Whenever I teach Miller Intro to Judaism around the holidays, I ask my students a straightforward question: Is time linear or cyclical?”
And then I offer a third Jewish answer: time is a spiral.
Every week, we pause for Shabbat. Around the world, Jews read the same Torah portion. And every year, we return to the same holidays—Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, Purim and Passover—reading the same stories again and again.
So why repeat?