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The Days of Repentance or Days of Awe

Find this year's date in the multifaith calendar

The judgements made at Rosh Hashanah and the plans that God has in mind for a person’s next year are only provisional.

God is merciful and offers people a chance to sort out all the things they’ve done wrong. That’s fortunate, as most people are likely to have quite a lot of bad deeds around.

So during the 10 days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur everyone gets a chance to repent (teshuvah).

Repentance and a time for healing

This involves a person admitting that they’ve done wrong and making a firm commitment not to do that wrong again.

But there’s more to it - Judaism does not accept forgiveness on behalf of other people, and God can only forgive a person for sins they committed against God.

So Jews are expected to find all the people they have hurt during the previous year and apologise to them. And it must be a sincere and an effective apology.

As you can imagine, a lot of making-up for hurts and insults goes on in the Jewish world during this period. It is very healing time for both individual and community.

Good deeds

Jews can also make up for the wrongs of the past year by doing good deeds - so this is a time for charitable acts (tzedakah).

Prayer

Jews will also spend much time in prayer (tefilah), seeking to put themselves into a good relationship with God.

Tashlich

There’s a ceremony in which Jews symbolically cast away their sins. It’s called tashlich.

A Jewish person goes to a river or a stream and, with appropriate prayers, throws some bread into the water.

Nobody believes that they’re actually getting rid of their sins in this way, but they are acknowledging their desire to rid themselves of their sins.