A Jewish sense of story

In a footnote to Most Famous Short Film of All Time, I wrote:

"Literary critic Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending (1965) said stories need satisfying endings, just as the Christian story offers an ending that provides a meaning to everything that came before. Dara Horn dissents, saying that Jewish storytelling recognizes that we 'cannot be true to the human experience while pretending to make sense of the world,' and so a story may instead serve as 'the beginning of the search for meaning.'"

I recently came across this reflection by Rachel Klein:

"Where apocalypse narratives are primarily concerned with the restructuring and healing of society writ large after tragedy, time loops focus on the personal growth of an individual by having the person relive their experiences until they learn the lessons required to move on."
— "A Case for Why Time Loops Are Inherently Jewish": These cyclical stories, from 'Russian Doll' to 'Palm Springs,' are the Jewish answer to the Christian apocalypse narrative. Rachel Klein, HeyAlma, June 13, 2022

It's likely that all cultures and religions have some sense of the life cycle, that is, of each generation as a cycle, and of each year as cyclical too. But Judaism, unlike Christianity, doesn't layer on any focus on the supposed end of history. There's just the cycle itself.

There are endings, though.

"The ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation ... likely reinforced the idea that the end times would inevitably be sudden, and total. All these years and millennia later most of us still haven’t learned the painful truth that most ends, even most apocalypses, are gradual, painful, drawn out and sometimes ongoing. If we don’t learn the truth about the end of the world, and worlds ending, the apocalypse may rest eternally on the horizon, ever-present, always informing our lives in numerous ways, but never quite occurring. And the truth is that worlds are ending as we speak. Our own world, your own world, could also end; it might already be falling apart."
— "The Apocalypse is not the End," Joshua P. Hill, New Means, December 30, 2023

"One of my all-time favourite academic articles is a little-known comparison between The Road and In The Mood For Love by Elisabetta Trincherini. From Trincherini I’ve drawn three central ideas about what defines an apocalypse. First, an event must take place that changes the way people relate to their environment so extremely that all that they seem to be somewhere new or different. As Trincherini puts it “what happens after the apocalypse is effectively an “elsewhere,” even if it’s the same place as before the disaster.” Second, what remains of the old world one used to inhabit must appear to the person as ruins. For Trincherini as for us, “ruin is something that follows a catastrophe, after which generally nothing usable remains. And this is the case whether it concerns a concrete universe like planet Earth or the more fleeting one of feelings.” Third and lastly, the catastrophic event must have been so intense that the afterwards in which the people feel that they are living is experienced as violently cut off from both the past and the future.
* * *
Between the transgender tipping point (2014) and the pandemic (2020) a new type of transition emerged. We were the first trans people en masse to refuse the prescribed apocalypse approach. We came out to our families with the expectation that our families could remain as part of our lives. We did not move. We told friends and tried to maintain friendships. Our goals were radical. We wanted what gay people had. The idea was to live out and proud as a trans person among cis people: coworkers, friends, family. Unfortunately, living in denial of an apocalypse hardly ever goes well. Many of us lost our family and friends to their transphobia. That part was just plain and simple. ... Or maybe they tried to help a little too much, they made you their dress up doll, their new project. Once they discovered that you would not play Pygmalion, once you stood up for yourself, they responded with hot rebuke. They were the nuns, and you were the refugee. How dare you scorn their attempts at charity. You were preventing them from completing their mitzvot. Did you not know your place? You suffer so that they can help. That’s how it goes. The last thing that often happened, especially when you were a trans woman and your friends were male, is that they tried really hard to accept you, but when your gender got less unstuck, when it became more clearly defined as ‘woman’, they began to treat you like they treated women. In the best of cases that meant they got awkward, clammed up, held their tongue. In the worst of cases that meant they sexualized you, mistreated you, and ignored you. It turns out it is not tenable to pretend that the apocalypse didn’t happen."
Unstuck In Gender: The Experience of Trans Apocalypse: On experiencing transition as apocalypse, Auto_Anon, May 11, 2026