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Returning to authenticity - Arizal Ki Teitze

 B"H



Adopted from the Arizal on Parshas Ki Teitze

"When you will go out to war against your enemies, and Hashem your Lord will deliver them into your hand, and you will capture its captivity… (Deut. 21:10-13)

When you go out to war against your enemies, you’re not simply entering a battlefield outside of yourself, this was is also addressing when you step into the confrontation with your own inner world.

In this war, the enemies are not people, they are the forces within you that pull you away from alignment: the addictions, the defensive patterns, the attachments, the voices of fear.

The Torah passage is describing a process that mirrors the human journey of shadow work. You come face-to-face with the parts of yourself that have been held captive. These are the pieces of your soul that were once innocent but have been dressed in the garments of survival: distorted beliefs, unhealthy coping strategies, and ways of living that disconnect you from your authenticity.

The “beautiful woman” you see among the captives is that very part of your soul. Even under layers of distortion, there is still beauty, still life-force, still purity. But to reclaim her, she must undergo a transformation.

Shaving her head means stripping away the false beliefs, the ideologies and philosophies that shaped her captivity. It is the painful but necessary dismantling of lies we have told ourselves to make sense of pain.

Letting her nails grow symbolizes looking at the unnecessary attachments, the self-indulgent distractions, and the ways we feed ourselves with empty energy. These must be trimmed back if we are to step into authenticity.

Removing the garment of captivity is peeling off the persona we wore to survive. Our soul does not thrive in costumes of vulgarity, cynicism, or numbness. When we take these garments off, we are left naked, vulnerable, and real.

And then comes the weeping. She weeps for her Father her Source, the Divine, which she felt cut off from. She weeps for her Mother, the collective soul, the belonging she lost. This is grief work. It is the recognition that our choices, our conditioning, our unconsciousness caused us separation from what is most sacred.

The Torah instructs that this weeping lasts “a month of days”, the month of Elul. Elul is not just a point in the calendar. It is a container of time in which the universe invites you into repentance, not in the sense of guilt and punishment, but in the sense of return. Elul is the portal for going back to who you truly are, reuniting with your Source, and reclaiming the lost parts of yourself.

And after this process of stripping down, grieving, and reorienting, she is no longer a captive. She becomes your partner. This once-exiled soul part is reintegrated, reconciled, and now serves your wholeness.

In this way, the passage is not about war at all. It is about love. It is about the radical reclamation of self that happens when you stop running from your shadows and instead welcome them home.


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