A few years ago, during school break, my husband, children, and I traveled with friends to the Berkshires for some winter activities. One day, we decided to go snowshoeing through the forest. The experience was a true delight, but it also became a foundational moment in how I would come to understand myself, others, and our relationship with the Ribbono Shel Olam. While our older children became enthralled with building a snowman and our baby fell asleep in a sled, I wandered deeper into the snowy, foggy woods and made one of my first intentional attempts at hisbodedus in nature. At the time, I was contemplating a major decision—one that would require a significant investment of time, energy, and resources. I genuinely didn’t know which direction was right.
I pleaded with Hashem for guidance: What is my tafkid? How can I best serve You with the kochos You have entrusted to me? Is this the path I should pursue? The only thought that arose was: “I Am That I Am.” I didn’t understand it as an answer. I simply experienced it as a mantra—a way of connecting to pure beingness, particularly in the stillness of nature. In the months that followed, without receiving the clarity I had initially asked for, I decided to take the leap. I chose to invest in myself and in the process, hoping that it would ultimately be l’shem shamayim. I chose to begin a professional training program in personal and executive coaching that began with a three-day in-person immersion.
Within the first three minutes of the opening seminar, the lead instructor introduced the foundational premise of the program: “When Moshe met Hashem at the burning bush, Hashem spoke to him saying, ‘I Am That I Am.’” Mic drop. Wait. What?!
To me, this was a Divine wink—a haskamah, a loving affirmation from Hashem that He had heard me. It reminded me that Hashem answers in His own time. In order to preserve our bechirah, our freedom to choose, He doesn’t always reveal the path beforehand.
Sometimes, after we have already taken a courageous leap of faith, He pulls back the veil of hashgacha pratis and lets us know: I am here. I see you. Keep going.
The program taught that the words that follow “I am…” shape our experienced reality. Lasting transformation occurs at the level of identity: before we can change what we do, we have to encounter who we believe ourselves to be. We learned to “coach the person, not the problem”—to explore the place where one’s identity lives before focusing on the how and what of change.
This struck me as profoundly connected to the spiritual work of the Yamim Noraim. Rosh Hashanah is not only about crowning Hashem as King. It is also about remembering and returning to who we are essentially: an etzem Elokim, a soul spark of Hashem Himself. The etymology of identity is “repeated beingness”. The more deeply we identify with and live from our essential self—our atzmus—the more capable we become of instantiating Hashem’s Malchus within the world and living our purpose.
The Baal Shem Tov radically deepened our understanding of tzimtzum. Hashem did not create the world and then withdraw from it, watching from a distance. He is present within both the revealed and concealed, within the details of our lives and within our own hearts. He desires to be revealed within the concealment—to have a dirah betachtonim, a dwelling place in this world.
We were brought into existence not accidentally, but through Divine desire, cheshek. We are deeply wanted. More so, chassidus teaches that Hashem desires to be encountered—to be seen, heard, known, acknowledged, and revealed within the very constraints, meitzarim, of our lives. In our joys and our struggles, in the light and in the darkness, He is here, ready to be met by us—His beloved.
And yet, one of the biggest barriers to our internalization and full experience of this truth is our self-concept. So many of us struggle with a fundamental sense of not enoughness: I’m not good enough, smart enough, capable enough. Or perhaps its closely related opposite: I’m too intense, too sensitive, too demanding, too much.
These are different expressions of the same rupture: forgetting who we are at our essential core. Perhaps one of the most powerful strategies of the yetzer hara is not merely convincing us that our actions are flawed, but convincing us that we are flawed—that there is something fundamentally wrong or defective with our being. When we operate from this place, sometimes unconsciously, our capacity to flourish, to receive, and to become true partners with Hashem remains limited.
Hashem is lovingly willing us into existence in this very moment. And this one. And every moment in the eternal NOW. The mere fact that we exist is already, in and of itself, a testament to our essential worth.
If we are rooted in the ever-present awareness that our life force is completely generated by Hashem’s will, then emunah and bitachon cannot ultimately exclude healthy self-belief and self-trust. Self-transcendence, bitul, requires healthy self-worth. While we are indeed infinitesimally small before His greatness, we must remember
that our essence is His. Even as we are being judged during the Yamim Noraim and invited to examine our zechusim and aveiros, perhaps we must first remember the place from which the judgment is taking place: within the rechem—the womb—of Divine compassion, mercy, and longing. We are being assessed by a King who fundamentally wants us, believes in us, and delights in our partnership.
Chazal teach that teshuvah preceded the creation of the world (Kiddushin 39b), suggesting that the possibility of return was woven into reality from the very beginning. Growth was never meant to be linear. It unfolds through ratz v’shov—running and returning, advancing and retreating, falling and rising—the Divine pulse and dance of creation itself. As the verse teaches, “A tzaddik falls seven times and rises” (Mishlei 24:16), the falling is not a detour from the process; it is part of the process. Our missteps are not a glitch in the Divine design, but features of it and the material we are here to work with. It is often through struggle itself, and through finding the strength to rise again, that we become all we are capable of becoming.
We see this archetypally in Yaakov Avinu’s all-night struggle with the mysterious ish. He emerges wounded, transformed, and with a new name: Yisrael—a name associated with wrestling, striving, and prevailing with the Divine (Bereishis 32:28–30). His transformation did not occur despite the struggle, but through it. The encounter itself became the doorway through which his ultimate identity was revealed.
Perhaps this is one of the deepest truths of teshuvah: we do not return to Hashem by becoming someone other than who we are. We return by allowing every struggle, rupture, and return to reveal more deeply who we were created to become. The invitation is not to strive for perfection, but to commit to a continual process of refinement and revealing Hashem’s presence through it all. The work of teshuvah—tashuv hei, “returning the hei”—is the continual returning of the lower hei of Hashem’s Name, associated with Malchus, back to the yud-Hei-vav: tracing the multiplicity of all of our lived experience back to its singular Source.
When we recognize His Malchus and understand ourselves as an aspect of His creation and expression, we can step more fully into our ultimate mission. We become clearer conduits through which His light can be revealed in the world.
During the Yamim Noraim, we are given a profound opportunity to encounter Him intimately, panim el panim, as loyal partners in creation—to turn toward Him, to remember who we really are, and to recommit ourselves to the extraordinary covenant for which we were created. May Hashem grant us the ability this Rosh Hashanah to reveal His presence within this world, to engage in complete teshuvah, and, together with Him, participate in the glorification and unfolding of Hashem’s malchus.
This article was found in Nekuda Tova Nashim Tzidkaniyos 2.