Both Libra season and Rosh Hashana are associated with the symbol of the balance scale.

Libra season begins at the equinox — the moment when day and night are equal length. For a brief moment, the Earth stills in its rotation and everything comes into balance.

Rosh Hashana marks the start of Tishrei, the seventh month of the Hebrew calendar. Like the Sabbath, the seventh day of the week, the seventh month is about pausing to rest and reflect, to bring things back into balance.

The scales generally signify both balance and justice, but there’s another important signification that’s not often discussed.

The scales are also about relationships.

A balance scale is a tool that gives an objective measure of the weight of something. But it doesn’t give that weight in an absolute metric.

An absolute metric — such as “this weighs 1 pound” — would be the purview of Virgo.

Libra’s scales give a relative weight: they tell you whether the object you’re weighing is heavier, lighter, or equal to another object. It’s relational.

Because a balance scale always requires two things, it functions like a mirror: one thing reflected against another.

This is core to Libra’s symbolism of inter-dependence as the polarity to Aries’s independence. Libra engages in dialogue, reflection, and comparison.

Comparison often gets a bad rap as the “thief of joy,” or one part of the “compare and despair” process.

But comparison is a natural part of the learning process. We learn what things are by comparing them to other things that are already familiar. For example, as children, we learned shapes and objects by comparing them:

This thing is like that thing.
This thing is not like that other thing.

It’s only a problem when we ascribe a value judgement to it. A circle is different from a square, but it’s not necessarily better.

The scales allow us to see the relationship between two things. It’s a more qualitative assessment, while still being objective. It shows us how one thing compares to another.

Comparison is how we orient ourselves.

We only know where we are when we compare ourselves to some landmark or anchor point.

Relationships show us who we are.

The scales remind us that nothing gets measure in isolation. Everything exists in relationship to something else.