This weekend, we experience a lunar eclipse as the sun causes the Earth to cast a shadow across the moon. Visible interactions between heavenly bodies fascinate humanity in general. For us as Jews, the dance between the rhythms of sun and moon has particular cultural import.
The Jewish calendar is itself luni-solar. Unlike the Muslim calendar, which is strictly lunar, the Jewish year stays in step with the solar year and its seasons. Passover and Sukkot must fall near the equinoxes, and so roughly once every three years, a 13th month is added. This expansion of the year has been mathematically scheduled ever since the Jews sojourned in Babylonia, home to some of the ancient world’s greatest astronomers. This is why Jewish holidays are sometimes ‘late’ and sometimes ‘early’ relative to the Gregorian year.
Nonetheless, Jewish time is oriented primarily around lunar cycles. The Torah’s very first commandment to the Israelites is to create a calendar based on observation of the moon (Exodus 12:2). Our months begin when the crescent first appears, a time known as rosh chodesh, or head of the month. Each rosh chodesh is a minor festival, and in ancient times, women were exempt from work on these days. Even now, when most of us don’t get a monthly day off, rosh chodesh is considered a joyful time, incompatible with mourning.
Many of our great holidays, meanwhile, occur at the moon’s fullness; indeed, only five of the 13 full moons of the Jewish year carry no extra significance. Kiddush levanah, a mystical practice of publicly greeting the waxing moon, adds attention to another phase, and there may also be points in the lunar cycle that are considered trying or unlucky. Three of our most important fast days occur on the 9th–10th of the month; and some also treat the final day of each cycle, at dark moon, as a propitious time for fasting, prayer and charity. This is known as Yom Kippur Katan, or a miniature Yom Kippur.
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So the moon is fundamental to our reckoning of time, and, in turn, to life and peoplehood. Over the millennia, many sages have gone further, drawing a sort of mythopoetic affinity between the moon and the people Israel. In contrast to the sun’s overweening dominance, the Jewish people take after the moon: subtle, small in numbers and constantly in flux. Thus the Maharal of Prague notes the distinction between Jacob, “the small one,” with his calendar based on the small white luminary, and his elder brother, Esau, who is also known as Edom, meaning red. “His food is red, his land is red, his warriors are red, his clothing is red … because Edom receives his strength from the sun which is red” (Netzach Yisrael 17:6).
“Edom” is often used by the rabbis as a term for the power of Rome, or violent non-Jewish overlords more generally. Perhaps we would rather be small and sometimes victims than act out as big red aggressors; for the sages this was certainly the ideal. The moon is also generally construed as feminine, and when the moon — or Levanah, the White One — gets a speaking part in Jewish legend, she is female.
That our still very male-centric and patriarchal Jewish culture is identified with the feminine is rather interesting. Sadly, this probably has some unavoidable coding of deference or even submission: Like the moon, we are not the axis around which everything else revolves. However, it arguably also allows for more softness, receptivity and range among Jewish men, as scholar Daniel Boyarin investigates in Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man.
In a strange and famous passage in the Talmud (Chullin 60b:2-4), the rabbis picture God’s decision to make the moon subsidiary to the sun. Whereas Genesis 1:14-15 initially describes them as “two great lights,” in the next verse, they are called “the great light to rule by day and the small light to rule by night.” In this legend, God reduces the moon, but claims her reduced size and status are not necessarily bad, since, unlike the sun, she will be visible both day and night, plus the Jewish people will base their lives around her. The moon is not consoled, and according to the text, God feels somewhat remorseful, too.
God’s note of regret, which legend tells us is referenced at each new moon, is also seen as a support for our own processes of repair and reconciliation. As the great sage Rabbi Nachman of Breslov explains:
“We are able to have Rosh Hashanah precisely because Rosh Hashanah falls on the new moon. This is an extraordinary kindness straight from the Blessed One: for God’s new moon regret gives us an opening to beseech atonement too. … And precisely because Rosh Hashanah is at rosh chodesh, we already start to see tikkun, a rectification, as the moon begins to return to her fullness” (Likutei Halachot, Orach Chaim, Laws of the New Moon 2:3).
If God can admit to mistakes and make amends, says Reb Nachman, then maybe we can, too. And if anything shows us that change is possible, it is quite literally the face of the moon.
Sometimes it is small and seems occluded completely, but sometimes it is big and shines a great light. And like the moon, the position and status of the Jewish people go through fluctuations, perhaps even cycles — as does our position in the court of public opinion. Antisemitism, unlike other forms of prejudice (but like the moon), is peculiarly cyclical in its appearance.
“Descent is for the sake of ascent,” the Hasidic masters remind us, and the image of the moon is one of returning what has been made small to ripeness. Kabbalistically, she is Shekhinah, that aspect of God that is dislocated and oppressed. She not only shows us how to renew ourselves in this realm. Her eventual return to cast as much light as the sun is a mystical mythic trope, imagining a world rectified and realigned.
As our most important heavenly bodies reposition themselves this weekend in unusual ways, we are literally gaining new perspectives on a cosmic scale. Perhaps this can lend us the vision we need to make this coming Rosh Hashanah a new moon of true teshuvah, a returning of ourselves to the source. And perhaps the year that grows from it will wax into something beautiful, a light that illuminates the entire earth.
May it be so.
Shana tova.
This essay initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on August 29, 2026. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
