Uncovering the Moon: The Compass of Compassion
by Rabbi Margie Jacobs
~Growing up, I was taught that our prayers on the High Holidays were an effort to move God, who sits on a throne of judgment on Rosh Hashanah writing our fate in the Book of Life, to a seat of compassion by the end of Yom Kippur.
But the Zohar, the 13th-century book of Kabbalah, offers us a different image. While Psalms 81:4 is often translated as “Blow the shofar on the new moon, on the full moon (b’keseh) of our festival day,” the Zohar instead understands “b’keseh” to mean ...
