Cordovero's other well known book is twenty pages long and does something the big system does not. The Palm Tree of Deborah takes the thirteen attributes of mercy, which Kabbalah reads as qualities of the divine, and turns each one into an instruction for conduct: since God bears insult and continues to sustain the one who insults him, so should you; since the divine attribute of judgement is always tempered, so should yours be. The logic is that a person is made in the image of the sefirot, and that ethics is therefore the practice of resembling them.
It is the first Jewish ethical work built on a Kabbalistic foundation rather than beside one, and it founded a genre. The musar literature of later centuries, and the whole Hasidic assumption that mystical doctrine issues in a way of behaving, run back through this short book.
He died in 1570. Isaac Luria had arrived in Safed shortly before, studied with him, and after his death produced a system so much more dramatic, with its shattering of the vessels and its scattered sparks awaiting repair, that within a generation it had taken the field. Cordovero was not refuted so much as overtaken, and the standard later view treated his account as the outer teaching and Luria's as the inner one. Historians of Kabbalah have since restored him, partly because his exposition is clear where Luria's is not, and partly because so much of what Luria assumes was settled here first.