth: a convergence of breath, color, movement, pnimiut, war, longing, teshuva, and the collective rising of the feminine soul.

Kislev, with its letter Samech—the circle of holding and the womb of concealed light—became the symbolic and energetic gateway through which these teachings could enter the world.


THE CIRCLE REMEMBERS

As the painting unfolds, something begins to stir — subtle at first, then unmistakable. Old memories surfacce not as stories, but as sensation: a tightness in the ribs, a warmth behind the sternum, a trembling in the hands. Colors blend and resist; circles widen and collapse; black ink bleeds into yellow and reveals green the artist never intended.

The Feminine Root of Light

Color, in this work, is not aesthetic. It is not decorative. Color is ontological — a way the soul reveals itself. Color bypasses the intellect and speaks directly to the subtle body. It travels beneath words, beneath analysis, beneath the thinking mind, and awakens a language that the neshama recognizes instinctively.

In Kabbalah, color emerges precisely when the Infinite Light — Ohr Ein Sof — prepares to become visible. Before that moment, the Ramak describes all existence as ohr pashut, simple undifferentiated light spreading in every direction. Circle rather than line. Womb rather than structure. Holding rather than dividing.

Torat HaTzeva guides the practitioner back to this primordial moment, not conceptually but somatically. Through breath, through movement, through the drawing of circles, through touching color before naming it, the body remembers what the mind once knew: that we come from light, that color is revelation, and that the soul speaks in gradients rather than conclusions.

This is feminine teshuva — a return not to ideology but to sensation, not to judgment but to gentleness, not to analysis but to embodied truth.


Parallel Universes of Revelation: Tzfat, Kandinsky, Bauhaus

Across history, different worlds received what is essentially the same revelation through different languages. The mystics of 16th-century Tzfat described Creation through the dance of igulim (circles) and yosher (lines), ohr (light) and kli (vessel), tzimtzum (contraction) and hitpashtut (expansion). They taught that truth is relational, that light appears only through its vessel, that perception is not fixed but alive.

Centuries later, in 1911, Wassily Kandinsky published Concerning the Spiritual in Art, articulating color as vibration, circle as the vessel of inner resonance, painting as the revelation of soul. In 1923, the Bauhaus began to teach the laws of perception — contrast, harmony, relational meaning — in ways that echoed the structure of the sefirot. By 1933, as the Bauhaus fell to political darkness, Josef Albers brought its insights to Yale, where his students learned that color is never absolute but always relational.

In The Interaction of Color, Albers demonstrated: color has no independent identity, perception is entirely contextual, harmony arises only through relationship, contrast reveals essence, truth is dynamic, and light appears only according to its vessel — kol ohr nigleh lefi ha’kli.

Different languages, different worlds of thought — yet all circling the same truth, refracting the same primordial light. One revelation appearing through many lenses.

These parallels are not coincidence. They are the fingerprints of a universal tikkun — color theory, modernism, and Kabbalah all responding to the same cosmic longing for integration.


Ma & Ech: Restoring the Sweetness of Becoming

Rav Osher explained that there are two primal forces shape the inner experience:

מה   MA — Where am I going? And אך  Ech — How will I get there?

Before the cheit, ma and ech were one. The tree tasted like the fruit. The path tasted like the destination.
There was no distance between becoming and being. After the rupture, ma and ech split — and humanity began chasing results while resisting the very process that gives them life. We wanted birth without pregnancy, Shabbat without preparation, clarity without confusion, transformation without slowing down.

Torat HaTzeva gently restores the sweetness of ech — the tenderness, dignity, and holiness of process. Through breath, color, movement, and circle, the nervous system learns again what the soul always knew: that becoming is not deficiency; it is delight.

That the tree itself is meant to be sweet.


Kislev: The Circle of Concealed Light

Kislev arrives quietly, like a breath taken in the dark. Its letter is Samech — a perfect circle, the geometry of containment and support, the symbol of womb, safety, and Divine embrace.

Samech teaches that darkness is not the opposite of light but the cradle from which hidden light emerges. Its message is:
“Somech Hashem l’chol ha’noflim” — Hashem supports all who fall.

Kislev is the month that teaches the soul how to rest back into being held.
How to trust.
How to soften.
How to re-enter gestation without fear.

In Kislev, the world remembers its original wholeness.


Inside the Workshop Field

Within this seasonal alignment, the Kislev workshops unfold as spaces of deep, embodied remembering — not conceptual remembering, but early-layer, root remembering. The emphasis is not on output but on presence: color, breath, Torah, movement, emotion, circle.

Participants begin with grounding, often through a tree meditation — feeling the rootedness of their legs, the stretch of their inner branches, the vertical line connecting breath to the heavens. They breathe inside a circle of light, a Samech, sensing Divine support. They recall the candle-flame colors of the previous session — white, red, green, blue — and how each hue mirrors a spiritual force.

Teachings from the Bnei Yissaschar reveal that the sense of Kislev is Sheinah, sleep/dream-awareness, the state in which the soul receives new light. Teachings from the Rebbe’s sichot about Yaakov’s dream deepen this further: the place where “the head and the feet are equal,” where hierarchy dissolves, where Essence is revealed, where a single ladder connects heaven and earth.

A right-hand/left-hand meditation supports emotional release and integration: fear or pain placed gently in the left hand, compassion held in the right, drawing from the Divine Name of Chesed. Painting circles introduces darkness as an integrator — how black softens, deepens, and reveals color, mirroring the inner process of healing.

None of this is psychological in the ordinary sense.
It is root work — spiritual, embodied, early-layer work — emerging through color, breath, Torah, and circle within the architecture of Kislev.

And then the painting begins.

Circles, layered upon circles.
Darkness interacting with light.
Color shifting with context.
Black deepening and softening everything it touches.
The page becomes a mirror, revealing emotional truths that words cannot yet speak.

Nothing in this process is superficial.
This is root work — the place where spiritual essence meets early memory.

As women paint, long-held defenses soften.
Hearts open.
Layers uncoil.
The inner child emerges.
Silence becomes revelation.
__

This is not art.
This is awakening.

And again and again, one theme rises:
the maternal root.

The Maternal Root: Early Layers Reopening

The healing that emerges in these workshops often reaches far deeper than participants expect. It is not simply emotional release or psychological insight. Rather, it touches the prenatal and pre-verbal layers of the soul—those formed before language, before identity, and before separation. These earliest imprints, shaped in the womb, hold a remarkable amount of information about how a person experiences safety, connection, and selfhood.

As the facilitator, I guide this process with deliberate gentleness. I avoid language that pathologizes or reduces complex experience to labels. I do not speak about “mother wounds.” Instead, I invite participants to explore the foundational impressions that formed their nervous systems long before they could articulate a thought. This is not about diagnosing pain; it is about remembering what shaped us in the deepest way.

During circle painting exercises, something profound often occurs. The body recognizes the circle before the mind does. As participants trace or paint these shapes, many begin to reconnect with the first circle they ever experienced—the womb. In those moments, shoulders drop, breathing deepens, and the nervous system softens. The inner child, often held tightly for decades, begins to emerge with surprising ease.

Again and again, women share similar reflections:

“I never understood my mother until now.”
“I never cry, and suddenly I’m crying.”
“The circles made something soften—like my inner child finally exhaled.”

“It feels like a new maternal tenderness—a new light.”

One participant described a transformative moment as she layered translucent circles on her page. When two circles overlapped, she noticed the shape that formed in between and said:

“I never realized how much tension I carried from my mother. But when the circles overlapped—that space in between—something shifted. It felt like forgiveness. Like understanding. Like yichud.”

The place where two circles intersect is the place of yichud — union, clarity, new color, and new consciousness. This overlapping shape—the vesica piscis—quickly becomes a meaningful visual metaphor. The intersection of two circles offers a clear representation of relational space: the place where two stories meet, where difference does not dissolve but becomes integrated. In these workshops, women begin to see their relationships not as fixed lines but as dynamic, overlapping forms.

Many describe the realization this way:
My mother and I share a yichud-space.
Our circles overlap.
We are not two separat stories / disconnected histories.
We are interwoven arcs of one unfolding story.
We are interlocking arcs of one Divine circle.

The shifts that occur in these moments are not psychological techniques or analytical breakthroughs. They are a form of root work that is both spiritual and embodied. The body recognizes truths long before the mind names them. The circular movement awakens a memory of being held. The geometry teaches relational insight. And the colors activate clarity that predates language.

This is what I understand as feminine teshuva: a return to the earliest layers of the self through softness, breath, movement, and color. It is a return to a knowledge that has always been present—quiet, intact, and waiting beneath the surface. Through this process, the women in these circles begin to access parts of themselves that were never lost, only forgotten, allowing healing to emerge in a steady, grounded, and deeply authentic way.

It is not psychological work.
It is root work — both spiritual and embodied.

The body recognizes this before the mind does.
Samech-consciousness awakens the womb-memory of being held.
Color reactivates pre-verbal clarity.
Circle geometry teaches relational truth.

This is feminine teshuva:
A return to the beginning, through softness, through breath, through color.


As these maternal layers begin to soften and reorganize, something larger becomes visible. The women often describe a sense that their personal healing is not occurring in isolation but as part of a wider movement—one that touches memory, lineage, and the collective body of Am Yisrael. The language of the workshops begins to shift naturally from the intimate to the expansive, from the inner child to the ancestral root, from the private circle of color to the national field of stones.

In Torat HaTzeva, this shift is expected. The work teaches that the same geometry that restores early maternal imprints—circle, overlap, yichud—is also the geometry that underlies the Jewish story. The womb-memory awakened through Samech becomes inseparable from the land-memory embedded in the Torah. The personal narrative widens into the national; the inner circles become fields.

And so, as the workshops progress, attention turns outward—not away from the self, but toward the larger pattern into which the self is woven. The women begin to sense that the same principles that guide their healing—color finding its vessel, breath finding its rhythm, pieces finding their place—mirror the ancient drama unfolding across generations.

It is here that the conversation moves naturally from the maternal root
to the stones in the field.

Stones in the Field: Personal and National Geulah

In Torat HaTzeva, the inner work inevitably mirrors the national, because the Jewish soul contains within it the entire story of the nation. What happens in the individual psyche echoes what has unfolded across generations. The personal palette and the collective palette share the same colors.

During the workshops, teachings arise almost organically from the parsha. As women move between breath, color, movement, and circle, we find ourselves returning again and again to the scenes of Yaakov’s journey:
Yaakov leaving home; avanim (אבנים)—stones—scattered across a field; vulnerability; chalom (חלום)—dreams; ladders between worlds; malachim (מלאכים) ascending and descending. These images resonate naturally with Torat HaTzeva’s core language of or (אור, light), kli (כלי, vessel), tzeva (צֶבַע, color), and relational geometry.

Why stones?

Because life often feels like that field—pieces everywhere, disconnected, random, resistant to meaning. Relationships scattered. Emotions lying under the surface like cold, unmoving stones. Personal and collective history marked by rupture and shattering.

Yet Yaakov shows us the earliest blueprint of geulah (גאולה, redemption):
He gathers the stones.
He arranges them.
He makes from them a foundation.

This physical gathering mirrors what happens internally through Torat HaTzeva. In color language, scattered stones resemble unintegrated tzirufim (צירופים)—combinations waiting to be harmonized. The emotional scattering reflects orot (אורות, lights) in search of keilim (כלים, vessels). Yaakov’s act becomes the spiritual architecture of healing: bringing what is scattered into relationship.

Later, Rabbi Akiva stands before the ruins of the Beit HaMikdash and laughs—not out of denial, but because he can perceive pri (פרי, fruit) hidden within the broken tree. He can gather from destruction the seeds of redemption. In Torat HaTzeva terms, he sees the color inside the darkness, the new tone emerging from the overlap, the ohr haganuz (אור הגנוז)—the hidden light—inside the fracture.

This is the feminine way.
Not denying the shattering.
Not rushing the rebuilding.
But gathering the pieces.
Softly. Quietly. With faith.

We live in a generation of immense light—and immense shattering.
A single siren can fragment a soul.
A single loss can send pieces in every direction.
Families, communities, and inner worlds are left holding the debris.

Yet hidden within this scattering is a profound spiritual calling:
geulah-consciousness—the art of gathering sparks, gathering stones, gathering the pieces of self and nation into a new wholeness.

Jewish tradition names two intertwined soul-forces that guide this process:

Nishmat Moshe (נשמת משה) — the soul-root of order, structure, halachic boundary, the eitz (עץ), the tree.

Nishmat Mashiach (נשמת משיח) — the soul-root that emerges from rupture (Lot, Tamar) and transforms darkness into diamond, sin into merit, shattering into sweetness—the pri (פרי), the fruit.

In Torat HaTzeva, these two energies meet. The structured practice of breath, circle, and color provides the tree; the emotional honesty and spiritual unveiling that arise through the process become the fruit. Together, they complete each other:

Tree and fruit. Process and revelation. Color in the vessel. Light finding its home. Stones scattered and stones gathered.

This is the work of Torat HaTzeva in our generation: teaching women to gather what has been dispersed—internally, interpersonally, and collectively—until the scattered stones reveal themselves as the foundation of something entirely new.

The War,  the Light in the Field

Our generation carries a profound and unmistakable weight. Parents are still holding the unprocessed tension of decades. Soldiers carry both the light and the trauma of impossible days. Families navigate layers of heartbreak from war and loss. Children are born into a world already vibrating with collective anxiety.

This is the reality of Ikvesa d’Meshicha—the footsteps of Mashiach—an era described in our tradition as one in which vessels crack before the light can expand. The ohr gadol, the great and overwhelming light of redemption, often arrives with such intensity that it shatters the structures meant to contain it. The result is a landscape that feels fragmented: stones scattered across every field of our lives.

And yet, the shattering is not the end of the story. In many ways, it is the beginning of the gathering.

Our sages teach this through the image of Rabbi Akiva, who stood before the ruins of the Beit HaMikdash and saw within the devastation the seeds of future joy. He recognized that destruction and redemption are not opposites, but stages in a single unfolding process.

Today, I see a parallel awakening among women. They are learning how to stand inside their own scattered fields—inside the fragmentation of family history, emotion, trauma, and memory—and begin to gather. Not all at once, and not through force, but breath by breath, color by color, circle by circle. Through the embodied language of Torat HaTzeva, they are discovering the quiet capacity to bring pieces back into relationship.

This, too, is a form of Mashiach-consciousness: the ability to recognize light inside the fracture, to locate meaning within the breaking, and to assemble the scattered stones of a life into a foundation from which something new can grow.

Every Circle is a Womb: Samech as Healing Geometry

As women begin to gather the scattered pieces of their lives, a deeper pattern starts to emerge. The act of gathering—whether emotional, spiritual, or generational—naturally leads them back to one of the central symbols of Torat HaTzeva: the Samech. In many ways, the movement from fragmentation to wholeness is the movement from a field of scattered stones back into a circle. And this circle is not simply a shape; it is a spiritual structure.

Samech is not a letter.
It is a worldview.

A perfect circle with no break, no beginning, and no end, it represents a geometry of trust, containment, and gestation. In Torat HaTzeva, we understand that Kislev draws us directly into this Samech-consciousness. It invites us to experience the circle as womb, the womb as universe, and the universe as circle—each one a vessel for holding and transforming light.

In the workshops, women often describe a sense of being physically and emotionally held when they breathe into the circular form. This sensation is not metaphorical. It has neurological, somatic, and spiritual reality. Many speak of feeling “wrapped,” “carried,” or “suspended,” as though embraced by something far beyond human capacity.

Here the Zohar offers a crucial teaching:
“Kol ohr nigleh lefi ha’kli” — all light is revealed according to its vessel.

The circle is the vessel.
Samech is the vessel.
The womb is the vessel.
And eventually, the body becomes the vessel.

When these vessels—womb, circle, soul—align, the earliest layers of experience reopen gently. Compassion rises. Memory softens. What was sealed begins to move. Darkness becomes approachable in Kislev precisely because the container is strong enough to hold it.

This is why color becomes deeper when black is added.
This is why the soul reveals hidden light when it feels held.
And this is why healing in these workshops often unfolds with surprising immediacy.

Not because of the art alone.
Not because of the meditation alone.
Not because of the learning alone.

But because of their fusion—a fusion that returns the soul to its original holding environment, to its womb-consciousness, where light was known before it fractured into color and experience.

In the language of Torat HaTzeva, this is a return to Ohr Ein Sof, the infinite light, to the primal unity in which all colors existed as one—the collective radiance of Ohr Pashut, the simple, undifferentiated light.

Participant Testimonies

These experiences are not theoretical. They are lived.

One participant wrote afterward:

“When I breathe and let the colors move, the thinking mind loosens its grip. The Zohar says that when outer noise quiets, the ‘kol demamah dakkah’ — the thin, subtle voice — can finally rise from within.”

“In this quiet place, I’m not trying to create or direct. I’m receiving. Each stroke becomes a whisper from the neshama. The canvas becomes a vessel, and I become a kli that allows healing to flow in its own Divine timing.”

A tefilla she whispers before painting:

 “Hashem, Malei Rachamim,
Let my breath open the gates of my heart.
Make me a clear kli for the Light You send.

May the colors carry truth,
may the silence reveal what needs healing,
and may the whisper of my Neshama guide my hands.

In this moment of creating,
let me touch the ‘kol demamah dakkah,’
and find the part of myself that is always held by You.

Tzamah lecha nafshi — my soul thirsts for Your Light as I begin.”**


Another participant simply said:

“Discovering Rachel Leah and BreathPainting is a beautiful matanah from Hashem. TYH.”

These are not reactions to art.
They are reactions to inner revelation.