The Maharal's teaching, as cited by מכתב מאליהו, חלק א עמוד רנד, provides the most direct articulation of this idea: when a person confesses — declaring "I have sinned before God" — he surrenders himself entirely to God, and through that very act of surrender the evil inclination is wholly removed from him, because the evil inclination has no possible attachment to God; vidui is thus the mechanism by which the foreign element that has inserted itself between the person and God is expelled entirely.
This removal-of-obstruction framework is deepened by the Hasidic sources: Tanya, Part I; Likkutei Amarim 29:6 teaches that the "sitra achra" — the animal soul animating the body — is what the person most immediately is in his own experience, while the divine soul within him remains pure and is described as something "given within me," implying that the person himself is not identical with it; and Tanya, Part I; Likkutei Amarim 31:9 follows from this by teaching that the body and its animating soul are what is "far from God" and contemptible, whereas the divine soul is a literal portion of God even within the most fallen individual — it is merely in a state of exile.
Peninei Halakhah, Days of Awe 6:6 makes the structural point explicit: throughout the year the soul is enveloped in a material cloak of bodily desires that cause a person to forget his inner aspirations and to sin, and the practices of Yom Kippur are designed so that the soul can disconnect from the bonds of the body and allow its true, noble aspirations to be freed — after which sins "fall away" and are separated from the person rather than being extracted by an act of willpower.
Peninei Halakhah, Days of Awe 6:11 carries the same logic into the language of liberation: repentance frees a person from the chains that bind him so that his soul can express itself freely, because the natural drift toward lust, arrogance, anger, and jealousy enslaves the inner self that still longs for truth — teshuvah is thus described as a striving for divine freedom rather than primarily an act of legal rectification.
The Ein Aya passages reinforce the image of vidui as expelling dross from the soul: Ein Aya, Berakhot 9:254 speaks of prayer, confession, and supplication as the means by which a person casts off the burden of every sin and evil trait that has adhered to the soul — explicitly using the language of removing "spiritual refuse" (פסולת נפשי) in order to purify one's spirit before God — while Ein Aya, Berakhot 5:127 adds that one who has verbally articulated his sins must recognize that the damage of every sin exceeds any verbal description, just as the splendor of perfection exceeds all speech, pressing against any facile sense that confession itself completes the work.
The Sha'arei Teshuvah's confession-language in Sha'arei Teshuvah 1:10 captures the felt dimension of this: the penitent cries that he has been cruel to his precious soul by defiling it with the idols of his evil inclination, that he has followed his impulses like a horse or mule without understanding, and that the Creator breathed into him a wise and good soul precisely in order to know and fear Him and to rule over the body — framing sin as a usurpation of what does not belong to the self and teshuvah as a restoration of right order.
Shaarei Teshuvah of the Mitteler Rebbe שער התשובה addresses the dispersal of the sparks of the soul into distant, alien places — the condition that requires gathering and teshuvah — and concludes, on our reading of the cited page, that teshuvah is superior even to Torah because it transforms evil itself into good, whereas Torah only distinguishes between good and evil without changing the impure thing.
The Tanach provides the root images these later sources draw on: the pasuk in Tehillim 32:5 presents confession as uncovering what had been covered — "I did not conceal my guilt" — after which God lifts the weight of sin, suggesting that the obstacle was already present and hidden rather than introduced by the transgression alone; and Hoshea 14:3 opens the prophetic call to return with the instruction to take words and return to God, with Rabbeinu Bahya noting in Rabbeinu Bahya, Shemot 29:1 that "the lips replacing bulls" — verbal confession substituting for sacrifice — was the intended mechanism of atonement, locating vidui structurally in the place where the offering removed the separation between the person and God.
The Rambam in Mishneh Torah, Repentance 2:2 defines teshuvah as abandoning the sin, removing it from one's thoughts, resolving never to return to it, feeling regret, and then giving verbal expression to all of this through vidui — and Mishneh Torah, Repentance 2:4 adds the striking practice of changing one's name as part of teshuvah, declaring "I am a different person and am not the one who did those deeds," which presupposes that the sinful acts belong to a self that is being shed rather than to the essential person who remains.
Tanya, Part I; Likkutei Amarim 41:22 ties the whole arc to its telos: what every member of Israel truly desires, with all heart and soul, is the union and absorption of the soul into the light of God so that they become one — the natural love hidden in every Jewish heart to cleave to God and never be separated from His oneness — so that the entire effort of surrender and confession aims not merely at legal repair but at restoring the soul to its source.