Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Yom Kippur Service, 1:3

[Upon concluding the Yom Kippur service, the Kohen Gadol] washed his hands and feet, removed the golden vestments, dressed himself in his own clothes, and set off for his home. The entire people would accompany him to his home. He would celebrate a festival over the fact that he had emerged in peace from the holy.

Ibid., 4:2

Holiness is transcendence, holiness is withdrawal. Holiness is disengagement from the physical, disavowal of the mundane, departure from the familiar and the everyday.

But holiness is not an end in itself. Holiness has an aim: to return to the very arena it has escaped and remake it in its image. To sanctify the material, to rarefy the mundane, to sublimate the everyday.

On the holiest day of the year, the holiest human being entered the holiest place on earth. To prepare for this confluence of the most sacred points of time, space and spirit, the Kohen Gadol underwent a process of sanctification. He withdrew from his home, from his marriage and family life, from his everyday self. For seven days he secluded himself in the Holy Temple, divorced from the cares and wants of physical life. Only then could he enter the innermost and most sacred chamber in the Holy Temple, the “Holy of Holies,” to draw forth the spiritual essence of life for the year, world and humanity.

When he concluded the Yom Kippur service, he went home. This is not just a fact but a halachah, a law, an integral part of the observance of Yom Kippur. The entire people accompanied him home, for this was the last of a long schedule of offerings and services he performed that day on behalf of the people. For the Kohen Gadol’s return to home life was the ultimate test and validation of the sacredness of the day. It emphasized the fact that not only had he entered into the holy, but he had also “emerged in peace”—that he had succeeded in making his post-Yom Kippur life a tranquil continuum of the day’s holiness.

Based on an address by the Rebbe, Av 25, 5746 (August 30, 1986)[1]

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[1]. Likkutei Sichot, vol. XXXII, pp. 106-111.