By Aaron Mandel
There is a person you have decided not to forgive yet. You would not say it that bluntly — you would say you are still hurt, still waiting, still working up to it — but you know the truth of where your heart sits when her name comes up. You want to be kinder than you are. You want to be the woman who lets things go, who answers softly, who does not keep the account open. And you cannot seem to get there by wanting it. This is precisely the ground that Tomer Devorah — “The Palm Tree of Deborah,” the small sixteenth-century masterwork of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero — was written to walk you across. Its claim is startling and patient at once: you become merciful not by deciding to feel mercy, but by imitating the One who is merciful, attribute by attribute, until His ways become yours.
What Tomer Devorah Teaches
The whole book rests on a single ancient instruction — that a person is meant to walk in God’s ways, to resemble Him in conduct. This is imitatio Dei, the imitation of God: not in His power, which you cannot share, but in His character, which you can. Cordovero takes the thirteen attributes of mercy that God proclaims of Himself and turns each one into a discipline for you. Where He is patient, you practice patience. Where He forgives, you learn the shape of forgiveness. The attributes stop being a description of heaven and become a curriculum for the heart.
The Torah states the obligation plainly, and binds it to belonging: “The LORD will establish thee for a holy people unto Himself, as He hath sworn unto thee; if thou shalt keep the commandments of the LORD thy God, and walk in His ways” (Deuteronomy 28:9). Notice that holiness here is not a feeling and not a status you are born into. It is tied to a verb — walk — and to a direction: His ways. To be set apart is to move, daily, in the manner He moves. Tomer Devorah is simply a map of that walking, drawn one attribute at a time.
Walking in His Ways, One Step at a Time
If the idea of remaking your whole character feels like more than you can carry, the tradition quietly agrees with you — and answers by making the path very small. The Psalmist who praises the life lived in God’s ways does not describe a single heroic leap. He describes a steady, unspectacular faithfulness: “Happy are they that are upright in the way, who walk in the law of the LORD. Happy are they that keep His testimonies, that seek Him with the whole heart. Yea, they do no unrighteousness; they walk in His ways” (Psalms 119:1–3).
They walk in His ways. Not they arrived, not they were born gentle, not they felt no anger. They walked — which means they were still in motion, still imperfect, still on the road. This is the mercy hidden inside Tomer Devorah‘s method. You are not asked to be merciful all at once toward the person you cannot yet forgive. You are asked to take one step in His direction today, and another tomorrow, and to trust that the walking itself is the becoming.
And the Psalm ties that walking to attention, to a kind of daily diligence: “Happy are they that keep His testimonies, that seek Him with the whole heart. Yea, they do no unrighteousness; they walk in His ways. Thou hast ordained Thy precepts, that we should observe them diligently” (Psalms 119:2–4). Diligently — the word that turns an ideal into a practice. Cordovero would have you keep His attributes the way you keep His precepts: not in a single rush of feeling, but observed, returned to, worked at, until the shape of mercy is worn into you like a path worn into grass by repeated walking.
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Be Merciful as He Is Merciful
Here is the hinge of the whole teaching, the place where imitation becomes transformation. The instruction the mystics return to again and again is stated with disarming simplicity: “Just as He is merciful — Rachum — you be merciful — Rachum.” And the same source draws out the quiet law beneath it: “This, then, explains the dictum, ‘Just as He is merciful, you be merciful,’ in other words, compassion begets compassion” (Tzava'at HaRivash 112:1).
Compassion begets compassion. Read that slowly, because it answers the very thing that has you stuck. You have been waiting to feel mercy before you act mercifully — waiting for the hurt to fade, for the apology, for the moment your heart finally softens on its own. Tomer Devorah reverses the order. You practice the attribute first, in the smallest concrete way you can manage, and the feeling follows the act rather than preceding it. You do the merciful thing toward her — you hold your tongue, you assume the better motive, you let one grievance go unspoken — and the doing begins, slowly, to beget the very compassion you could not summon by force.
This is also why Cordovero grounds it all in God’s own self-description, the thirteen attributes He proclaims as His name. The God you serve does not merely permit mercy; He leads with it, generation after generation. To walk in His ways is to take that leading as your own pattern — to become, in your one small life, a faint and faithful echo of the mercy you have received.
A Mercy You Can Begin Tonight
So you do not have to wait until you feel forgiving. You have only to take a single attribute and walk one step in its direction, today, while the feeling is still unfinished. That is the genius of Tomer Devorah: it makes the impossibly large work of becoming kind into something you can actually do, one trait and one evening at a time.
Choose one attribute — mercy, patience, the soft answer, the refusal to keep the account open — and ask of yourself one honest, narrow question: where could I imitate Him in this, today, toward the person I find hardest? Then do that one thing, however small, and notice what it begins. Many who walk this path keep a single page for it — a Mussar journal, a reflection notebook — and write each night the one attribute they practiced and the one place they fell short, so that walking in His ways becomes something they can see taking shape across the weeks. The heart you long for is not summoned in a single act of will. It is worn into you, step by patient step, until the One you serve and the woman you are becoming begin, at last, to resemble each other.
Published by Higgayon Press. For questions of halacha, consult a qualified rabbi.