The midrash describes that on Rosh Hashanah, when the shofar is blown, a shift happens in heaven; God moves from the throne of judgment to the seat of compassion (Vayikra Rabbah 29:3). God is changing course, doing teshuva, as it were, remembering God’s own essence as articulated in the 13 attributes of mercy, and returning to that essential Self.
Our teshuva can be modeled on God’s. We spend most of our days on the throne of judgment, judging ourselves and others with great harshness. What if, like God, we shift our seat, our perspective, our way of viewing ourselves and others? Instead of a lens of judgment, we could, like God, view one another and especially ourselves through a compassionate lens, seeing the suffering and the pain that lies behind our way of being in the world, and bringing a tenderness to that seeing that softens our old habits and begins to change them, not with disparagement, but with love.
It’s not that judgment doesn’t have its place in the world — of course it does — but judgment is not the substance out of which lasting change can occur; change happens in the softer, gentler light of compassion.
This is teshuva. The shofar’s blasts are a call home after a long straying, and, like God, our true home, our essence — even if judgment is also a part of us — is compassion. When we come home to that place, to that seat, everything else shifts of its own accord in the warmth of the light that can now shine inside with gentleness, allowing understanding and collaborative, creative transformation to unfold.
We are partners with God in this work. God’s movement, the midrash says, in some way responds to our shofar blowing, to our ability to call ourselves home in this way; the more compassionate we are, the more we draw down God’s compassion into the world. And vice versa, the more we can see God’s compassion – calling it out as we call out God’s 13 attributes, over and over again in our prayers – noticing its signs and permutations in our everyday lives, how the world is filled with divine compassion, the more we can see all of that, the more we can find inside ourselves that same divine compassionate essence and manifest it. We mirror each other – God and us – moving ever closer towards meeting, reuniting, in the ultimate seat of compassion that is redemption.
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