The High Holidays or High Holy Days, in Judaism, more properly known as the Yamim Noraim (Hebrew: ימים נוראים "Days of Awe"), may mean:
- strictly, the holidays of Rosh Hashanah ("Jewish New Year") and Yom Kippur ("Day of Atonement");
- by extension, the period of ten days including those holidays, known also as the Ten Days of Repentance (Aseret Yemei Teshuvah); or
- by a further extension, the entire 40-day penitential period in the Jewish year from Rosh Chodesh Elul to Yom Kippur, traditionally taken to represent the forty days Moses spent on Mount Sinai before coming down with the second ("replacement") set of the Tablets of stone.
Read more about High Holy Days: Etymology, The Days Preceding Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year), Rosh Hashanah, The Ten Days of Repentance, Yom Kippur, Hoshana Rabbah
Famous quotes containing the words high, holy and/or days:
“How high they build hospitals!
Lighted cliffs, against dawns
Of days people will die on.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he has looked favorably on his people and redeemed them.
He has raised up a mighty savior for us
in the house of his servant David,
as he spoke through the mouth of his holy prophets from of old...”
—Bible: New Testament, Luke 1:68-70.
“In a few days I’ll have lived one score and three days in this vale of tears. On I plod—always bored, often drunk, doing no penance for my faults—rather do I become more tolerant of myself from day to day, hardening my crystal heart with blasphemous humor and shunning only toothpicks, pathos, and poverty as being the three unforgivable things in life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)