The Ten Days of Repentance
The "ten days of repentance" include Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and the days in between, during which time Jews should meditate on the subject of the holidays and ask for forgiveness from anyone they have wronged. They include the Fast of Gedaliah, on the third day of Tishri, and Shabbat Shuvah, which is the Shabbat between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
Shabbat Shuvah has a special Haftarah that begins Shuvah Yisrael (come back, oh Israel), hence the name of that Shabbat. Traditionally the rabbi gives a long sermon on that day.
It is held that, while judgment on each person is pronounced on Rosh Hashanah, it is not made absolute until Yom Kippur. The Ten Days are therefore an opportunity to mend one's ways in order to alter the judgment in one's favor.
Read more about this topic: High Holy Days
Famous quotes containing the words ten, days and/or repentance:
“Generally speaking, the political news, whether domestic or foreign, might be written today for the next ten years with sufficient accuracy. Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm us; but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying out in the country, and I might attend.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“These are days ... when a great cloud of trouble hangs and broods over the greater part of the world.... Then all about them, all about us, sits the silent, waiting tribunal which is going to utter the ultimate judgment upon this struggle.... No man is wise enough to produce judgment, but we call hold our spirits in readiness to accept the truth when it dawns on us and is revealed to us in the outcome of this titanic struggle.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“Try what repentance can. What can it not?
Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)