There’s a particular exhaustion that comes at the end of Deuteronomy. Moses is dying. The people have wandered for forty years. We’ve heard the laws recited, the covenants restated, the warnings repeated. And then—the cycle ends. In a few moments, we’ll roll the scroll back to the beginning, and we’ll read again about a formless void, a first word, a creation from nothing. We’ll start over.
It would be easy to see this as mere repetition. The cycles of Jewish life can feel that way sometimes: you clean for Passover, then a few months later you’re buying new clothes for the holidays, then you’re buying candles for Hanukkah, then cleaning again. You turn thirty and think you’ve figured things out, you turn forty and realize you’re doing the same therapy work you thought you’d finished. We return. Again. The same again.
But I think the Torah is telling us something more interesting about time, about growth, and about how human beings actually change—which is rarely in a straight line.
We live in an age obsessed with linear progress. We speak in terms of trajectories and breakthroughs and moving on. We’re supposed to get over things, move past them, leave them behind. We make resolutions to become new versions of ourselves entirely. There’s a kind of American myth that says if you’re not advancing, you’re failing. The metaphor is always forward. Up. Away from where you were.
But look at what actually happens in your life. You meet someone. You have a conflict. You resolve it or you don’t. Years pass. You meet that same person again, or someone like them, and you face a similar conflict. But it’s not the same conflict, is it? You’re different. They’re different. Your history together is different. You’ll handle it differently—or you’ll make the same mistakes again, but in a different context, which means they’re also new mistakes. You circle back.
This is what a spiral is. It’s not a circle, which would suggest we’re trapped in repetition. And it’s not a line, which would suggest we’re ever truly leaving anything behind. It’s both at once. We return to familiar terrain, but we’ve changed the position from which we view it. We’re not the same person reading Genesis this year as the person who read it last year. We’ve lived through another year. We’ve failed at things we thought we’d mastered. We’ve succeeded at things we thought were impossible. We’ve grown tired, and we’ve grown wise, and mostly we’ve just grown older.
The Torah understands this. If it were purely linear, we’d read the five books once and put them away. We’d move on to something else. But the Torah asks us to return, year after year, and read the same stories. And each year those stories mean something different because we are someone different.
Think about reading the Exodus story when you’re trapped in circumstances that feel like confinement—a job, a relationship, a situation you can’t escape—and the Israelites aren’t characters in an ancient tale, they’re your own story. Read it again after you’ve finally broken free, and the sea parting becomes your own liberation, your own redemption. Read it when you’re wandering through a period of confusion and change, and the forty years in the desert become less a punishment for doubt and more a description of what it actually means to be transformed. Read it when you’re leading something—your family, your community, a project—and everyone is complaining, and you recognize yourself in Moses, bearing weight you never expected to carry. You’re reading the same text. The text isn’t changing. You are.
And this matters, because it tells us something about what it means to be have self awareness and integrity. It means accepting that you don’t solve your problems once and for all. You solve them, and then in a different form they come back. You learn to set boundaries, and then you have to learn to set them again with someone new. You learn to forgive, and then you’re forgiven, and then you have to forgive someone else, or yourself again. It’s not failure to circle back. It’s the job of being alive.
And sometimes—and I think this is the harder part to accept—you circle back to exactly where you were, and you realize you haven’t moved forward at all. You’re having the same argument with your parent you had ten years ago. You’re struggling with the same fear you thought you’d overcome. You’re in the same cycle. This is where the spiral metaphor can feel like a lie, like something we tell ourselves to make repetition feel meaningful.
But here’s what I’ve learned: even when you’re not making progress, the context has changed. Ten years ago, you were having this argument from a place of defensiveness. This time, maybe you’re just tired. Or maybe this time you can see your parent’s fear underneath their anger. Or maybe this time you’re choosing to step out of it instead of going deeper in. The spiral doesn’t mean you’re always moving up. Sometimes you move around the same level—or down. But the position from which you move, the tools you have, the awareness you bring—these are different.
The Torah cycles because life cycles. And that’s not a poetic metaphor; that’s an observation about how human beings actually work. We’re not linear creatures. We’re creatures of return and recovery, of revision and re-engagement. We’re creatures who circle back.
This is why Simchat Torah isn’t the end of something and the start of something entirely new—it’s the recognition that life isn’t built that way. We finish Deuteronomy, which ends with Israel standing on the edge of a promised land, and we circle back immediately to Genesis, to the question of beginning and creation. We’re not leaving behind what we’ve learned from Deuteronomy; we’re taking it with us into Genesis. We’re the same reader, but we’re reading it differently because we’ve just lived through the law, the struggle, the covenant being tested.
So as we move through this year, as we circle through these stories again, I want to invite you to notice what’s different about your reading of both our tradition Torah and the Torah of your life. What do you understand now that you didn’t understand last year? What questions are you asking that are new? What old questions have finally become answerable? You might be in the same place in some ways—the same job, the same relationship, the same struggle—but you’re not the same person standing there.
That’s important to notice. That’s how we actually grow. Not away from our patterns, but through them, with more awareness, more compassion, more wisdom about what we’re doing. We return. But we don’t return the same.
This year, as we celebrate finishing the Torah and beginning it again, let’s celebrate that particular kind of growth. The kind that looks like a spiral. The kind that brings us home again and again, each time stronger, each time with a deeper and richer story to tell.