High Holy Days

The High Holy Days, the Days of Awe that begin the Jewish year, are the novel's recurring sacred time, the ritual axis around which its dramas of faith, theft, and conversion turn. They are the season when the congregation of the Synagogue of Evolutionary Judaism gathers for its most solemn observances, when the ordinary routines of the city yield to a heightened awareness of judgment and repentance, and when the novel's central figures—a priest who has lost his cross, a rabbi who has lost her faith in easy answers, a congregation that has lost its certainties—confront the question of what it means to stand before God. The Days of Awe are not merely a calendar reference in City of God; they are the theological weather system that shapes the book's most intimate and most public moments.